KMi Seminars
Opening up Educational Materials to the World: Many Surprising Benefits and Some Unexpected Perils
This event took place on Friday 28 November 2008 at 10:30

 
Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Shigeru Miyagawa has been at MIT since 1991, where he is Professor of Linguistics and holds the endowed chair, Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture. In linguistics, he has a monograph to be published by MIT Press in 2009, Why Agree? Why Move? Unifying Agreement-based and Discourse-configurational Languages. The book he co-edited with Mamoru Saito, Oxford Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, was published by the Oxford University Press in 2008. Along with other books and monographs, he has nearly fifty articles on syntax, argument structure, and East Asian and Altaic linguistics. He also runs a laboratory that creates interactive educational programs. StarFestival, which looks at issues of growing up in multilingual, multicultural societies, was awarded the Best of Show at the 1997 MacWorld Exposition and the Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Contribution to MIT Education. JP NET, which has the entire MIT Japanese program on the web, was one of the first online projects in the world to place an entire academic program on the Internet (1993-1994). Visualizing Cultures, in collaboration with the Pulitzer Prize historian John W. Dower, has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities as an outstanding humanities educational website. It won the 2004 MIT Class of 1960 Innovation in Education Award. For his work in interactive media, the educational technology magazine Converge chose him as one of twenty national "Shapers of the Future." He was on the original team that proposed OpenCourseWare, and has helped to start opencoursewares in Japan and elsewhere. He serves on the MIT OpenCourseWare Advisory Board. Miyagawa received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Arizona in 1980, and his B.A. from the International Christian University in Tokyo in 1975.

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.