IET ICT Labs:
The first Doctoral Summer School
“Imagine the Future in ICT”
(September 3-7, 2012)
We are pleased to announce that the first Summer School "Imagine the Future in ICT” will be
held from September 3 to 7, 2012 in Paris - France (Co-Location Center, 23 avenue d’Italie).
This Summer School is planned within the frame of the EIT ICT Labs Doctoral School and
will be organized by Inria, in collaboration with EIT ICT Labs partners.
During the event, we aim at creating a small community involving both students, young
innovators and speakers. Main thread is to arouse curiosity and imagination among the
attendees in allowing them to share open issues with recognized scientists.
Lectures of recognized scientists shall put emphasis on prospective issues (what may be the
state of the art in 5 years ?). Talks given by business leaders shall relate success (or failure)
stories from business.
Objective and subject
The general objective of this series of summer schools is to promote excellence and
imagination among PhD students, young researchers and innovators within the KIC EIT ICT
Labs.
To this aim, most of the speakers will be ERC (European Research Council) laureates who
will bring an ambitious and ground-breaking vision of their field... Keynote speakers from
leading companies in the field will also participate. In order to favor discussions and
exchanges, the audience will be limited to highly motivated people (no more than 40
persons).
The 2012 edition will address the challenges of data management in today's digital
world.
Organizational details
Participation in the Summer School (incl. lectures, accommodation, social events) will be free
for 40 attendees (35 from the nodes). Travel costs are not taken in charge: attendees should
make a travel claim to their own department / institution or node.
Admission:
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We want to attract highly motivated students with a strong background at PhD level
(exceptionally master level), R&D engineers from industry or SMEs and young innovators.
We propose each node to participate in the admission process of attendees, to select and
propose 5 students with short personal profile (+ 2 additional names – final list will depend on
the places available). Closing of the first selection of attendees: May 15th, 2012.
Contact : contact-imagine-the-future-2012@inria.fr
Thematic presentation
The Digital World has become a reality: in early 2011, it has been observed that humanity
creates every two days as much data as it did from the dawn of human civilization until 2003,
and most of this data is user data, under the form of Web content, blogs, social network
contents, pictures and movies. Data usage and consumption scenarios cover all areas of
science, from experiment-produced data to documentary, historical and statistic data used by
social sciences. Ever increasing data volumes are also produced through any economic
activity; private data such as personal information, medical data, social media further
contribute to this data deluge. Computers, initially introduced in the aftermath of the 2nd
World War to achieve computation capacity breakthrough, are now being more and more
used to store and analyze such data.
Due to this ubiquity of data, “literacy” in today’s society necessarily includes the capability of
producing, using, reasoning about, and sharing digital data. Indeed, the availability of such
unheard-of volumes of data, especially on the Web, has started to change cognitive function
in humans: a psychology study has shown that when told that a piece of information is also
available on the Web, instead of memorizing the information, subjects tend to learn where to
look it up! From a scientific data management perspective, recurring challenges in this
context are:
- Large scale: the volumes of data to be manipulated explode in all application domains.
Architectures currently considered to handle such volumes are massively parallel, typically
deployed in clusters or clouds. Massively parallel storage and processing of data is
becoming just as important as the parallelization of massive computations that are growing
common e.g. in experimental or economic simulations…
- Potential heterogeneity: data is frequently produced by independent actors, with different
purposes and different interests in modeling the world. Heterogeneity gaps ensue, in the
structure, organization and operation constraints of each database, which appropriate
integration techniques must properly formalize and resolve. This is exacerbated in the Web
context (social networks, semantic Web, open data…) where sources count by the million.
- Structure and semantic complexity: more and more data on almost all aspects of real
world are now at our disposal, and so are potentially the answers to all our questions – if only
one knew how to tease these answers out of the data. Data formats are becoming complex
and new formats emerge frequently; complex languages with appropriate efficient
implementations are required. Data is often rich with meaning, describing the semantics of
an application domain. Well-grounded formalisms to capture this meaning enable the
automation of reasoning tasks, which goes beyond the reach of humans at the current data
volume scales. 11388
- Global intelligence: Because of the flood of data, tools to filter, classify select information
are more are more fundamental. Typically they rely on extracting “global intelligence” from
web information of from the participation of web users.
Different approaches have been considered such as recommendation, data mining, trust
evaluation.
The context is also particularly ripe with potential for interaction with other related branches
of computer science research: machine learning and natural language processing are
powerful tools for making sense of Web data; data visualization techniques help bring out the
message in the data; the programming language community shares the database scientists’
interest in verifiable languages amenable to massive parallelization…
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With a main focus on data, our summer school will bring to the fore and explore these
unprecedented convergence and opportunities.
Tentative agenda
Monday, Sept. 3rd
8.30-9.00
Tuesday, Sept. 4th
Flash presentation 5 attendees
Wednesday, Sept. 5th
Flash presentation 5
attendees
Thursday, Sept. 6th
Falsh presentation 5
attendees
Friday, Sept. 7th
Flash presentation 5
attendees
9.00-10.15
Keynote and discussion
Keynote and
Keynote and discussion Keynote and discussion discussion
10.15-10.30
Coffee Break
Coffee Break
Coffee Break
Coffee Break
10.30-11.30
Brainstorming Session in
groups
Brainstorming Session in
groups
Brainstorming Session in
groups
Brainstorming
Session in groups
Lunch
Lunch
Lunch
Conclusion of the
Summer School
11.30-13.30
13.30-14.00
14.00-15.30
15.30-16.00
16.00-17.00
17.00-17.30
Evening
Registration
Opening + Welcoming
speach
Flash presentation 5-7
attendees
Flash presentation 5-7
attendees
Flash presentation 5-7
attendees
Keynote and discussion Keynote and discussion
Keynote and discussion Keynote and discussion
Coffee Break
Coffee Break
Brainstorming Session in Brainstorming Session in
groups
groups
Coffee Break
Brainstorming Session in
groups
Coffee Break
Brainstorming Session in
groups
Report of the groups a nd
s ynthes e of the da y
Report of the groups a nd
s ynthes e of the da y
Report of the groups a nd
s ynthes e of the da y
Free evening or
Recreational
Programme
Report of the groups a nd
s ynthes e of the da y
Invited talk
Free evening
Soci a l Event
Keynote speakers
- Prof. Stefano Ceri
Professor at Politecnico di Milano, Director of Ata Schuola Politecnica ( the school of
excellence for top-level master students selected from Engineering, Architecture, and Design
Faculties of Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino). ERC grant on search computing.
Interest: extending database technologies, engineering of Web-based applications and, more
recently, complex search systems, search computing
- Prof. Dr. Emil Aarts
Vice President and Scientific Program Manager of the Philips Research Laboratories
Eindhoven.
Interest: computational intelligence, interaction technology, and design.
- Dr. Serge Abiteboul
Professor at Collège de France, Member of the French Academy of Science, Senior Scientist
at Inria. ERC grant to develop a formal model for Web data management.
Interest: database, data management, web, change control, electronic commerce, electronic
documents, object databases, distributed databases, heterogeneous databases, active
databases, database theory, database languages, complexity theory temporal databases...
- Prof. Dr. Martin Kersten
CWI Fellow INS1 (Information Systems - Database Architectures).
Interest: Data based architectures, query optimization and their use in scientific databases.
- Dr. Ioana Manolescu
Research Director at Inria.
Interest: Cloud-based management of Web data, Efficient tehcniques for large-scale SML
data management, Database techniques for the Semantic Web, Scalable interactive
visualization.
- Dr. Bruno Levy
Senior Researcher at Inria, ERC Starting Grant GOODSHAPE, that aims at computing the
optimal sampling of 3D objects.
Interest: Computer Graphics: the interaction of light with the geometry of the objects.
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- Pekka Aakko
Chairman of the board at Applifier (game promotion network on Facebook and Mobile with
about 150 million users monthly), Director at Applifier Europe, Founder and CEO at
Assembly Organizing.
Abstracts
-
Prof. Stefano Ceri
Search Computing
Search computing is a new multi-disciplinary science which provides the abstractions,
foundations, methods, and tools required to answer compex queries, such as "Who are the
strongest European competitors on software ideas? Who is the best doctor to cure insomnia
in a nearby hospital? Where can I attend an interesting conference in my field close to a
sunny beach?" This information is available on the Web, but no software system can accept
such queries nor compute the answer. Search computing is an evolution of service
computing where ranking is the dominant factor for composing services. While state-of-art
search systems answer generic or domain-specific queries, search computing enables
answering multi-domain queries via a constellation of dynamically selected, cooperating
search services.
CrowdSearch: Using the Crowds for Improving Search Experiences
While Web search is concerned with locating information from content
on the Web, crowdsearch denotes information extraction directly from online humans.
CrowdSearch uses the crowds as sources for the content processing and information
seeking processes; it fills the gap between generalized search systems, which operate upon
world-wide information - including facts and recommendations as crawled and indexed by
computerized systems – and social systems, capable of interacting with real people,
in real time. Crowdsearch is part of the more general trend towards crowdsourcing, which is
emerging as a general paradigm of organizing the human working and leisure activities by
means of computerized platforms. Industry is heavily moving toward crowdsourcing, as
demonstrated by the high number of new start-ups that exploit social networking, social
participation, humans as sensors, application gamification, and other variants of this trend.
Data
Dr. Serge Abiteboul
sciences:
from
First-order
logic
to
the
Web
Information technology has revolutionized our lives. Computers are traditionally seen as
computing machines, although their main purpose is now to manage information. We will
cover important aspects of data management, including relationships with mathematical logic
and complexity theory. We will discuss the Web that can be seen as a huge distributed
database. We will mention challenges: the extraction of global knowledge from the masses of
available information and distributed reasoning in the semantic Web.
“Viewing the Web as a Distributed Knowledge Base”
Information of interest may be found on the Web in a variety of forms, in many systems, and
with different access protocols. A typical user may have information on many devices
(smartphone, laptop, TV box, etc.), many systems (mailers, blogs, Web sites, etc.), many
social networks (Facebook, Picasa, etc.). This same user may have access to more
information from family, friends, associations, companies, and organizations. Today, the
control and management of the diversity of data and tasks in this setting are beyond the skills
of casual users. Facing similar issues, companies see the cost of managing and integrating
information skyrocketing.
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We are interested here in the management of such data. Our focus is not on harvesting all
the data of a particular user or a group of users and then managing it in a centralized
manner. Instead, we are concerned with the management of Web data in place in a
distributed manner, with a possibly large number of autonomous, heterogeneous systems
collaborating to support certain tasks.
Our thesis is that managing the richness and diversity of user-centric data residing on the
Web can be tamed using a holistic approach based on a distributed knowledge base. All
Web informations are represented as logical facts, and Web data management tasks as
logical rules. We discuss Webdamlog, a variant of datalog for distributed data management
that we use for this purpose. The automatic reasoning provided by its inference engine,
operating over the Web knowledge base, greatly benefits a variety of complex data
management tasks that currently require intense work and deep expertise.
This work is part of the Webdam European project.
- Pekka Aakko
Provisional title: “Applifier - social game discovery with 150 million users”
Applifier is the company that transformed globally how new games in social networks and
mobile are discovered via cross promotion. Applifier's fast growth into leading cross
promotion service on Facebook has had multiple challenges: the company has grown into
servicing over 150 million gamers each month and the amount of data collected from users
looking for new games is huge. The presentation will touch the data collection and refining,
trends in the social gaming industry in general and how the company actually pivoted from a
failed social gaming startup.
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