JIST2015 Travel Report

This is the first travel report for my first participation at a conference for presenting my paper. The Joint International Semantic Technology Conference is a merged conference of ASWC (Asian Semantic Web Conference) and CSWC (Chinese Semantic Web Conference). This year, the conference consists of main conference as well as an industrial forum and a data challenge. The majority of the participants come from China and Japan and the committees expects more participants from the USA and Europe. Overall, there were around 100 participants for the conference and the industrial forum.

Keynote speakers:
There were two keynote speakers and many invited talks during the conference and the industrial forum. Speakers include Prof. Frank van Harmelen, Hong-gee Kim from SNU Korea, Ming Zhou from Microsoft Asia, Prof. Jeff Pan and many industrial participants from giant companies such as Baidu, Alibaba, China Mobile etc.

Prof. Frank van Harmelen talked about the research efforts on Semantic Web till now and the near future and several projects that they are currently working on for understanding the Semantic Web.

• 2000-2010: how to build it
• 2010-2015: how to use it
• next decades: how to understand it 

To this end, he talked about How to build a WoD observatory and their solution named - LOD Laundromat: clean your dirty triples: crawl from registries (CKAN), which consists of 38 billion triples and counting!

Look back the research papers on Semantic Web community, there were a majority of papers optimized in DBpedia last 5 years. This is an especially bad idea since Semantic Web!= DBpedia... They try to use some analytical tools on top of the LOD Laundromat (LODLab, LOTUS) re-run experiments on larger datasets (100+) which was collected by the WoD observatory.

Even at an early stage, there are some interesting findings such as "Hotspots: Most of the dataset is not used in many queries (in terms of datasets)", if we can identify it, we can optimize for these queries and local sub-graph works well for answering queries (no explanation yet - theory)

So the agenda should be changed: not building things, but why those things work so well!

Industry forum: 

It was very impressive that there were around 10 companies participated in the forum to present their work on using Semantic Technologies in their companies. The most impressive talk for me was given by Jie Bao from Memect Inc., who was working at RPI and MIT before. He pointed out the difference of research in Europe and the USA:

• based on project vs. business
• conference: ISWC vs. semantics

He stressed that even Semantic Web community is often talking about schema.org for a good example of SW, it is a project and not a business. There are little start ups survived at present even we expected a new semantic search engine, semantic agent etc..

And other slides on start-up companies with Semantic Web...

Data Challenge:

I think this session is one of the most beneficial ones for me. I personally participated the data challenge on entity type prediction and placed 4th among 13 teams. Other top-5 participants came from Peking University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fujitsu R&D and Dongnan University. Learnt a lot about NLP and Machine Learning and I need to improve NLP skills and ML skills in the near future.

JIST2015 data challenge from GUANGYUAN PIAO

Editors' session:

Since my paper "Computing the Semantic Similarity of Resources in DBpedia for Recommendation Purposes" for the main conference was one of the Best Paper Candidates, I had the chance to meet journal editors to get some feedbacks about the work. I had many useful comments from them and had a lot of work to do to improve/strengthen it.

Computing the Semantic Similarity of Resources in DBpedia for Recommendation Purposes from GUANGYUAN PIAO

It was a good experience to attend the conference and the JIST2016 will be at Singapore:)

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Update after the conference:

The proceedings are available from March, 2016. This is a very slow publication of post proceeding compared to other conferences such as UMAP. The proceeding of UMAP was available during the conference while JIST2015 proceeding had not been available until March, 2016. Both were published by Springer, what's the difference??

Previous JIST conferences have external proceedings for posters and workshops in CEUR but not this time. May be it depends on the organizing committees and it is better to check it before you submit any workshop or poster papers in a conference.

Although the conference has a line up of great speakers and programs, it would be better to disseminate the activities of the conference in global channel like Twitter (instead of using the localized social network) as it is a "international" conference.