Text Analytics: the convergence of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence

The analysis of the text content in emails, blogs, tweets, forums and other forms of textual communication constitutes what we call text analytics. Text analytics is applicable to most industries: it can help analyze millions of emails; you can analyze customers’ comments and questions in forums; you can perform sentiment analysis using text analytics by measuring positive or negative perceptions of a company, brand, or product. Text Analytics has also been called text mining, and is a subcategory of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field, which is one of the founding branches of Artificial Intelligence, back in the 1950s, when an interest in understanding text originally developed. Currently Text Analytics is often considered as the next step in Big Data analysis. Text Analytics has a number of subdivisions: Information Extraction, Named Entity Recognition, Semantic Web annotated domain’s representation, and many more. Several techniques are currently used and some of them have gained a lot of attention, such as Machine Learning, to show a semisupervised enhancement of systems, but they also present a number of limitations which make them not always the only or the best choice. We conclude with current and near future applications of Text Analytics

Tacit knowledge elicitation process for industry 4.0

Manufacturers migrate their processes to Industry 4.0, which includes new technologies for improving productivity and efficiency of operations. One of the issues is capturing, recreating, and documenting the tacit knowledge of the aging workers. However, there are no systematic procedures to incorporate this knowledge into Enterprise Resource Planning systems and maintain a competitive advantage. This paper describes a solution proposal for a tacit knowledge elicitation process for capturing operational best practices of experienced workers in industrial domains based on a mix of algorithmic techniques and a cooperative game. We use domain ontologies for Industry 4.0 and reasoning techniques to discover and integrate new facts from textual sources into an Operational Knowledge Graph. We describe a concepts formation iterative process in a role game played by human and virtual agents through socialization and externalization for knowledge graph refinement. Ethical and societal concerns are discussed as well

uC: Ubiquitous Collaboration Platform for Multimodal Team Interaction Support

A human-centered computing platform that improves teamwork and transforms the “human- computer interaction experience” for distributed teams is presented. This Ubiquitous Collaboration, or uC (“you see”), platform\u27s objective is to transform distributed teamwork (i.e., work occurring when teams of workers and learners are geographically dispersed and often interacting at different times). It achieves this goal through a multimodal team interaction interface realized through a reconfigurable open architecture. The approach taken is to integrate: (1) an intuitive speech- and video-centric multi-modal interface to augment more conventional methods (e.g., mouse, stylus and touch), (2) an open and reconfigurable architecture supporting information gathering, and (3) a machine intelligent approach to analysis and management of heterogeneous live and stored sensor data to support collaboration. The system will transform how teams of people interact with computers by drawing on both the virtual and physical environment

Nanoinformatics knowledge infrastructures: bringing efficient information management to nanomedical research

Nanotechnology represents an area of particular promise and significant opportunity across multiple scientific disciplines. Ongoing nanotechnology research ranges from the characterization of nanoparticles and nanomaterials to the analysis and processing of experimental data seeking correlations between nanoparticles and their functionalities and side effects. Due to their special properties, nanoparticles are suitable for cellular-level diagnostics and therapy, offering numerous applications in medicine, e.g. development of biomedical devices, tissue repair, drug delivery systems and biosensors. In nanomedicine, recent studies are producing large amounts of structural and property data, highlighting the role for computational approaches in information management. While in vitro and in vivo assays are expensive, the cost of computing is falling. Furthermore, improvements in the accuracy of computational methods (e.g. data mining, knowledge discovery, modeling and simulation) have enabled effective tools to automate the extraction, management and storage of these vast data volumes. Since this information is widely distributed, one major issue is how to locate and access data where it resides (which also poses data-sharing limitations). The novel discipline of nanoinformatics addresses the information challenges related to nanotechnology research. In this paper, we summarize the needs and challenges in the field and present an overview of extant initiatives and efforts

Collaboratory Digital Libraries for Humanities in the Italian context

The study investigates the approach to collaboration in Humanities, within the Italian context, to test the possibility of collaborative digital library for scholars. The research hypothesis is that collaboration can foster innovation and scienti c development: therefore, within Humanities, digital libraries can be the collaborative laboratory for research. Thus, understanding perception of scholars towards collaboration, especially online, and comprehending if wiki systems could be the framework of collaboration were the objectives of the study. A qualitative approach has been adopted, using case study as research method: in-depth, semi-structured interviews to Digital Humanities scholars provide data integrated with interviews with two key informants (one of which is prof. Umberto Eco). The results of the study show that Humanities, within Italian context, do appreciate collaboration and the concept of a collaboratory digital library, though several issues need to be solved. In fact, Humanities are still tied with individual work and collaboration is not easy to pursue, for cultural, technical and political reasons. Great e ort needs to be done at many different levels to eliminate obstacles and facilitate online collaboration for scholars. The study provides a draft model for a collaborative digital library arisen from gathered data

Social Software, Groups, and Governance

Formal groups play an important role in the law. Informal groups largely lie outside it. Should the law be more attentive to informal groups? The paper argues that this and related questions are appearing more frequently as a number of computer technologies, which I collect under the heading social software, increase the salience of groups. In turn, that salience raises important questions about both the significance and the benefits of informal groups. The paper suggests that there may be important social benefits associated with informal groups, and that the law should move towards a framework for encouraging and recognizing them. Such a framework may be organized along three dimensions by which groups arise and sustain themselves: regulating places, things, and stories