After submitting my PhD in January, I continue my long-term effort to blog about my phd.



When you submitted your phd, according to an old scottish tradition, you burn the last printed draft in the woods. Gunnar Grimnes and I did adhere to that scottish tradition on the 10th of January 2009, it also includes drinking a lot of alcoholic beverages.



The tradition also includes defending the thesis quickly, you say something like "I made a phd on helping people remember, and it is great." - the attackers (your dudes) then shout "It is shit - burn it!". Do that, and drink alcohol.

Please comment below, blog it, or contact me if you also burnt your phd. use the flickr tag phdburning.

“The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.”
—Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises

Design for the Other 90% is an exhibition currently on view at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through May 29, 2009, and online.

There must be a use for technology for the Other 90%. And they are a market - for products that help them improve life, or even stay alive. Products such as the Q-Drum:


https://other90.cooperhewitt.org/Design/q-drum

It can hold up to 50 liters of water and be used to transport that water over long distances. At an affordable price, saving time and money, all in one, clever, design.

I remember a keynote at the I-Know conference in Graz (I think 2005, and I forgot the speaker's name - is there a program online?) which was not about knowledge management, but how computer are be used in rural india. One case was to examine eye patients remotely via a webcam - the patient sits in front of the only computer in the village and looks into the webcam, the examining doctor sits somewhere else and gives a diagnose. This cuts travel costs and saves money (and improves health). So, there is a market in the low-income population, for life-improving products.

"So, computer, please find me all documents that contain research information about a drug that can cure cancer, developed anywhere in the world" - this is a classic question we would like to ask a computer. Actually, its so classic that it is defined as an example in the 1992 version in the TREC test data.

The DFKI Spin-Off SemVox may provide something that helps realizing this. They are combining ontologies with speech interaction:
The SemVox technology enables the user to employ various applications without having to resort to traditional operating concepts such as keyboards or remote controls. Using our technology the user is free to choose between a number of modalities such as speech, gestures, keyboard or mouse or a combination thereof.



Their technology incorporates a heterogenous set of modules that can be remixed to allow different application scenarios. Part of their demos is to tell the computer to "find me an action film". Nice side-effect: using the speech-synthesis module offered by SVOX, the computer will talk back to you (press release in german).

So - this is a next step to the semantic web,as Vint Cerf has put it:
I’m almost certain you’ll see products emerging that will allow you to orally interact with the network
Sure, it is nearly here, and you can buy the tools for it off-the-shelf. And I guess SemVox is open for investors :-)

What is really funny, is that today we are very close to actually answer the questions defined as scientific goals in 1992 (for example here, page 64, I was not able to find the original TREC-1 set).

I have seen the SemVox system live at CeBit, I was demoing NEPOMUK (and advertising my gnowsis.com startup) 5 meters away from them and we had great fun demoing our products to each other. Here is a picture of Jan, one of the founders:

Freitag, 27.3.2009

22:00, 4 EUR Eintritt



Pflichttermin, beste Musik der Stadt, Balkan Beatz meets Electronic.

Well, I was just totally sold by Adam, the idea being that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So if this duck is not giving you the noise that you want, you’ve got to just punch that duck until it returns what you expect.

From https://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/railsconf-2007 via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_patch

Here the CFP from the IR-KR workshop. All who think there are cooler uris than those, submit something.

=======================
CALL FOR PAPERS

IR-KR2009 at IJCAI-09

July 11-13, 2009
Pasadena, CA, USA
=======================

The IJCAI-09 Workshop on
"Identity and Reference in web-based Knowledge Representation" (IR-KR2009)
https://ir-kr.okkam.org/

July 11-13, 2009
Pasadena, California, USA

held at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(IJCAI-09)
https://ijcai-09.org


-- IR-KR2009 goals --

The goal of this workshop, which in past years was mainly organised
within the Web and Semantic Web (SW) communities (see past editions at
WWW2006, WWW2007, ESWC200q8), is to widen debate on the impact and the
challenges that the notions of *identity* and *reference* in
web-oriented KR poses to some of the core concepts of AI.

-- Background & Description of the workshop --

The Semantic Web initiative advances the idea that the web may become
a space not only for publishing and interlinking documents (through
HTML hyperlinks), but also knowledge bases (e.g. in the form of RDF
graphs) in an open and fully decentralized environment.

Even though models and languages used to implement the nascent
Semantic Web have been taken from long-standing research in AI, SW and
AI have different priorities. While traditionally a strong focus
within AI has been developing theories and code to support sound and
complete reasoning, web-oriented KR has a primary concern of web-wide
information interoperability and integration.

Perhaps the most central issue in reconciling these concernd is the
Principle of Global Identifiers: "global naming leads to global
network effects" (see Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One,
2004, at https://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/). As for the
web of documents, the overall value of such open and distributed
network of truly interlinked knowledge sources, based on global names,
would be immensely bigger than the sum of the value of the components.

This central role of identity and reference for a web-scale KR poses
new challenges to traditional KR, and many researchers have suggested
that the concept of URI may deeply affect the notions of language
(e.g. the semantics of using the "same" URI in different models),
reference (e.g. rigid vs. non rigid designation), interpretation
(e.g. the meaning of "links" across knowledge bases) & reasoning
(e.g. distributed reasoning across theories) in traditional
logic-based KR in AI. This workshop addresses these challenges.

-- Expected outcome --

The anticipated outcome of the workshop is to assess the state of the
art in the area of Identity and Reference in AI and the SW, and to go
beyond the limited scope of the current Semantic Web, as well as to
discuss and critically evaluate approach and next steps in
implementing and reasoning about identity and reference. It is
expected that the workshop will provide a valuable opportunity for
cross-fertilization across different research communities.

-- Workshop format --

Based on the successful experience in the past workshops on this
topic, the format of IR-KR2009 will be the following:

* a keynote talk that illustrates the importance of the topic
* very short presentations of the accepted papers, to give
participants an overview of the research work of the main
workshop contributors
* presentation of a detailed list of topics to discuss, by the
workshop chair
* extensive, moderated plenary discussion
* collaborative write-up of conclusions and next steps

-- Submissions --

The workshop aims at collecting contributions which can roughly be
grouped as follows:

* Foundations: formal and conceptual theories of identity and
reference for web-oriented KR
* Formal theories: semantics for KR on the web, soundness and
completeness of web-oriented reasoning, semantics of interlinked
data
* Vision papers: visionary solutions to the problems of identity
and reference in KR
* Project papers: descriptions of research & development projects
in this area
* Experiences: contributions from research and industry that
illustrate case studies or approaches to deal with the issues of
identity and reference on a web-scale
* Critical viewpoints: discussions of advantages and disadvantages
of the proposed approaches

We especially encourage contributions from groups or organizations
which are working on assembling large knowledge-based data collections
in order to compare the different practical solutions which were found
for integrating semantic data from multiple sources.

-- Submission Requirements and Dates --

IR-KR2009 will accept submissions for full papers, posters and
demonstrations. The selection will be based on the significance and
the quality of submissions as well as oriented towards fostering
cross-pollination and discussions during the event. All selected
abstracts will be included in the IJCAI-09 Working Notes. Authors are
kindly requested to provide keywords upon submission. The format for
submissions is the same as that of IJCAI-09. Please check
https://ijcai-09.org for the style files. Submissions should be no
longer than 5 pages.

- Submission deadline (papers, posters, demos): March 6, 2009
- Notification to authors: April 17, 2009
- Camera-ready version: May 8, 2009
- Workshop dates: July 11-13, 2009

Submissions will be managed through EasyChair.org at:

https://www.easychair.org/login.cgi?conf=irkr2009

-- Attendance --

Following IJCAI-09 policy, the total number of participants in
IR-KR2009 will be limited to 75 people. This includes organizers, PC
members, invited speakers, authors and attendees. Authors will be
selected based on the significance of their submission and will be
preferred during registration to non-presenting
attendees. Non-presenting attendees will be selected on a
first-come-first-served basis. Please refer to https://ijcai-09.org for
the application procedure and fees.

-- Workshop Chair --

Paolo Bouquet, University of Trento [PRIMARY CONTACT]
bouquet@disi.unitn.it

-- Workshop Organizers --

Marko Grobelnik, IJS, Slovenia
marko.grobelnik@ijs.si

Harry Halpin, University of Edinburgh
hhalpin@ibiblio.org

Frank van Harmelen. VU Amsterdam
Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl

Heiko Stoermer. University of Trento
stoermer@dit.unitn.it

Giovanni Tummarello. DERI Galway
giovanni.tummarello@deri.org

Michael Witbrock, Cycorp Inc
witbrock@cycorp.eu

-- Program Committee --

Confirmed members:

Bo Andersson
Karl Aberer
Michael K. Bergman
Dan Brickley
Werner Ceusters
Kendall Clark
Richard Cyganiak
Hugh Glaser
Nicola Guarino
Gregor Hackenbroich
Tom Heath
Alexander Löser
Antonio Maña
Larry Masinter
Bijan Parsia
Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Valentina Presutti
Marta Sabou
Leo Sauermann
Luciano Serafini
Dagobert Soergel
Andraz Tori
Bernard Vatant