Wednesday, November 22, 10.15, 2017.

On web stream processing
Daniele Dell'Aglio (University of Zurich, Switzerland)

Abstract: Processing data streams is increasingly gaining momentum, given the need to handle these flows of information in real-time. In the semantic web context, several solutions have emerged to combine semantic technologies with stream and event processing techniques. However, such solutions have only marginally taken into account the web dimension so far, and as a result, the realisation of a stream processing infrastructure on the web is still an open challenge. In my talk, I will present two ongoing studies about web stream processing. First, I will focus on the problem of publishing and consuming data streams on the web. I will discuss a set requirements elicited from state of the art, as well as existing use cases; then, I will describe our current proposal to exchange data streams on the web. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss the problem of combining streaming data, often distributed with push-based mechanisms, with quasi-static data, usually exposed behind APIs and SPARQL endpoints. The challenge lays down in the fact that the quasi-static data is stored remotely, and accessing it on demand may become the bottleneck of the stream processing engine. As a solution, I describe a framework that exploits caching and relative maintenance mechanisms to balance latency and freshness of the answer.

Speaker bio: Daniele is a Postdoc at the Department of Informatics (IFI) of the University of Zurich since September 2016. His research activities focus on Stream Reasoning, i.e. the application of inference techniques to data streams. He holds a Ph.D. from Politecnico di Milano, that he obtained under the supervision of Prof. Emanuele Della Valle. The major research topic of his Ph.D. was the design of a formal reference model to capture the behaviour of existing stream reasoning solutions. From 2013 to 2016, he was also involved in the activities of the W3C Community Group on RDF Stream Processing.

Location: Room "Alan Turing"
Organizer: Eva Blomqvist

Tuesday, November 7, 13.15, 2017.

Towards Automated Fact Checking of Claims Online
Isabelle Augenstein (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

Abstract: Spreading of mis- and disinformation is growing and is having a big impact on interpersonal communications, politics, and even science. Traditional methods, e.g. manual fact-checking by reporters, cannot keep up with the growth of information. On the other hand, there has been much progress in natural language processing recently, partly due to the resurgence of neural methods. How can natural language processing methods fill this gap and help to automatically check facts? This talk will explore different ways to frame fact checking and detail our ongoing work on learning to encode documents for automated fact checking, as well as describe future challenges.

Speaker bio: Isabelle Augenstein is a a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Computer Science, affiliated with the CoAStAL NLP group and work in the general areas of Statistical Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Her main research interests are weakly supervised and low-resource learning with applications including information extraction, machine reading and fact checking. Previously she was a postdoctoral research associate at UCL and was awarded a PhD from the University of Sheffield.

Location: Room "Alan Turing"
Organizers: Eva Blomqvist and Marco Kuhlmann

Thursday, October 5, 9.00 am, 2017.

Stream Reasoning: A Summary of Ten Years of Research and a Vision for the Next Decade
Emanuele Della Valle (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Abstract: Stream reasoning studies the application of inference techniques to data characterised by being highly dynamic. It can find application in several settings, from Smart Cities to Industry 4.0, from Internet of Things to Social Media analytics. This year stream reasoning turns ten, and this talk analyses its growth. In the first part, it traces the main results obtained so far, by presenting the most prominent studies. It starts by an overview of the most relevant studies developed in the context of semantic web, and then it extends the analysis to include contributions from adjacent areas, such as database and artificial intelligence. Looking at the past is useful to prepare for the future: the second part presents a set of open challenges and issues that stream reasoning will face in the next future.
Location: Room "Alan Turing"
Organizer: Fredrik Heintz

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