The International Semantic Web Conference 2016 was held in Kobe, Japan and was very very well organised. There was a lot of exciting research work on the Semantic Web and related fields and interest from industry (plenty of great application and resource papers). I presented 2 papers titled SPARQL-to-SQL on Internet of Things Databases and Streams and PIOTRe: Personal Internet of Things Repository (including a demo) at the conference. The conference was featured on NHK world.
There were 3 wonderful keynotes and I especially liked the one by Hiroaki Kitano, CEO of Sony Computer Science Labs and Professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, titled Artificial Intelligence to Win the Nobel Prize and Beyond: Creating the Engine for Scientific Discovery.
My work was presented at the streams session and demos session at the conference.
My slides are available here:Â SPARQL-to-SQL on Internet of Things Databases and Streams, Presentation @ ISWC2016
And thereâs a video of my talk at http://videolectures.net/iswc2016_siow_databases_streams/
The research track paper is published by Springer: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-46523-4_31
While the demo track paper is available from CEUR-WS:
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1690/paper20.pdf
Finally, the conference website is here: http://iswc2016.semanticweb.org/
It was back to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, South Korea for the 3rd International Disaster Management Workshop. As per the last few times, there were some really excellent speakers from a diverse range of studies.
From Bio Engineering, Law, Computer Science, Social Media Analytics, Civil Engineering and Food Nutrition, day 1 was packed with great talks.
Day 2 featured more variety and ended with a great discussion and proposal planning.
I presented some of my work on Fog Computing, optimising Linked Data for Lightweight Computers and Personal IoT Repositories.
The 3rd International Conference for Internet Science (INSCI16) was held at the University of Firenze in Florence, Italy. I presented a paper titled Interoperable & Efficient: Linked Data for the Internet of Things at the conference.Â
The conference had many good speakers and papers from a wide range of  disciplines - physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, sociologists, political scientists and economists - each bringing their technical knowledge and expertise to the table.
The first day the conference was also open to the public and in the afternoon there was a range of workshops including the one I attended, ISEM 2016: 1st International Workshop on Internet and Social media for Environmental Monitoring.
My slides are available here:Â http://www.slideshare.net/eugenesiow/interoperable-efficient-linked-data-for-the-internet-of-things-insci16
The paper is published by Springer:Â http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-45982-0_15
Finally, the conference website is here:Â http://insci2016.complexworld.net/
Iâve been helping as an education volunteer with the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) for over a year now and itâs been a wonderful experience! Our role is to organise workshops in local schools and each time Iâve done so Iâve received so much inspiration from the students!
In January this year we did a workshop on Climate Change at the Relationships Day at St Maryâs College in Southampton.Â
The studentâs learned alot from the experience of playing the flood game - simulating how aid agencies in developing countries manage resources to rescue as many people from a flood. When asked to draw out some practical things they could do to help prevent and mitigate climate change, they came up with many good ideas!
Hereâs the CAFOD blog post:Â https://cafodportsmouth.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/relationships-day-at-st-marys-college/
We then spent a morning at St Georgeâs College, Southampton in March conducting a workshop on Climate Change. We did a Who Wants to be a Millionaire style quiz which got all the students participating, before we delved more into various actions that each one could resolve to take to prevent climate change and love our environment more.
In July, we conducted another workshop at St Georgeâs for Relationships Day on the Refugee Crisis. In the workshop we played a game âOn the Moveâ, which had students role-playing the tough conditions that refugees and their families are subjected to.
I received a scholarship for Early Career Researchers to attend and present at the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Plenary 7 in Tokyo, Japan. The RDA is an organisation that builds the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing of data. I presented about how Linked Data can be a technical bridge for encouraging inter-operability among silos of Internet of Things data.
It was an interesting and enriching experience as I had the opportunity to serve as the secretary for a working group on Permanent Identifiers and a birds of the feather session on data search. I also managed to attend working group sessions on big data and research repositories.
Here is a blog post of my experience:Â https://rd-alliance.org/blogs/rda-p7-tokyo-lens-iot-researcher.html
Above is the poster with a larger version available at:Â https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eugene_Siow/publications
Of course, beautiful Tokyo and the wonderful ramen, sushi and other Japanese cuisine added to the experience. It brought back memories of the backpacking trip and the other times in Japan.
Tutoring at a Web Science Winter School in Shenzhen
This time I was asked to tutor at a Web Science Winter School in Tsinghua Graduate School in Shenzhen, China with postgraduate participants from the University of Southampton, National University of Singapore, KAIST, Tsinghua and the University of Beijing participating.
Tsinghua were great hosts and we had 4 groups led by 4 tutors.
The project I had prepared for the team was using both geospatial (sensor and IoT) and social media (twitter) data to analyse the Singapore Haze Crisis.
This was the project page prepared:Â http://eugenesiow.github.io/sensor-data/index.html
Plus others I prepared for the other projects: http://eugenesiow.github.io/wellbeing-page/ and http://eugenesiow.github.io/inno-app/
The team was excellent and nearly got the top prize with a snazzy visualisation of the data which is now on the Web Observatory.
http://eugenesiow.github.io/haze_visualization/
The keynote day also saw the students exposed to some top quality academic work from soton, NUS, Tsinghua and KAIST.Â
A website to unite some of the work being done on Linked Data Analytics for the Internet of Things.
http://eugenesiow.github.io/iot/
The Internet of Things is currently beset by product silos. To unlock the commercial potential there is a need for open ecosystems based upon open standards. This includes standards for identification, discovery andinteroperation of services across platforms from different vendors, and will involve the need for rich descriptions and shared data models, as well as close attention to security, privacy, scalability and accessibility.
WEB OF THINGS AT W3C
Applications and their utility to end users have been known to drive the adoption of technology just as with the iPhone and data services. Before the iPhone, data services had infrastructure in place but low adoption.Â
For applications in the IoT to demonstrate the benefits of interconnecting entities and their data, there exist the challenges of aggregating & integrating multiple sources of data to derive insight and foresight from the data and creating an environment where entities can inter-operate and share data.
Hence the need to perform analytics on IoT data that uses open standards to model and describe the data for integration. Furthermore, this has to be performed on a platform suitable for the distributed, heterogeneous nature of IoT deployments.
Lightweight computers, like the Raspberry Pi, are cost efficient and compact enough for broad or mobile deployments but possess significant storage and compute capabilities unlike sensors.
In IoT scenarios like Smart Homes, Smart Offices and Smart Cities, Lightweight Computers can serve as local platforms to perform integration and aggregation of data for analytics and applications. An additional benefit is fine-grained control over data privacy, protection and physical access by device owners.
Linked Data, which semantically interconnects structured data, has demonstrated its feasibility as a means of connecting and integrating web data using current infrastructure. 'Things' in the IoT, however, produce data that is markedly different and unique from Web data. This has to be handled differently to achieve good performance for analytics on the limited resources of Lightweight Computers.
The following projects, publications and research go towards this effort to provide powerful Linked Data solutions on distributed Lightweight Computers that allow data analytics for applications on the Internet of Things.
I was fortunate to be invited to tutor at a Web Science and Big Data Analytics Summer School in Jakarta, Indonesia at the University of Indonesia. As part of the program, the British Council also organised a Web Science and Big Data Analytics Conference on Information Transparency and Digital Democracy.
3 groups of students worked on the Smart City theme and datasets I had prepared for the summer school with one of them eventually winning the top prize.
Here are the students presenting their initial ideas to Ramine and me.
And who can forget the daily 3h commute from UI (University of Indonesia) to the Pullman in central Jakarta.
The conference also generated a good interchange of ideas and was well represented by academics, government officials, the UN, entrepreneurs and MNC representatives.
Finally, we found the time at the end of the trip to pop by Singapore for a meeting with Prof Chua Tat-Seng at NUS and were pleasantly surprised that they had kindly prepared an office for Ramine.
I presented some of my work at the International Workshop of Social Machines for Disaster Management at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, Korea. KAIST is truly the MIT of South Korea! I had a great time interacting with the brilliant researchers there - social scientists, medical doctors, computer scientists and policy studies academics!
I presented on Rapid Response Linked Data for Disaster Management based on my work on putting Linked Data on Raspberry Pisâ which can serve as hubs for aggregating and integrating data in an inter-operable way in offline disaster management scenarios.Â
I also carried out a live demo of a Raspberry Pi utilising Linked Data to provide analytics in an Internet of Things scenario.
My slides are avaialble here:Â http://www.slideshare.net/eugenesiow/rapid-response-linked-data
Thereâs no Internet of Things, just Things on the Internet
Why Data Mining and not itâs encompassing term, Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD)? Why the World Wide Web and not the Information Superhighway? Why the Internet of Things and not Ubiquitous Computing? If history has taught us anything, some terms catch on, become buzzwords and form a nucleus around which technology and applications coalesce, other terms donât.
What I think the Internet of Things will be though, is a development where machines can(or might opt not to) communicate with each other and their human users to impact society collectively in terms of efficiency and productivity through automation. In another words, the Internet of Things will be more than the sum of its parts.
Iâve only been in Southampton a few months now but there are so many wonderfully interesting bits of trivia about the city...
1. The Titanic set sail from Southampton on 10 April 1912
2. In the book Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Vernes, Southampton is mentioned as a possible destination for the transatlantic voyage, though it would take too long.
3. Clarence Birdseye tested cod sticks on shoppers in Southampton and because of the positive response, they were rolled out as fish fingers across the country.
4. The Mayflower, the pilgrim ship to the new world, left from or at least docked at Southampton.
5. Southampton possesses the longest surviving stretch of medieval walls in England!Â
6. Southampton has an airport with flights as far as Mallorca, Corsica, Faro and Hamburg.
7. The Spitfire, a British-made WWII plane, is often associated with Southampton where its prototype was tested at what is now Southampton Airport and factories assembling it were located here.
8. There are 2 universities in Southampton, the University of Southampton and Southampton Solent University.
9. Southampton is home to the historic Tudor house.
10. The new Britannia cruise ship sails from Southampton.
Internet Science brings together a range of disciplines from computer science to law, economics and psychology. Registration is free for students:Â http://bit.ly/1Jnv3wX
The focus of the conference this year is: Societies, Governance and Innovation. As part of my work on the Internet of Things, Big Data, Analytics and distribution, I will be attending the second iteration of this conference at the end of May this year.
