ESSENCE

The Final ESSENCE Conference

rovatsos — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 16:31:32 +0000

The Final ESSENCE Conference, titled "International Conference on Computational Approaches to Diversity in Interaction and Meaning" took place in San Servolo, Venice, from 7th to 9th October 2017. The conference was a massive success, bringing together many European researchers from the multiagent systems, semantic web, knowledge representation, and natural language processing communities. Apart from the great invited talks and presentations by ESSENCE members, the conference was used to plan a host of future activities for people interested in diversity-aware AI.

ESSSENCE at IJCAI 2017

rovatsos — Fri, 22 Sep 2017 16:31:01 +0000

We recently exhibited at IJCAI 2017, one of the largest and most high-profile international conferences in AI, which was held in Melbourne. The ESSENCE booth attracted a lot of interest, and this conference also included our Taboo Challenge Competition Workshop, where we presented the results of the ESSENCE Challenge!

The Fifth ESSENCE Workshop

milicavukomanovic — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 12:56:17 +0000

The Fifth ESSENCE Workshop held in Madrid, Spain (20-21 February, 2017) focused on individual progress, collaborations, integration, and anticipated final outcomes. All Fellows presented their research, while senior partners presented updates on project-wide activities. All participants took advantage of collaboration meetings and cross-institutional project planning. On 22^nd February senior staff had a Supervisory Board Meeting, while the Fellows had a full day of training on commercialization and proposal writing.

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON DIVERSITY-AWARE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (DIVERSITY 2016) AT ECAI 2016

milicavukomanovic — Mon, 05 Sep 2016 17:29:37 +0000

We were delighted to have out 4^th international ESSENCE Workshop (29^th August, 2016) on Diversity-Aware Artificial Intelligence accepted to the ECAI 2016 conference in The Hague, The Netherlands. Being part of such a prestigious and international conference was an amazing opportunity to showcase our work and network with the Artificial Intelligence community.

The workshop explored diversity as a phenomenon that both poses a challenge for AI in terms of dealing with and managing diversity in an intelligent system (or ecosystem of intelligent human and/or artificial agents) and presents an opportunity in terms of leveraging diversity (for example through processes like crowdsourcing and collaborative knowledge production) to achieve human-like (and human-friendly) capabilities in more open-ended, incrementally evolving, and interactive AI systems.

3RD INTERNATIONAL ESSENCE WORKSHOP:ALGORITHMS FOR PROCESSING MEANING

milicavukomanovic — Thu, 28 May 2015 17:07:53 +0000

We just finished our 3^rd ESSENCE Workshop, in Barcelona Spain (20-22 May, 2015). This workshop was open to external participants, who were invited to submit a conference paper to the workshop. All participants presented their conference papers and received feedback from the senior panel members and Thomas Brochhagen was awarded a best paper award. The ESSENCE Fellows also received further one-on-one training on academic writing.

ESSENCE at IJCAI 2015: Buenos Aires, Argentina

milicavukomanovic — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 16:52:31 +0000

We were delighted to be a sponsor at IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence) in Buenos Aires, Argentina (25^th -31^st July, 2015). We were able to showcase our research and collaborations to date, and invite international researchers to our upcoming Second ESSENCE Summer School in Edinburgh, Scotland.

2ND ESSENCE SUMMER SCHOOL ON EVOLVING SEMANTIC SYSTEMS

milicavukomanovic — Fri, 04 Sep 2015 16:18:30 +0000

We just finished the week long 2^nd ESSENCE Summer School on Evolving Semantic Systems (24-28^th August, 2015) in Edinburgh, Scotland. The participants were treated with parallel sessions, where they could choose exceptional talks from leaders in the field, or try something completely new; from the Evolutionary Semantics to The Geometry of Meaning! We opened the doors of the Informatics Forum to the public with a distinguished lecture by Dr Benjamin Kuipers

The participants were also treated to a historic walk around the medieval city, followed by a traditional Scottish supper with live jazz band.

Second ESSENCE Workshop—Ad Hoc Approaches to ESSENCE Problems

milicavukomanovic — Sat, 15 Nov 2014 16:43:05 +0000

The second ESSENCE Workshop was held together with the First ESSENCE Autumn School on the volcanic island of Ischia, in the Gulf of Naples, Italy. The first ESSENCE cohort gave short poster presentation on the first day followed by group discussion. During the second day, the second ESSENCE cohort presented their research projects and received feedback and networking opportunities.

The Fellows also had in-depth training on “Planning a PhD” by Dr. Sara Shinton.

First ESSENCE Workshop: Exploring the ESSENCE space

milicavukomanovic — Fri, 02 May 2014 15:17:19 +0000

The First ESSENCE Workshop on Exploring the ESSENCE space was held this week (28^th-30^th April, 2014) at the historic Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh, Scotland. The event was kicked off with a team building weekend at Firbush, in the Scottish Highlands followed by the Workshop. Senior staff members introduced their area of expertise and the new Fellows gave short presentation on their academic background and research interests. The event concluded with a public lecture by Prof Alan Bundy on the topic of "Can Computers Change their Minds?" at the University of Edinburgh.

Recent and upcoming activities

Thomas — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 08:19:08 +0000

Recent publications:

Chocrón, P. & Gromann D. (2017). Towards Building Ontologies from Crowdsourced Data. Proceedings of the AISB Annual Convention 2017, p. 232-242.

Gromann, D. & Hedblom, M.M. (2017). Kinesthetic Mind Reader: A Method to Identify Schemas in Natural Language. Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference of Advances in Cognitive Systems (ACS).

Brochhagen, Thomas. Signaling under uncertainty: Interpretative alignment without a common prior. To appear in British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

Brochhagen, Thomas & Michael Franke. Effects of transmission perturbation in the cultural evolution of language. To appear in Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017).