My Predictions for 2006+2007

A couple of ideas for whats going to be the trends in the next TWO years (two years, because looking at my predictions I realized that many are to ambitious for just one year).

I expect live broadcasting of events - the last frontier for citizens journalism - to be tackled (not live blogging - video streams!).
Mobile internet will finally really take of (not WLAN - WiMax and UMTS). Google Wallet will make picopayment on the net a reality.
Mainstream media talk a lot about the privacy questions posed by CCTV cameras plus image recognition technology.

I do not expect to see a sudden rise in semantic web adoption in the mainstream web (at least not of its owl centric academic variant). I expect to see an increase in "simple metadata" (think RSS, microformats). I expect to see continuing and increasing interest in Semantic Technologies, (within large applications, for a few corporate intranets and expert system like applications). Semantic Web Services will be increasingly used in "Problem Solving Environments" (move into more constraint domains, use PSM ideas). There will be more interest in the "web" part of Semantic Web, there will be much more interest in multimedia + metadata. There will be less interest in Ontology Learning. Rule languages for the Semantic Web will receive a lot of attention as well as schema/ontology mapping/alignment. Manchester will get an even more prominent role in the DL community.

Politically I expect Iran to be the main story of 2006.

"Foundatations and Grand Challenges of Artificial Intelligence"

This article by Raj Reddi is a nice short overview of AI history prior to 1990.

What can we do today that we could not do thirty years ago? It is fortunate that AI has several areas in which there has been sustained research over the past twenty to thirty years. These areas are chess, natural language, speech, vision, robotics and expert systems. I would like to illustrate the progress by providing a historical perspective on some of these areas.

More fun articles from Raj Reddi can be found on his webpage, I liked "Computing - the next 10 years"(2001), "Implications of Infinite Memory and Bandwidth" (2000) and All Authored Works On-Line : A Global Infrastructure for Universal Access to Information (1997).

Tags: Artificial Intelligence, AI

A Universal Measure of Intelligence for Artificial Agents

I came across this interesting paper today: A Universal Measure of Intelligence for Artificial Agents.
The task they use to define intelligence is a generic reinforcement learning - an agent gets some observation, a part of this observation is a reward that depends on earlier actions, the agent has a finite set of possible actions. The agent needs to maximize the total reward across all possible environments.
Computing this total reward across all possible, or even across all computable environments, however, is not possible, hence the authors define a distribution of "simple environments" - rewarding agents for applying Occams Razor.
This short summary obviously omitted some details - read the paper for the details.

The authors did not do it and don't even discuss the possibility - but I would assume that it should be possible to apply similar ideas to actually evaluate learning algorithms. What I don't know is, how an algorithm to actually create samples from the distribution of simple environments would work (and how fast slow it would be). I'm also not sure how much a completely unbiased learner could help us solve any real problems.

Related: Metrics for Faulty Inferences
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, AI

The Interesting Link

The last week saw many predictions for the coming year, I found BBCs prediction that 2006 will be the year digital music will be feed from DRM. Ajax developers journals nice selection of web related technology predictions for 2006. Kevin Burton has some more web related predictions and Mercury News has an article on the top ten tech predictions.

At the same time there are lots of retrospectives around, wired talks about worst tech moments of 2005, Best tech moments of 2005 and the 50 best robots ever. On other sites I found an article about the 50 greatest gadgets of the last 50 years and 2005: The year in biology and medicine.

I wrote earlier about how normal cctv cameras together with suitable image recognition can pose gigantic privacy questions - here now is the newest twist to this trend: Britain will be the first country to monitor every car journey.

Upcoming Conferences: 17th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications has a workshop on Web Semantics. There are new CfPs for ECAI Workshop on Agent-Mediated Knowledge Management and Workshop on Applications of Logic Programming in the Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services . I also added the CfPs/conference websites for IJCAI-07, PAKM 2006 and SIGIR 2006.

The Political Link: Juan Coles Top Ten Myths about Iraq in 2005.

Last Weeks Interesting Link

The Last Rose

In Germany there was a bit of snow on the last day of Christmas.

EU-IST Project: KnowledgeWeb

Knowledge Web is the Network of Excellence project in the Semantic Web area. Its stated main goal is to help Semantic technologies into the industry.

Or as they put it

Outreach to Industry: The main objective of Knowledge Web's outreach to industry area is to promote greater awareness and faster take-up of Semantic Web technology within Europe in full synergy with the research activity. This outreach will help to reduce time needed to transfer the technology to industry and to market.
Outreach to Education: Knowledge Web aims to work towards the establishment of a European Association for Semantic Web Education (EASE), which will act as the principal focus for educational activities on Semantic Web.
Coordination of Research: The objective of Knowledge Web will be to ensure that the research as performed by the leading groups in this area will be sufficiently coordinated to avoid both duplication and fragmentation. Such coordination is particularly important for the Semantic Web: since it is an inter-disciplinary area, joint collaborations among and across various research communities is necessary. The objective of Knowledge Web is to coordinate the European research effort to make Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services a reality.

Project Data: Network of Excellence, January of 2004 until January of 2008
Project Funding: 6.7 million €
Coordinated by the Universtity Innsbruck. Participants include the Universtiy Karlsruhe, Vrije Unisiteit Brussel, DERI Gallway, Victoria University of Manchester and the University of Sheffield (Full List)

More Info: The best source of information again seem to be the public available deliverables (for industry, research,education and management)

Earlier Project Profiles: DIP, NeOn, SEKT, VIKEF

Tags: Semantic Web, EU-IST, EU-ICT

EU-IST Project: SEKT

The goal of the SEKT - Semantically Enabled Knowledge Technologies - project is to build the next generation knowledge management tools using semantic technologies.

SEKT will deliver software to: semi-automatically learn ontology and extract metadata, and to maintain and evolve the ontology and metadata over time; to provide knowledge access; besides middleware to effect integration of all the SEKT components. SEKT will also develop a methodology for using semantically based knowledge management. The software components and the methodology will be evaluated and refined through three case studies, in the legal, media and telecom industries.

Project Data: Integrated Project, January 2004 until January 2007
Estimated Cost: 12.5 million €
Project Funding: 8.33 million € (the project also receives some money from Switzerland)
Coordinator is British Telecom, participants include the University Karlsruhe, University Innsbruck, Ontoprise and Empolis. Complete List

More Info: You can find the project deliverables online. Even better is the Semantic Knowledge Management special issue of the Journal of Knowledge Management that features articles about work in the SEKT project (full content is available online).

Earlier Project Profiles: DIP, NeOn, VIKEF

EU-IST Project: DIP

DIP - Data, Information, and Process Integration with Semantic Web Services - is THE large Semantic Web Services Project. It wants to create the infrastructure to make Semantic Web Services a reality. In their words:

The major mission of DIP is to further develop Semantic Web and Web Services and especially to enable their combination. Web Services are the proper means to access semantically enriched data and semantic enrichment of Web Services is essential for their scalability and maturity. This new area is called Semantic Web Services. [...]
DIP will develop this technology and will focus on applications in eWork and eCommerce including sub topics such as Knowledge Management, Enterprise Application Integration and eGoverment. DIP'S mission is to make Semantic Web Services a reality, providing an infrastructure (i.e. an architecture and tools) that will revolutionize data and process integration in eWork, and eCommerce as the web did it for human access.

Project Data: Integrated Project, January 2004 until January 2007
Estimated cost: 16.3 million €
EU funding 10.1 million € (don't get confused, the figure on their project homepage is wrong)

Coordinator is the DERI in Gallway, Participants include the Forschungszentrum Informatik (my employer), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, University of Innsbruck, ILOG, British Telecom and SAP. You find a complete list here.

More Info: The project homepage offers a load of information, especially the deliverables page gives a good view of whats happening in the project.

Earlier Project Profiles: VIKEF, NeOn,

Tags: Semantic Web, EU-IST, EU-ICT

Fröhliche Weihnachten!

(thats how we say merry christmas in germany)
The picture shows some christmas decoration in a main shopping street in Berlin (Kurfüstendamm). Although that is not so easy to see, but the Santa Claus stands in front of the "Gedächtniskirche", ruins of a old church that got destroyed in WWII and that serve as a war memorial.

An extendable Java Framework for Instance Similarities in Ontologies

A paper I co-authored got accepted, its about a Java framework for calculating instance similarities in ontologies (the full list of authors: Mark Hefke, Valentin Zacharias, Ernst Biesalski, Andreas Abecker, Qingli Wang, Marco Breiter), the paper is called An extendable Java Framework for Instance Similarities in Ontologies and it will be presented at the 8th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems. Abstract:

We present the conceptual basis and a prototypical implementation of a technical framework for computing syntactical and semantical similarities between instances within an ontology. The focus of this work did not only comprise the implementation of specific, ontology-based similarity measures, but also their flexible and efficient combination and extensibility.

EU-IST Project: NeOn

NeOn: Lifecycle Support for Networked Ontologies is a large integrated project due to start in March-April of 2006. The aim of this project is to create the reference architecture for the development of applications based on networked and rapidly changing ontologies:

The aim of NeOn is to create the first ever service-oriented, open infrastructure, and associated methodology, to support the development life-cycle of such a new generation of semantic applications, with the overall goal of extending the state of the art with economically viable solutions. These applications will rely on a network of contextualized ontologies, exhibiting local but not necessarily global consistency.

Even though this project hasn't started yet, there is already quite a bit of discussion about it. Many of the "big players" in semantic technologies in Europe are partners in this project - this is a project you'll continue to hear about.

Project Data
Integrated Project, March/April 2006 until end of March/April 2010
Estimated Project Cost and funding: not public yet
Coordinator: Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University (UK) Participants: Institute AIFB, Universitaet Karlsruhe (Germany), Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (Spain), Software AG (Germany), iSOCO S.A. (Spain), 'Jozef Stefan' Institute (Slovenia), INRIA (France), University of Sheffield (UK), Universitaet Koblenz-Landau (Germany), ontoprise GmbH (Germany), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italy), Asociación Española de Comercio Electrónico (Spain), United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization (Italy), Atos Origin s.a.e. (Spain).

Earlier Project Profiles: VIKEF

Tags: Semantic Web, EU-IST, EU-ICT

The Interesting Link

This REWERSE deliverable "Rule-based Policy Specication: State of the Art and Future Work" could be a nice starting point if you want to get an overview of the state of the art security policies, trust management or business rules.

Very interesting overview of the work of the Social Computing Group at Microsoft

This bbc article explores Microsoft's vision of the future (gadgets for your home). I especially like the paragraph "Picture This" about how better image recognition techology will may one day enable vastly better graphics editors and about tools that automatically create caricatures from portraits. Along the same lines an article about more cool gadgets under development: Technology's just getting started.

Japan starts a program aimed at developing search technologies to challenge Google and Yahoo. This is another program that will have a focus on multimedia retrieval (the EU is going in that direction too).

Wired prognoses 2006 to be the year of mobile malware - what a great prospect ;-)

Businessweek has a nice best of 2005 site (best ideas, best leaders, best products). I was surprised by the "best products" - really thought I had already seen all cool new gadgets ...

structured blogging is surely an interesting development - but I guess it'll be a while until Blogspot offers something like it :-( (yea, I should be hosting my own blog).

Google is becoming more evil by the day ;-) (but it really sounds more like AOL bought a stake in Google and not the other way around)

Why you should continue to date me - a series of charts and graphs" - very nice (via information aesthetics)

Upcoming Conferences: New CfPs for the eChallenges 2006 (not so well known, but a good place for not so technical stuff), 8th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning ECCBR 2006 and the AAAI-06 Workshop on Modeling and retrieval of context.

The Political Link: I'm constantly tempted to post politcal articles to this blog ... So I decided to allow myself to sneak in exactly one political link per week: Here it is: Caroline Hawley - BBC Correspondent in Bagdad since before the fall of Saddam - moves to Jordan and in this article says Goodbye to Badgad.

BibSonomy

The team of Gerd Stumme(a former AIFB researcher and now professor at the university of Kassel) created BibSonomy:

our social bookmarking system BibSonomy is now online, and some of you are already using ist. We would like to invite you all to join us in sharing and organizing bibtex data. BibSonomy is intended to support everyone, but in particular researchers, to share bookmarks and bibliographies. One main reason for setting up the system is that we have to deal with bibliographic data all the time, and needed a more coherent way to manage our bibtex data.

Tags: Semantic Web, Tags, Web2.0

EU-IST Project: VIKEF

VIKEF ("Virtual Information and Knowledge Environment Framework") is an Integrated Project that wants to

"bridge the gap between the partly implicit knowledge and information conveyed in scientific and business content resources (e.g. text, speech, images) and the explicit representation of knowledge required for a targeted and effective access, dissemination, sharing, use, and annotation"[...]

They are claiming to build a framework and that supports the entire knowledge lifecycle with acquisition of information resources, (semi-automatic) annotation, knowledge discovery, ontology engineering and evolution, metadata management, context-aware infromation access and knowledge sharing using semantic information.
Publications that aknowledge financing through this project are mostly about user profiles/personalization (for example Ontologically-enriched Unified User Modeling for Cross-System Personalization or A Framework for RDF User Profile Management) and RDF storage in general (Optimizing RDF Storage Removing Redundancies). In their last annual report they are writing interesting things about automatic annotation of images, but it is unclear if this is anything more than ideas.
I wasn't able to find live/downloadable software demos; the 2005 project report contains one screenshot of some visualization component.

Project Data
Integrated Project, April 2004 until end of March 2007
Estimated Project Cost: 10.2 Million €
EU funding 5.6 Million €

Participants: INMARK Estudios y Estrategias (Spain), Fraunhofer IPSI (Germany), Xerox (France), Istituto Trentino di Cultura (Italy), Telefónica (Spain), University of Trento (Italy), Università di Bari (Italy), University of Sheffield (UK), CNR, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale (Italy), The National Microelectronics Applications Centre Ltd (Ireland), finebrain.com Ltd. (Switzerland), Cyberlab.Org (Norway), CPO Hanser (Germany), Fundación Semana Verde de Ga-licia (Spain).

Tags: Semantic Web, EU-IST, EU-ICT

"Focus on EU Projects"?

In this blogs mission statement I wrote that "I want to focus on EU projects" ... which I didn't so far but now actually want to start to deliver on that promise. Starting today at irregular intervals I will write short profiles of EU (or other Government funded) projects related to Semantic Web / AI / Knowledge management. I don't have insider knowledge about most of the projects and so will mostly rely on public accessible information. I do have some experience with these kinds of projects "in general".

Semantic Web Übernodes

I hope that since I just discovered Stephan Decker’s blog that I might be forgiven for commenting on one of his older posts. In it he takes about the relation between Web 2.0, the Semantic Web and how he believes that both may come together in the “Semantic Web 2.0”.
I started out to write a rebuttal of his thesis, but in the process ended up actually understanding (and sharing) his arguments (I think, or I just bended them until I could agree).

I always tend to think of the Semantic Web as a web of personal homepages where everyone annotates his stuff. This vision seems to be at odds with the current state of the Web 2.0 which is dominated by large, centralised applications like del.icio.us or flickr. They offer lots of API’s – but are centralised nonetheless. It would be possible to build a really decentralised flickr - just embed metadata in each and every image you post on the web, give each image a unique uri, use a couple of trust services and define a suitable machine understandable comment format. This decentralised flickr, however, would be inconvenient* and quite difficult to build; its unrealistic that it will appear anytime soon.

But actually I wasn’t seeing the forest for the trees (not seeing the Semantic Web for the data?): Why do the semantic web notes need to be so small, if this causes inconvenience? Why not have one large node for pictures (or five for that matter), two for events, ten for reviews … ? This vision is less distributed than the current web, but has less technical challenges and is easier to understand & use (than my above sketched vision of a fully decentralised Semantic Web). Large database driven website may eventually become their own node in the Semantic Web. Everyone else (who’s currently using some simple shared web hosting or does not yet have a web presence) will not host their own Semantic Web data, but put their data on a few Semantic Web Übernodes.

* for example everyone posting images would need to worry about metadata standards and uris.

Manual Trackback: Richard Cyganiak writes:

He’s right. Here’s something I realized when I built the FOAF crawler for our Google Base upload experiment: Most RDF geeks hand-craft their FOAF files, or use RDF tools like the FOAF-a-matic or FoafMe. There seem to be around 500 of these profiles out there in the vast wilderness of the WWW. Then, there are two million FOAF profiles created automatically by LiveJournal for their users. Five hundred! Two million! [...].

Tags: Semantic Web

Information Sources

capsolo blog had some links to new Semantic Web blogs, so its time for another blogroll update:
TBL now has a blog ... not too much there yet, but - its TBL! Not as famous, but still well known - Stefan Decker has a blog too. And some more Semantic Web researchers: my colleagues Denny and Max, the AIFB in general and since Denny recommended him - Nick Kings.
More general IT related I can recommend Simon Phipps, "Chief Open Source Officer" at Sun Microsystems and the ZD Blog Software as Services

Upcoming Event: EKAW06

Added the EKAW 2006 - 15th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management to the "Upcoming Events" to the right.

----------------------
Key Areas (see http://ekaw.vse.cz for a more detailed list):
----------------------

* Ontologies and the Semantic Web
* Semantics for Grid and Web Services
* Knowledge and Social Networks
* Knowledge Management
* Knowledge Acquisition and Modeling

Proceedings will be published by Springer Verlag 
in the LNCS series.

----------------------
Important deadlines
----------------------

April 1, 2006     Workshop and tutorial proposals
April 12, 2006    Research abstract submissions;
                  Industrial abstract submissions
April 19, 2006    Research paper submissions; 
                  Industrial track papers submissions
June 15, 2006     Poster submissions; Demo paper 
                  submissions

via the Semantic Web Mailing List

The Interesting Link

Want to catch up on those developments in the Web 2.0 area? This "best of web2.0 software" is a great place to start (a nice follow-up on the same blog is "Companies I’d like to Profile (but don’t exist)"- check out the comments as well).

Tool helps you find stuff that you didn't know you were looking for(Watsons context based search).

The simple methods employed for km at bbc.

Cyc offers prizes for the best publications or proposals involving OpenCyc and/or ResearchCyc.

The European Institute of Public Administration awards prizes for innovation in e-government and healthcare, the Guardian highlights some finalists.

An interesting article about how AI technologies may change air traffic control.

A wired article about how the facial recognition technology developed by Riya is endangering your privacy (sorry, but I just can’t help but to point to the fact that I wrote about the privacy implications of facial-recognition techniques months ago ;-))

Search Engine Watch has a positive review for “Ambient Findability” – a book about how to deal with the information overload. I read it a while ago and did not like it. It describes a few current IT developments (Google Earth, Flickr, GPS, internet anywhere …) but to me offered no new insights. It may, however, be interesting to people that haven’t followed recent internet developments. It’s also available on safari.

On a lighter note I found a post about how to date an Apple developer and an article about products that could have changed the industry but didn’t (among them an analog computer and "The Connection Machine"). And a piece about high-tech graffiti.

Oh, and don’t forget to celebrate: The digital camera turns 30 this month.

From now own "The Interesting Link" will be my weekly links post - things that I believe could be interesting to people reading this blog but that for any reason I don't want to write more than a sentence about.

Strange technological developments

Sometimes I'm wondering what new technological developments will be as strange to us in 40 years as a self driving car is now to my grand mother. A while ago I came across one article that describes one nice possibility: Emotional attachement to robots (I would like to add "and software agents"). I think its a pretty safe bet that our children and grand children will have more emotional attachement to things we will continue to see as "just a machine"(the short Tamagotchi craze gave a glimpse of what is ahead). I also believe that our grand children will grow up to accept that some robots have emotions - something my generation will have a hard time to understand (although I would guess that in the end society will accept that machines - even those created by humans - can have emotions).
Unless of course, humankind fails to preserve this increasingly fragile society of ours (then one of the main things that will amaze us about our grand children will be that they don't miss running water)

Googlespotting: Googles Dashboard

With all this excitment about Alexa and all the Xmas parties I almost forgot to hype the newest Google invention: Google now offers a simple API that allows to build modules for your personalized homepage at Google (yours, not mine; I still think that the best startpage is "null").
Anyway: very nice idea, API looks really simple to use. A nice point is that you can host your modules on Google Base - possible the first real use for this service ;-).
But still, Apple did it first (yea, looks different at first glance, but think about it from a widget/module developer point of view). Microsoft and Yahoo where faster too.

PS: I was just checking if somebody had already used the term "Googlespotting" - (of course, somebody did), but I was "shocked" to find that some are using this term absolutely wrong. Googlespotting is not (!) looking at interesting places using Google Earth (thats Google Sightseeing) ;-)

Alexa Web Search Platform Is For Information Extraction

Yesterdays announcement about Alexas Web Search Platform left me wondering: "Well this sounds cool, but what exactly are those new applications that could not be build using small scale crawlers + googles/alexas old apis?"
After a few minutes of thought this became clear: Alexas Web Search Platform is for novell information extraction and text mining applications. All applications that can gather some data from web sites that normally don't make it into the index. The two examples Alexa made - search engines that index the metadata of images and music - further illustrate this. So if you have algorithms that can get more information from websites than Google/MSN/Alexa (Recognizing people in pictures? Any kind of complex named entity recognition? NLP in general? Recognizing technorati tags not just on blogs but across the whole web? Reading XMP from files?)- Alexa offers you the framework to apply them. Or if you have algorithms that use large corpora of text to learn "something" (Ontology learning anyone?) - Alexa is the chance to process a really really large corpus (my very rough estimate: its less than $16500 to process the entire german speaking web*)

*: The entire index has 100TB, the german speaking web will be <25%, more than >75% will be images and the like; that leaves <7000GB. Processing this data at 1$/50GB is 160$ (generously assuming that in the process we create additional 1000GB of traffic). Estimating the runtime without knowing the algorithm is impossible, but assuming a pretty quick 100kB/s (what kind of cpu is that anyway?), we spend 16.000 CPU hours or $16.000 (better make that algorithm paralell - you could be waiting >2 years ;-) ). The 100GB we use for intermediate storage ($100) don't add very much.

Tags: Amazon, Alexa

Simpler DIY Search Engine and Web Mining

Apparently Alexa, Amazons search company, is offering its index to anyone who wants it (and is willing to pay for it - but its quite cheap and you only pay for CPU hours, storage used and data processed, no setup or licensing fee). From John Batelle's Searchblog:

Anyone can also use Alexa's servers and processing power to mine its index to discover things - perhaps, to outsource the crawl needed to create a vertical search engine, for example. Or maybe to build new kinds of search engines entirely, or ...well, whatever creative folks can dream up. And then, anyone can run that new service on Alexa's (er...Amazon's) platform, should they wish.

Although I currently don't have any great idea how to use it - this sounds great. Maybe one day we'll have the same for structured data, either Google Base going down the same path offering similar apis or Alexa/Amazon will build their own Base/Fremont.

More: Much more information on the Read/Write Web blog.

Tags: Amazon, Alexa

Internet links

Microsoft relaunches virtual earth as Windows Live Local. Coolest new feature are "close up" arial pictures of selected US-areas.

Microsofts cool ideas about socially ordering emails.

Advances in machine translation. I'm always wondering if Ontology Learning approaches could profit from recent methods in statistical machine translation by framing the Ontology Learning problem as a translation (from a natural language to a more formalized language).

IBM's Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise

Are there 100000 professional chinese gamers in computer gaming factories, earning money by selling items and character for online games?

This I left lying around for a while, but more Google speculation by Cringely. And the bbc about Googles offline search.

Blog Template Update ...

I changed the blog template such that a list of upcoming conferences, workshops etc. is now displayed to the right. The list shows the paper submission dates (dd/mm/yy) not the date of the conference. I'll try to keep this list current and will post any "new arrivals" as blog entry.
For this list I made a selection of the conferences from my recent conferences post, in this post there where too many deadlines in too short of a time - I only kept the conferences most closely related to my work.

Future Technology Links:

Salons "The Big Idea" on Robugs, biologically based software, the GeoWeb, transgenic art and other hot frontiers in technological innovation.

Microsoft Testing Its Own 'Google Base', called Microsoft Freemont.

Some cool pictures from the International Robot Exhibition in Japan (via Boing Boing).

Another Salon article, this time about desktop manufacturing. Desktop manufacturing is for me one of the most fascinating emerging trends - the technologies looks pretty solid but I have no clue what its going to be used for.

An article about the camera that lets you focus after(!) you made your picture.

Upcoming Conferences, Workshops etc. (Updated twice)

I need to plan my paper submissions, so I made I collection of upcoming conferences. The list is surely not complete and the selection subjective, but I thought some other people may still profit from it:

9th International Conference on Business Information Systems May 31 – June 2 in Klagenfurt, Austria, papers until January 9th.
Same location, but May 29-31: 5th International Conference on Information Systems Technology and its Applications (no CfP yet, but judging from the title you will be hard pressed to find a topic that’s not within the scope of the conference).

The WWW 2006 conference, 23rd till 29th of May. Interesting workshops:

• Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop, paper submissions until 10th of January. CfP.
• Reasoning on the Web, deadline 10th of January.
• Semantic Web Annotations for Multimedia (SWAMM 2006), submissions until January 10th.
• Workshop IntraWebs 2006, another WWW workshot, submissions until January 10th.
• Evaluation of Ontologies for the Web, located at the WWW06, May 22 or 23, papers until February 24th.

Workshop on Agents in Medicine, Computational Biology, and Bioinformatics at the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2006), submissions until January 15th.

2006 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC 2006), September 18-22 in Chicago, papers until 16th of January. CfP.

Eighteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-06), July 16-20 in Boston, papers until January 24.

Symposium on Adaptation and Learning on the Web, April 3rd to 4th in Bristol. Papers until February 3rd.

IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, Washington State August 12-15, short abstracts until February 3rd.

17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Italy August 28-September 1, summaries until February 8th.

International Provenance and Annotation Workshop (IPAW'06), Chicago, May 3-5, 2006, submissions until February 10th.

Twenty-first National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06), July 16-20 in Boston, abstracts until Febraury 16. Has a special track on web intelligence.

2nd International Symposium of Knowledge and Argument Visualization, 5-7 July in London, paper submission until 1st March. A part of the conference of Information Visualization, homepage should be here: http://www.graphicslink.demon.co.uk/IV06/ but apparently isn’t online yet (I can send you the CfP if your interested).

I-KNOW ‘06 Special Track on Advanced Semantic Technologies 2006, 6th September in Graz, submissions until 3. April. Business Process Oriented Knowledge Infrastructures 2006 (BPOKI'06) is another special track at the same conference.

Update 12/7/05: added the European AI Conference, Workshop on Agents in Medicine, Computational Biology, and Bioinformatics and the IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science.
Update 12/8/05: added the AAAI-06 and the colocated IAAI-06. I'll soon add a small "upcoming conferences" part below the "publications" to the right. I will then only post the updates to the list in this blog.
Update 12/8/05: fixed all the broken links. Never again will I try to create html in Word! promised.

Tags: Semantic Web, Artificial Intelligence.

Metrics For Faulty Inferences

It is my firm conviction that with current logic based inference techniques it is not possible to get “internet scale” or “Turing test able” reasoning. I also believe that for this kind of reasoning both soundness and completeness will have to be given up.
To develop algorithms doing incomplete and unsound reasoning we need metrics that tell us just HOW unsound and incomplete this algorithms results are.

Tags: Semantic Web, Artificial Intelligence, OWL

Back From IAWTIC

For a few days now I'm back from Vienna and the IAWTIC... how do I put this politely ... the conference reconfirmed my long standing aversion against certain kinds of IT conferences. The conference did not manage to convince me that I was spending my time or my companies money very wisely. But well, you need to do some kind of dissemination activities. Talking of dissemination activity: here is a link to the paper I presented, the abstract is also here.

The picture above was taken in the very beautiful city center of Vienna.