By: Stefan Rueger (Open University - UK)
Abstract:
The talk reflects on the value and potential of social networks, interlinked data, semantic web and data-mining. At the same time I would like to elicit new research directions, which are only enabled by the sheer mass of data, sensors, facts, reports, opinions and inter-linkage of people. There are a number of information requests that traditional web services can cover well: best route from A to B, opening times of theatre plays, book reviews given a snapshot of a book cover, extensive and competent wikipedia articles on virtually every aspect of our lives. We can hardly imagine a world that does not offer these web services, which have complemented traditional methods of resource discovery, say, in libraries. It is quite possible that automated processing of excessive amounts of data paired with new methods of semantic web, information retrieval, human information interaction, social networks, and cloud computing opens up novel and unprecedented areas of knowledge discovery: What are the prospects of wikiversities? Will search and inference engines built at TrueKnowledge and Wolfram Alpha be in a position to answer all complex questions that have factual answers? Will automated mechanisms or social network activity be able to answer questions for the scientific evidence for global warming? What can we learn by computers being able to read 1 million books? Or watch the news of thousands of television channels in 100 countries for that matter?
Bio:
Professor at the Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK, Stefan Rüger read Physics at Freie Universität Berlin and gained his PhD at Technische Universität Berlin (1996). He carved out his academic career at Imperial College London (1997-2006), where he also held an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship (1999-2004). In 2006 he became a full Professor of Knowledge Media when he joined The Open University's Knowledge Media Institute to cover the area of Multimedia and Information Systems. Since 2009 he has held a Honorary Professorship from the University of Waikato, New Zealand, for his collaboration with the Greenstone Digital Library group on Multimedia Digital Libraries. Rüger has published widely in the area of Multimedia Information Retrieval. Rüger 's research interests are firmly rooted in the area of automated multimedia understanding with a view to improving multimedia indexing, search and browsing in digital collections and beyond. The relevant research contributes to - and is informed by - machine learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence. He was Principal Investigator in the EPSRC-funded Multimedia Knowledge Management Network, of a national EPSRC grant to research and develop video digital libraries and Principal Investigator for The Open University in the European FP6-ICT project PHAROS that established a horizontal layer of technologies for large-scale audio-visual search engines. As of 2011, he has served the academic community in various roles as conference chair (3x), programme chair (3x), journal editor (3x), guest editor (3x) and as referee for a wide range of Computing journals (>25), international conferences (>50) and research sponsors (12). Rüger is a member of the EPSRC College, ACM, BCS, the BCS IRSG committee and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.