Subjective Databases
Alon Halevy, Facebook AI, United States
Digital Innovation and Transformation to Business Ecosystems
Kecheng Liu, Henley Business School, The University of Reading, United Kingdom
Information for Regional Innovation Systems
Fred Phillips, University of New Mexico, United States
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
Henley Business School, The University of Reading
United Kingdom
www.henley.ac.uk/people/person/professor-kecheng-liu/
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Brief Bio
Kecheng Liu, Fellow of the British Computer Society and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, currently holds the position of Professor of Applied Informatics at the University of Reading. Additionally, he serves as the Director of the Digital Talent Academy. With a diverse range of roles, including academic lead, senior advisor, and consultant, his extensive experience spans areas such as business and IT strategies, information management, and digital leadership and transformation in both public and private sectors. As a prominent researcher, he has published 300 papers in various journals and conferences and has authored and edited 25 books on topics ranging from organisational semiotics to business and IT strategy alignment, digital leadership, as well as business informatics (e.g. in big data analytics and AI for business transformation, healthcare and green finance).
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.
Information for Regional Innovation Systems
Fred Phillips
University of New Mexico
United States
Brief Bio
Dr. FRED PHILLIPS is a Professor at University of New Mexico, and Visiting Professor at SUNY Stony Brook and Tongji University. He is the 2017 winner of the Kondratieff Medal, awarded by the Russian Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of PICMET (Portland International Conferences on Management of Engineering and Technology).
Earlier, Fred was Visiting Scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Distinguished Professor at Yuan Ze University Professor in Taiwan; Vice Provost for Research at Alliant International University; Associate Dean at Maastricht School of Management (Netherlands); Dean of Management at Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology Research Director at the IC2 Institute of the University of Texas at Austin, and Vice President of Market Research Corporation of America.
Dr. Phillips is Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier’s international journal Technological Forecasting & Social Change, one of the top three journals in the technology management field. He authored the textbook Market- Oriented Technology Management (Springer 2001), the popular title The Conscious Manager: Zen for Decision Makers (General Informatics 2003), a book on high-tech economic development, The Technopolis Columns (Palgrave 2006), and most recently What About the Future? (Springer 2019).
In the USA and overseas, he has been a leader in developing graduate management curricula for employees of international and high-tech companies. His contributions in operations research include "Phillips' Law" of longitudinal sampling, and the first parallel computing experiments with Data Envelopment Analysis. He has won several multimillion dollar grants in the technology management area, and awards for outstanding research.
Dr. Phillips has consulted worldwide on technology based regional development and research policy, most recently for World Bank, UNESCO, Merck KGaA, and the US Environmental Protection Agency. Fred is a founder of the Austin Technology Council, and was a Board member for the Software Association of Oregon. He is a popular op-ed columnist and panel member in forums dealing with trends in management, technology, higher education, and economic development.
Dr. Phillips attended The University of Texas and Tokyo Institute of Technology, earning the Ph.D. at Texas (1978) in mathematics and management science. Married to Sue Phillips since 1979 and with two grown daughters, Fred enjoys his mission as an educator. His avocational passions are aikido, Argentine tango, travel and writing.
In earlier years he held teaching, research, honorary, or management positions at the Universities of Aston and Birmingham in England, General Motors Research Laboratories, Battelle-Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, CENTRUM Católica in Peru, and National Chengchi University in Taiwan.
Abstract
Regional innovation system (RIS) need information infrastructure to gather and diffuse knowledge to and from a broad range of actors. Yet we find information is rarely centralized, or even well coordinated, in the typical RIS. Through interviews with RIS leaders, literature review, and consulting experience we uncover twenty obstacles to comprehensive RIS information support. We compare the obstacles faced by grassroots RIS initiatives (typical in the USA) and government-led RIS initiatives (more typical in Asia), focusing on examples from Portland, Austin, and Daeduk. We benchmark these metro areas’ performance against an “ideal” RIS support specification, and briefly compare the ICT orientations of an RIS and a smart city. Though obstacles to information coordination fall into several categories, remedying them appears to require cultural and regulatory reform. This work has been developed with the collaboration of Urusha Thapa and Ben Matheson.