Bootstrapping Cognitive Systems
Kenneth D. Forbus
Annotation, even by crowdsourcing, is a trap: People learn without others having privileged access to their mental states. Today’s ML systems require a cadre of technical experts to train them, using massively more data than people require, whereas people manage their own learning processes over a lifetime. Understanding how to build cognitive systems that can learn well from small amounts of data, expressed in forms natural to people, and able to manage their own learning over extended periods would be a revolutionary advance. In the Companion cognitive architecture, we are exploring ways to do this, using a combination of analogy and relational representations. This talk will describe several recent advances we have made, including learning human behavior from Kinect data, analogical chaining for common-sense reasoning, and co-learning of language disambiguation and reasoning using unannotated data. Ideas for scaling an analogical approach to cognitive systems to human-sized knowledge bases and potential applications along the way will also be discussed.
Kenneth D. Forbus is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Education at Northwestern University. He received his degrees from MIT (Ph.D. in 1984). His research interests include qualitative reasoning, analogical reasoning and learning, spatial reasoning, sketch understanding, natural language understanding, cognitive architecture, reasoning system design, intelligent educational software, and the use of AI in interactive entertainment. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received the Humboldt Award and has served as Chair of the Cognitive Science Society.
Integrating Semantic Web in the Real World: A journey between two cities
Juan F. Sequeda
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An early vision in Computer Science has been to create intelligent systems capable of reasoning on large amounts of data. Today, this vision can be delivered by integrating Relational Databases with the Semantic Web using the W3C standards: a graph data model (RDF), ontology language (OWL), mapping language (R2RML) and query language (SPARQL). The research community has successfully been showing how intelligent systems can be created with Semantic Web technologies, dubbed now as Knowledge Graphs.
However, where is the mainstream industry adoption? What are the barriers to adoption? Are these engineering and social barriers or are they open scientific problems that need to be addressed?
This talk will chronicle our journey of deploying Semantic Web technologies with real world users to address Business Intelligence and Data Integration needs, describe technical and social obstacles that are present in large organizations, and scientific challenges that require attention.
Juan F. Sequeda is the co-founder of Capsenta, a spin-off from his research, and the Senior Director of Capsenta Labs. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests are on the intersection of Logic and Data and in particular between the Semantic Web and Relational Databases for data integration, ontology based data access and semantic/graph data management. Juan is the recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, received 2nd Place in the 2013 Semantic Web Challenge for his work on ConstituteProject.org, Best Student Research Paper at the 2014 International Semantic Web Conference and the 2015 Best Transfer and Innovation Project awarded by Institute for Applied Informatics. Juan is the General Chair of AMW 2018, was the PC chair of the ISWC 2017 In-Use track, is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Web Semantics, member of multiple program committees (ISWC, ESWC, WWW, AAAI, IJCAI) and co-creator of the Consuming Linked Data Workshop series. Juan is a member of the Graph Query Languages task force of the Linked Data Benchmark Council (LDBC) and has also been an invited expert member and standards editor at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).