I’ve spent a good part of the last two months on the road attending meetings, workshops and conferences and giving talks at various locations from Pisa (of the leaning tower) to Newcastle (of the many bridges).  The following is a short synopsis of the main events (slightly edited version of the post “Six weeks on the road” on my personal blog).

Supportive User Interfaces

Monday 13th June I attended a workshop in Pisa on “Supportive User Interfaces“, which includes interfaces that adapt in various ways to users. This workshop was part of EICS 2011, the ACM conference on “engineering interactive computer systems”.  The majority of people there were involved in various forms of model-based user interfaces in which various models of the task, application and interaction are used to generate user interfaces on the fly. W3C have had a previous group in this area (see reports here and here); Dave Raggett from w3c was at the workshop and it sounds like there will be a new working group soon. This clearly has strong links to various forms of ‘meta-level’ representations of data, tasks, etc.. My own contribution started the day, framing the area, focusing partly on reasons for having more ‘meta-level’ interfaces including social empowerment, and partly on the principles/techniques that need to be considered at a human level.

Following the workshop was a meeting of IFIP Working Group 2.7/13.4. IFIP is the UNESCO founded pan-national agency that national computer societies such as as the BCS in the UK and ACM and IEEE Computer in the US belong to. Working Group 2.7/13.4 is focused on the engineering of user interfaces. I had been actively involved in the past, but have had many years’ lapse. However, this seemed a good thing to re-engage with with my new Talis hat on!

SUI: paper:

• Opening the Box: Meta-level Interfaces Needs and Solutions

Web Science Conference in Koblenz

Jaime Teevan from Microsoft gave the opening keynote at WebSci 2011. I know her from her earlier work on personal information management, but her recent work and keynote was about work on analysing and visualising changes in web pages. Web page changes are also analysed alongside users re-visitation patterns; by looking at the frequency of re-visitation Jaime and her colleagues are able to identify the parts of pages that change with similar frequency, helping them, inter alia, to improve search ranking.

Had many great conversations, some with people I know previously (e.g. the Southampton folks), but also new, including the group at Troy that do lots of work with data.gov. I was particularly interested in some work using content matching to look for links between otherwise unlinked (or only partly inter-linked) datasets. Also lots of good presentations including one on trust prediction and a fantastic talk by Mark Bernstein from Eastgate, which he delivered in blank verse!

My own contribution included the poster that Dave@Talis prepared, which was on the web-scale spreading activation work in collaboration with Univ. Athens. Quite a niche area in a multi-disciplinary conference, so it didn’t elicit quite the interest of the social networking posters, but did lead to a small number of in depth discussions.

In addition I gave talk on the more cognitive/philosophical issues when we start to use the web as an external extension to / replacement of memory, including its impact on education. Got some good feedback from this.

Closing keynote was from Barry Wellman, the guy who started social network analysis way before they were on computers. At one point he challenged the Dunbar number (the idea that there are fundamental cognitive limits on social groups with different sized circles family~6, extended family~20, village~60, large village~200). I wondered whether this was due to cognitive extension with address books etc., but he didn’t seem to think so; there is evidence that some large circles pre-date web (although maybe not physical address books). Made me wonder about itinerant tradesmen, tinkers, etc., even with no prostheses. Maybe the numbers sort of apply to any single content, but are repeated for each new context?

WebSci papers:

• Spreading Activation for Web Scale Reasoning: Promise and Problems
• A Shifting Boundary: the dynamics of internal cognition and the web as external representation

The HCI Conference – Newcastle

I attended the British HCI conference in Newcastle. This was the 25th conference, and as my very first academic paper in computing was at the first BHCI in 1984, I was pleased to be there at this anniversary. The paper I was presenting was a retrospective on vfridge, a social networking site dating back to 1999/2000, it seemed an historic occasion!   The paper related to a dot.com era company, which also involved other current Talis folk: Nadeem Shabir and Justin Leavesley.

Abi Sellen gave the opening keynote on “The Future of Looking Back”, discussing various technologies for digital memory (including of course the Microsoft SenseCam), and their current and potential impact on people and society.  This is an area of growing concern and Memories for Life is one of the UK Computing Grand Challenges.

Gregory Abowd gave the closing keynote. It was great to see Gregory again, we meet too rarely. The main focus of his keynote was on three aspects of research: novelty, value and reliability and how his own work had moved within this space over the years. In particular having two autistic sons has led him in directions he would never have considered, and this immediately valuable work has also created highly novel research. Novelty and value can coexist.

One thing that was interesting with a Talis hat on was a number of people who expressed a degree  of hostility (in an intellectual rather than personal sense) to semantic web technology.  This was because they quite reasonably critiqued the somewhat simplistic notion of ‘meaning’ embodied in the idea of a URI as identifier for real world concepts, or even objects.  Natural language words and terms tend to be used in multifarious and rich ways, which simply cannot be encompassed with a simple one-to-one map to URIs.

To be fair the same critique could be levelled against keys in relational databases or indeed any formal data structure.  However, these tend to have very specific and local uses, whereas SemWeb and Linked Data aims to have more global semantics.  Personally I see this as an exciting challenge for the SemWeb community, how to allow richer human-like kinds of meaning whilst retaining the potential for computer interpretation — SemWeb N.0?

vfridge paper:

• Anatomy of an Early Social Networking Site

Nottingham MRL

I was at Mixed Reality Lab in Nottingham for Joel Fischer‘s PhD viva and while there did a seminar the afternoon on “extended episodic experience” based on Haliyana Khalid‘s PhD work and ideas that arose from it. Basically, whereas ‘user experience’ has become a big issue most of the work is focused on individual ‘experiences’ whereas much of life consists of ongoing series of experiences (episodes) which together make up the whole experience of interacting with a person or place, following a band, etc.

I had obviously not done a good enough job at wearing Joel down with difficult questions in the PhD viva in the morning as he was there in the afternoon to ask difficult questions back of his own

Docfest – Digital Economy Summer School

The last major event was Docfest, which brought together the PhD students from the digital economy centres from around the country. Not sure of the exact count but just short of 150 participants I think. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds, business, design, computing, engineering, and many are mature students with years of professional experience behind them.

This looked like being a super event, unfortunately I was only able to attend for a day However, I had a great evening at the welcome event talking with many of the students and even got to ride in Steve Forshaw‘s Sinclair C5!

My contribution to the event was running the first morning session on ‘creativity’. Surprise, surprise this started with a bad ideas session, but new for me too as the largest group I’ve run in the past has been around 30. There were a number of local Highwire students acting as facilitators for the groups, so I had only to set them off and observe results . At the end of the morning I gave some the theoretical background to bad ideas as a method and in understanding (aspects of) creativity more widely.

Other speakers at the event included Jane Prophet, Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Chris Bonnington, so was sad to miss them; although I did get a fascinating chat with Jane over breakfast in the hotel hearing about her new projects on arts and neural imaging, and on how repetitious writing induces temporary psychosis … That is why the teachers give lines, to send the pupils bonkers!

As part of our support for SSSW2011, the 8th Semantic Web Summer School, taking place this week in Spain, Talis is sponsoring a student to attend the school, who through lack of funds would not otherwise be able to attend. After a significant number of applications for the funded place and a challenging selection process, the grant was awarded to Kelli de Faria Cordeiro. Kelli is a PhD student in the Knowledge Engineering Group (GRECO) of the Computer Science Department / Institute of Mathematics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Just before we arrived in Spain for the Summer School, I caught up with Kelli to find out about her research and her hopes for the Summer School.

Tom: In simple terms, what is the focus of your research?

Kelli: My research is centred on Advanced Conceptual Modelling of Complex Information Systems, focusing on Linked Open Data as a Complex Information System. The main issue is how to semantically enrich Linked Data keeping the flexibility of Linked Data Principles.

Tom: How did you come to be doing research in this area? What led you here?

Kelli: I have been studying semantic web for the past 5 years, and I have been an enthusiast on data integration and analysis during my whole professional life. The Linked Data Principles as an approach to integrate heterogeneous and dynamic data called my attention. The possibilities to create a data analysis environment with the data available on the web took my thoughts since I started to study it.

Tom: Could you explain a bit about the context in which your research is taking place?

Kelli: Currently, I am working on the LinkedDataBR Project – Expose, Share and Connection of Open Data Resources on the Web, supported by the National Education and Research Network (RNP) of Brazil. Central functionalities to be included are data cleaning, transformation, association, annotation and referencing to terminology mechanisms. At this project, we have been facing critical issues about the role of ontologies on Linked Open Data Publish Process, and I hope to address some of these issues with my research work. Moreover, there has been a Brazilian governmental movement to open data, leading to the development of applied projects to support it with tools and guidelines with a broad scope. The consequence is the need for human resources qualification, and I also expect to meet this demand with my studies on the subject.

Tom: What are you most looking forward to about the Semantic Web Summer School?

Kelli: I want to improve my learning on Ontology Engineering, Knowledge Representation and Linked Open Data by developing my technical and social skills, having great time with tutors and other students. Besides the contributions to my PhD Thesis, one of the main objectives of attending the school is to learn as much as I can and then share the knowledge with my colleagues in Brazil with whom I am working on Linked Data Research Projects.

Tom: In what ways do you expect the Summer School to benefit your research?

Kelli: The development of my research can benefit as I learn the current key topics in the field. It can also be improved with discussion and validation of the ideas and approaches to solve my research problems with tutors, invited speakers and other students. I look forward discussing the description of aggregate data as well as analytical processing over Linked Data.

Way back in the mists of time, aka July 2005, when I was a young, starry-eyed PhD student, I found myself in the hills outside Madrid with 50 other people fitting the same description. The occasion was the International Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web, and in the week that followed we received a crash course in Semantic Web technologies, delivered by some of the top researchers in the field.

This year I return to the school as a tutor, and I’m taking three of my Talis colleagues with me — one each from the Consulting, Kasabi and Platform teams. I’m intrigued to see what they each make of it, bringing as they do a really diverse range of skills and experience, from training people in the fundamentals of Linked Data, to Web design and user experience, to frontline operation of our Talis Platform.

We’re also very proud to be sponsors of the Summer School. As part of this arrangement we’re sponsoring a student from Brazil to attend the school, and in the next few days I’ll be introducing her and her work through a post on this blog. Stay tuned.