UNB Computer Science Expo 2010

I just attended (13 April 2010) the UNB Computer Science Expo at the University of New Brunswick Fredericton.

It was a great Industry-University forum to discuss business development partnerships (Enterprise Fredericton, Propel ICT, NB IT Council), funding (New Brunswick Innovation Fund), human resource development (MITACS), example success stories (Chalk/RIM), as well as specific research projects of faculty and graduate students.

As an example of its utility, my current research at Innovatia is in Knowledge Engineering creating Ontology’s for text mining. At the expo, I found the following talks to be useful:

• Ken Kents research in Accelerating Java Using Massive Multicore Systems to be useful for understanding how to overcome the large Triple Store we will face when operationalizing our RDF store (database).
• Huajie Zhang research in Semi-supervised Learning and Its Applications to be useful for re-validating how grassroots users will be needed to help build the ontology for an organization.
• Judy Zhao research in Managing Uncertain Knowledge on the Fuzzy Semantic Web to be useful for reminding me that one group of users can have precise queries, while other users (like the public) can have fuzzy queries. In fact, while she was talking, she helped my realize how I could solve a fuzzy ontology problem I had around one fuzzy object relationship that had 8 precise meanings. I am now modelling that fuzzy relationship with no description logic (axioms) but the sub-object properties that have precise meaning with axioms. This will allow us to suggest to the average user that we think their query is actually asking the one precise relationship meaning based on other aspects of the query (class/instance terms). Tomorrows job is to hammer out the details with the project team.
• Nicola Bicocchi presentation on Collaborative Organizational Modelling and Simulation for Emergency-Response where he talked about 5 different models and how none interact well when responsinf to an emergency. I think ther is some OWL-2 ontology work here. Must call him in the morning.
• And of course, Chris Baker’s presentation (On the Illustration of Ontology Reuse ) where he featured my ontology and knowledge engineering project plan. 🙂
• Alexandre Kouznetsov’s poster on  Text Mining & NLP based Algorithm to populate ontology with A-Box individuals and object properties where he thanked me for my ontology (THANKS ALEX!) and I got to talk about my work. 🙂
• And some interesting research posters: http://www.cs.unb.ca/research-expo/2010/2010Posters.htm
• And, to pursue my PhD studies, I need to talk to Ian Baird at MITACs about my particular problem of trying to find funding for studies when I am already employed in Industry. Again, another phone call in the morning.

The great thing about this is that I discovered all this talent here in UNB when I have been looking at reasearch all over the world to help with our Semantic project. I had conversations with the NRC (William Langley) about how we could create networking between NB industry and UNB with a suggestion of www.academia.edu and Google Alerts playing a role. So I spent an hour writing him an email prior to this blog post instead of grading some early submitted term papers for RMC.

I also had some brief conversations with other industry participants about how semantics can help them. I think I convinced a few of them of its utility and hopefully some projects will emerge where I can use my ontology creation skills.

All in all a succesful day.

Tags: Chalk, Enterprise Fredericton, fuzzy logic, Innovatia, knowledge engineering, knowledge engineering project plan, MITACS, NB IT Council, New Brunswick Innovation Fund, ontology, ontology project plan, Propel ICT, RIM, UNB Computer Science Expo