News Story

Crete in May: ESWC Summer School, ESWC Conference and a Dinner Keynote

John Domingue, Wednesday 6 Jun 2012

Following a longish tradition the end for May saw two weeks of events starting with the ESWC Summer School held in a small village the south of Crete. This school borrows from long-held OU pedagogical principles for running such events combining technical hands-on sessions with a two-day project where students build their own Linked Data applications to present back to the school. Interspersed with these activities the school included Keynotes from notable Semantic Web researchers including: Enrico Franconi, Chris Welty, Lora Aroyo and Marko Grobelnik. KMi involvement in the school was high with Matthew Rowe acting as a tutor and John Domingue serving as the School Director with Elena Simperl of KIT. Activities moved to the north of the island where the ESWC Conference was held. This year the conference received over 200 submissions and attracted over 250 attendees. In addition the research paper track the conference also included a PhD Symposium, tutorials, workshops, posters, demos, panels, an EU project networking session and an AI Mashup Challenge. Keynotes at the conference included: Abraham Bernstein of the University of Zurich, Jeroen van Grondelle of the Semantic Web SME Be Informed, Alon Halevy from Google, Alek Kolcz from Twitter, Monica Lam from Stanford, Marta Nagy-Rothengass Head of the Data Value Chain Unit at the European Commission and Julius van de Laar who was involved in the US 2008 presidential election campaign for Barack Obama. KMi involvement included posters (Jacek Kopecky and John Domingue), workshop organization (Vanessa Lopez and Enrico Motta), 5 papers (Carlo Allocca, Mathieu D’Aquin, Trevor Collins, Enrico Motta, Paul Mulholland, Andriy Nikolov, Matthew Rowe and Annika Wolff). The paper from Andriy Nikolov, Mathieu D’Aquin and Enrico Motta on Unsupervised Learning of Data Linking Configuration was shortlisted for a best paper award As part of the Conference Banquet John Domingue gave the after dinner talk (also listed as a Keynote for some reason). This proved fairly popular with the presentation highlighted at one point on the SlideShare home page as it was the most talked about slidedeck in Facebook. The ESWC 2013 Summer School will again be held in Crete in September and the Conference will be held in May again but will move to Montpellier, France. As ever the end of May in Crete proved to be a very enjoyable and stimulating experience!