News Story

Russian State Owned News Agency Reports on STI ‘East meets West’ Russian Summit

John Domingue, Friday 2 Aug 2013

The middle of July saw STI International hold it’s bi-annual Strategic Semantic Summit an event which allows senior Semantic Web researchers to meet and discuss the future of semantic technology in the medium to long-term. This year’s event was held in Suzdal – a beautiful Russian town dating back to the 11th century and part of the famous Golden Ring north-east of Moscow.

The event focused on establishing new networks connecting Linked Data research within western Europe, Russia and Korea. The main representatives for Europe included the Summit Co-Chairs, John Domingue and Soren Auer from the University of Bonn and Franhofer, and also Dieter Fensel from the University of Innsbuck and Georg Gottlob from the University of Oxford. In addition to introducing the whole Summit John Domingue chaired a discussion on the concepts and state-of-the-art delivery methods for a Data Science Curriculum, building on the session he chaired at this year’s European Data Forum. Georg Gottlob talked about DIADEM a large project which targets web scale information extraction.

From Russia the representatives included Daniel Hladky of W3C Russia, Victor Klintsov from Avicomp and Dmitry Mouromtsev from the National University of St. Petersburg. Dmitry will Chair this year’s Russian Conference on Knowledge Engineering and the Semantic Web to be held in St. Petersburg. The main theme presented by the Russian contingent was on the growth of Open Data in Russia and the strong desire from President Putin to install Russian Universities into the top 100 as measured by global league tables. On the technical side they are currently developing an RDF store which can run on an Android device which was demoed during a dedicated session.

From Korea we had Ho-Chin Choi and Key-Sun Choi both from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology’s (KAIST) which is currently ranked in the top 50 universities globally. Ho-Chin is a Professor in the biomedical informatics centre at KAIST. His talked focused on the use of semantics and AI in creating personalized context-aware health avatars to run on smart phones. Key-Sun heads the Semantic Web Research Center at KAIST and was the Programme Chair for ISWC 2006 when it was held in Korea. His talk covered the emerging topic of AI combined with Big Data.

The event was covered by the Russian state-owned newsagency RIA Novosti. This news agency is one of the largest news agencies in Russia, is headquartered in Moscow and operates about 80 bureaus internationally. A pre-event workshop was also covered by Russian TV.