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.

Join the NEPOMUK Social Semantic Desktop Summer School 1.0

Together with Yngve Sundblad, Siegfried Handschuh, Tudor Groza, and Charlie Abela I organise the First NEPOMUK Social Semantic Desktop Summer School at Hotel Victoria, Sliema, Malta 7-13 September 2008.

Application deadline: 9 June 2008

The NEPOMUK Social Semantic Desktop EU project develops a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations.

The summer school will provide a very good opportunity for postgraduate students to refine their knowledge in a variety of topics such as Semantic Web, Personal Information Management, P2P, HCI or Social Networking, all in the context of the Social Semantic Desktop. It will consist of a range of theoretical and practical sessions taught by leading researchers in the field and combined with a series of mini-projects to encourage collaboration between participants. In addition to the taught and practical sessions, the students will also benefit from and enjoy a stimulating environment through social interactions with the lecturers, tutors, and the other students.

Please visit the NEPOMUK Summer School website for details of the application process and further information on topics, lecturers, and tutors.

ECAP, Day #1, morning

I am at the European Computing and Philosophy Conference ECAP 2007 at the University of Twente, The Netherlands.

Already yesterday I met by chance next year’s organiser, Jean Sallantin, Research Director at LIRM (Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics, and Microelectronics). He has some interesting and challenging ideas on Wiki-usage for preparing the next conference. As he thinks already about using XWiki, Stéphane Laurière, my trusted colleague in the Nepomuk project, was the logical connection to make. And there are some other interesting ideas.

The conference started with some introductions and welcome notes. One was given by Luciano Floridi, President of the International Association of Computing and Philosophy IACAP, which is doing quite good on “the market of philosophical thinking”. He provided an overview of the IACAP structure with the three chapters (Asian Pacific) APCAP, (European) ECAP, and (North American) NACAP, each with their own successful conference. Expansion plans are under work for creating a Latin American chapter (LACAP) and for including China, Japan, and India. Going for a non-profit organisation is another important step, a step IACAP needs to take in order to give the association a legal form. Luciano Floridi asked us to advertise IACAP. Well: Become a member, dear reader, and support IACAP.

The conference’s first and very interesting keynote talk was given by Jeroen van der Hoven (Delft University of Technology and Australian National University) on “The ethics of Wideware Engineering”. Wideware (or “cognitive scaffolding”) encompasses more than hardware or software. At least, that is my understanding now. Quoting Clark and Chalmer’s “extended mind hypothesis”, “the mind leaks into the environment. […] Where does the mind stop and where does the rest o the world begin?”. This corresponds quite well to the semantic desktop and its metaphor of a “semantically enlarged supplement to [human] memory”.

Thought-provoking, at least for me, was Jeroen van der Hoven’s analysis of “epistemic enslavement”. For example, a flight operator in his epistemic niche (his technical environment, which provides data on flight paths etc.) needs to believe what is presented to him screen. In his epistemic niche there is no opting-out for the narrowly embedded user of the system. “If I believe that the system provides the output (p) on good grounds, then I myself have good grounds to believe that (p).” This is called epistemic dependence. The user here has no cognitive ability to find non-obvious defeaters! From all that follows epistemic enslavement. “Non-compliance with system output constitutes taking a moral risk the user cannot justify at the moment of non-compliance.” For example, the flight operator cannot think for himself. He needs to rely on the system.

The basic ethical issue, thus, in Wideware Engineering is: “Do we get epistemic enhancement/engineering at the expense of our moral autonomy (”think for yourself“)?” I believe my research on explanation heads exactly into that direction where decision support systems are concerned, in order to provide the user with the information to lessen the moral risk mentioned above. Of course, such real-time systems in flight control are an extreme, but expert or decision support systems in medicine also need to deal with the issue of responsibility.

So much for now …

[composed and posted with ecto]

First Nepomuk Doctoral Colloquium

At the General Assembly this week in Palaiseau, France, (near Paris) the first Nepomuk doctoral colloquium took place (see also an earlier post). Due to the lack of time only six presentations could be given. (From 24 participants 18 were doctorands. And those were not even all PhD students of the project!) I was supported in this effort by Mehdi Jazayeri, professor of computer science at University of Lugano, Switzerland, and Yngve Sundblad, professor of computer science at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

The event was quite a learning experience not only for the doctorands (at least, I hope so!) but more so for me. It was kind of comparing notes on how to supervise doctorands. I am involved in supervising doctorands for quite a while now, but I rarely get the opportunity to see if my opinion / my view on how PhD research should be done is valid …

PhD research is communicated in the project via the Nepomuk-internal wiki. So I cannot link to it from here. But I will give you an impression of what such information looks like. Each doctorand is being asked to provide basically the following information:

====================== snip ======================

PhD research of doctorand X

General information

• Title of the thesis (even if temporary): <title>
  Supervisor(s) (formal): <formal supervisor>
  Supervisor (informal): <informal supervisor>
  University (where thesis should be submitted): <university>
  Start: <start date>
  Planned end: <end date>

Motivation

Topic of the thesis

Research question

Publications relevant to the thesis

1. [XY] title, author
   [YZ] title, author
   …

Planned publications

Directly related Nepomuk PhDs

====================== snap ======================

Maybe this helps others—supervisors as well as doctorands—out there. And if so, let me know!

Explanation, Dialog, and Communication: Supporting the Use of Complex Information Systems

I gave another talk on explanation, dialog, and communication, this time at the University of Hildesheim, Germany, on January 24, 2007. Klaus-Dieter Althoff invited me to discuss this topic with his work group.

Benjamin Horak

Benjamin Horak, one of my students, has won the IBPM award for his diploma thesis ConTag – A Tagging System linking the Semantic Desktop with Web 2.0.

Congratulations, Ben! Well done.

Explanation, Dialog, and Communication: Supporting the Use of Complex Information Systems

Update: Handout of slides

I will give an invited talk at Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland, on January 11, 2007. (see announcement)

Abstract
Explanation, trust, and transparency are concepts that are strongly associated with information systems. One trusts a computer system much more if it can explain what it is doing and, thus, can „prove“ its trustworthiness. An information system (and more so a knowledge-based one) should be able to explain at every point in time why it prefers solution A over solution B. Furthermore, it should tell about the meaning of concepts used, and where an information item originally came from („knowledge provenance“). Explanations are part of human understanding processes and part of most dialogs, and, therefore, need to be incorporated into system interactions in order to, for example, improve decision-making processes. As information systems grow more and more complex, computer support is needed. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important for computer systems to have advanced explanation capabilities.

Complex personal information systems will be part of the results of the EU project Nepomuk – The Social Semantic Desktop [1]. Those systems will allow annotating and linking of arbitrary information objects on one‘s desktop such as documents, emails, address book entries, photos, and bookmarks. In addition, Nepomuked systems such as gnowsis automatically crawl and classify (or tag) information objects, thus linking them to one’s personal information model ontology (PIMO). (For example, address book entries become PIMO persons.) But more complex lifting operations are under development, and explanation needs become obvious.

Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) systems are another example of complex information systems. In e-commerce scenarios, the case base often is filled from product catalogs. Modeling the similarity measures for products is a complex task for the knowledge engineer, who can be supported by providing explanations about the structure and content of the case base. Such support features are currently being implemented in the open source CBR tool myCBR [2]. First results will be shown.

References
[1] http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org
[2] http://mycbr-project.net

Two explanation scenarios

Explanations are always tied to some goal or intention in order to understand something better. One asks questions either explicitly or implicitly during a conversation. The conversation partner does not even need to be another person (or computer program). Often we ask questions to ourselves, e.g., in order to comprehend what we read or how a system works. Currently, I am working with two students at two scenarios where I think explanations are helpful.

Scenario 1: Similarity measure modeling in case-based reasoning (CBR) is a complex task. In commercial settings consultants help the users of CBR tools, i.e., the to-be knowledge engineers, to learn necessary skills. The goal of explanation I pursue here is to collect questions knowledge engineers ask the consultants and transfer some of the rules of thumb CBR that consultants use into the system. First implementation results of the work will be available soon. Check the myCBR homepage.

Scenario 2: Applications being built using Nepomuk standards and components will be knowledge-based systems of high complexity. Users of such applications will need support in some places where automatisms enrich already entered knowledge. The gnowsis system already shows how complex the upcoming Nepomuked applications will become. One of its components, the so-called Rebirth Machine, already generates new concepts in the personal information model PIMO from data on your desktop (also known as lifting). For example, the Rebirth Machine generates PIMO Persons from address book entries. As there could be some “magic” involved the user might wonder where certain concepts came from (knowledge provenance) and how they were generated and/or interconnected (cognitive explanations).

Doctoral colloquium at next Nepomuk General Assembly

As many Nepomukians pursue a PhD in the project it is only logical to support them. Yesterday, at the Steering Committee (STC) meeting in Athens, Greece, I suggested to hold a doctoral colloquium where PhD students can report on their research work and discuss about achievements, problems, and goals. The PhD students will report to each other and probably also discuss their work with senior project members. As the STC supports this idea the doctoral colloquium will be part of the next General Assembly end of February next year in Paris. Of course, details have yet to be discussed.