Events Calendar

AI SEMINAR

Speaker: Yolanda Gil, Deputy Director, Intelligent Systems Division

Talk Title: Semantic Challenges in Getting Work Done

Abstract: In the new millennium, work involves an increasing amount of tasks that are knowledge-rich and collaborative. We are investigating how semantics can help on both fronts. Our focus is scientific work, in particular data analysis, where tremendous potential resides in combining the knowledge and resources of a highly fragmented science community. We capture task knowledge in semantic workflows, and use skeletal plan refinement algorithms to assist users when they specify high-level tasks. But the formulation of workflows is in itself a collaborative activity, a kind of meta-workflow composed of tasks such as finding the data needed or designing a new algorithm to handle the data available. We are investigating "organic data science", a new approach to collaboration that allows scientists to formulate and resolve scientific tasks through an open framework that facilitates ad-hoc participation. With a design based on social computing principles, our approach makes scientific processes transparent and incorporates semantic representations of tasks and their properties. The semantic challenges involved in this work are numerous and have great potential to transform the Web to help us do work in more productive and unanticipated ways.

Biography: Yolanda Gil is Director of Knowledge Technologies and Associate Division Director at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, and Research Professor in the Computer Science Department. She received her M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Gil conducts research on various aspects of Interactive Knowledge Capture, including intelligent user interfaces, knowledge-rich problem solving, and the semantic web. In recent years, her work has focused on collaborative large-scale scientific data analysis through semantic workflows. She initiated and chaired the W3C Provenance Incubator that led to the PROV community standard. She was elected Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 2012. Dr. Gil is the current Chair of ACM SIGAI, the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence.

Host: Greg VerSteeg

Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor large conference room

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kary LAU