IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM

7:00 PM, Thursday, 19 June

MIT Room E51-345

The Semantic Web: It's not just for searching anymore!

Kenneth Baclawski, Northeastern University

The WWW is currently dominated by human-computer interactions using web browsers. However, automated interactions are becoming increasingly common. The Semantic Web is an extension of the WWW in which the meaning of information and services is formally defined, making it possible for machines to understand and satisfy requests. In this talk I will briefly introduce the Semantic Web, and then give some examples of the wide variety of applications that the Semantic Web makes possible. I will also discuss some of the recent progress that has been made in the development of Semantic Web tools and protocols. The application domains include the following:

1. Interoperability and integration of information

2. Web services and composite applications

3. Records management

4. Uncertain, incomplete, conflicting and misleading information

5. Decision and policy making

6. Collaboration tools

7. Wireless communication

8. Behavioral health counseling

9. Epidemiology: disease tracking systems

Kenneth Baclawski is an Associate Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. Professor Baclawski's primary research area is ontology based computing. This includes research in the Semantic Web, ontology-based methods in the health sciences, and methods for decision making in the presence of uncertainty. Professor Baclawski holds 11 patents and has authored over 80 refereed publications in such journals and conferences as the National Academy of Science, Information Systems, the International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, and the International Semantic Web Conference. He has served on numerous peer review panels and program committees for the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Association for Computing Machinery. He serves as a consultant to companies and government laboratories, and has edited and written several books and research monographs, including "Ontologies for Bioinformatics" published by the MIT Press, and "Introduction to Probability with R" published by Chapman and Hall.

This joint meeting of the Boston/Central New England Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM will be held in MIT Room E51-345.  E51 is the Tang Center on the corner of Wadsworth and Amherst Sts and Memorial Dr.; it's mostly used by the Sloan School. You can see it on the map at . Room 345 is on the 3rd floor.

For more information contact Peter Mager (p.mager AT computer.org)

Updated: April 20, 2008.