“Broad Data: Technology Challenges on the emerging Web of data”
Speaker: James Hendler
Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science
Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute
Time: 11am-12:30pm, May 1, Wednesday
Place: Queens College, Remsen Hall, Room 209
“Big Data” usually refers to the very large datasets generated by
scientists, to the many petabytes of data held by companies like Facebook
and Google, and to analyzing real-time data assets like the stream of
twitter messages emerging from events around the world. Key areas of
interest include technologies to manage much larger datasets, technologies
for the visualization and analysis of databases, cloud-based data
management and datamining algorithms.
Recently, however, we have begun to see the emergence of another, and
equally compelling data challenge — that of the “Broad data” that emerges
from millions and millions of raw datasets available on the World Wide
Web. For broad data the new challenges that emerge include Web-scale data
search and discovery, rapid and potentially ad hoc integration of
datasets, visualization and analysis of only-partially modeled datasets,
and issues relating to the policies for data use, reuse and combination.
In this talk, we present the broad data challenge and discuss potential
starting points for solutions including those arising from research in the
Semantic Web area. We illustrate these approaches using data from a
“meta-catalog” of over 1,000,000 open datasets that have been collected
from about two hundred governments around the world.
Bio:
James Hendler is the Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive
Science and the Head of the Computer Science Department at RPI. He is
also a faculty affiliate of the Experimental Multimedia Performing Arts
Center (EMPAC), serves as a Director of the UKs charitable Web Science
Trust and is a visiting Professor of Computer Science at DeMontfort
University in Leicester, UK. Hendler has authored about 200 technical
papers in the areas of Semantic Web, artificial intelligence, agent-based
computing and high performance processing. One of the inventors of the
Semantic Web, Hendler was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation
Fellowship, is a former member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board,
and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence,
the British Computer Society, the IEEE and the AAAS. He is also the former
Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was awarded a US Air Force
Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002. In 2010, Hendler was named one
of the 20 most innovative professors in America by Playboy magazine and
was selected as an Internet Web Expert by the US government. He is the
Editor-in-Chief emeritus of IEEE Intelligent Systems and was the first
computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science.
In 2012, he was one of the inaugural recipients of the Strata Conference
Big Data awards for his work on large-scale open government data, and he
is a columnist and associate editor of the Big Data journal.
