Keynote Speakers

Hans Akkermans:

Hans AKKERMANS is an international consultant in knowledge and information management, and a full professor of Business Informatics at the Free University Amsterdam. He holds a cum laude PhD degree in theoretical physics from the University of Groningen. He is a regular international keynote speaker, and has published over 160 scientific articles in information systems, physics, engineering, and e-business. He is the chair of the Board of Governors of the Royal Academy of Sciences KNAW-accredited Netherlands Graduate Research School of Information and Knowledge Systems SIKS. He participates in many national and international cooperative industry-university projects. European projects in recent years in which he had or has a leading role include: OBELIX, OntoKnowledge, PALAS, TRACKS, BUSMOD, CRISP, IRED, FENIX. He co-authored the textbook Knowledge Engineering and Management, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000, which has been translated into Chinese, and also separately published in India. He co-invented the HomeBots agent concept, realizing smart communicating household and industrial equipment by means of intelligent multi-agent and electronic markets software, now being commercialized as a basis for new electronic energy customer services. He is a key developer of the e3-value methodology and ontology library for networked e-business models and e-services, an interdisciplinary effort involving business administration as well as IT/Information Systems research. He is also a regular reviewer and evaluator for the European Commission. He received a European innovation award for his work twice.

ABSTRACT:

Title:
Services over the Web: From Semantics to Pragmatics
Speaker:
Hans Akkermans, the Network Institute, Department of Informatics
VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands

In this talk, I will put forward some theses concerning service innovation and ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), based on our experiences and ongoing research at VU Amsterdam.
1. ICT plays a key role in service innovation for several reasons: (a) it offers universal connectivity between humans plus a very wide range of devices: the “networked world”; (b) Internet and Web constitute not just a big, more or less passive, information store, but offer an active standardized platform for the creation and delivery of services in this networked world; (c) This service platform is further enhanced by new forms of intelligence on the Web that will enable the flexible composition of service bundles with strong features of self-organization.
2. ICT has traditionally been seen as a technical area. This is no longer adequate, however. Due to the penetration of ICT (especially the Web) everywhere, ICT has now become a social technology, the progress of which is first of all driven by social factors stemming from the specific uses the technology is put by people and communities.
3. This leads to more social network-driven mechanisms for innovation that are significantly different from traditional industrial enterprise innovation. Examples of this we see already today are Open Source and Web communities of interest / practice.
4. Research in service innovation and ICT must therefore be inherently interdisciplinary, cross-cutting technological, social, and economic/business aspects. There is still a long way to go here. For example, there is a big gap between the notion of ‘service’ as understood in the technical computer sense in Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture, and the notion of ‘service’ as an economic entity as understood in a technologically rather unsophisticated way in service marketing and management.
5. I will elucidate these points by discussing the e3service ontology that we have developed, implemented and applied in different industry sectors. Practical examples include emarket based distributed control of smart electricity grids, e-health, and ICT service bundles.
6. To date, much of ontology engineering derives its foundational ideas from the standard truth-conditional view: essentially, the meaning of a proposition coincides with the conditions for its truth. This is a view that goes back to logicians such as Frege and Tarski and is still held by many modern model-theoretic logicians, formal semanticists, computer scientists, and knowledge representation researchers. However, the above-mentioned developments lead us to characterize ontology as inherently social and contextual in nature and, as a consequence, lead us to entertain a different, namely pragmatic conception of meaning: the meaning of a sentence or proposition or utterance lies in its actual use in communication. I will attempt to sketch how knowledge patterns and schemas drawn from different fields — such as problem-solving methods (PSMs), argumentation theory, and speech-act communication theory — might be helpful in developing a semantic-based Service Science that is pragmatically adequate.
7. For good or not so good, service innovation and ICT in the Information Society constitute a significant factor in the ongoing industrialization of the service economy and associated knowledge work, quite analogous to the way the mechanization of Industrial Revolution industrialized manual labor. This unavoidably raises questions and reflections as to what kind of society we will and want to live in. Also ICT as a social network technology is not value free or neutral.

Massimo Paolucci:

Massimo PAOLUCCI is a senior researcher at DOCOMO Euro-labs where he is conducting research on service provisioning and composition to mobile users exploiting web services, and semantic web technology. Before joining DOCOMO he worked on semantic web services and agent technology at Carnegie Mellon University. Massimo has been a member of the UDDI technical committee, and a member of the OWL-S coalition. He served in the organizing committee of ISWC as PC member is a number of AI related conferences including ISWC, ICWS, IJCAI, AAMAS and numerous workshops.

ABSTRACT:

Title:
Bringing Services to the street level
Speaker:
Massimo Paolucci
DOCOMO Communications Laboratories Europe GmbH, Munich, Germany

We are living in a world in which digital services are increasingly provided at the “street level”. Such services which include information services such as public transport information, payment systems, and ticketing are becoming one of the media through which we interact with the environment in which we live. In this trend, mobile phones are the tool through which we gain access to these services, and through them to operate in the real world. This poses new problems of how to discover services in a new contextual way, how to provision them in such a way that they make sense to a busy user on the run, and how to support the user when things go wrong. In this talk I will discuss our experience with developing a mobile platform to deploy on mobile phones that for intelligent service provisioning, and I will try to highlight the emerging challenges and opportunities for electronic commerce.

Jeff Rosenschein:

Jeff Rosenschein is the director of the Multiagent Systems Research Group at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, which made its mark in early work on game theory and mechanism design as applied to multiagent negotiation and planning. That research explored issues of cooperation and competition among agents, and the use of economic theory, voting theory, and game theory to establish appropriate foundations for Multiagent Systems (MAS). His more recent work has touched on a variety of additional MAS research areas, including multiagent learning, reputation systems, and dynamic control, though he remains active in the area of computational social choice and preference aggregation. he recently became co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (JAAMAS), and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). From July 2004 through June 2007 he served as president of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS), formerly known as IFMAS, a non-profit organization whose purpose is to promote science and technology in the areas of artificial intelligence, autonomous agents, and multiagent systems. Between October 2003 and June 2007 he was Chairman of Studies for Computer Engineering, within the School of Computer Science and Engineering at Hebrew University.

ABSTRACT:

Title:
Computational Voting Theory: Of the Agents, By the Agents, For the Agents
Speaker:
Jeffrey S. Rosenschein, School of Engineering and Computer Science
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Classical social choice theory deals with the design and analysis of methods for collective decision making. Heterogeneous, self-interested agents may have conflicting preferences, which can be aggregated by voting over possible outcomes. The winning outcome is then designated by a voting rule, a function from the preferences of the voters to the set of candidates.

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the computational aspects of social choice, motivated by applications of voting theory to electronic commerce, electronic voting, and multiagent systems. The candidates in automated multiagent systems can be beliefs, joint plans, schedules, movies, or indeed entities of almost any conceivable sort. Computational voting theory is concerned both with the application of computer science techniques to the study of social choice mechanisms, and with the importing of social choice concepts into computing.

This talk will present an overview of some of the issues that have been dealt with in recent years within computational voting theory, including distortion, robustness, the use of complexity as a guard against manipulation, the automated design of voting rules, and the calculation of power indices.

This talk covers joint work with Ariel Procaccia, Aviv Zohar, Yoram Bachrach, Michael Zuckerman, Reshef Meir, Yoni Peleg, and Gal Kaminka.