KI 2008 – Artificial IntelIigence comes to (K-)town

This week will become quite a busy week at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern*. The 31st annual German conference on AI KI 2008 is co-organised with the University of Kaiserslautern. KI 2008 and takes place at DFKI and the University of Kaiserslautern. DFKI celebrates also its 20th birthday, which added considerably to my workload over the last year. I am also very much looking forward to MATES 2008, the German Conference on Multi-Agent System Technologies, co-located with KI 2008.

 

31st Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence KI 2008

As with every conference, it is a pleasure to finally start with the conference. Nearly all my work as Workshop Chair is done and in a few hours I will meet again friends and colleagues from all over Europe. This evening we just hold an informal reception for the early arriving participants who already want to register. Tomorrow is dominated by the workshops and tutorials, followed by nearly full three days of technical programme with talks, demos and robots, and a poster session. The conference dinner is a joint event of KI / MATES and the 20th anniversary celebration of DFKI.

With KI 2008 we introduce conference link (C-LINK), the new platform for one’s individual conference organisation and social networking with other attendees. C-LINK features

• Sharing papers, slides and other resources,
• Recommendations for KI 2008 events (talks, posters, demos),
• Your personal conference plan,
• Finding similar c-link users,
• Whiteboard, Chat,
• And more.

C-LINK uses several technologies developed at DFKI:

• ALOE, the social resource and metadata hub,
• DynaQ, dynamic desktop search for document-based, personal information spaces, and
• myCBR, the open-source case-based reasoning tool that I develop together with my colleague Armin Stahl.

We are looking forward to the comments by the conference attendees.

* Kaiserslautern is often called K-Town by American soldiers stationed in this region.

Sunny Social Semantic Desktop Summer School Successful

Participants, lecturers, and tutors of the the first Nepomuk Social Semantic Desktop Summer School on Malta

I have spent last week on Malta where I had co-organised the first Nepomuk Social Semantic Desktop Summer School. The summer school was a great experience and, from what we learned from the participants, a great success. (Read more about the summer school in general here.)

The working atmosphere was enthusiastic from beginning to end. The students were eager to learn—something one would like to see at university in one’s own courses a bit more from time to time. The summer school students indeed wanted to be there. They had had to apply for a seat on the summer school. They worked for their success and they did so wholeheartedly.

Having so much time together at hand for talking and discussing alongside with a lot of fun (and sun!) helped tremendously to concentrate on the topics and to deepen one’s knowledge. There surely was knowledge and experience transferred both ways, from lecturers and tutors to students and vice versa.

A highlight for me were the mini-projects where students worked in groups on topics they had chosen to their liking. Until deep into the night one found groups sitting in different places discussing and programming towards their self-imposed goals. On the last day the student groups presented their impressive results. I was amazed by how much they achieved in so few days.

I surely would like to organise another summer school in the future.

ECCBR 2008

Last week I attended the ninth European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning ECCBR 2008 in Trier, Germany. Just around the corner of Kaiserslautern, one could say.

The conference was again a great experience. The community is special. I always feel welcome and at home. From talking to other participants to this conference series I know that even people who attended the conference for the first time feel the same.

A first highlight of this year’s conference was the invited talk by Pádraig Cunningham and Barry Smyth. They analysed research themes in CBR conference literature. One motivation was to check whether our often pessimistic view of our community was founded. It was quite nice to learn that they found that the CBR community is in fact quite healthy. What a relief Their analysis discovered a few evolving CBR themes such as recommender systems and diversity, case-base maintenance, adaptation, creativity and knowledge-intensive CBR, and conversational CBR. Their evaluation shows clear evidence of sustained innovation and maturing research. An important discovery surely is that the impact factor is comparable with big AI conferences such as ECAI and ECML.

ECCBR 2008 also presented an innovation: The Computer Cookery Contest CCC. The task:

Write your own software application for the live competition. Show that your program is more creative than the average kitchen user. Let your computer’s recipe creations be evaluated by a professional cook and an international jury of scientists! [From the call for participation]

The competition was quite entertaining. Some of the systems provided, well, interesting recipes when they needed to change ingredients in order to accommodate for ingredients at hand / in the fridge. You can find the results here.

There were also two personal highlights: I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on open source software and I had a talk together with Armin Stahl where we presented myCBR for rapid prototyping and also its explanation capabilities.

The discussion panel was chaired by Ralph Traphöner, a former colleague. Mehmet Göker, with whom I have organised ECCBR 2006, took the view of a global player in software use whereas Eyke Hüllermeier, professor at University of Marburg, took on the role of academia. They discussed with three open source software providers, i.e., with Christian Brockmann (eclipse project smila), Pedro Gonzalez Callero (jColibri), and me (myCBR).

The talk about myCBR was received very well. Over the course of the conference I was asked to show the tool to several attendees who either planned to evaluate myCBR in commercial settings or want to use it for teaching purposes. In my part of the talk I presented some of the explanation capabilities built into myCBR. Go and check out myCBR