Keynote1:The Emerging Science of the Web and Why it is Important
 | Speaker: Wendy Hall, DBE, FRS, FREng is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton,UK |
Abstract: With the advent of the internet and the World Wide Web we are able to share information as
never before. The Web has become a critical global infrastructure. Since its emergence in the mid-1990s
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it has exploded into hundreds of billions of pages that touch almost all aspects of modern life.
Today the jobs of more and more people depend on the Web. Media, banking and health care are being
revolutionized by it, and governments are even considering how to run their countries with it. Little
appreciated, however, is the fact that the Web is more than the sum of its pages and it is more than it
s technical protocols. Vast emergent properties have arisen that are transforming society. E-mail led
to instant messaging, which on the Web has led to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. The
transfer of documents led to file-sharing sites such as Napster, which have led to user-generated
portals such as blogs, Flickr and YouTube. Web 2.0, tagging content with labels, is creating online
communities that share everything from concert news to health care. Looking forward we are adding to
the Web of documents by creating a Web of linked data. It is our hypothesis that this will become the
dominant data sharing and integration platform and that its effect on the world will be as profound
and unexpected as the impact of the first Web. As we seek to understand the origins of the Web,
appreciate its current state and anticipate possible futures there is a need to address the critical
questions that will determine how the Web evolves as both a social and a technical network.
The emerging field of understanding these issues is becoming known as Web Science. In this talk
we will explore how this new science of the Web has become established, the insights that are
beginning to emerge and discuss the major research and education challenges ahead.
About the speaker
Wendy Hall, DBE, FRS, FREng is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. She was Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) from 2002 to 2007.
One of the first computer scientists to undertake serious research in multimedia and hypermedia, she has been at its forefront ever since. The influence of her work has been significant in many areas including digital libraries, the development of the Semantic Web, and the emerging research discipline of Web Science.
Her current research includes applications of the Semantic Web and exploring the interface between the life sciences and the physical sciences. She is a Founding Director, along with Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J. Weitzner, of the Web Science Research Initiative.
In addition to playing a prominent role in the development of her subject, she also helps shape science and engineering policy and education. Through her leadership roles on national and international bodies, she has shattered many glass ceilings, readily deploying her position on numerous national and international bodies to promote the role of women in SET, and acting as an important role model for others.
She became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2009 UK New Year's Honours list, and was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
She was elected President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in July 2008, and is the first person from outside North America to hold this position.
Until July 2008, she was Senior Vice President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, is currently a member of the UK Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology, and is a founder member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council. She was President of the British Computer Society (2003-4) and an EPSRC Senior Research Fellow from 1996 to 2002.
Keynote 2: Two-stage Constraint Parsing for Indian Languages
 | Speaker: Prof. Rajeev Sangal, Founder-Head of Language Technologies Research Centre, at IIIT, Hyderabad, India
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Abstract: Natural Language Processing deals with understanding and developing computational theories of human language.
Such theories allow us to understand the structure of language and build computer software that can process language.
For example, if a query in a human language can be processed (that is, analyzed and understood) by the machine,
then it can try to find an answer from a given database or from a set of documents. A search engine of the future
is likely to use such a technology. Parsing gives the grammatical analysis of a given sentence. Here, we will describe
2-stage parsing in the Computational Paninian Grammar framework. The parser is a constraint solver, where constraints
are expressed in the form of integer programming constraints. Research results regarding its performance would be
presented, and compared with data driven parsing.
About the speaker
Prof. Rajeev Sangal is the founder-head of Language Technologies Research
Centre, at IIIT, Hyderabad, India, the largest academic centre for
computational linguistics (CL) research in this region of the world.
He has worked on Computational Paninian Grammar framework which is
linguistically elegant and computationally efficient. It is a dependency
grammar based framework, particularly well suited for morphologically
rich and free word-order languages. Constraint-based parser for it uses
integer programming and bipartite graph matching. He has also worked
on machine learning of parsing, reaching high accuracy even with a small
treebank. High accuracy has been reached by following two approaches: (1)
introducing two-stage parsing, handling intra-clausal and inter-clausal
relations (besides other stages as well), and (2) using light semantics
with just two semantic features (animacy, humanness).
He leads a consortium of 11 institutions for building machine translation
systems for 9 Indian language pairs (bidirectional), some of which have
been deployed over the net.
He also leads a newly established research university, namely IIIT-H, as
its Director (Vice Chancellor). The new university has an innovative
academic structure around research centres rather than departments,
a research oriented undergraduate curriculum, an integrated UG cum
masters program in CL, Human Values as a part of academic curriculum, etc.
He was a member of the editorial board of Computational Linguistics in
2004-06 and of Computer Science and Informatics journal during 1995-2003.
He has been the founding President of NLP Association India since 2002,
have established a quality annual conference series called ICON, held
special summer and winter schools and workshops, as well as competitive
evaluations, etc. He was the local organizing chair for IJCNLP-08
and IJCAI-07. Substantial support has come from Microsoft, HP, Yahoo,
Google, TCS, Infosys, Rediff, etc. to build a strong CL community in
India, which has been linked to the larger Asian Community.
He has helped make human values course a regular part of the academic
curriculum at IIIT-H. It is playing a major role in shaping the
atmosphere, and drawing attention to larger human and societal
concerns. He was the Organizing Chair of the National Convention of
Value Education based on Jeevan Vidya at IIT Delhi in May 2007.
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday,
December 30, 2009 ) |
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