Keynotes

Maria Teresa Pazienza

"ART framework for Ontology Management"

Alfio Gliozzo

"Beyond Jeopardy! Adapting Watson to the Medical Domain"

Steffen Staab

"Managing Online Business Communities "

Keynote Speaker: Maria Teresa Pazienza

Title: ART framework for Ontology Management

Abstract:

The Semantic Web is laying the foundations for a new, and very rapidly consolidating, way of searching, filtering, accessing and storing information across multiple, distributed and heterogeneous information streams. The overall aim is to facilitate access to wider and more complex knowledge resources with reduced time and effort.

Unfortunately, large part of the information on the web continues to be available through traditional unstructured content which will need to be analyzed and processed, to be levelled to ontological and semantic standards. In this context, it emerges the need for an architecture and a framework supporting the development/evolution/population of ontologies through exploitation of data mined over unstructured content.

The Artificial intelligence Research group at Tor Vergata University - ART- has the ambition to contribute to solve issues related to ontology management and semantic web. In short, the outcome of ART research activities during the last few years includes the development of real systems, components and frameworks operating in the contexts of NLP, Semantic Web and combination of both , with environments for Semantic Annotation, automatic Ontology-Lexicon interfacing, Ontology creation & population from text analysis.

Bio:

Maria Teresa Pazienza is currently full Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Engineering Faculty of the University of Roma "Tor Vergata" where founded dedicated curricula on AI both at degree and doctoral levels. Moreover she founded the ART Laboratory in 1988 http://art.uniroma2.it/ for supporting research and development activities and open to international partnerships with public and private institutions.
She coordinates researches and development activities on Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation and Management, Natural Language Processing at the Dept. of Enterprise Engineering.
Her areas of expertise include education, research, system development and user applications of AI technologies (natural language processing, information extraction, conceptual knowledge engineering, applied ontologies, knowledge-based systems, semantic web, linguistic resources production, linguistic agents). She is author/co-author of more than 200 scientific publications.

She is reviewer and evaluator for the European Community, for the Danish Council for Strategic Research, for the Ireland Science Foundation, for CHIST-ERA, a consortium of European national research funding organisations, for Chile Superior Council of the National Fund for Scientific & Technological Development and for the Italian Ministry of University.
She is in the editorial board of a few international journals (Journ. of Terminology, Cognitive Processing, Applied Ontology among others), in the scientific committee of CERTIA (academy/companies consortium for software engineering and applied AI technologies transfer) and participates in the scientific committees of several international conferences on AI. Prof. Pazienza is director of the Unit of Roma Tor Vergata University for CINI Consortium, and is in the Steering Committee of ESA (European Space Agency)-ESRIN and Roma Tor Vergata University Collaboration Agreement.
In 2010 prof. Pazienza received the IBM Faculty Award for her research activities and technologies achievements.

Keynote Speaker: Alfio Gliozzo

Title: Beyond Jeopardy! Adapting Watson to the Medical Domain

Abstract:

Watson is a computer system capable of answering rich natural language 
questions and estimating its confidence in those answers at a level of the best humans at the task. In an historic event, Watson triumphed over the best 
Jeopardy! players of all time. 
The new challenge for IBM is to adapt Watson to Domain Specific applications, with a strong focus on Healthcare. This talk describes the Deep QA framework and how Watson exploits it to answer both the Jeopardy! and the Medical questions, focusing on the adaptation methodology and presenting the new solutions implemented to minimize the adaptation effort.

Bio:

Alfio Gliozzo is a research staff member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He is a main contributor to the Watson core technology, with strong focus on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Acquisition. He has been involved in both academic research and industry for 12 years, achieving a significant track record in delivering semantic technologies across different applications including internet advertising, healthcare and eLearning. He is author of more than 50 scientific publications including papers, patents and books.

Keynote Speaker: Steffen Staab

Title: Managing Online Business Communities

Abstract:
Online Business Communities constitute an asset to companies for various purposes such as open innovation, customer self-help or knowledge management.
In this talk we will present challenges and opportunities that arise from actively monitoring and managing business communities.

Bio:

Steffen Staab is director of the Institute for Web Science and Technologies
and professor for databases and information system at the University Koblenz-Landau. His research interests lie in Web Science including semantic and social Web technologies and their application to multimedia and software engineering. He has co-authored more than 200 publications, which are widely cited.
He  is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Web Semantics and has been programme co-chair for WWW-2012.