A Semantics-based Approach to Machine Perception

Thursday, March 7, 2013 - 02:30 pm
SWGN Faculty Lounge
COLLOQUIUM Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina Cory Henson Kno.e.sis Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing Wright State University Date: March 7, 2013 Time: 1430-1530 (2:30pm-3:30pm) Place: Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge) Abstract There are an estimated 40+ billion sensors connected to mobile devices; and it has been predicted that within the next five years, sensor data from such devices will become the dominant type of information on the Web. For this data to be useful in applications, ranging from healthcare to environmental monitoring, it needs to be translated into higher-levels of abstraction (e.g., translated from observed symptoms to disorders). This act of translating low-level signals into high-level knowledge is called perception, and while people have evolved sophisticated mechanisms to efficiently perceive their environment, machines continue to struggle with the task. In this talk, I will describe a model of machine perception, Intellego, derived from cognitive theories of perception. Encoded in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), this model provides a formal semantics of perception by defining the information processes involved in collecting and interpreting heterogeneous sensor data. While the use of OWL enables advanced integration and interpretation of sensor data, the computational complexity of reasoning seriously limits its applicability and use within resource-constrained environments, such as mobile devices. To overcome this challenge, I will discuss an efficient implementation using bit-vector encodings and operations, resulting in order-of-magnitude improvements in both efficiency and scale. The applicability of this approach will be demonstrated through a real-world application in healthcare. This application, called kHealth (knowledge-enabled healthcare), provides a means for patients with chronic heart disease, and their doctors, to remotely monitor and manage their condition after release from the hospital. The kHealth application is expected to go into pre-clinical trials by the end of March. Cory Henson is a Ph.D. Candidate at Wright State University and a researcher at Kno.e.sis, the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled computing. He also works at Riverside Research, a research organization spun out of Columbia University, where he collaborates on projects for the DoD and Intelligence Community. He has bachelor's degrees in both Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of Georgia. Cory's research revolves around Web-based data and metadata management, including knowledge representation, ontology modeling, data integration, and reasoning. More specifically, his research comprises the synergistic use of semantic web, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science to develop the theoretical foundation and practical tools needed to enable sensor data management and machine perception. This technology has exciting applications in developing smart environments and enabling more proactive, preventative healthcare. For more, see: http://knoesis.org/researchers/cory.

From the Sensor Web to Big Data: How the World of the Sensor Web Is Transforming How We Live, Work, and Play.

Friday, February 22, 2013 - 12:00 pm
Russell House Theater
Dr. Barry Smyth of Dublin, Ireland, an internationally recognized leader in technology development, will be the featured guest speaker for the 2013 Delta Omega Lecture at noon on Friday, Feb. 22. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will begin at noon in the Russell House Theater and is sponsored by the Arnold School of Public. The title of Smyth’s talk is “From the Sensor Web to Big Data: How the World of the Sensor Web Is Transforming How We Live, Work, and Play.” Smyth holds the Digital Chair of Computer Science at the University College Dublin. He is the director of CLARITY: The Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, a Science Foundation Ireland-funded Centre for Science and Engineering Technologies. More info

Better Insights into Linguistic and Cultural Shifts with an Improved Google Books Interface

Friday, February 1, 2013 - 03:30 pm
Hollings Room of the TCL
Mark Davies, Professor of Linguistics / Brigham Young University http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/ Hollings Room of the TCL, part of the Center for Digital Humanities’ Future Knowledge series: Google Books is a promising tool for the study of language change, and how it may relate to historical, societal, and cultural shifts. However, the standard Google Books interface to the n-grams data only provides the most rudimentary of searches, and so much more could and should be done with the massive amount of data. In this presentation, I will discuss an alternative interface for the Google Books data (googlebooks.byu.edu), which provide a much wider range of searches -- incorporating collocates, searching by part of speech, and an integrated thesaurus -- all of which provide much more insight into cultural changes than are possible with the simple, standard Google Books interface.

Using large, robust corpora to look at language changes in Spanish and Portuguese

Thursday, January 31, 2013 - 04:00 pm
Gambrell 153
Mark Davies, Professor of Linguistics / Brigham Young University http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/ Large, robust corpora allow us to map linguistic changes in languages, in ways that would have been considered impossible just 10-20 years ago. In this presentation, I will examine how the Corpus del Español (100 million words, 1200s-1900s) and the Corpus do Português (45 million words, 1300s-1900s) can be used to examine a wide range of linguistic changes -- lexical, morphological, syntactic, and semantic. I will also compare these resources with corpora that allow a much smaller range of searches, such as the CORDE from the Real Academia Española. Finally, I will look at the new googlebooks.byu.edu interface, which allows access to 45 *billion* words of Spanish from the 1500s-2000s. This improves greatly on the standard, simple Google Books interface, and it also allows for research on an extremely wide range of changes in Spanish.

SET Career Fair

Tuesday, January 29, 2013 - 12:00 pm
Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center

Student Project Demos

Friday, December 7, 2012 - 10:00 am
Swearingen Lobby
Students in the CSE Capstone projects class will be showing posters and prototypes of their projects in the Swearingen lobby from 10:00 to 12:00. There are 19 projects including, computer games, apps, a Turing machine, web applications and more … Freshmen, Sophomores, Juniors: Please stop by and see what the Seniors have been working on. Talk with them about their projects, courses in the curriculum, and what you have to look forward to.