Research

There are 44 posts filed in Research (this is page 3 of 4).

Emerald Reading List

During June and July, I have participated in the creation of a “Reading List” for the Emerald Publishing Group in collaboration with Prof. Patricia Ordoñez de Pablos. The objective of this task is to create a list of relevant publications for a target journal or topic, in this case the main topic was “Knowledge management and organizational learning in the workplace” and it was an interesting research activity because I could extend my background in these areas reading some papers.

I have to say I consider the creation of a reading list as something very relevant in order to help authors to focus on a journal’s topic or to ease the access to the most adequated references. Besides the methodology followed by Emerald is very professional and they are aware of any change in your selected papers and can help you in any step of the process. Finally, could this practice considered as “crowd-reading-list-assistance”? Yes, it could! “Crowds and Power” is changing the way you perform your work!

With regards to the list, it is available at this link, if you any comment or doubt, please do not hesitate to contact me at anytime,

Enjoy reading!

 

 

WebIndex Launch

Today it is the official launch of the Web Index. Last months I have collaborated, through my activities in WESO Research Group, with the Web Foundation to promote its statistical data following the Linked Data principles. I think we have published an appropriate version of this data and I hope to continue this fruitful collaboration with my new colleagues in next months.

You can find more information about the Web Index as Linked Data in http://data.webfoundation.org/.

If you have any comment, suggestion, etc. please feel free to contact me at any time,

Best,

Logic and Social Choice Theory

I just finished an introduction to social choice theory as the formal study of mechanisms for collective decision making. The article presents all the required background to start in this discipline. I reached this paper through the website of UVA and I consider that the concepts presented in the paper could be applied to a lot of use cases, for instance matchmaking of organizations and public contracts or maybe to mediation in Linked Data. Now I am also very interested in works related to “The Wisdom of Crowds” and, on the best of my knowledge, this kind of research and tools can help to validate the results generated by a crowd. There are also other relevant concepts and definitions I did not know (in this context) such as: dictatorship, liberalism, positive responsiveness or manipulation among others . Furthermore, author presents somo logic concepts that have emerged to support social choice theory with a formal syntax and semantics. Thus there are approches based on FOL, HOL and others trying to formalize the underlying concepts of this theory. I would like to highlight the “Doctrinal Paradox” that makes me feel uncomfortable with existing methods of judging being that using a “premise-based procedure” or a “conclusion-based procedure” to get a decision, the final result can change although both procedures are correct!

If you are interested in this kind of work or research, you can follow the Autumm Course about Computational Social Choice teached by Ulle Endriss as part of a Logics master.

Keep in touch!

 

Re-reasoning starting…

Last days I have read a lot of papers about different topics such as FOL, inference, artificial intelligence, large scale reasoning, rule engines, etc. I have collected all these references in ROCAS wiki with the objective of saving all relevant works that can help me to finally develop our semantic reasoner for large datasets.

This afternoon I have found a paper entitled as “Making Web-Scale Semantic Reasoning More Service- Oriented: The Large Knowledge Collider” that presents the whole architecture of the well-know project LarKc, in some sense the ROCAS project was inspired by this European project but with a restricted scope and different objectives. This paper has two main points for me:

  1. One of the authors is Zhisheng Huang who helped me in 2004 to use his Distributed Logic Programming system to animate humanoids when I was developing my final degree project to get the Bachelor Degree.
  2. From a research point of view, authors present a compilation of works made during the execution of the LarKc project that should be relevant to ROCAS. It is not a research paper but a good summary of this project.

This is a short post but I want to highlight that the world is small enough to meet same people (in this case researchers) again and again! It is incredible! 🙂

Finally, I would also like to report my first progresses in the development. I have deployed a job in Hadoop to perform the classical graph-algorithm “Breadth-First Search”, this is one of the tries I am thinking about for performing reasoning tasks…the other approches can be summarized:

  1. Distribute Jena rule engine (reusing source code)
  2. Develop from scratch the typical backward chain engine using unification and resolution
  3. Mix of 1 and 2 to avoid parsing rules, matching triples, etc.
  4. Build a graph (rules in backward chain can be shown as an AND/OR tree) and try to infer new facts using unification and search.
  5. …

Let’s rock it!

HPC-Europe2 visiting

In February I made an application to the HPC-Europa2 Transnational Access programme and I finally got a grant that enabled the opportunity of using the SARA infrastructure to test some algorithms. Thanks to the Professor Maarten de Rijke I could select the University of Amsterdam as host so…Now I am here for 6 weeks at the University of Amsterdam in the Institute for Informatics and more specifically in the Intelligent Systems Lab. I am very excited with this opportunity and I will do my best to get a good version of our reasoning prototype. Besides I would like to start a fruitful collaboration between people in this lab and our research group through publications, projects or whatever.

I would also like to thank all the administrative staff of UVA their time and consideration. When I arrived, last Thursday, in 15 minutes I had a visiting card, a desktop and WI-FI connection and a great sight…

I will keep you informed!

HTML5

Last week I teached at the summer courses within the University of Oviedo with my colleagues of the WESO Research Group. My talk was about HTML5 Audio& Video and HTML Applications. It was very interesting because I could reload my expertise and knowledge in this technology. Although HTML5 purposes a lot of new interesting things the browser support is still a little bit poor and most of examples that worked in my laptop, did not work during the lecture and I tried Ipad2, HTC Desire HD and others but the behaviour changed depending on the brower, SO, etc. Anyway I leave my slides (Spanish) here:



CFP: Data Mining on Linked Data workshop with Linked Data Mining Challenge

To be held during the 20th Int. Symposium on Methodologies of Intelligent Systems, ISMIS 2012, 4-7 December 2012 Macao (http://www.fst.umac.mo/wic2012/ISMIS/)

Official CFP

Workshop Scope

Over the past 3 years, the Semantic Web activity has gained momentum with the  widespread publishing of structured data as RDF. The Linked Data paradigm has therefore evolved from a practical research idea into a very promising candidate for addressing one of the biggest challenges in the area of intelligent information management: the exploitation of the Web as a platform for data and information integration in addition to document search. Although numerous workshops and even Challenges already emerged in the intersection of Data Mining and Linked Data (e.g. Know@LOD at ESWC) and even Challenges have been organized (USEWODs at WWW, http://data.semanticweb.org/usewod/2012/challenge.html), the particular setting chosen (with a highly topical Government-related dataset) will allow to explore new methods of exploiting Linked Data with state-of-the-art mining tools.

Workshop Topic

The workshop consists of an Open Track and of a Challenge Track.
The Open Track will expect submission of regular research papers, describing novel approaches to applying Data Mining techniques on the Linked Data sources.

Participation in the Challenge Track will require the participants to download a real-world RDF dataset from the domain of Public Contract Procurement, and accomplish at least one of the four pre-defined tasks on it using their own or publicly available data mining tool. To get access to the data, participants have to register to the Challenge Track at http://keg.vse.cz/ismis2012. Partial mapping to external datasets will also be available, which will allow for extraction of further potential features from the Linked Open Data cloud. Task 1 will amount to unrestricted discovery of interesting nuggets in the (augmented) dataset. Task 2 will be similar but the category of interesting hypotheses will be partially specified. Task 3 will concern prediction of one of the features natively present in training data (but only added to the evaluation dataset after the result submission). Task 4 will concern prediction of a feature manually added to a sample of the data by a team of domain experts.
Participants will submit textual reports (Challenge Track papers) and, for Tasks 3 and 4, also the classification results.

Submissions

Both the research papers (submitted to the Open Track) and the Challenge Track papers should follow the Springer formatting style. The templates for Word and LaTeX are available at the workshop web http://keg.vse.cz/ismis2012 and can be also found at http://www.springer.com/authors/book+authors?SGWID=0-154102-12-417900-0. The length of the submission should not exceed 10 pages. All papers will be made available at the workshop web pages and there will be a post-conference proceedings for selected workshop papers.

Papers (and results for Tasks 3 and 4) should be submitted using the EasyChair http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ismis2012dmold .

Important Dates

  • Data ready for download: June 20, 2012
  • Workshop paper and result data submissions: August 10, 2012
  • Notification of Workshop paper acceptance: August 25, 2012
  • Workshop: December 4, 2012

 

CFP: Intellectual Capital Strategy Management for Knowledge-based Organizations

Call for Chapters

  • Proposals Submission Deadline: April 30, 2012
  • Full Chapters Due: June 15, 2012

Introduction

Strategy management addresses the forces and causes that explain performance differences between organisations. One approach studies industry structures as external determinants of organisational performance. An alternative approach focuses on internal resources and capabilities as sources of sustained competitive advantage. This is the resource and capabilities theory of the firm. On the other hand, the knowledge-based view of the firm considers the firm as a repository of knowledge-based resources and capabilities. To the extent that these resources and capabilities are unique, rare, difficult to imitate and non-substitutable, they confer sustained competitive advantage on the firm. Thus, in these approaches, organisational performance differences are a result of different stocks of knowledge-based resources and capabilities.

On the other hand, intellectual capital literature focuses on the measurement of companies/organizations/regions knowledge base. It also deals with building guidelines for the development of ”intellectual capital accounts”, a corporate report to inform about firms’ stock of knowledge-based resources.

Objectives of the book

The topics of Organizational Learning (OL), Knowledge Management (KM) and Intellectual Capital (IC) are receiving increased interest both from the academic community and companies because of the influence of innovation and learning on the achievement of a competitive advantage for the firm in the New Economy. Literature on knowledge management and intellectual capital suggests that competitive advantage flows from the creation, ownership, protection, storage and use of certain knowledge-based organisational resources. Superior organizational performance depends on firms/organizations/regions ability to be good at innovation, learning, protecting, deploying, amplifying and measuring this strategic intellect.

The objective of book is to bring together a selection of new perspectives that collectively articulate a knowledge-based view of strategy management. It adopts a knowledge-based view that considers the role companies, organizations and nations in the nurturing, deployment, storage and measurement of their knowledge.

The book aims to understand how policies and strategies for the management of knowledge-based resources (human capital, relational capital, structural capital) can contribute to the creation of a competitive advantage not only for companies and institutions but also for nations and economic regions. The adequate design of human resource management policies (“make”/”buy” policies), the strategic design and implementation of strategies for managing knowledge and learning in companies as well as actions take to measure and report on knowledge management can make a difference and create a long term competitive advantage of companies, nations and regions.

Topics of interest for the book

The book will be structured into 5 main sections:

  • Section 1. Intellectual Capital in Companies and Organization
  • Section 2. Intellectual Capital Reports: New Trends in publishing
  • Section 3. Knowledge Management in Practice: Lessons to learn
  • Section 4. Human Resource Management Policies: Strategies to manage knowledge in companies and organizations
  • Section 5. Challenges for the Management of Knowledge-based Resources.

Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Cases studies on human resource management
  • Economic development of nations and regions
  • Knowledge management theory
  • Knowledge creation
  • Knowledge-based resources
  • Human resource policies
  • “Make”/ “Buy” human resource systems
  • Human capital
  • Relation capital
  • Structural capital
  • Innovation
  • Organizational learning
  • Organizational unlearning

Submission Procedure

Chapter proposals (2 pages) are expected by April 30, 2012. Full chapters (20-25 pages) are expected to be submitted by June 15, 2012. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project.

Publisher

This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), publisher of the “Information Science Reference” (formerly Idea Group Reference) and “Medical Information Science Reference” imprints. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit www.igi-global.com. This publication is anticipated to be released in 2013.

Important Dates

  • April 30, 2012 Book Chapter Submission
  • June 15, 2012 Full Chapter Submission
  • July 1, 2012 Review Results to Authors
  • July 15, 2012 Revised Chapter Submission
  • September 1, 2012 Final Acceptance Notifications

Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically (Word document):

Patricia Ordóñez de Pablos
University of Oviedo, Spain
E-mail: patriop@uniovi.es

With CC to:
Robert D. Tennyson
University of Minnesota, USA
Email: rtenny@umn.edu

Jingyuan Zhao
University of Québec at Montréal, Canada
Email: jingyzh@gmail.com

CFP: Focussed Topic Issue on “New trends on E-Procurement applying Semantic Technologies”

Call for Papers: “Special issue on New trends on E-Procurement applying Semantic Technologies”

Overview

The aim of this special issue is to collect innovative and high-quality research and industrial contributions regarding E-Procurement processes that can fulfill the needs of this new realm. This special issue aims at exploring the recent advances in the application of Semantic Technologies in the E-Procurement sector soliciting original scientific contributions in the form of theoretical, experimental and real research and case studies.

Important dates and Timeline

  • 15 of July 2012, for abstracts (send directly to the guest editors)
  • 1st of September, 2012 for invitations sent to authors to submit full paper
  • 28 Feb 2013, full papers due (submit only to the Elsevier Editorial System)
  • 1st of May 2013, first round of reviews
  • 1st of July 2013, revised papers due (also submitted to the EES)
  • 1st of September 2013, second round of reviews,
  • 1st of November 2013, final papers due (also in EES)
if you need additional information, please contact guest editors:
  •  Jose María Alvarez Rodríguez (Assistant Professor, University of Oviedo), Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Oviedo, C/Calvo Sotelo, S/N, 33003, Oviedo, Asturias, Spain, E-mail: josem.alvarez@weso.es
  • José Emilio Labra Gayo (Associate Professor, University of Oviedo), Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Oviedo, C/Calvo Sotelo, S/N, 33003, Oviedo, Asturias, Spain, E-mail: labra@uniovi.es
    http://www.di.uniovi.es/~labra
  • Patricia Ordoñez de Pablos (Associate Professor,  University of Oviedo), Department of Business Management, School of Economics and Business, University of Oviedo, Campus del Cristo – Avda. del Cristo, s/n 33006 Oviedo, Asturias, Spain, E-mail: patriop@uniovi.es

Review of “Mining of Massive Datasets”

Finally, I finished the reviewed of this excellent book about mining massive datasets. The sheer mass of data on the web is continuosly growing, a lot of new methods, algorithms and tools are emerging in order to deal with this big amount of data but in some cases without providing a formal model to process the information. In this book, authors present a compilation of the most used algorithms (and its formal definition) to build recommendation systems based on data mining techniques.

I strongly recommend the reading of this book because it focuses on data mining of very large amounts of data that does not fit in main memory. Currently this situation can be applied to the management of digital libraries, analysis of social networks, bioinformatics, etc. in which the processing of large datasets is necessary. The main topics can be shown in the next figures but according to authors you will learn the next concepts:

  • Distributed file systems and map/reduce approaches a a tool for creating parallel algorithms
  • Methods to estimate and calculate similarity search
  • Processing of data streams with specializaed algorithms
  • Technology of existing search engines: page rank, link-spam detection, etc.
  • Frequent-itemset mining
  • Algorithms for clustering very large and high-dimensional datasets
  • Two main applications of these techniques: advertising and recommendation systems

Nevertheless, I miss a section about real time processing of large amounts data instead of streaming techniques.