The 2011 AAAI Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges (OGK2011) seeks papers on all aspects of publishing public government data as reusable knowledge on the Web. Both long papers presenting research results and shorter papers describing late breaking work, outlining implemented systems, identifying new research challenges, or articulating a position are invited. Submissions are due by June 3, notifications will be sent by July 15, and the final camera-ready copy must be provided by September 9.

Websites like data.gov, research.gov and USASpending.gov aim to improve government transparency, increase accountability, and encourage public participation by publishing public government data online. Although this data has been used for some intriguing applications, it is difficult for citizens to understand and use. This symposium will explore how AI technologies such as the Semantic Web, information extraction, statistical analysis and machine learning can be used to make the knowledge embedded in the data more explicit, accessible and reusable. The symposium’s location of Washington, DC will facilitate the participation of U.S. federal government agency members and enable interchange between researchers and practitioners. We also expect attendance of international open government data players from e.g. UK and Australia.

Relevant topics include the automatic and semi-automatic creation of linked data resources, ontologies for government data, entity linking and co-reference detection between linked data resources, adding temporal qualifications to government data, creating mash-ups with open government data, linked open government data analysis, metadata for provenance, certainty and trust, policies for information sharing, privacy and use, social networks and government data, machine learning applied to government data, data visualization techniques, and applications.

This symposium will include a mix of invited talks, paper presentations, panels, system demonstrations, a poster session, and discussions. We plan to have several invited speakers drawn from government, academia and industry. We will run panels on the emerging challenges and best practices, including (i) how to enhance transparency and interoperability within an agency and across different agencies/countries, and (ii) how to promote nationwide health information network that effectively integrates government-curated public records and citizens’ personal health data.

The symposium organizers are Li Ding (RPI), Tim Finin (UMBC), Lalana Kagal (MIT) and Deborah McGuinness (RPI). Program committee members and additional information are listed on the OGK2011 symposium site. For more information about the the symposium, send email inquiries to ogk11-info@googlegroups.com.

Important Dates

• Workshop: 4-6 November 2011 in Arlington, Virginia USA
• Submissions due: 3 June 2011
• Decisions by: 15 July 15 2011
• Camera ready by: 9 September 2011

With the goal of building a greater sense of community in the Linehan Artist Scholars Program, students in the Linehan Freshman Seminar class participated in a Digital Story Workshop over a four week period. Their stories reflect the broad concerns of young talented artists as they begin their university careers in the arts. The stories speak of family, creative passions, and the search for identity in a complicated and fractured world.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

“We don’t cast spells on people” says NY TSA former employee who also happens to be a wiccan.

This might be it! The much anticipated Superman: Man of Steel to be released in 2012 may just compete with the Batman craze of 08.  Recipes for success: Amy Adams as Lois Lane and Henry Cavill as Clark Kent.

Small, intimate, and breathtaking. Slovenia is the new travel destination that’s off the radar.

FOB: Fresh Off The Boat … literally! Italian fishermen block off boats full of Tunisian Immigrants in protest.

At one point or another we have all have taken standardized tests.   You know, the ones with endless rows of perfectly formed multiple choice bubbles or ovals and well sharpened #2 pencils.  Not to mention attempting to stay inside the lines, without crayons!  Yeah, those.

Well, President Obama may have just exponential boosted his popularity with this comment,

“All you’re learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test and that’s not going to make education interesting.”

It looks like 10 years after the Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy, the era of filling in bubbles instead of the brain may just come to end.  The Obama administration is advocating “learning about the world, learning about different cultures,  learning about science, learning about math.”

Revolutionary huh! What? ACTUALLY learning instead of memorizing to regurgitate on standardized tests? What is that all about? After all, we have singlehandedly  managed to become one of the wealthiest nations that ranks 25th in math scores compared to 70 other countries. Quite an accomplishment.

But before you take a stand on the American education system and standardized testing, here are the pros and cons as presented by advocates and critics.

Pro

• Both Teachers & Students can be held accountable
• Easier to grade & not time consuming
• Measure student progress by identifying their weaknesses

Con

• Results in no meaningful learning in classrooms
• Assess a narrow set of skills
• Some high stakes testing have negative emotional and material impacts on students, schools, and teachers.

We want to know what you think. Take our poll below ( ironically, it is multiple choice)

Unsatisfied with your government?

The largest mass demonstration since the war in Iraq has hit London.  Over 250,000 people showed up to what was a largely peaceful protest against UK’s government austerity measures that plan to cut $131 billion over the next 5 years.

The March for the Alternative brought together incredible support by taking a page from  Egypt’s ingenious use of cyber space to organize.

Although not at the same level, it would appear Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Morocco, and Iran are not the only ones uprising.  With the way things are going, no country will be free of protests!

Dissertation Defense

Enabling Reproducibility of Scientific Data Flows
through Tracking and Representation of Provenance

Curt Tilmes

10:00am Thursday, 31 March 2011
ITE 325b, UMBC

Reproducibility of results is a key tenet of science. Some modern scientific domains, such as Earth Science, have become computationally complicated and, particularly with the advent of higher resolution space based remote sensing platforms, tremendously data intensive. Over the last few decades, these complexities along with the the rapid advancement of the state of the art confound the goal of scientific transparency.

This thesis explores concepts of data identification, organization, equivalence and reproducibility for such data intensive scientific processing. It presents a conceptual model useful for describing and representing data provenance suitable for very precise data and processing identification. It presents algorithms for creating and maintaining precise dataset membership and provenance equivalence at various degrees of granularity and data aggregation.

Application of this model will allow more specific data citations in scientific literature based on large datasets and data provenance equivalence. Our provenance representations will enable independent reproducibility required by scientific transparency. Increasing transparency will contribute to understanding, and ultimately, credibility of scientific results.

Committee:

• Yelena Yesha (co-chair)
• Milton Halem (co-chair)
• Tim Finin
• Anupam Joshi
• Jim Smith (NASA)