The deadline is April 1, 2011.

Awards

• € 1750 sponsored by Elsevier
• Speech outfit from Linguatec
• 10 O’Reilly e-books
• 2 x up to 5 mashup books from Addison-Wesley

http://sites.google.com/a/fh-hannover.de/aimashup11/

AI Mashup Challenge 2011

http://sites.google.com/a/fh-hannover.de/aimashup11/

of the

8th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC)

http://www.eswc2011.org/

May 29 – June 2, 2011, Heraklion, Greece

Topics of interest

A mashup is a lightweight (web) application that offers new
functionality by combining, aggregating and transforming resources and
services available on the web.
The AI mashup challenge accepts and awards “intelligent” mashups that
use AI technology, including but not restricted to
• machine learning and data mining
• machine vision
• natural language processing
• reasoning
• ontologies and the semantic web.
The emphasis is not on providing and consuming semantic markup, but
rather on using intelligence to mashup these resources in a more
powerful way.

Some examples:
• Information extraction or automatic text summarization to create a
task-oriented overview mashup for mobile devices.
• Semantic Web technology and data sources adapting to user and
task-specific configurations.
• Semantic background knowledge (such as ontologies, WordNet or Cyc)
to improve search and content combination.
• Machine translation for mashups that cross language borders.
• Machine vision technology for novel ways of aggregating images, for
instance mixing real and virtual environments.
• Intelligent agents taking over simple household planning tasks.
• Text-to-speech technology creating a voice mashup with intelligent
and emotional intonation.
• The display of Pub Med articles on a map based on geographic entity
detection referring to diseases or health centers.

Awards

• € 1750 sponsored by Elsevier
• Speech outfit from Linguatec
• 10 O’Reilly e-books
• 2 x up to 5 mashup books from Addison-Wesley

Submission and deadline

The challenge tries to mediate between a grassroot bar-camp style and
standard conference organization. This means for submitters:
• You announce your mashup as soon as you are ready, simply sending an
email to the organizers (address below).
• The deadline is April 1, 2011.
• At a subpage of the mashup website provided by the organizers, you
explain your work and refer to its URL.
• Your mashup stays at your URL and under your control. You can go on
improving it.
• At review time (1st April 2011), reviewers need a 5 page paper (LNCS
format) that explains the mashup.
• The reviewers select the most interesting mashups for presentation
and vote during the conference.
• Vote is public for all conference participants, but the reviewer
quota makes up 40%.
• Be prepared to a give a brief talk and a demo during the conference.
• Awards will be handed over during the conference, and everybody will
congratulate the winners!

Organizers

• Brigitte Endres-Niggemeyer, Hannover, Germany
       with the support of
• Pascal Hitzler, Dayton, OH

Program Committee

• Adrian Giurca, Brandenburg University, Cottbus, Germany
• Christoph Lange, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany
• Emilian Pascalau, University of Potsdam, Germany
• Giuseppe Di Fabbrizio, AT&T Labs, Florham Park NJ, USA
• Jevon Wright, Massey University, Palmerston North, NZ
• Sven Windisch, Univ. of Leipzig, Germany
• Alexandre Passant, DERI Galway, Ireland
• Emanuele Della Valle, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• Giovanni Tummarello, DERI Galway, Ireland
• Gregoire Burel,OAK, Univ. of Sheffield, UK
• Krzysztof Janowicz, Pennsylvania State University, USA
• Thorsten Liebig, Univ. of Ulm & derivo GmbH, Germany

Main Contact

• Brigitte Endres

…where might things have gone wrong? The leaders of the first generation were influenced by the metaphor of the electrical communications devices that where in use in their lifetimes, all of which centered on the sending of signals down wires. If you model information theory on signals going down a wire, you simplify your task in that you only have one point being measured or modified at a time at each end…At the same time, though, you pay by adding complexity at another level….which leads to a particular set of ideas about coding schemes in which the sender and receiver have agreed on a temporal syntactical layer in advance…You stretch information out in time and have past bits give context to future bits in order to create a coding scheme….In order to keep track of a protocol you have to devote huge memory and computational resources to representing the protocol rather than the stuff of ultimate interest. This kind of memory use is populated by software artifacts called data-structures, such as stacks, caches, hash tables, links and so on. They are the first objects in history to be purely syntactical…..With protocols you tend to be drawn into all-or-nothing high wire acts of perfect adherence in at least some aspects of your design….leads to…. brittleness in existing computer software, which means that it breaks before it bends.

The alternative, in which you have a lot of measurements available at one time on a surface, is called pattern classification….The distinction between protocols and patterns is not absolute-one can in theory convert between them. But it’s an important distinction in practice…

….you enter into a different world that has its own tradeoffs and expenses. You’re trying to be an ever better guesser instead of a perfect decoder. You probably start to try to guess ahead, to predict what you are about to see, in order to get more confident about your guesses. You might even start to apply the guessing method between parts of your own guessing process. You rely on feedback to improve your guesses….you enter into a world of approximation rather than perfection. With protocols you tend to be drawn into all-or-nothing high wire acts of perfect adherence in at least some aspects of your design. Pattern recognition, in contrast, assumes the constant minor presence of errors and doesn’t mind them.

I’ve suggested that we call the alternative approach to software that I’ve outlined above “Phenotropic.”…The goal is to have all of the components in the system connect to each other by recognizing and interpreting each other as patterns rather than as followers of a protocol that is vulnerable to catastrophic failures. One day I’d like to build large computers using pattern classification as the most fundamental binding principle, where the different modules of the computer are essentially looking at each other and recognizing states in each other, rather than adhering to codes in order to perfectly match up with each other.

via Edge: WHY GORDIAN SOFTWARE HAS CONVINCED ME TO BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF CATS AND APPLES by Jaron Lanier.

IBM is building a massive question answering A.I., named “Watson”, that is going to play on Jeopardy in the fall.

http://www.bostondynamics.com/dist/BigDog.wmv

Here’s the BigDog project page.

I know we already posted a link to a video of this amazing robot, but that link is dead so I thought I’d post another one.

In addition to an index of over 200 open source machine learning software projects, the “about” section notes that there is an open source tools track of the journal JMLR, and that there are MLOSS workshops sometimes at NIPS and ICML.

http://fold.it/

According to the website, currently they are collecting data from the game to see if humans can actually contribute anything beyond what the computers can already do.