News Story

KMi@WebScience2018

Miriam Fernandez, Tuesday 5 Jun 2018

This year was a very special edition of the WebScience 2018 conference. Not only because it was the 10th anniversary of the event, but because Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and recipient of the 2016 ACM A. M. Turing Award (also known as the Nobel Price for informatics) delivered his award lecture at the conference on Tuesday 29th of May. This lecture was open to the public, and several renown Computer Scientist across the world, including our own Professor Enrico Motta, were invited by Elsevier to participate at the event.

Not only KMi researchers were invited to attend such a unique event, but also to deliver the only other invited keynote at the conference. Professor John Domingue spoke about The Future of Semantics on the Web. He provided a fantastic overview of Semantic Web history, highlighted the importance of common sense knowledge, discussed the problems with data and technology (data poor, fair principles, verifiable claims) and stressed the need of semantics to adapting to ever changing context.

Big Congratulations are also in order to Miriam Fernandez, Moizzah Asif and Harith Alani for bringing to KMi the WebScience2018 best paper (joint) award. The paper "Understanding the Roots of Radicalisation on Twitter" aims to bridge the gap between the Social Science and Computer Science research fields by translating current theories of radicalisation into computational models that enable the analysis of radicalisations at scale .

In summary, a very exciting conference with a key participation from KMi researchers!