Computer Science Seminar - University of Houston
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Computer Science Seminar

Big Data Europe: Using Location to Associate Heterogeneous Information About Events

When: Monday, March 7, 2016
Where: PGH 563
Time: 5:30 PM

Speaker: Dr. Vangelis Karkaletsis and Dr. Stasinos Konstantopoulos

Host: Prof. Ioannis Kakadiaris

The Big Data Europe project (http://www.big-data-europe.eu/) envisages a modular platform that integrates systems from Apache and European projects into a Big Data swiss army knife. Development within Big Data Europe aims to provide a layer for semantically describing and discovering what data and processing is available at a deployment, to maintain data provenance and lineage including rights and obligations regarding derivative data, and to provide a data integration layer.

Extracting and fusing information from the ever-increasing amount of heterogeneous publicly available data is quickly becoming an important feature of applications related to the security domain, such as evacuation route planning, monitoring of critical infrastructures, and border security. In one of the pilots of the Big Data Europe project, we investigate the fusion of information extracted from satellite images and user-generated content on social media. In our pilot, we deploy change detection from satellite images and event detection in social media text on the Big Data Europe distributed processing infrastructure and relate changes in land cover with events extracted from geo-located social media and news text. From the software engineering point of view, this pilot allows us to experiment with the integration of diverse analysis tools into modern big data infrastructures; from the security domain’s point of view, it allows us to demonstrate how heterogeneous data fused via geo-temporal indexing.

Bio:

Dr. Vangelis Karkaletsis is the head of the Software and Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (SKEL) of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications at NCSR "Demokritos", and responsible for the Institute's educational activities. His research interests are in the areas of Language and Knowledge Engineering, as applied to content analysis, natural language interfaces, ontology engineering. He has extensive experience in the coordination and technical management of European and national projects. He is currently site manager for the H2020 Big Data Europe project for the development of a Big Data Integrator platform, and coordinator of the H2020 Radio project on the use of robots in assisted living environments. He is also scientific manager of the H2020 project Your Data Stories on the analysis of open governmental data and their linking to social web. He has organised international workshops, conferences, summer schools. He teaches for many years at post-graduate courses on language and knowledge technologies. He is co-founder of the spin-off company ‘i-sieve Technologies’ that exploited SKEL research work on on-line content analysis. He is currently involved in the founding of the new spin-off company Newsum that exploits SKEL technology on multilingual and multi-document summarization.

Dr. Stasinos Konstantopoulos, MEng in Computer Engineering and Informatics (University of Patras, Greece, 1997), MSc in Artificial Intelligence (Edinburgh University, U.K., 1998), PhD on Computational Logic and Language Technology (Groningen University, the Netherlands, 2003) has been affiliated to the Software and Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (SKEL) of the Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications, NCSR "Demokritos" since 2004. Since 2012 he has been leading core technical work packages in Intelligent Data Management and Big Data projects. He is currently Scientific Manager for the H2020 RADIO project and work package leader for the H2020 Big Data Europe project. He is also actively involved in W3C activities and has participated in various Working Groups and Community Groups. Besides semantic and data technologies, Stasinos' research interests also include robotics and artificial intelligence. He recently assumed the initiative for, and currently leads, Roboskel, the robotics activity of SKEL. Stasinos has authored or co-authored more than 50 articles published in refereed journals and full-length conference proceedings, has reviewed submissions to artificial intelligence and machine learning journals, and has been on the programme and organizing committees of various international conferences including chairing the programme committee of the 6th Hellenic Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SETN 2010).