Subjective Databases
Alon Halevy, Facebook AI, United States
Digital Innovation and Transformation to Business Ecosystems
Kecheng Liu, The University of Reading, United Kingdom
Available soon.
Domingo Ribeiro, Universidad de Valencia, Spain
Subjective Databases
Alon Halevy
Facebook AI
United States
Brief Bio
Alon Halevy joined Facebook AI in August, 2019. Until December, 2018, Alon was the CEO of Megagon Labs where his team focused on developing AI for well-being. Before that, Alon led the Structured Data Research Group at Google for 10 years. Previously, he was a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, where he founded the database research group. Alon is a founder Nimble Technology, and of Transformatic, Inc., which was acquired by Google in 2005. He is the author of "The Infinite Emotions of Coffee" and co-author of "Principles of Data Integration". Alon is an ACM Fellow, received the Sloan Fellowship and the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) Award. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1993 and his bachelor’s degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Abstract
Online consumers are constantly seeking experiences, such as vacations, restaurant outings and exciting jobs in order to improve their well-being. However, e-commerce search engines only support searches for experiences to a very limited extent -- you can search on the objective attributes of a service (e.g., hotel price and location), but the experiential aspects are buried in online reviews. E-commerce sites make some effort to surface comments from reviews, but users can still not specify experiential aspects (e.g., romantic hotel in a quiet Mediterranean town) in their queries. There has been considerable work in the NLP community to recognize and extract subjective text, but that’s only the first step towards querying.
To address this challenge, we introduce OpineDB, a subjective database. OpineDB is based on a data model that carefully balances the richness and bottom-up nature of natural language and the top-down design principles of databases. OpineDB is able to answer queries that combine multiple subjective conditions and aggregate subjective data. Unlike a traditional database system, there may not be a 1-1 mapping between query terms and the database schema. In some cases, OpineDB needs to find the closest attribute (or combination of attributes) that answers a user query, and in some cases it may have to fall back to retrieval directly from the review text.
Joint work with Yuliang Li, Jinfeng Li, Vivian Li, Aaron Feng, Saran Mumick and Wang-Chiew Tan from Megagon Labs.
Digital Innovation and Transformation to Business Ecosystems
Kecheng Liu
The University of Reading
United Kingdom
Brief Bio
Kecheng Liu, Fellow of British Computer Society, is a full professor of Business Informatics. He is the Honorary Director of Informatics Research Centre, Henley Business School, University of Reading, UK. He has published over 200 papers in conferences and journals. His research interests span from organizational semiotics, information systems management and engineering, business ecosystems and transformation, alignment of business and IT strategies, pervasive informatics and intelligent spaces for working and living. Fifty PhD students graduated under his supervision. He is currently Visiting Professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Renmin University, Beijing Institute of Technology, and Beijing Jiaotong University, all in China.
Abstract
Digital technologies have been penetrating every aspect of business. Such pervasive deployment of digital technologies enables organisations to reinvent themselves in defining and conducting business. Leveraging the value of information as the key resource, through digital innovation such as digitisation and servitisation of products and services, becomes necessary for a business to survive and to remain competitive. Business ecosystems of the organisations and their partners have been formed through digital connectivity and digital platform which offer clearly strategic advantages and competitiveness. Interconnectivities between entities in the ecosystem are realised through multiple flows such as goods, finance and information. For a business organisation to gain competitive advantages, a successful transformation of the organisation in many dimensions are essential to allow value co-creation with other members in the ecosystem. These dimensions include mindset, culture, values, leadership, structure, process and IT systems. This keynote will discuss the notions of digital innovation and transformation, and the prerequisites and readiness for the transformation towards business ecosystems. By examining the current practice of successful examples, key findings will lead to the principles and models of organisational transformation for value co-creation and optimising benefits in the business ecosystems. This keynote will hopefully inspire practitioners and researchers to benefit from existing theoretical lenses and methods, and to derive their own guidelines and models to support organisations in digital transformation.
Available soon.
Domingo Ribeiro
Universidad de Valencia
Spain
Brief Bio
Available soon.