KMi Seminars
Computing for Human Experience
This event took place on Friday 10 September 2010 at 11:30

 
Amit Sheth Kno.e.sis, Wright State University

Today, systems, devices, sensors, data and human participation enable something more than a “human instructs machine” paradigm. Traditionally, we had to artificially simplify the complexity and richness of the real world to constrained computer models and languages for more efficient computation. Now, mobile and fixed sensors as well as human-in-the-loop sensing, social computing and ubiquitous Web access work in concert to enrich interactions, information sharing and collective intelligence. Increasingly intelligent systems and participatory sensing capture observations that can be contextually integrated and enhanced to create awareness of events and situations— they not only deal with documents or entities but also support situational awareness by incorporating thematic (“what”), temporal (“when”), spatial (”where”), causal (“why”) and other relationships between objects and events. This positions us for what we call an era of “computing for human experience” (CHE) that supports a seamless interaction between the physical world and the cyber world, which encompass integrated capabilities in sensing, perceiving and recognizing the physical world (e.g., in extending sensory engagement with environments and narrowing the gaps between the real world and computing). It also uses “humans as sensors” of intensions and emotions, historical facts or background knowledge and community generated knowledge or collective intelligence. Semantic (Web) techniques and technologies (annotations, conceptual models/ontologies and reasoning) play a central role in important tasks such as building context, integrating online and offline interactions, and help enhance human experience with focus on natural activities while relegating explicit computing and communication activities to background.

In this talk we will give a brief background of Kno.e.sis and discuss instances of semantics-empowered services computing, social networking and sensor Web that point to early capabilities towards CHE. An article in IEEE Internet Computing provides further information: http://bit.ly/HumanExperience

 
KMi Seminars
 

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.