SDForum Semantic Web SIG: Intelligence at the Interface November 7, 2007

Technology showcase organized by Tom Gruber

The interfaces we use to interact with the world's information are getting smarter. First we had web portals, which give us someone else's idea of the content we should see. Then came search engines, which let us tell the system what we want. We are about to see the next wave -- intelligence at the interface -- which will know a lot more about us, our interests, our information, and our environment. This SD Forum event will showcase four exciting new examples of intelligence at the interface developed by Bay Area companies.

SRI will demonstrate an intelligent assistant system that came out of an ambitious AI research program. It learns about your documents, email, people, schedules, and meetings, and learns even more as you use it. It helps you organize your information world, prepare for meetings, create presentations, and find information in the context of your work.

Yahoo! Research Berkeley will demo ZoneTag and Zurfer, mobile-phone photo-driven applications that use your social, spatial, and temporal context to support and enhance key user tasks on the mobile device. They intelligently help you capture, upload, tag, view and search for photos on your mobile device, minimizing requirements on explicit input and user attention.

PARC will demonstrate a mobile leisure guide, codenamed Magitti, which recommends places to visit in an urban environment. It pays attention to your time, location, past behavior and preferences and it also infers your current and future activity type to better target its recommendations.

Radar Networks will demonstrate a new online service based on their Semantic Web platform that helps people organize, find, and share their information more intelligently. It knows about the semantic content of information of all sorts, from web content to email.

Price: $15 at the door for non-SDForum members. No charge for SDForum members. No pre-registration required

Agenda:
6:30pm - 7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza
7:00pm - 7:10pm Community announcement
7:10pm - 7:30pm Overview of Intelligence at Interface, by Tom Gruber
7:30pm - 8:30pm Tech/Product demos by SRI, Yahoo, PARC, Radar
8:30pm - 9:00pm Dedicated Q&A period

Contact: SIG co-chair AJ Chen (ajchen-at-web2express.org) or Jeff Pollock (jeff.pollock-at-oracle.com)

Panelist Bios:

Adam Cheyer, SRI

Adam Cheyer is currently a Program Director in SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center, where he serves as Chief Architect of the CALO/PAL project. Previously, Mr. Cheyer was VP of Engineering at Dejima, a mobile solutions company, and before that, VP of Engineering at Verticalnet, an enterprise software provider. As Senior Scientist and Co-Director of the Computer Human Interaction Center (CHIC) at SRI International, Mr. Cheyer led a multidisciplinary team of researchers exploring web services, distributed knowledge, and pervasive computing.

Dr. Mor Naaman, Yahoo! Research Berkeley

Mor Naaman is a research team lead at Yahoo! Research Berkeley (Yahoo! Advanced Development Research). His research focuses on context-based tools and algorithms for interacting with media. Mor has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. His research in the Stanford Infolab also focused on management of digital photographs, thereby allowing (and requiring!) him to take photos throughout his working life. In previous careers, Mor was a professional basketball player as well as a software developer and a college radio DJ.

Kurt Partridge, PARC

Kurt Partridge is a researcher in the Ubiquitous Computing Area in the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). His research spans a variety of areas, including context awareness, activity modeling, location modeling, mobile device interaction, and wearable computing. He is particularly interested in systems and devices that blend naturally with people's everyday activities. Kurt received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2005.

Victoria Bellotti, PARC

Victoria Bellotti is a Principal Scientist and manager of the Socio-Technical and Interaction Research (STIR) group at PARC. She studies people to understand their practices, problems and requirements for future technology. She also designs and analyzes systems, focusing on user needs and experience and is an inventor on multiple patents and pending patent applications. Her past work encompasses domains such as transportation, process control, computer-mediated communication, collaboration and ubiquitous computing. Victoria is best known for her research on personal information management and task management. However, more recently, she has been focusing on user-centered design of context- and activity-aware computing systems.

Nova Spivack, Radar Networks

Nova Spivack is one of the leading voices of the emerging Semantic Web, often referred to as Web3.0. Nova founded Radar Networks to develop semantic social software.
In 1994, Nova co-founded EarthWeb (IPO 1998). Nova has worked at Individual, Xerox/Kurzweil, Thinking Machines, and also with SRI International on the DARPA CALO program and nVention. Nova founded Lucid Ventures, and co-founded the San Francisco Web Innovators Network. As a grandson of management guru Peter F. Drucker, Nova shares his grandfather's interests in the evolution of knowledge work. In 1999 Nova flew to the edge of space in Russia with Space Adventures.

Moderator Bio:

Tom Gruber is an innovator in technologies that augment human intelligence, individually and collectively. At Stanford University he did foundational work in Ontology Engineering and the precursors of Semantic Web technology to enable knowledge sharing and coordination among heterogeneous, distributed systems. During Web 0.1, he built the first public library for sharing ontologies on the Web; led the team that deployed the first virtual document applications on the Web that generate natural language explanations in response to questions; and invented the first widely-used open source application that turns email conversations into collective memories on the Web. During Web 1.0, he led technology development at Intraspect, an enterprise software company that pioneered the space of Collaborative Knowledge Management -- software that helps large, distributed communities of professional people contribute to and learn from a collective body of knowledge. During Web 2.0, he led technology development at RealTravel.com, a popular user-contributed content site where travelers from around the world find and share their travel experiences. During Web 3.0, he is working on technologies that will bring intelligence to the interface.

Official Website: http://www.sdforum.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Calendar.eventDetail&eventID=12956