News Story

KMi at ISWC 2016

Allan Third, Tuesday 1 Nov 2016

The 15th International Semantic Web Conference took place recently in Kobe, Japan, and the KMi contingent had a very strong showing at the conference.

Ilaria Tiddi and Allan Third presented papers in the highly selective research track, on "Learning to Assess Linked Data Relationships Using Genetic Programming", and "Integrating medical scientific knowledge with the semantically Quantified Self", respectively.

The application track was also well covered by KMi-ers, with Gregoire Burel ("EnergyUse – a Collaborative Semantic Platform for Monitoring and Discussing Energy Consumption"), and Francesco Osborne ("Automatic Classification of Springer Nature Proceedings with Smart Topic Miner"), both presenting in this track.

However, the highlight was probably Hassan Saif winning the highly prestigious SWSA Distinguished Dissertation prize, awarded every year to the best Doctoral Thesis in the field. As the winner of this prize, Hassan gave an invited talk about his doctoral thesis, "Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Microblogs".

Hassan also presented an expert highlights paper in the workshop on Linked Data for Information Extraction, "A Linked Open Data Approach for Sentiment Lexicon Adaptation" and contributed to the Posters & Demos session, with a poster entitled "On the Role of Semantics for Detecting pro-ISIS Stances on Social Media". There were also two demos presented by KMi-ers – Gregoire Burel, "Monitoring, Discussing and Publishing Energy Consumption Data using EnergyUse", and Francesco Osborne, "Smart Topic Miner@Supporting Springer Nature Editors with Semantic Web Technologies". See more at: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/news/article/18881#sthash.vt0Cetws.dpuf

Miriam Fernandez chaired the lightning talks session, during which Ilaria presented on "Semantic Web and Robotics: can we work together?".

Other important contributions were provided by Miriam and Enrico Motta, who were part of the tutor group invited to attend the mentoring lunch for PhD students, postdocs and junior faculty members, and Harith Alani, who attended editorial board meetings for the Semantic Web Journal and the Journal of Web Semantics – the latter of which was also attended by Miriam.

Next year’s ISWC will be held in Vienna, Austria, and our very own Miriam Fernandez will be one of the research track chairs!