Program
of
trackPanels

View schedule for this track
Unfold all Fold all

Accepted panels :

  • Panel on Cognitive Service Engineering
    Moderators:
    • Boualem Benatallah (UNSW Sydney, Australia)
    • Fabio Casati (University of Trento, Italy and Tomsk Polytechnic University, Russia)

    Keywords: Web Knowledge, Tagging, Temporal Representation

    Panelists:

    • Alessandro Bozzon (Delft University of Technology , Netherlands)
    • Xuedong Huang (Microsoft Research, USA)
    • Hamid Motahari (Ernst & Young Global Innovation, USA)
    • Amit Sheth (Wright State University, USA)

    Abstract:
    Cognitive services and conversational digital assistants are emerg- ing as the engine that powers natural interactions between humans, software services, devices and “things” – supported by advances in AI and human computations. Not surprisingly, many large and small tech companies are rushing to occupy this space by providing platforms for building cognitive services and conversational bots. Digital assistants interact in a natural way (through text or voice) with both software and humans to get information and perform actions, from checking the weather to booking a restaurants and a cab ride, managing cloud resources, answering simple scientific questions, and preparing a decaf latte using IoT enabled coffee machines. User requests or tasks are often expressed in natural language, an interaction ensues to clarify the intent and the details, and the answer is sought – or the appropriate service or device is invoked – based on the cognitive service understanding.

    While the potential of this new wave of services is exciting, it also brings significant challenges: we are far away from the comfort of developing deterministic software that responds to API calls by invoking other APIs. Now we have to understand, guess, explore options, take decisions based on probabilistic models over a large set of possible intents and services, all while engaging with users. Doing so brings a large set of engineering challenges related to the development, training, tuning and evolution of such services. This panel will discuss such challenges and identify interesting opportunities for research as well as promising trends.

  • The shifting landscape of Web search and mining: past, present, and future
    Moderators:

    Keywords: Web search, Web mining, Content analysis, Future of Web search

    Panelists:

    • Eugene Agichtein (Emory University)
    • Ricardo Baeza-Yates (NTENT)
    • Jon Kleinberg (Cornell University)
    • Jure Leskovec (Stanford University & Pinterest)

    Abstract:
    The Web content has been going through major changes, triggered by multiple factors including changes in user demographic and authoring behaviour, a shift in device types that access the Web, and changes in common use cases of the Web. More specifically, the number of mobile internet users has surpassed the desktop users according to different statistics; a considerable portion of Web use cases are in the form of social interactions rather than information seeking; and the authoring behaviour has transformed from compiling a page and linking resources to sharing content with like-minded followers and leaving likes and comments on posts. Those changes have influenced and are expected to shape the way the content is organized, searched, ranked and analyzed. This panel will bring together researchers who have been working in different established areas related to Web search and mining, Web content and social network analysis, and semantics and knowledge harvesting and management. The panel will draw from the experience of panellists, dealing with changes in their respective fields. In the first (role-playing) round, each panellist will strongly take a side on where the changes are heading, arguing that one form of content will dominate in near future. In the second round, the panellists will counter each other and will share their vision on what future holds in terms of research problems and directions.

  • Structured Knowledge on the Web 7.0
    Moderators:
    • Steffen Staab, Universität Koblenz-Landau (Germany) & University of Southampton (UK)

    Keywords: Web Knowledge, Tagging, Temporal Representation

    Panelists:

    • Lora Aroyo (VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
    • Evgeniy Gabrilovich (Google, USA)
    • Jens Lehmann (University of Bonn, Germany & Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany)
    • Ruben Verborgh (Ghent University — imec, Belgium)

    Abstract:
    “The Semantic Web cannot work.” was a widely held belief, which has been proven wrong. Just like the Web of 2018 does not look like anyone might have imagined, when the first web conference was held in 1994, the structured knowledge we find on the Web now is there for slightly other purposes and enriched by other languages than we imagined in the late 90ies for the Semantic Web. Novel opportunities are immediate — as well as new challenges.