Videolectures.net was recording talks at the 6th International Semantic Web Conference and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007) held in Busan, South Korea this week. They already have up two of the three keynote talks and one tutorial.

This is a great service run by the Jozef Stefan Institute. The videos of computer science talks, lectures and tutorials are professionally recorded and edited and provide a wonderful resource to the international computer science community.

The ISWC 2007 talks that have already been put online are:

• POWERSET - Natural Language and the Semantic Web, Keynote talk by Barney Pell, Powerset, Inc.
• How I was right even when I was wrong, Keynote talk by Chris Welty, IBM
• Automatic Techniques for Extracting Semantic Data (from text and media), Tutorial by Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield

See Videolecture’s ISWC 2007 page for the complete set of videos. I expect to see many more from ISWC 2007 in the coming weeks.

AAAI-06 will include a special technical track on Artificial Intelligence and the Web. This year’s conference will Celebrate “Fifty Years of Artificial Intellligence” and be held at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center in Boston 16-20 July 2006. The deadline for submitting papers is 16 February 2006.

The track is especially interested in receiving papers in two active research areas: (i) using text and language analysis to interpret and understand natural language text found on the web and (ii) developing and exploiting Semantic Web languages and systems that explicitly encode knowledge using languages such as RDF and OWL. Innovative papers in other areas describing research involving both AI and the Web are also encouraged. See the track web site for details.

The Workshop on Models of Trust for the Web (MTW’06) will be a one-day workshop held on May 22 or 23, 2006 in Edinburgh in conjunction with the 15th International World Wide Web Conference. Tentative deadlines are January 10 for paper submission and February 1 for acceptance notification.

“There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and facts found on the Web.” — anon

“As it gets easier to add information to the web via html pages, wikis, blogs, and other documents, it gets tougher to distinguish accurate information from inaccurate or untrustworthy information. A search engine query usually results in several hits that are outdated and/or from unreliable sources and the user is forced to go through the results and pick what she/he considers the most reliable information based on her/his trust requirements. With the introduction of web services, the problem is further exacerbated as users have to come up with a new set of requirements for trusting web services and web services themselves require a more automated way of trusting each other. Apart from inaccurate or outdated information, we also need to anticipate Semantic Web Spam (SWAM) — where spammers publish false facts and scams to deliberately mislead users. This workshop is interested in all aspects of enabling trust on the web.”

Rob Clyde, Vice President of Technology, Office of the CTO @ Symantec Corporation presented his keynote today morning. Along with the usual security stuff he reported on some interesting statistics –

• Phishing is becoming an increasing threat as 3 to 4% of users respond to such mails — much higher than traditional e-mail spam.
• In the first half of 2005 phishing increased from 2.99 Million e-mails/day to 5.7 Million e-mails/day.
• 31% of online consumers are buying less due to increased web security threat.
• US leads in the number of hacked machine reports followed closely by Germany.
• Broadband penetration is actually increasing security threats. Many personal machines are now vulnerable to hackers using them as web bots for DOS attacks.
• DOS Attacks are now a business. Such attacks are now available for as low as US $300. Where?

Some other interesting comments ..

• The increasing speed at which worms propogate are now demanding better use of proactive measures.
• In the absence of such measures Akamai and it’s expandable bandwith pipes are the only solution against DOS Attacks. Looks like more revenues to Akamai in the days to come! Maybe Akamai’s stock is in for a ride.

Finally, and of importance to us — Symantec is now working on compating web (and blog) spam. They see this as being one of the next big security threat.

Paper presentations at CASCON 2005 started today. This annual event is sponsored by IBM Toronto Labs and IBM CAS in co-operation with National Research Council Canada. Initial impressions — a very good place to demonstrate/present work relevant to IBM.

CASCON 2005, the 15th annual international conference hosted by the IBM Centers for Advanced Studies, is the premiere computer science and software engineering conference in Canada. CASCON is an excellent venue for exchanging ideas, showcasing results, experiences and tools, and networking with researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government.

Check out CASCON blog for information as it happens.

Just when you thought you might actually have to pay attention to that talk at AAAI (you know the one), along comes the AAAI 2005 Word Search Puzzle. It’s new, it’s improved, it’s old-fashioned, and ‘AI’ is particularly easy to find (more than once if you so desire).

As with each of the previous puzzles (such as this one, this one, or even this one), the terms (generously provided by Tim “Rack-Mount” Finin) were interlinked using a heuristic best-first search that favors shared letters, small diagrams and a uniform distribution of word directions. The empty cells were filled using a character 4-gram language model derived from the entries themselves.

The W3C will hold a workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services 9-10 June 9-10, 2005 at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Innsbruck, Austria. Position papers must be submitted to obtain an invitation to participate and are due by 22 APril 2005.

A one-day Workshop on Ambient Intelligence - Agents for Ubiquitous Environments will be held in 25 or 26 July 2005 in Ultrecht, The Netherlands in conjunction with the 2005 Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. Submitted papers are due 14 March, 2005.

The merging of virtual environments, mobile communication and sensors, allows the emergence of a new vision: Ambient Intelligence, a pervasive and unobtrusive intelligence in the surrounding environment supporting the activities and interactions of the users. Ambient intelligence appears poised to cause remarkable changes in the way
people live. With digital information, the ease of interaction between humans and computers can be greatly increased by broadening the interface media available and allowing mobile and portable communication to become free of inhibiting wires and stationary units. The result of ambient intelligence is ultimately a more empowered computer with the benefits of added convenience, time and cost savings, and possibilities for increased safety, security, and entertainment. This technology has the potential to significantly impact business and government processes, as well as private life.

Ambient Intelligence represents a vision of the future where we shall be surrounded by electronic environments, sensitive and responsive to people. Ambient intelligence technologies are expected to combine concepts of ubiquitous computing and intelligent systems putting humans in the centre of technological developments. Ambient
Intelligence emphasises greater user-friendliness, more efficient services support, user-empowerment, and support for human interactions. Software Agent (SA) technology is promising in this field and thus, should have a major role in Ambient Intelligence development due to SA characteristics such as autonomy and mobility. For instance, a user could launch an agent from his mobile phone and disconnect itself from the network. Its agent roams the net
of providers and afterwards submits its findings to user through SMS messages.

The Second NASA Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts (WRAC) will be held 20-22 September, 2005 at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Visitor’s Center, Greenbelt MD, USA. To enable adequate discussion, attendance will be limited and will be limited based on the submission of an abstract or complete paper, which is due by 30 April 2005.. Student and non-US citizens are encouraged to participate. Proceedings of the workshop will be made available to attendees and are anticipated to be published after the workshop.

Agents and the Semantic Web, a three day symposium in the 2005 AAAI Fall Symposium Series, will be held in on 3rd-6th November, 2005. The symposium aims to promote and foster a greater understanding of the synergy between Multi-Agent Systems and the Semantic Web. Papers should be submitted by 25 April, 2005.

MobiQuitous 2005, the 2nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Services, will be held 17-21 July 2005 in San Diego CA. Submitted papers are due 2 February 2005.

Combining mobile and ubiquitous computing yields a paradigm providing people and agents with computing and communication services all the time, everywhere, transparently and invisibly using devices embedded in physical environments. In this context, the communication devices, the objects with which they interact, or both may be mobile. This requires advances in wireless network technologies and devices, development of infrastructures supporting cognitive environments, and discovery and identification of ubiquitous computing applications and services.

MobiQuitous 2005 will cover all these aspects, representing a forum where practitioners and researchers coming from the many areas involved in ubiquitous solutions design and deployment will be able to interact exchanging the cross-layer experiences needed to build the overall ubiquitous systems. Areas addressed by the conference include: applications, service-oriented computing, middleware, networking, agents, knowledge management and databases.

Policy Management for the Web (PM4W) is a one day workshop to be held as part of the 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2005) on Tuesday 10 May 2005 in Chiba, Japan. PM4W will consist of invited talks, presentations of submitted papers, a panel and discussions. Daniel Weitzner of the W3C will give an invited talk on transparency and policy. Two kinds of papers are sought: research papers that report on the results of original research and short papers that articulate a position, describe an application or demonstrate a working language or system. Papers must be submitted electronically by 1 February 2005. Further details are on the PMW4 web page.