News Story

KMi at ISWC 2017

Jane Whild, Friday 3 Nov 2017

It was the turn of Vienna, Austria to host the International Semantic Web Conference, and once again KMi’s participation at the event was very strong. Miriam Fernandez co-chaired the Research Track, while Harith Alani, Enrico Motta, Alessandro Adamou, Francesco Osborne and Ilaria Tiddi sat on various program committees.

KMi members organised two Workshops this year, namely Alessandro Adamou and Enrico Daga’s WHiSe: Humanities in the Semantic Web and Pinelopi Troullinou and Ilaria Tiddi’s BlkMirror: Re-coding Black Mirror #RCBlackMirror. In addition, KMiers presented three workshop papers:

John Domingue and Allan Third presented “LinkChains: Exploring the Space of Decentralised Trustworthy Linked Data” at DeSemWeb: Decentralizing the Semantic Web Workshop #DeSemWeb2017.
Andrea Mannocci, Angelo Antonio Salatino, Francesco Osborne and Enrico Motta presented “2100 AI: Reflections on the mechanisation of scientific discovery”, at the BlkMirror workshop.
Enrico Daga and Paul Mulholland co-presented "Characterizing the Landscape of Musical Data on the Web: State of the Art and Challenges" at the WHiSe workshop.

Two papers were also presented in the highly selective research and industry tracks, on

"Semantic Wide and Deep Learning for Detecting Crisis-Information Categories on Social Media", by Gregoire Burel, Hassan Saif, and Harith Alani, and
"Supporting Springer Nature Editors by means of Semantic Technologies", by Francesco Osborne, Angelo Antonio Salatino, Aliaksandr Birukou, Thiviyan Thanapalasingam, and Enrico Motta.

Within the demo and poster tracks the following contributions were given:

Shuangyan Liu, Carlo Allocca, Mathieu D’Aquin and Enrico Motta demonstrated "A Platform for Triple Accuracy Measuring and Evidence Triples Discovering”.
Francesco Osborne, Thiviyan Thanapalasingam, Angelo Antonio Salatino, Aliaksandr Birukou and Enrico Motta demonstrated “Smart Book Recommender: A Semantic Recommendation Engine for Editorial Products”.
Francesco Osborne, Andrea Mannocci and Enrico Motta presented “Forecasting Technology Migrations by means of the Technology-Topic Framework”.
The highlight of the week was Ilaria Tiddi winning the SWSA Distinguished Dissertation prize – “Explaining Data Patterns using Knowledge from the Web of Data”. The prize is awarded every year to the best Doctoral Thesis in the field. This was the second year in a row that a KMi graduate has scooped this highly prestigious award.

To top all this, we participated in the first ISWC Job Fair where our members were on hand to talk to the ISCW community about the exciting academic and developer vacancies that are currently available at KMi.

Last but not least, The Knowledge Media Instruments band took part in the legendary ISWC Jam Session promoting the cultural environment of KMi.

Other important contributions were provided by Miriam Fernandez and Harith Alani, who were part of the tutor group invited to attend the mentoring lunch for PhD students, postdocs and junior faculty members; Miriam also attended editorial board meetings for the Journal of Web Semantics and Enrico Motta, who took part in the annual meeting of the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA), the body that oversees the ISWC series of conferences.