Keynote Talks

• Visual Search and Analysis in Textual and Non-Textual Document Repositories - Approaches, Applications, and Research Challenges.
  Tobias Schreck, University of Konstanz, Germany
  
  Abstract:
  Information retrieval and analysis are key tasks in dealing with the information overload problem characteristic for today's networked digital environments. Advances in data acquisition, transmission and storage, and emergence of social media, lead to an abundance of textual and non-textual information items available to everyone at any time. Advances in visual-interactive data analysis can provide for effective visual interfaces for query formulation, navigation, and result exploration in complex information spaces. In this presentation, we will discuss selected approaches for visual analysis in large textual and non-textual document collections. First, recent techniques for visual analysis of readability, sentiment and opinion properties in large amounts of textual documents, including promising application possibilities, will be discussed. Then, we will focus on visual analysis support for information retrieval in non-textual documents, in particular multimedia and time-oriented research data. We argue that new visual-interactive approaches can provide for effective user access to large document corpora, including discovering of interesting relationships between data items, and understanding the space of similarity notions for a given document repository. We will conclude the presentation by discussing research opportunities at the intersection of visual data analysis, information retrieval, and evaluation.
  
  
  
• From Information Retrieval to Knowledgeable Machines
  Peter Clark, Vulcan Inc., USA
  
  Abstract:
  Ultimately we would like our machines to not only search and retrieve information, but also have some "understanding" of the material that they are manipulating so that they can better meet the user's needs. In this talk, I will present our work in Project Halo to create an (iPad hosted) "knowledgeable biology textbook", called Inquire. Inquire includes a formal, hand-crafted knowledge base encoding some of the book's content, being augmented (this year) with capabilities for textual entailment and question-answering directly from the book text itself. Inquire allows the user to not only read and browse the textbook, but also to ask questions and get reasoned or retrieved answers back, explore the material through semantic connections, and receive suggestions of useful questions to ask. In this talk I will describe the project, in particular the textual question-answering component and its use of natural language processing, paraphrasing, textual entailment, and its exploitation of the formal knowledge base. I will also discuss the interplay being developed between the hand-built knowledge and automatic text-extracted knowledge, how each offers complementary strengths, and how each can leverage the other. Finally I will discuss the value of this approach, and argue for the importance of creating a deeper understanding of textual material, and ultimately more knowledgeable machines.
  
  
  

Peter Clark

Peter Clark is a Senior Research Scientist at Vulcan Inc, working in the areas of natural language understanding, question answering, large knowledge bases, and the interplay between these three areas. Prior to Vulcan, he was an Associate Technical Fellow at Boeing Research (1996-2010), leading research in the areas of natural language processing and knowledge-based systems. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science in 1991, and has researched these topics for 25 years with more than 70 refereed publications in artificial intelligence, including a AAAI Best Paper award in 1997. He was co-chair of the Third International Conference on Knowledge Capture, held in 2005.

Tobias Schreck

Tobias Schreck is an Assistant Professor for Visual Analytics with the Department for Computer and Information Science at University of Konstanz, Germany. Between 2007 and 2011, he was a Postdoc researcher at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, where he built and led a research group on visual search and analysis. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science in 2006, and a Master of Science degree in Information Engineering in 2002, both from University of Konstanz. Tobias Schreck works in the areas of Visual Analytics, Information Visualization, and Digital Libraries. His research interests include visual search and analysis in time-oriented, high-dimensional, and 3D object data, with applications in data analysis and multimedia retrieval. He has published more than 70 scientific papers and served in various committees, including co-chairing the Eurographics Workshop on 3D Object Retrieval in 2010 and 2011, and being a workshop co-chair for the 2012 IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology.