A look back at the HHAI2023 Doctoral Consortium

The next generation of Hybrid-Human-AI researchers are here! As part of the second International Conference on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence that was held in June in Munich, German, myself and Amy Loutfi of Örebro University organized a doctoral consortium. We put out a Call for Papers asking for early to late stage PhD candidates on the topic of Hybrid Human-AI research to submit their research proposals. We received 10 submissions and after a smooth peer-reviewing process we were able to invite 8 participants to the workshop in Munich.

A really nice room for a really nice symposium

The workshop started with a great keynote by Wendy Mackay of Inria, Paris-Saclay, and the Université Paris-Saclay. Wendy is a great authority on Human-Computer Interaction and the relation of that field to Artificial Intelligence and she gave a great talk about the importance of being sensitive to both ends of the AI-HCI scale.

Wendy Mackay

Next, the participants presented their research (plans) in 20 minute presentations, with plenty time for questions and discussions. We were joined by multiple members of the community who provided interesting comments and discussion items after the talks. Each presenter was paired with another participant who would lead the discussion following the presentation. All in all my impression was that this set-up lead to a fruitful and nice atmosphere for in-depth discussions about the research.

The participants of the Doctoral Consortium (from left to right: Anastasiya Zakreuskaya, Johanna Wolff, Dhivyabharathi Ramasamy, Cosimo Palma, Regina Duarte, Victor de Boer, Wendy Mackay, Azade Farshad, Amir Homayounirad, and Nicole Orzan).

Below you find some pictures of the day. The entire programme, including (most of) the papers can be found on the HHAI conference web page. The papers are published by IOS press in the proceedings of the conference: Augmenting Human Intellect.

On behalf of Amy as well: Thank you Azade Farshad, Johanna Wolff, Regina Duarte, Amir Homayounirad, Anastasiya Zakreuskaya, Nicole Orzan, Dhivyabharathi Ramasamy, Cosimo Palma and Wendy Mackay for making the DC work. Thanks as well to the wonderful organization team of HHAI2023 to make everything run so smooth!

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Listening to AI: ARIAS workshop report

Last week, I attended the second workshop of the ARIAS working group of AI and the Arts. ARIAS is a platform for research on Arts and Sciences and as such seeks to build a bridge between these disciplines. The new working group is looking at the interplay between Arts and AI specifically. Interestingly, this is not only about using AI to make art, but also to explore what art can do for AI (research). The workshop fell under the thematic theme for ARIAS “Art of Listening to the Matter” and consisted of a number of keynote talks and workshop presentations/discussions.

The workshop at the super-hip Butcher’s Tears in Amsterdam, note the 1.5m COVID-distance.

UvA university professor Tobias Blanke kicked off the meeting with an interesting overview of the different ‘schools’ of AI and how they relate to the humanities. Quite interesting was the talk by Sabine Niederer (a professor of visual methodologies at HvA) and Andy Dockett . They presented the results of an experiment feeding Climate Fiction (cli-fi) texts to the famous GPT algorithm. The results were then aggregated, filtered and visualized in a number of rizoprint-like pamflets.

My favourite talk of the day was by writer and critic Flavia Dzodan. Her talk was quite incendiary as it presented a post-colonial perspective on the whole notion of data science. Her point being that data science only truly started with the ‘discoveries’ of the Americas, the subsequent slave-trade and the therefor required counting of people. She then proceeded by pointing out some of the more nefarious examples of identification, classification and other data-driven ways of dealing with humans, especially those from marginalized groups. Her activist/artistic angle to this problem was to me quite interesting as it tied together themes around representation, participation that appear in the field of ICT4D and those found in AI and (Digital) Humanities. Food for thought at least.

The afternoon was reserved for talks from three artists that wanted to highlight various views on AI and art. Femke Dekker, S. de Jager and Martina Raponi all showed various art projects that in some way used AI technology and reflected on the practice and philosophical implications. Again, here GPT popped up a number of times, but also other methods of visual analysis and generative models.

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Events panel at DHBenelux2017

At the Digital Humanities Benelux 2017 conference, the e-humanities Events working group organized a panel with the titel “A Pragmatic Approach to Understanding and Utilizing Events in Cultural Heritage”. In this panel, researchers from  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, CWI, NIOD, Huygens ING, and Nationaal Archief presented different views on Events as objects of study and Events as building blocks for historical narratives.

The session was packed and the introductory talks were followed by a lively discussion. From this discussion it became clear that consensus on the nature of Events or what typology of Events would be useful is not to be expected soon. At the same time, a simple and generic data model for representing Events allows for multiple viewpoints and levels of aggregations to be modeled. The combined slides of the panel can be found below. For those interested in more discussion about Events: A workshop at SEMANTICS2017 will also be organized and you can join!

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Getting down with LOD tools at the 2nd CLARIAH Linked Data workshop

[cross-post from clariah.nl]

On Tuesday 13 June 2017, the second CLARIAH Linked Data workshop took place. After the first workshop in September which was very much an introduction to Linked Data to the CLARIAH community, we wanted to organise a more hands-on workshop where researchers, curators and developers could get their hands dirty.

The main goal of the workshop was to introduce relevant tools to novice as well as more advanced users. After a short plenary introduction, we therefore split up the group where for the novice users the focus was on tools that are accompanied by a graphical user interface, like OpenRefine and Gephi; whereas we demonstrated API-based tools to the advanced users, such as the CLARIAH-incubated COW, grlc, Cultuurlink and ANANSI. Our setup, namely to have the participants convert their own dataset to Linked Data and query and visualise, was somewhat ambitious as we had not taken into account all data formats or encodings. Overall, participants were able to get started with some data, and ask questions specific to their use cases.

It is impossible to fully clean and convert and analyse a dataset in a single day, so the CLARIAH team will keep investigating ways to support researchers with their Linked Data needs. For now, you can check out the CultuurLink slides and tutorial materials from the workshop and keep an eye out on this website for future CLARIAH LOD events.

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Kickoff meeting Mixed Methods in the Humanities projects

Last week, the Volkswagen Stiftung-funded “Mixed Methods’ in the Humanities?” programme had its kickoff meeting for all funded projects in in Hannover, Germany. Our ArchiMediaL project on enriching and linking historical architectural and urban image collections was one of the projects funded through this programme and even though our project will only start in September, we already presented our approach,  the challenges we will be facing and who will face them (our great team of post-docs Tino Mager, Seyran Khademi and Ronald Siebes). Group picture. Can you spot all the humanities and computer science people?Other interesting projects included analysing of multi-religious spaces on the Medieval World (“Dhimmis and Muslims”); the “From Bach to Beatles” project on representing music and schemata to support musicological scholarship as well as the nice Digital Plato project which uses NLP technologies to map paraphrasing of Plato in the ancient world. An overarching theme was a discussion on the role of digital / quantitative / distant reading methods in humanities research. The projects will run for three years so we have some time to say some sensible things about this in 2020.

 

 

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EVENTS2017 workshop at SEMANTiCS

An important role in the interpretation of cultural heritage collections is played by ‘historic events’. In the SEMANTiCS workshop Events2017: Understanding Events Semantics in Cultural Heritage, to be held on 11 Sept 2017, we will investigate and discuss challenges around identifying, representing, linking and reasoning about historical events. We invite full papers (8p) as well as short papers (4p) on this topic.

The call for papers is out now.  You have until July 10, 2017 to submite your contribution. Contributions can include original research papers, position papers, or papers describing tools, demonstrators or datasets. Accepted contributions will be published on the CEUR-WS website (or equivalent).

More information at https://events2017workshop.wordpress.com/

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A Look Back at the 2nd BDE Workshop on Big Data in Health, Demographic Change and Wellbeing

[reblogged from Big-Data-Europe.eu]

On 9 December 2016, the second workshop for the Big Data Europe Health, Demographic Change and Wellbeing societal challenge was held in Brussels. The aim of this workshop was to highlight progress from the BigDataEurope project in building the foundations of a generically applicable big data platform which can be applied across all Horizon 2020 societal challenges. This workshop specifically focused on health, and showcased our first pilot’s application to early bioscience research data.

The workshop in full effect

The workshop had 15 participants, from within the health domain and outside it, including many participants from the European Commission. Together we discussed different perspectives on how we may use appropriate H2020 instruments and work programmes to better integrate the ecosystem of linked data repositories, data management services and virtual collaboration environments to increase the pace of knowledge sharing in health.

The workshop featured presentations from BDE’s Simon Scerri and Aad Versteden on the general goals and progress of the BigDataEurope project and the BDE infrastructure respectively. After lunch, Ronald Siebes (BDE / VU Amsterdam) presented the first pilot in this specific domain. More information on that pilot can be found here. An extensive round-table discussion followed, in which possible options for new applications and connections were considered.

Snapshot of the SC1 pilot interface, as presented by Ronald Siebes

One question raised was whether the generic BDE infrastructure can be used by European SMEs. The fact that the BDE infrastructure is completely Open Source, very easy to install and features intuitive interface components makes re-use relatively simple even for smaller institutions and companies.

A significant part of the discussion focussed on possible new use cases for expanding the scope of the pilot. One suggestion was to look at post-hoc integration of clinical data, which represents a typical problem of data ‘variance’. This would require integrating information from different versions of medical questionnaires, which may be recorded or stored in different ways. Data provenance is also a key concern, as keeping a trail of what has happened to clinical data is crucial to tracking patients’ histories. Once integrated, this data could then be mined to identify biases or data patterns.

Finally, the workshop participants discussed potential connections to other European projects. Here many projects were mentioned including the MIDAS project, the Big-O project on childhood obesity, the PULSE projects and IMI / IMI2 projects including EMIF. We will be seeking collaborations with these projects and will continue to develop new and interesting Big Data use cases in this domain in the coming year.

More images can be found below: BDE Health Workshop SC 1.2

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VU looking further in Mali

[This post by Anna Bon is cross-posted from W4RA.org. See also the VU press release: VU looking further in Mali]

On 13 October 2016, the W4RA team organized and co-chaired, a Green Climate Funds workshop together with Malian farmer organization AOPP (l’Association des Organisations professionnelles paysannes). The objective of the meeting was to form a consortium and prepare a project plan, which will be submitted in the framework of this United Nations program.

The workshop was attended by representatives from the Dutch Embassy, the Swedish and Norwegian embassies, and by development (donor) agencies from the EU, Germany, the United Nations Capital Development Fund, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and a range of Malian and Dutch development organizations.

The workshop in full effect (photo Anna Bon/W4RA.org)
The workshop in full effect (photo Anna Bon/W4RA.org)

 

Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world, plagued by the effects of climate change and a civil war in the northern regions. The effects of land degradation and desertification are a serious threat to the food security of millions of people, especially those living in rural regions.

Recently, the United Nations prioritized its support to Mali in the framework of the Green Climate Funds, a new programme to fight the effects of climate change on global scale. In response to a call for proposals, organizations in Mali are forming consortia, to prepare project proposals for funding by the Green Climate Funds.

Through ongoing interdisciplinary research collaboration, W4RA has obtained extensive experience in socio-technical field-based action research in West Africa. Building on partnerships with local partners (AOPP, Sahel Eco and Radio Rurale – Mali, Réseau MARP -Burkina Faso, University for Development Studies – Ghana) VU’s research programme W4RA wants to contribute to regreening, local knowledge sharing, local innovation and emerging rural agro-forestry value chains.

Meanwhile the W4RA is training students, through community service education, in rural Africa. This is done through the ICT4D master course (artificial intelligence, information science, computer science,) and various master research projects (Network Institute Academy assistants, various master research projects).

 

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CLARIAH Linked Data Workshop

[This blog post is co-written with Marieke van Erp and Rinke Hoekstra and is cross-posted from the Clariah website]

Background
Linked Data, RDF and Semantic Web are popular buzzwords in tech-land and within CLARIAH. But they may not be familiar to everyone within CLARIAH. On 12 september, CLARIAH therefore organized a workshop at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam to discuss the use of Linked Data as technology for connecting data across the different CLARIAH work packages (WP3 linguistics, WP4 structured data and WP5 multimedia).

Great turnout at Clariah LOD workshop

The goal of the workshop was twofold. First of all, to give an overview from the ‘tech’ side of these concepts and show how they are currently employed in the different work packages. At the same time we wanted to hear from Arts and Humanities researchers how these technologies would best suit their research and how CLARIAH can support them in familiarising themselves with Semantic Web tools and data.

The workshop
Monday afternoon, at 13:00 sharp, around 40 people showed up for the workshop at the Boelelaan in Amsterdam. The workshop included plenary presentations that laid the groundwork for discussions in smaller groups centred around the different types of data from the different WPs (raw collective notes can be found on this piratepad).

Presentations
Rinke Hoekstra presented an Introduction Linked Data: What is it, how does it compare to other technologies and what is its potential for CLARIAH. [Slides]
In the discussion that followed, some concerns about the potential for Linked Data to deal with data provenance and data quality were discussed.
After this, three humanities researchers from each of the work packages discussed experiences, opportunities, and challenges around Linked Data. Our “Linked Data Champions” of this day were:

  • WP3: Piek Vossen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) [Slides]
  • WP4: Richard Zijdeman (International Institute of Social History)
  • WP5: Kaspar Beelen and Liliana Melgar (University of Amsterdam) [Slides]

Discussions
Marieke van Erp, Rinke Hoekstra and Victor de Boer then discussed how Linked Data is currently being produced in the different work packages and showed an example of how these could be integrated (see image). [Slides]. If you want to try these out yourself, here are some example SPARQL queries to play with.hisco integrated data example

Break out sessions
Finally, in the break out sessions, the implications and challenges for the individual work packages were further discussed.

  • For WP3, the discussion focused on formats. There are manynatural language annotation formats used, some with a long history, and these formats are often very closely connected to text analysis software. One of the reasons it may not be useful to WP3 to convert all tools and data to RDF is that performance cannot be guaranteed, and in some cases has already been proven to not be preserved when doing certain text analysis tasks in RDF. However, converting certain annotations, i.e. end results of processing to RDF could be useful here. We further talked about different types of use cases for WP3 that include LOD.
  • The WP4 break-out session consisted of about a dozen researchers, representing all working packages. The focus of the talk was on the expectations of the tools and data that were demonstrated throughout the day. Various persons were interested to apply QBer, the tool that allows one to turn csv files into Linked Data. The really exciting bit about this, is that the interest was shared by persons outside WP4, thus from persons usually working with text or audio-video sources. This does not just signal the interest in interdisciplinary research, but also the interest for research based on various data types. A second issue discussed was the need for vocabularies ((hierarchical) lists of standard terms). For various research fields such vocabularies do not yet exist. While some vocabularies can be derived relatively easily from existing standards that experts use, it will prove more difficult for a large range of variables. The final issue discussed was the quality of datasets. Should tools be able to handle ‘messy’ data? The audience agreed that data cleaning is the responsibility of the researcher, but that tools should be accompanied by guidelines on the expected format of the datafile.
  • In the WP5 discussion, issues around data privacy and copyrights were discussed as well as how memory institutions and individual researchers can be persuaded to make their data available as LOD (see image).

wp5 result

Closing
The day ended with some final considerations and some well-deserved drinks.

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A look back at Downscale2016

On 29 August, the 4th International Workshop on Downscaling the Semantic Web (Downscale2016) was held as a full-day workshop in Amsterdam co-located with the ICT4S conference. The workshop attracted 12 participants and we received 4 invited paper contributions, which were presented and discussed in the morning session (slides can be found below). These papers describe a issues regarding sustainability of ICT4D approaches, specific downscaled solutions for two ICT4D use cases and a system for distributed publishing and consuming of Linked Data.. The afternoon session was reserved for demonstrations and discussions. An introduction into the Kasadaka platform was followed by an in-depth howto on developing voice-based information services using Linked Data. The papers and the descriptions of the demos are gathered in a proceedings (published online at figshare: doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.3827052.v1).

downscale2016 participants
Downscale2016 participants (photo: Kim Bosman)

During the discussions the issue of sustainability was addressed. Different dimensions of sustainability were discussed (technical, economical, social and environmental). The participants agreed that a holistic approach is needed for successful and sustainable ICT4D and that most of these dimensions were indeed present in the four presentations and the design of the Kasadaka platform. There remains a question on how different architectural solutions for services (centralized, decentralized, cloud services) relate to eachother in terms of sustainability and when a choice for one of these is most suited. Discussion then moved towards different technical opportunities for green power supplies, including solar panels.

The main presentations and slides are listed below::

  • Downscale2016  introduction (Victor and Anna) (slides)
  • Jari Ferguson and Kim Bosman. The Kasadaka Weather Forecast Service (slides)
  • Aske Robenhagen and Bart Aulbers. The Mali Milk Service – a voice based platform for enabling farmer networking and connections with buyers. (slides)
  • Anna Bon, Jaap Gordijn et al. A Structured Model-Based Approach To Preview Sustainability in ICT4D (slides)
  • Mihai Gramada and Christophe Gueret Low profile data sharing with the Entity Registry System (ERS) (slides)

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