The Academic Fringe Festival - Diego Calvanese: Designing Virtual Knowledge Graphs

by Diego Calvanese | Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Abstract

Complex data processing tasks, including data analytics and machine/deep learning pipelines, in order to be effective, require to access large datasets in a coherent way. Knowledge graphs (KGs) provide a uniform data format that guarantees the required flexibility in processing and moreover is able to take into account domain knowledge. However, actual data is often available only in legacy data sources, and one needs to overcome their inherent heterogeneity. The recently proposed Virtual Knowledge Graph (VKG) approach is well suited for this purpose: the KG is kept virtual, and the relevant content of data sources is exposed by declaratively mapping it to classes and properties of a domain ontology, which users in turn can query. In this talk we introduce the VKG paradigm for data access, present the challenges encountered when designing complex VKG scenarios, and discuss possible solutions, in particular to deal with the complexity of the mapping layer and its relationship to domain ontologies.

Speaker Biography

Diego Calvanese is a full professor at the Research Centre for Knowledge and Data (KRDB), Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy), where he leads the Intelligent Integration and Access to Data (In2Data) research group. He is also Wallenberg Guest Professor in Artificial Intelligence for Data Management at Umeå University (Sweden). His research interests concern foundational and applied aspects in Artificial Intelligence and Databases, notably Virtual Knowledge Graphs for data management and integration, Ontologies, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Semantic Technologies, and Data-aware Processes. He is the author of more than 400 refereed publications, with over 35000 citations and an h-index of 74, according to Google Scholar. He is a Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI) and a Fellow of the ACM. He is the originator and a co-founder of Ontopic, the first spin-off of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, founded in 2019, and developing solutions and technologies for data management and integration based on Virtual Knowledge Graphs.

Homepage: http://www.inf.unibz.it/~calvanese/

About the Academic Fringe Festival

The Academic Fringe Festival (TAFF) is an exciting concoction of invited talks and panel discussions around important themes of research and innovation in Computer Science.This fourth edition is on "Human-Centered AI: Knowledge and Language". The series features prominent researchers and practitioners, whose work has made fundamental contributions in these fields.

Artificial Intelligence is used more and more in society, from healthcare to government decisions and recruitment. Along with the rapid increase of AI adoption comes increased concerns about the inherent shortcomings of such technologies (e.g., robustness) and the social, and ethical implications. To create AI systems that can properly serve humans, it is crucial to put humans at the center of the process such that the outcome system behaves in a way that fits the values and needs of people. This poses new challenges to technological development: how to build AI systems that can be understood by humans and that can align their behaviour with human values? Tackling these challenges requires new ways of looking at AI systems, e.g., machine learning models as knowledge bases and as autonomous agents that people can query, interact with, and influence.

More information: https://www.academicfringe.org/hcai-knowledge-and-language

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