DKG Talks
In collaboration with SWSA, the Action organises a talk series on Distributed Knowledge Graphs and related aspects of Semantic Web research.
Jerven Tjalling Bolleman: "UniProt and others: FAIRly large and connected SPARQL in the
life-sciences"
Mark A. Musen: "Semantic Technology in Science: Enhancing Data Stewardship in Support of New Discovery" (Stanford University)
- When: Mon Mar 4th 2024 at 18:00 (CET) View in Local Time
- Where: YouTube
- About the speaker: Dr. Musen is the Stanford Medicine Professor of Biomedical Informatics
Research at Stanford University. He conducts research related to open
science, intelligent systems, computational ontologies, and biomedical
decision support. His group developed Protégé, the world's most widely
used technology for building and managing terminologies and ontologies.
He served as principal investigator of the National Center for
Biomedical Ontology, one of the original National Centers for
Biomedical Computing created by the U.S. National Institutes of Health,
leading to the BioPortal ontology repository. He directs the Center
for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR), founded under the
NIH Big Data to Knowledge Initiative. CEDAR develops semantic
technology to ease the authoring and management of experimental
metadata.
Dr. Musen was the recipient of the Donald A. B. Lindberg Award for
Innovation in Informatics from the American Medical Informatics
Association in 2006. He has been elected to the American College of
Medical Informatics, the International Academy of Health Sciences
Informatics, and the U.S. National Academy of Medicine.
- About the talk: Much of the Semantic Web research community emerged from the cadre of
investigators who were studying the engineering of knowledge-based
systems in the 1990s. Development of such systems required intense
interactions between modelers and subject-matter experts to build
symbolic representations of discipline-specific knowledge. Such
knowledge-engineering activities may be making a comeback, as funders
and regulators require scientists of all kinds to share their
experimental datasets online, in a manner that makes the data findable,
accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). At the core of data
FAIRness is the idea that the metadata that describe experimental
datasets must adhere to the standards used by the relevant scientific
communities, aiding dataset search and integration. Typically, those
metadata standards are not well specified, which impedes the ability of
researchers to locate existing datasets and to perform secondary
analysis in the hope of making new discoveries. This situation is
driving a new kind of knowledge engineering—one to formalize the
preferences of various scientific communities regarding the way their
experiments should be described. The CEDAR Workbench, a suite of tools
that builds on other semantic technologies that we have developed at
Stanford University, demonstrates how the elicitation and formal
representation of community standards for experimental metadata both
enhances access to and reuse of scientific datasets and, by extension,
can lead to better science.
Mayank Kejriwal: "Neurosymbolic Approaches for Robust Domain-Specific Semantic Search: Current Progress and Future Opportunities" (University of Southern California)
- When: Wed Jan 31st 2024 at 18:00 (CET) View in Local Time
- Where: YouTube
- About the speaker:
Mayank Kejriwal is a research assistant professor in the Department of
Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Southern
California (USC), and a principal scientist in the USC Information
Sciences Institute. Prior to joining USC, he received his PhD in
computer science from the University of Texas at Austin. His PhD thesis
was awarded the SWSA Dissertation Award in 2017. At USC, he is the
director of the Artificial Intelligence and Complex Systems group, and
is also affiliated with the Center on Knowledge Graphs and theAI4Health
initiative. His research has been published in international venues
such as ISWC, ESWC, Semantic Web Journal, Royal Society Open Science,
and several others. He is the author of four books, including an MIT
Press textbook on knowledge graphs that has been republished in several
languages.
- About the talk:
With the advent of large language models (LLMs), previous state-of-the-
art performance has been exceeded on a number of difficult challenges
in the AI community, including commonsense reasoning, question
answering (and other rich forms of information retrieval), text
summarization, and computational creativity. Knowledge graphs have been
used to address some of these problems before. This talk will address
the question of whether, and how, knowledge graphs and LLMs can be used
synergistically in an important application in both industry and the
Semantic Web: domain-specific search. My thesis is that a neurosymbolic
approach can allow us to use the 'best of both worlds' in tackling this
challenging problem in a robust manner. I will discuss current progress
in this area in both my research group, and others, and outline the key
challenges and future opportunities still outstanding in this area.
Ilaria Tiddi: "Explainability with Knowledge Graphs: what have we learnt?" (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
- When: Wed Jan 17th 2024 at 18:00 (CET) View in Local Time
- Where: YouTube
- About the speaker: Ilaria Tiddi is an Assistant Professor in Hybrid Intelligence at the
Knowledge in AI (KAI) group of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL).
Her research focuses on creating systems that generate complex
narratives through a combination of semantic technologies, open data
and machine learning, applied mostly in scientific and robotics
scenarios. She is Editor-in-Chief of the CEUR-WS publication, part of
the Steering Committee for the Hybrid Human-AI Conference, and
Coordinator of the international Staff Exchange for the Dutch Hybrid
Intelligence consortium. Since 2014, she is regularly active in the
OCs/PCs of the major venues in the KR field (ISWC/ESWC, HHAI, WWW,
CIKM, IJCAI/ECAI).
- About the talk: We hear about explanations for AI all the time these days, since the
the latest (deep) machine learning solutions revealed to provide highly
accurate, but hardly scrutable and interpretable decisions. In 2013, we
were looking into using Knowledge Graphs to create explanations from ML
outputs, well before we even heard of the term eXplainable AI (XAI,
coined by DARPA in 2017). In this teasing talk, we will look into this
work from today’s perspective, including what has been done in this
context, whether it is still useful and relevant, and whether the same
methods still apply. We will conclude with a discussion on the future
of these ideas, hoping to foster new research in this direction.
Terry R. Payne: "Autonomy, the Web and Semantic Web Services"
- When: Wed Oct 4th 2023 at 18:00 (CEST) View in Local Time
- Where: YouTube
- About the speaker:
Terry Payne is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science
at the University of Liverpool. He has been active in the area of
agent-based computing and knowledge-based systems and services since
the mid 90ies, and has a specific interest is in the use of ontological
knowledge for the support of autonomous service discovery and
provision. He is actively exploring the use of autonomous approaches
to facilitate the communication and collaboration of heterogeneous
systems, using a variety of cross-disciplinary approaches. This
supports the longer term aim of describing, discovering and utilising
autonomous devices and services in a variety of settings, including
life sciences and laboratory environments.
- About the talk:
One of the early visions of Agent based Computing was the goal of
bringing multiple systems together serendipitously, and have complex
behaviour emerge as a consequence of their co-existence, driven by user
goals or external events (for example, in the case of RoboCupRescue,
which was inspired by the 1995 Kobe Earthquake). Whilst syntactic
interoperability has been addressed through a plethora of (primarily
web-based) standards; semantic interoperability remained a key
challenge. When Darpa announced DAML, the DARPA Agent Markup Language
(which later evolved into OWL), there was a keen desire to explore how
services themselves could be modelled through ontologies. In this talk
I’ll look back at the early days of Semantic Web Services, including
the evolution of DAML-S and its successor, OWL-S, and reflect on how
they were viewed from different perspectives. The talk will then
provide a view on emerging opportunities for Autonomy and the use of
services, from today’s Semantic Web and Knowledge Graph perspective.
Anupriya Ankolekar: "Supporting Professional Information Workflows With Knowledge Graphs" (SWSA Ten-Year Award 2011)
- When: Tue Sep 5th 2023 at 18:00 (CEST) View in Local Time
- Where: YouTube
- About the speaker: Anupriya Ankolekar is Co-Founder & Principal Scientist at ModuleQ, an enterprise AI startup focussed on empowering knowledge professionals through proactive, mission-critical business intelligence and insights. Prior to ModuleQ, Anupriya was a Principal Research Scientist at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto and an Assistant Professor at AIFB Institute, part of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. She holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and a Masters in Computer Science from RWTH Aachen.
- About the talk: The vision of agents supporting human tasks and workflows gave rise to the field of Semantic Web, which in turn led to significant developments, such as web ontologies, linked data, semantic web services, and knowledge graphs. In this talk, I'll make the case that supporting information workflows for professional, strategic knowledge work and learning is a valuable application area for knowledge graphs. Professional information workflows are complex, role-dependent and stretch across application and enterprise boundaries. I'll describe examples of such workflows, outline a vision for proactive human-centred AI support for them and describe our approach at ModuleQ inspired by knowledge graphs. Key elements of our approach are explicit representation of professional and organizational priorities, information fusion of work traces across applications, and contextual knowledge to interpret professional work and to proactively identify relevant content and resources. I'll conclude with some of the challenges and open questions for building effective information workflow support.
Ian Horrocks: "KR and the Semantic Web: What We Did Right (and Wrong)" (SWSA Ten-Year Award 2013)
- When: Wed May 17th 2023 at 18:00 (CEST) View in Local Time
- Where: YouTube
- About the speaker:
Ian Horrocks is a full professor in the Oxford University Department of Computer Science,
a visiting professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo and a
co-founder of Oxford Semantic Technologies.
He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of Academia Europaea,
a fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI),
a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and a British Computer Society Lovelace Medalist.
His research concerns the representation of knowledge, and
the efficient manipulation of such knowledge by computers.
He played a leading role in establishing the Semantic Web as a significant research field,
pioneering many of the underlying logics, algorithms, optimisation techniques, and
reasoning systems.
He has contributed to the development of several widely used reasoning systems including FaCT++,
HermiT, Elk and RDFox. He has published more than 300 papers in
major international conferences and journals, winning best paper prizes at KR-98, AAAI-2010, and
IJCAI-2017, and test of time awards at ISWC-2013, KR-2020 and CADE-2021.
He is one of the UK’s most highly cited computer scientists, with more than 59,000 citations, and an h-index of 99.
- About the talk:
Augmenting the web to include some form of Knowledge Representation (KR) was one of the first directions for
Semantic Web research and led to the development of the OWL KR language(s) and the SPARQL query language.
In this talk I will recall the development of these languages and their genesis in foundational research,
highlighting what I believe were the many good design decisions as well as a few not so good.
I will then go on to trace the development of KR systems and applications based on these technologies and
argue that the this represents a significant success story for Semantic Web research.
Olaf Hartig: "Reflections on Linked Data Querying and Other Related Topics" (SWSA Distinguished Dissertation Award 2015 and SWSA Ten-Year award 2019)
- When: Mon Mar 7th 2022 at 18:00 (CET) View in Local Time
- Where: YouTube
- About the speaker:
Olaf Hartig is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science of Linköping University.
Additionally, he is an Amazon Scholar working with the Neptune graph database team at Amazon Web Services. Olaf is
interested in problems related to the management of databases and knowledge, with a focus on graph data and data that is
distributed over multiple, autonomous and/or heterogeneous sources. He received the 2019 SWSA Ten-Year Award for a paper
which pioneered the idea of traversal-based query execution as well as querying Linked Data on the Web in general, and
for his PhD thesis on the foundations of Linked Data queries, he was honored with the SWSA Distinguished Dissertation
Award in 2015.
- About the talk:
When aiming to evolve the World Wide Web into a Web of interlinked data ready for software agents and applications to
consume and act upon, Semantic Web researchers have advanced the state of the art of federated data management, with
novel ideas that focus on discoverability, interoperability, and automation. While the adoption and the practicality of
these ideas did, generally, not pan out as expected or hoped for, core aspects of the ideas have the potential to be
carried over as key ingredients of new approaches to interact with decentralized knowledge graphs and to build
decentralized data architectures. In this talk I will reflect on these earlier ideas and describe research problems that
need to be addressed in order to carry these ideas forward.
Ora Lassila: "On the broad applicability of Semantic Web technologies" (SWSA Ten-Year award 2011)
- When: Tue Dec 7th 2021 at 18:00 (CET) View in Local Time
- Where: YouTube
- About the speaker:
Ora Lassila is a Principal Technologist at Amazon
Web Services, working in the Neptune graph database team. Earlier, he
has held research and product development positions in many
organizations interested in complex data problems, ontologies, and AI.
Together with his co-authors he was the recipient of the first SWSA
“10-year award”. He was also a co-author of the original RDF
specification as well as a co-author of the seminal article on the
Semantic Web. Dr. Lassila is a graduate of the Helsinki University of
Technology.
- About the talk:
The Semantic Web, despite how it was originally advertised,
was not a replacement for the World Wide Web, nor was it really
knowledge representation (KR) solely for the Web. Rather, the Semantic
Web is KR using Web technologies. The different technologies and
standards of the Semantic Web have broad applicability in many areas
distinctly outside of what we consider to be the “Web”. The DAML-S
(later OWL-S) effort was one such example: apply ontologies to the
problem of describing the semantics of functionality and services (in
this case Web services, but the concept was more general). While the
effort may not have been successful in the long term, it was an early
example of the application of Semantic Web technologies and approaches
to a wide variety of use cases and domains. These include agent-based
computing, ubiquitous computing, context-awareness, policies, privacy,
enterprise knowledge graphs, and many others. But there is still an
even bigger role for Semantic Web technologies: Modern enterprise data
practice is messy, with daunting problems such as data integration,
elimination of “data silos”, and alignment of semantics. This
“messiness” will be perpetuated until we have a practical unifying
logical representation for data and semantics, and the promise of
Semantic Web is that it could be this representation.
SWSA Panel "20 years into ISWC: What's next beyond Knowledge Graphs?"
- Recording: YouTube
- When: Thu Oct 7th 2021 at 18:00 (CEST) / Thu Oct 7th 2021 at 12:00 (EDT) / Fri Oct 8th 2021 at 0:00 (CST)
- Moderator: Catia Pesquita
- Panelist: Jim Hendler, Natasha Noy, Rudi Studer
- Learn more