ISSUE 2015 - 4 Review - Open Universitykmi.open.ac.uk/review/pdf/kmi-review-issue-4-2015.pdf · KMi...

KMi Review Jul-Sep ISSUE 2015 - 4

In this issue we’re featuring one of KMi’s greenest projects. DecarboNet demonstrates the lab’s social responsibility with regards to the environment, as well as its spirit of innovation. This is achieved by fusing Computer Science and Social Science theories.

Helping us reflect on our energy consumption Here in the lab, Harith Alani’s team is working on how to help the public become more aware of how much energy their appliances are using and how they compare with one another in this respect. A web platform will soon be launched which will help people to review their energy habits and share tips with friends on how to reduce consumption.

The project is called DecarboNet and it is a collaboration between various organisations (The Open University, Modul University, University of Sheffield, University of Vienna, World Wide Fund Switzerland, Waag Society), as well as a private UK company; Green Energy Options. The main objective is to raise awareness and to encourage behaviour change through collective intelligence platforms.

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/ ISSUE 2015 - 4 - page �1

Review

Student Analytics

mentioned on BBC

Inquiry-Based

Learning with Online

Labs and Mobile Apps

KMi wins over 2

million euros in

funding from H2020

Other articles in this issue

http://kmi.open.ac.uk


“It can be difficult to know where to start in the fight against climate change. It’s such a wide subject with colossal consequences, but studies show that the problem needs to be communicated at the personal and home level to initiate a positive reaction.”

- Dr Harith Alani

To meet this challenge, the project is developing a citizen engagement platform that is focused on environmental topics which we can all have an impact on, such as the effect of using old, energy-inefficient appliances on electricity consumption, or the cost of using appliances inefficiently (e.g., overfilling kettles). The design of the platform is based on a variety of theories and concepts borrowed from computer and social sciences to encourage and foster engagement and behaviour change.

Periodically rotating these energy-saving topics will help users refocus their attention on different key debates or

appliances, and hopefully encourage them to return time and time again to share or debate tips and best practices. The platform also provides a variety of learning tools, actions, and social media engagement services related to climate change.

The platform will be released in October in the run up to the 2015 United Nations Climate

Change Conference, COP21. Over 400 hundred people have already registered their interest in participating in the DecarboNet research trials, and 250 lucky users will receive a free electricity monitoring kits.


Dr Harith Alani Senior Lecturer

Harith is a senior lecturer at the Knowledge Media institute, The Open University, where he leads a group specialising in Social Semantics and Web Science. Before joining KMi, he was a senior research fellow at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton. He has published around 90 scientific papers in various leading journals and conferences, and has been involved as a Principle Investigator in several national and international research projects.

Kay supports eight Senior Academics within the Lab and provides support to 12 live grants. He is also the Administration Coordinator of the EC Funded, FP7 DecarboNet project which kicked-off in October 2013.

Keyur Dave Senior Administration Assistant

http://t.co/4hWbgN6hjl



Do you know how energy-efficient your white goods are and how appliances compare in energy consumption? The electricity monitoring equipment built by our project partner, Green Energy Options, uploads your energy data to the project’s energy quest platform for you to review and share. This allows you to compare the efficiency of energy-hungry appliances (such as fridges and freezers) with friends and other users.

Why not have a look at http://www.decarbonet.eu for further information about the goals of the project, and the applications that have already been released to the public.


Her current research at KMi is focused on the analysis of online communities (Social Web). Miriam says her aim is to understand users' behaviour and needs and to develop prediction models to foresee risks and opportunities in online communities based on the behaviour of their users. She has also previously worked on semantic search.

Miriam Fernandez Research Fellow

Lara says her personal mission is to connect people and technology. She’s a Computer Engineer and has worked in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field in the last 10 years mainly developing new technologies for people unfamiliar with ICT. To understand a bit more about people, she has brought in aspects from both Psychology and the Social Sciences to her research.

Lara Piccolo Research Fellow

http://www.decarbonet.eu



And in other news…

KMi wins over 2 million euros in funding from H2020 The lab won funding for four of the six successful Horizon 2020 projects at The Open University. These projects will be pushing the boundaries in terms of moving analytics into the everyday, helping to deliver MOOCs through collaborative technology and integrating the use of wearables. Of the four new projects, we are proud to be coordinating one – COMRADES.

AFEL (Analytics for Everyday Learning)PI - Mathieu d’Aquin The goal is to develop, pilot and evaluate methods and applications, which advance informal/collective learning when it takes place in online social environments.Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining traditionally relate to the analysis

and exploration of data coming from learning environments, especially to understand learners' behaviours. However, studies have for a long time demonstrated that learning activities happen outside of formal educational platforms, also. This includes informal and collective learning usually associated, as a side effect, with other (social) environments and activities. AFEL will tackle the main challenges of informal learning analytics through 1) developing the tools and techniques necessary to capture information about learning activities from (not necessarily educational) online social environments; 2) creating methods for the analysis of such informal learning data, based on combining visual analytics with cognitive models of learning and collaboration; 3) demonstrating the potential of the approach in improving the understanding of informal learning, and the way it is better supported; and 4) evaluating all the former items in real world large-scale applications and platforms.




COMRADES

Project Coordinator – Harith AlaniThis project will build an intelligent collective resilience platform to help communities to reconnect, respond, and recover from crisis situations. The rise of social media as an information channel during crises has become key

to community resilience and response. However, existing crisis awareness applications, such as Ushahidi, while vital for information gathering, often struggle to address the challenges of real-time social data analysis and aggregation of crisis micro-events, and filtering of unverified content and reporters. COMRADES will achieve its aims through an interdisciplinary, socio-technical approach, which will draw on the latest advances in computational social science, social computing, real-time analytics, text and social media analysis, and Linked Open Data. The open source COMRADES platform will go beyond the now standard data collection, mapping, and manual analysis functions provided by the underpinning, widely used Ushahidi crisis mapping tool, to include new intelligent algorithms aimed at helping communities, citizens, and humanitarian services with analysing, verifying, monitoring, and responding to emergency events. COMRADES is funded under the CAPS (Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation) H2020 call, and its consortium consists of The Open University, I-Hub (Kenya), University of Sheffield, University of Agder (Norway), and Government To You (Brussels).

SLIDEWIKI PI – John Domingue This project will develop a state-of-the-art MOOC delivery platform which enables collaborative slide creation. A major obstacle to increase the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of education in Europe is the lack of widely available, accessible, multilingual, timely, engaging and high-quality educational material (i.e. OpenCourseWare). The creation of comprehensive OpenCourseWare (OCW) is tedious, time-consuming and expensive, with the effect, that often courseware employed by teachers, instructors and professors is incomplete, outdated and inaccessible to those with disabilities. With the open-source SlideWiki platform (available at SlideWiki.org) the effort of the creation, translation and evolution of highly-structured remixable OCW can be widely shared using crowdsourcing. As part of this project we will run four large-scale trials in secondary education, vocational and professional training, higher education and community-driven open-education. Each of these large-scale trials will be performed with hundreds of educators and thousands of learners in countries all over Europe.




WEKITPI – Fridolin Wild

Wearable TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) platforms enhance human abilities to acquire procedural knowledge on the factory floor. Smarter products and services will improve workflows, enhancing (re)training of workers whose skill sets need upgrading to cyber-physical systems present in a Smart Factory. By building on multi-discipline research (e.g., human-centred

methodology integrating cognitive models, ergonomics, an understanding of worker’s wellbeing) we will accelerate how we identify, acquire and exploit skills valued by industry. WEKIT aims to encourage early adopters (e.g., in manufacturing) who will experience Augmented Reality (AR) training in situ with live expert guidance, often in new situations, which have a high impact on effectiveness in production. WEKIT is strongly aligned with EU job/training policies (e.g., Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs). It enhances the industrial value chain, reduces fragmentation/cost and improves efficiencies with impact regarding speed and scale in production. The final outputs will be made suitable for workplace integration via industry-standard repositories and toolkits.


Driving a car - with just your mind

KMi researchers sometimes get to do some

pretty strange things and this week project officer Chris Valentine got the chance to be one of the first people in the world to drive a car using just the power of thought. Technicians working for insurance comparison website MoneySuperMarket.com combined the very latest in commercial electroencephalogram (EEG) neuro headsets with the type of remote car control technology you might have seen on TV programmes such as Fifth Gear, and added some clever interpretation software to allow a person to actually drive a car purely using the power of thought.

Based in a blacked-out movie studio deep in the heart of Hampshire, a short but twisty circuit is projected on the studio floor using lasers. A single forward-facing camera is the only feedback the driver gets that the car is actually following their instructions. And I can tell you - it’s not easy! Each driver has to train the software first, thinking lefty and righty thoughts that the computer can learn and recognise and relay to the remote systems via a local wireless network. In addition, a forward tilt of the head accelerates the car from standing to a safe five miles per hour; a tilt backwards stops it immediately - a good thing when large concrete blocks are deployed to protect sensitive equipment. A telematic system inside reports on how smoothly - or not - the driver is managing to control the car. The whole system took two months from initial idea to fruition and to their knowledge is a world-first.



Angelo reports on SSSW 2015 Last week, the 11th Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web took place. Unlike other years, it was held in Bertinoro (Italy) instead of Cercedilla (Spain) and relied on an extended organising committee including Mathieu d’Aquin, Valentina Presutti and Oscar Corcho. KMi’ers, Ilaria Tiddi and Enrico Daga also helped to organise the summer school and arrange the social events.

There were tutorials from Claudia d’Amato, Philippe Cudre-Mauroux, Laura Hollink, Axel Ngonga, Axel Polleres, Maria-Ester Vidal, as well as talks from Frank van Harmelen, Steffen Staab, Roberto Navigli, Luc Steels and a hackday from IBM which aimed to engage students in research and the open challenges that the scientific community is currently facing. Angelo Salatino, attended the summer school as a KMi PhD student, along with 58 other students from different institutions all around the world: “During the summer school I had the chance to learn many things about the Semantic Web and how other research fields can be improved with the technologies it provides. I also attended some interesting talks from experts in this field and I worked on some of the current challenges in research which I consider useful for my career. However, one of the most important things was that I had the chance to meet new people, that hopefully I will meet again at conferences and maybe we will have the chance to work together! If somebody were to ask me how I would describe the summer school, in brief I would say: exciting and useful to build your network of contacts!” - Angelo Salatino, PhD student at KMi

VPH Share rated 'Excellent' in final review VPH Share has concluded with a very successful final review in Eindhoven this month, where the reviewers described the project as "excellent and important". VPH Share is focused on providing a cloud environment enabling clinical researchers to develop simulation and decision support workflows to allow raw medical data to be refined into meaningful diagnostic and therapeutic information. The review presentation focused on the user stories enabled by the VPH Share "infostructure", for clinical, educational, industrial and research users, each of which have real-world problems which can be addressed using the project. The sustainability of the project was highlighted, showing how it can continue to contribute to the various user groups beyond the life of the project.



http://sssw.org/2015/


KMi's contribution to the project is in the area of semantic services. By supporting the semantic annotation of VPH Share services using the SWEET and iServe technologies, clinical researchers discover and create new workflows relevant to their data, and datasets already published on the VPH Share platform. Particular mention was made of the positive and open attitude of the project and its service to users.

Inquiry-Based Learning with Online Labs and Mobile Apps Representatives from the European projects weSPOT and Go-Lab organised and delivered a joint hands-on workshop at the JTEL summer school, which took place at the beginning of July in Ischia, Italy. The workshop was entitled "Inquiry-Based Learning with Online Labs and Mobile Apps" and allowed participants to experiment with the inquiry toolkits developed by the weSPOT and Go-Lab projects in order to perform scientific inquiries collaboratively using virtual labs and dedicated mobile apps. weSPOT was represented by Alexander Mikroyannidis (KMi) and Go-Lab by Denis Gillet (EPFL), Sten Govaerts (EPFL) and Yiwei Cao (IMC). This workshop has built on the successful collaboration between the two projects, which was initiated in last year’s JTEL summer school. During that event, a first step towards the technical integration of the toolkits offered by the two projects was achieved. This year’s joint workshop strengthened this collaboration and presented the outcomes of both projects in a pedagogical and technological way.The JTEL summer school (Joint European Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning) is an annual event for PhD students working on topics from a broad range of domains, which contribute to advancing the field of Technology Enhanced Learning. This year, the JTEL summer school was co-located with the EMMA summer school on MOOC Design.


http://wespot.net

http://www.go-lab-project.eu

http://jtelsummerschool.eu

http://wespot.net/en_GB/home/-/blogs/golab-tools-now-available-in-wespot

http://project.europeanmoocs.eu/project/get-involved/summer-school/



KMi technologies feature in the FT The Financial Times published an article (25 July) on how universities, including The Open University, are using student data to predict academic performance. Our former Director, Peter Scott, introduced journalist, Helen Warrell to OU Analyse, a project led by Zdenek Zdrahal. The data collected by the technology created by Zdenek’s team includes how much of the online textbooks students have read and how they have engaged on student forums. Peter mentioned how student data can inform HE institutions to encourage learners to head in the right direction. He went on to say that data could also be used by the student themselves to maximise their chances of succeeding. “We want to give you the data so you manipulate yourself.” – Peter ScottWhen the FT came to visit us they also filmed some of our work to find out how digital technology is changing the way people learn. Fridolin Wild and Giuseppe Scavo took this opportunity to showcase their work with Augmented Reality and how it can help people learn skills remotely. The “Ghost Hands” technology, featured in the video on the FT's site, allows an instructor to talk pupils through complicated manoeuvres via the Internet.

Student Analytics mentioned on BBC

On Tuesday 28 July the BBC posted a news story about how students at the OU are going to have their progress monitored by software to spot if they need any extra support. This related to Zdenek Zdrahal's project - OU Analyse.KMi's new Director, John Domingue and Ruth Tudor, President of The Open University's Students' Association represented the University and explained that the scheme is designed to observe students' paths through courses and engagement with online learning modules



http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/634624c6-312b-11e5-91ac-a5e17d9b4cff.html%22%20%5Cl%20%22slide0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFzUK8XMgA0

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-33675471?SThisFB


International recognition of in the Best of Business Web

KMi’s project COnnecting REpositories (CORE) was included in the June issue of the Best of Business Web newsletter. According to a comment from the editor, Robert Berkman, “CORE ... is a real gold mine of a research site. You can perform precision searches by using the advanced search to quickly search via phrase or Boolean; limit by author, publisher and year; choose to only return articles available in fulltext; and search the entire text or limit to those found in the title and abstract. After the list of initial results are returned, you can further refine the list by publication type, language, journal and other fields. CORE also will suggest similar articles and displays these via a visually impressive interactive graph. While only 10% of the items are available in PDF fulltext, even for those that are not, full bibliographic information and an abstract are provided. Consider this site if you are looking for academic and scholarly papers from around the world, including those in languages other than English.” The Best of Business Web is a monthly newsletter addressed to market researchers, information professionals, entrepreneurs and business librarians. The newsletter is run by the New School of Public Engagement, New York City, USA.This demonstrates the international attention that CORE receives and its important role in promoting open access to scholarly scientific results.

Keep up-to-date with our news on iPhone or Apple Watch

Here in KMi we have built The Open University’s first Apple Watch app to help you keep up-to-date with KMi’s news. The mobile version is also available for the iPhone. KMi's Paul Hogan has ensured that it is easy to use on the Apple Watch – you simply tap on the news story which interests you and scroll down to read. Return to the list with a quick tap and choose another article. Think there’s a recent story you may have missed? To read older news items simply tap and hold (also known as force-tap) and you will be able to access the archive.



http://www.bestbizweb.com


ESWC Summer School 2015 – Everything was perfect! “Definitely would recommend ESWC Summer School not as a regular event you can visit, but as a unique part of my life”

Just a statement from one of our 24 students who attended ESWC Summer School in Kalamaki, Southern Crete last week. Prof John Domingue, Director of the School and President of STI International lead a very successful 5th ESWC Summer school with Dr Elena Simperl (University of Southampton) and a team of tutors who included KMi’s Allan Third.

The school, which was completely taught outdoors, combined a number of tutorials, hands-on sessions, a poster session and also a group mini-project to ‘prepare the next generation of young researchers in Semantic Web and Linked Data’. Highlights of the week included five fantastic and inspirational keynotes from both an industrial background, James Hodson and Chris Welty and also prominent figures in academia; Marko Grobelnik, Martin Hepp and Lora Aroyo.

Next year, the Summer School moves to Dubrovnik – look out for registration opening soon!





KMi’s Post Graduate School

KMi offers a PhD programme for both full-time and part-time students. We currently have 16 students undertaking PhD study. Three more students are expected to join the PhD programme on 1st October 2015.

A common characteristic of KMi postgraduate study, and KMi research in general, is that it involves the design, development and testing of technologies to address theoretical and practical concerns in real contexts with real users. Current student research projects address a range of topics within the scope of Knowledge Media including visual analytics, semantic web, ontologies, data mining, online communities, natural language processing, technology enhanced learning and augmented reality.

The application process for full time students takes place between February

and May. Accepted full-time students usually begin their studies on 1st October. Part-time students can apply and commence their studies at any time of the year. KMi welcomes PhD applications within the areas of artificial intelligence and semantic technologies, human computer interaction,

technology enhanced learning and multimedia systems.

For more information about PhD opportunities in KMi, contact Paul Mulholland (above)([email protected]). Details on how to apply can found at http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships/


mailto:[email protected]

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships/

mailto:[email protected]

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships/



In this issue we asked Dr Francesco Osborne to talk us through two hot papers he has recently co-‐authored.

What we are writing: in the spotlight Dr Francesco Osborne

Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2015) Klink-‐2: Integrating Multiple Web Sources to Generate Semantic Topic Networks, International Semantic Web Conference, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

This paper describes an innovative method which takes as input a corpus of academic publications and automatically generates an accurate, comprehensive and up-‐to-‐date ontology of research topics. This ontology identifies the research topics relevant to the given corpus and also defines the key relationships between them – e.g., that “Neural Networks” is a sub-‐area of “Art i f ic ia l Intelligence” or that “Ontology Alignment” is the same topic as “Ontology Mapping”. The resulting topic network can be used to support more precise methods for exploring what goes on in research – e.g., to identify researchers working on a particular topic and to understand the dynamics of sub-‐topics within a more general topic, etc.

The KMi team working on Klink-‐2 is collaborating with Elsevier BV and Springer DE, two major international academic publishers who are interested in using the novel technologies developed by KMi in their own business scenarios. In particular, both Elsevier and Springer are providing us with access to their very large databases of academic publications and as a result Klink-‐2 is being tested on very large-‐scale and high quality repositories of research papers, thus yielding very large ontologies. For example, we were able to generate a Computer Science taxonomy of about 16,000 topics l inked by about 70,000

relationships. These topic networks will be used by both publishers and researchers to gain new insights into the dynamics of the research world.

Osborne, F., Motta, E. and Mu l ho l l and , P. ( 2 013 ) Exploring Scholarly Data with Rexplore, International Semantic Web Conference, Sydney, Australia

This paper presents Rexplore, a system which leverages novel solutions in large-‐scale data mining, semantic technologies and visual analytics, to provide an innovative environment for exploring and making sense of scholarly data.

Rexplore had a significant impact both in the academic world and in the industr ia l environment, attracting the attention of major academic publishers and companies working in the innovation space. In 2014, the system was awarded first prize, as Best Semantic Publishing Application, at the at the "Semantic Publishing Challenge", which was held in the context of the 11th Extended Semantic Web Conference.

Rexplore uses Klink-‐2 for characterising research topics in semantic way, and thus can provide very precise analytics and visualisations describing how researchers, communities and organisation address different research areas and how disciplines evolve over time. It also allows users to detect and make sense of important trends in research, such as, significant migrations of researchers from one area to another, the emergence of new topics, and the evolution of communities within a particular area.




KMi’s World Stage and Closer to Home John Domingue, gave a keynote at ICSOFT/ICETE/ICE-B Conference (22 July).

Mathieu d’Aquin and Ilaria Tiddi, attended ECML PKDD in Porto, Portugal (7-11 Sept).

Harith Alani, was invited to attend a KAIST Workshop in Korea (7-12 July).

Fridolin Wild travelled to Prague for the TCBL Kick Off meeting (11-16 July).

Michelle Bachelor attended a meeting for the Catalyst Project in Brussels. (6-10 Jul).

Greg Burel travelled to Cyprus for the Hypertext conference 2015 (31 Aug - 4 Sept).

Allan Third, attended a CARRE Project meeting in Kaunas, Lithuania (23-26 Sept).

John Domingue and Carlos Pedrinaci attended the STI Summit in Crete, Greece (6-8 Sept.).

KMi Future

Events Coming Soon… • John Domingue is attending a board meeting at the Future Internet Research and

Experimentation as a member (2 Oct)

• Mathieu d’Aquin and Ilaria Tiddi are attending K-CAPS 2015 in NY, USA (7-10 October)

• Mathieu d’Aquin, Aba-Sha Dadzie, Enrico Daga and many other KMi’ers are travelling to Bethleham, Pennsylvania for ISWC 15 (11-15 Oct)

• John Domingue is attending ICT 2015 in Lisbon (20-22 Oct)

• Alan Fletcher is attending the Smart City Expo with Milton Keynes Council in Barcelona (15-17 Nov)

• John Domingue is attending the EDF Conference in Luxemborug and will be chairing the committee. (16-17 Nov)

In the NEXT Issue - The Phase 1 Launch of the MK Data Hub


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