Bernardo A. Huberman
Title: Social Media and Attention
The past decade has witnessed a momentous transformation in the way people interact and exchange information with each other. Content is now co-produced, shared, classified, and rated on the Web by millions of people, while attention has become the ephemeral and valuable resource that everyone seeks to acquire.
This talk will describe how social attention determines the production and consumption of content within social media, and the role it plays in the prediction of future events and trends.
Bernardo A. Huberman
Senior Fellow and Director, Social Computing Lab
HP Labs
Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/people/huberman
Tom Scott
Title: Using Linked Data to describe the natural world
Linked Data is a deceptively simply yet powerful idea, an idea that provides the foundations for much of the semantic web project. It has the potential to offer organisation and users new ways of using the web by publishing and linking data using standard web technologies and paradigms. Tim Berners-Lee's original proposed a web of things, not just a web of documents. A web that linked documents, people and things in the real world. And not just links but 'semantic' links which described why those things where related. By publishing HTTP URIs for people and things as well as documents and describing the relationship between those things with semantic links Linked Data allow publishers to make assertions about a domain of knowledge and the relationships between those things on the Web.
The BBC has adopted the principles of Linked Data in publishing significant sections of its Web site, including: programme information (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes) and natural history content (www.bbc.co.uk/wildlifefinder). This presentation provides an introduction to Linked Data and describes how the BBC has used the approach in the development of Wildlife Finder and BBC Programmes; including how Wildlife Finder reuses data from across the Web (e.g. IUCN, WWF, Zoological Society of London, Animal Diversity Web and Wikipedia) and from across the BBC to build the site.
Tom Scott
Executive Product Manager
BBC
UK
http://derivadow.com/
Enrico Motta
New Frontiers for Knowledge Engineering and Management:
Embedding Knowledge Technologies in Everyday’s Devices
The notion of "Smart Product" has recently emerged, which refers to "an autonomous object designed for self-organized embedding into different environments in the course of its lifecycle, supporting natural and purposeful product-to-human interaction". For instance, a smart product may be a car, which at different times of its lifecycle may be interacting with workers on the assembly line, dealers, garage mechanics, and a number of owners, and is able to exploit its awareness of its own history and the current context, to improve the level of interaction and proactive support provided to the user in any particular context.
In order to realise this vision, several challenges need to be addressed: in particular, in the context of smart products knowledge acquisition is no longer a structured process under the control of a knowledge engineer but it is a highly dynamic process where contextual knowledge is continuously acquired from a variety of sources, including sensors, databases, the internet, and different types of users, at different stages of the lifecycle. Effective knowledge acquisition is in turn crucial to support proactive behaviour, where the smart product is able to initiate communication and action on the basis of its understanding of the current situation and goals. Again, this scenario provides a major departure from classic decision-making support scenarios, which are relatively static with respect to problem solving contexts and types of users.
Finally, the dynamic nature of the decision-making support provided by smart products, for different contexts and different classes of users, also introduces new challenges with respect to human-computer interaction: depending on the user and the current context, different interaction modalities may be needed, thus introducing the need for smart, adaptive, multi-modal interaction methods.
In my talk I will discuss these new scenarios for knowledge technologies in the context of the SmartProducts project, in particular illustrating these ideas in two everyday application scenarios: smart products in the car and in the kitchen.
Enrico Motta
Professor of Knowledge Technologies, Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes
UK