Inaugural Lecture - Enrico Motta, Professor of Knowledge Technologies,
Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University
Monday 10 December 2007,
4pm, Berrill Lecture Theatre
The Age of Semantics
Professor Motta will assess the current status and promise of this research area and will also situate these developments in the context of fifty years of research in Artificial Intelligence (AI). In particular, a long-standing research challenge in AI concerns the so-called ³knowledge acquisition bottleneck².
Leaving aside the epistemological issues, this can be characterized in purely economic terms as an unfavourable trade-off between the cost of acquiring, modelling and maintaining the knowledge required by an intelligent system, versus the added value provided by this knowledge. In his lecture Professor Motta will argue that the emerging Semantic Web brings an unprecedented opportunity to address this long-term research challenge, by providing the large scale, massively distributed amounts of knowledge, which can enable the development of a new generation of intelligent systems. These will acquire dynamically from the Semantic Web the knowledge relevant to their problem solving needs, thus avoiding the brittleness characterizing earlier generations of knowledge-based systems.
Enrico Motta is Professor in Knowledge Technologies and Former Director (2000 - 2007) of the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) at the Open University in UK. Prof. Motta is one of the leading scientists in the world in the new field of the Semantic Web, which can be characterized as a large scale "web of data".
For more information on Professor Motta and the Knowledge Media Institute go to: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/
Tea/Coffee served in the Berrill Foyer from 3.30pm. Buffet Reception afterwards in the Berrill Cafe Bar.
All are welcome to attend.
