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THREE EVENTS. THREE CITIES | VISUO-SPATIAL THINKING 2015

Sat, 25 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0200

I. SANTA FE | TUTORIAL ON: COMMONSENSE VISUO-SPATIAL REASONING

-- Theory and Applications

part of: Conference on Spatial Information Theory XII (COSIT) October 12-16, 2015. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.

Tutorial Presenters:

- Mehul Bhatt (University of Bremen; and DFKI Bremen, Germany)

- Carl Schultz (University of Münster, Germany)

II. ROME | SYMPOSIUM ON: HUMAN BEHAVIOUR, DESIGN, AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

-- The Case of Visuo-Spatial Cognition and Computation

part of: VI International Conference on Spatial Cognition - Space and Situated Cognition (ICSC). Sep 7-11 2015, Rome, Italy. http://www.icsc-rome.org

Symposium Speakers:

- Mehul Bhatt (University of Bremen; and DFKI Bremen, Germany)

- Yehuda Kalay (Israel Institute of Technology, Israel)

- Juval Portugali (Tel-Aviv University, Israel)

- Carl Schultz (University of Münster, Germany)

- Barbara Tversky (Stanford University; Columbia Teachers College, United States)

III. BUENOS AIRES | INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON: SPATIO-TEMPORAL DYNAMICS (STeDy)

http://stedy.spatialnetwork.org

part of: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2015). July 25 - 31, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Workshop chairs:

- Mehul Bhatt (University of Bremen; and DFKI Bremen, Germany)

- Hans Guesgen (Massey University, New Zealand)

If you have questions, or would generally like to connect in the context of these events, or their future development, please email me at mehul@design-space.org

FULL DETAILS: THREE EVENTS. THREE CITIES | VISUO-SPATIAL THINKING 2015. www

THREE EVENTS is an initiative of:

The DesignSpace Group

www.design-space.org/Next/

Keyword-Based Querying of Points of Interest

Fri, 21 Nov 2014 09:29:00 +0100

Prof. Christian S. Jensen
Aalborg University

The web is being accessed increasingly by users for which an accurate geo-location is available, and a spatial, or geographical, web is surfacing where content is associated with locations, resulting in so-called Points of Interest, that are used in a wide range of location-based services. In particular, studies suggest that each week, several billions of web queries are issued that have some form of local intent and that target Points of Interest with locations and textual descriptions.

This state of affairs gives prominence to spatial web data management, and it opens to a research area full of new and exciting opportunities and challenges. A prototypical spatial web query takes a user location and user-supplied keywords as arguments, and it returns Points of Interest that are spatially and textually relevant to these arguments. Due perhaps to the rich semantics of geographical space and its importance to our daily lives, many different kinds of relevant spatial web queries may be envisioned.

Based on recent and ongoing work by the speaker and his colleagues, the talk presents key functionality, concepts, and techniques relating to spatial web querying; it presents functionality that addresses different kinds of local intent; and it outlines directions for the future development of keyword-based spatial web querying. Date: 14.11.2014 Time: 15:30 h Location: Cartesium, Bremen Speaker-URL`s:http://cs.au.dk/~csj/ Bio: Christian S. Jensen is Obel Professor of Computer Science at Aalborg University, Denmark, and he was previously with Aarhus University for three years and spent a one-year sabbatical at Google Inc., Mountain View. His research concerns data management and data-intensive systems, and its focus is on temporal and spatio-temporal data management. Christian is an ACM and an IEEE Fellow, and he is a member of Academia Europaea, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences. He has received several national and international awards for his research. He is Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Database Systems.

Using Semantic Knowledge to deal with Contradictions in Robotics

Fri, 14 Nov 2014 11:00:00 +0100

Alessandro Saffiotti AASS Cognitive Robotics Laboratory
Orebro University, Sweden We the humans know the semantics of the environment where we live. We know the function of objects and places around us, we know which objects belong to which place, and so on. We use this knowledge when we plan our activities, and when something in our plans go wrong. Robots should do the same. However, it is only recently that researchers in autonomous robotics have started to endow robots with semantic knowledge, and with the ability to reason from this knowledge. In this talk, I will outline the efforts in this direction performed at the AASS Cognitive Robotic Systems Lab of Orebro University, Sweden. Our effort are based on a specific type of semantic maps, which integrates hierarchical spatial information and semantic knowledge, and leverage this knowledge to facilitate taskplanning and reasoning about exceptions. I will focus in particular on the second issue: how can semantic knowledge allow a robot to recognize when things are NOT as they should be, and provide indications to correct these deviations. I will discuss in particular the generation of goals from semantic knowledge. For instance, if a robot has semantic knowledge that perishable items must be kept in a refrigerator, and it observes a bottle of milk on a table, this robot will generate the goal to bring that bottle into a refrigerator.This work was done in cooperation with Cipriano Galindo, from the University of Malaga, Spain. Date: 14.11.2014 Time: 15:30 h Location: Cartesium, Bremen Speaker-URL`s: http://aass.oru.se/~asaffio/ Alessandro Saffiotti (MSc, PhD) is full professor of Computer Science at the University of Orebro, Sweden, where he heads the AASS Cognitive Robotic Systems laboratory. He holds a MSc in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, Italy, and a PhD in Applied Science from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. His research interests encompass artificial intelligence, autonomous robotics, and technology for elderly people. He is the inventor of the notion of "Ecology ofphysically embedded intelligent systems", a new approach to include robotic technologies in everyday life that has been applied in several projects. He is the initiator of a series of ongoing international initiatives on combining AI and Robotics. He has published more than 160 papers in international journals and conferences, and organized many international events. He is or has been P.I. in a dozen EU projects and networks. He is a member of AAAI, a senior member of IEEE, and an ECCAI fellow.

Symposium Spatial Language Modules

Fri, 19 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0200

This symposiums aims to shed light on and discuss the nature of the components that subserve spatial information processing and communication, that is, spatial language modules, from an interdisciplinary perspective. Topics of particular interest include:

The nature of spatial language modules
How many and which modules are involved?
Which neural structures support the workings of which modules?
How do the different modules develop?
The interaction of spatial language modules
How do the different modules combine to yield comprehensive spatial
communication skills?
How does control of the modules' interplay develop, how is it realized in neural terms?
The relation of spatial language modules to spatial cognition
To what extent are spatial language modules specifically tailored for language processing or modules that solve more general spatial information processing problems?
Does spatial language influence spatial thinking or vice versa?

http://www.h-w-k.de/index.php?id=2073

Spatial Cognition 2014

Mon, 15 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Spatial Cognition is concerned with the acquisition, organization, and utilization of knowledge about spatial objects and environments, be it real, virtual, or abstract, human or machine. Spatial Cognition comprises research in different scientific fields insofar as they are concerned with cognitive agents and space, such as cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, and education. Research issues in the field range from the investigation of human spatial cognition to mobile robot navigation, including aspects such as wayfinding, spatial planning, spatial learning, internal and external representations of space, and communication of spatial information. SC 2014 will bring together researchers working on spatial cognition from all of these perspectives. The conference is single-track, and the final program will be the result of a selective review process. The program will include invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers. The main conference will be preceded by one day of workshops and tutorials and one day that is dedicated to the final colloquium and presentation of the Spatial Cognition Research Center SFB/TR 8.
http://conference.spatial-cognition.de/SC2014/

MLIS 2014: 3rd Workshop on Machine Learning for Interactive Systems

Mon, 28 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Intelligent systems or robots that interact with their environment by perceiving, acting or communicating often face a challenge in how to bring these different concepts together. One of the main reasons for this challenge is the fact that the core concepts in perception, action and communication are typically studied by different communities: the computer vision, robotics and natural language processing communities, among others, without much interchange between them. Learning systems that encompass perception, action and communication in a unified and principled way are still rare. As machine learning lies at the core of these communities, it can act as a unifying factor in bringing the communities closer together. Unifying these communities is highly important for understanding how state-of-the-art approaches from different disciplines can be combined (and applied) to form generally interactive intelligent systems. This is important for many applications in robotics, human-robot interaction and intelligent interfaces. This workshop aims to bring researchers from multiple disciplines together that are in some way or another affected by the gap between perception, action and communication. We hope to provide a forum for interdisciplinary discussion that allows researchers to look at their work from new perspectives that go beyond their core community and potentially develop new interdisciplinary collaborations. http://mlis-workshop.org/2014/

TOWARDS AN AXIOMATIC THEORY OF GEOINFORMATICS

Fri, 04 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Prof. Gilberto Camara, Universität Münster Researchers that work with the computer representation of geographical spaces have long debated about the right label to use for the discipline. The terms used by researchers in this area include Geographical Information Science, Geomatics, Geocomputation, Geoinformation Science and Spatial Computing. This talk will argue that the term Geoinformatics is the most appropriate one, since it describes an interdisciplinary field having at its core the science of information. However, to firmly establish itself as a scientific field, Geoinformatics needs a theoretical core that would be a common and shared basis for researchers, students and practitioners. Since GI systems development predates Geoinformatics research, current technologies embody many ad hoc solutions that reduce the potential for shared knowledge and hamper progress. We will argue that one of the components of the scientific core of Geoinformatics is a sound axiomatic theory that describes unambiguously the concepts used to represent the geographical world in computers. This theory should also provide the basis for implementations in different settings, thus allowing the same concept to be used consistently by different systems. In this talk, we will present some contributions for the proposed axiomatic theory of geoinformatics, but discussing an algebra for spatiotemporal data that represents objects, fields, trajectories, time series and events. Date: 04.07.2014 Time: 15:30 h Location: Cartesium, Bremen Speaker-URL`s: https://www.uni-muenster.de/Geoinformatics/institute/staff/index.php/197/Gilberto_Camara http://www.dpi.inpe.br/gilberto/

A data-driven approach to commonsense reasoning based on qualitative spatial representations from the web

Fri, 27 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Steven Schockaert, Cardiff University Conceptual spaces (sometimes also called semantic spaces) are high-dimensional geometric spaces in which entities are modelled as points and categories as convex regions. Given a relevant text corpus, conceptual spaces can be induced from data by using dimensionality reduction methods such as multi-dimensional scaling. To date, conceptual spaces are mainly used for measuring similarity. In this talk, I will argue that many aspects of semantic relatedness can be identified with qualitative spatial relations in conceptual spaces, and that this allows us to learn symbolic knowledge about categories in a purely data-driven way. As a simple example, the spatial part-of relation corresponds to the conceptual is-a relation, which is useful for automatically refining taxonomies. Second, spatial betweenness in conceptual spaces is useful for identifying “intermediary concepts”. For example, we can think of a tapas bar as being intermediate between a pub and a restaurant, and accordingly we can expect the representation of “tapas bar” to be geometrically between the representations of “restaurant” and “pub” in a conceptual space of places. Finally, relative attributes such as “more violent than” (for films) or “more tannic than” (for wines) can be associated with direction relations in a conceptual space. The aforementioned spatial relations are useful for implementing various patterns of commonsense reasoning. Betweenness, for example, can be used to implement a symbolic counterpart to numerical interpolation, e.g. from the knowledge that bars and restaurants sell drinks, we derive that tapas-bars are also likely to sell drinks. Direction relations are useful for implementing a fortiori inference (and other forms of analogical reasoning). For example, given that Die Hard has received an 18 certificate from the British Board of Film Classification and that Drive is more violent than Die Hard, we can plausibly derive that Drive has also received an 18 certificate. I will report the result of experiments that show the usefulness of the aforementioned patterns of commonsense reasoning. For example, we have found that a betweenness based classifier, using a conceptual space of place types induced from Flickr, outperforms humans in categorising places from the Foursquare and Geonames taxonomies. Similarly, by identifying qualitative direction relations in a conceptual space of films (derived from a large corpus of film reviews), we can implement a form of analogical reasoning which outperforms standard classifiers such as SVMs, kNN and C4.5 in a variety of film related categorisation tasks. Bio: Steven Schockaert studied computer science at Ghent University, where he also defended his PhD thesis in 2008 on "Reasoning about fuzzy temporal and spatial information from the web". This thesis was awarded with the 2008 ECCAI Artificial Intelligence Dissertation Award and the IBM Belgium Prize for Computer Science. After his PhD, he obtained a postdoctoral fellowship from the Research Foundation - Flanders. In September 2011 he became a lecturer at Cardiff University, where he currently works. His current research interests are largely centred around three areas: multi-valued logics, commonsense reasoning, and geographic information retrieval. In the area of multi-valued logics, he is mainly working on Łukasiewicz logic (e.g. automated reasoning and complexity) and on extensions of answer set programming, a form of logic programming based on the notion of stable models. In the area of commonsense reasoning, he looks at qualitative techniques for managing imperfect knowledge bases, including possibilistic logic and qualitative approaches to similarity-based and analogical reasoning. Finally, in the area of geographic information retrieval, his main focus is on acquiring geographic information from semi-structured web resources Date: 27.06.2014 Time: 15:30 h Location: Cartesium, Bremen Speaker-URL: http://users.cs.cf.ac.uk/S.Schockaert/Home.html

SPATIAL REASONING WITH MIRRORS

Mon, 16 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Achille Varzi, Columbia University Mirrors are familiar objects, yet we all have a hard time dealing with them and reasoning about what we see or expect to see on their surface. Common errors include: failing to establish a proper correspondence between real and reflected movements; overestimating the size of our own mirror reflection; expecting the size itself to depend on our distance from the mirror; miscalculating what we can see in a mirror as we approach it or look at it from a side; and, of course, believing that (and wondering why) mirror images are reversed left/right but not up/down. One may ask what psychological factors explain these surprising difficulties, and one may speculate on their philosophical significance (e.g. regarding the opposition between absolute and relational conceptions of space, or the ungroundedness of certain spatial distinctions). But beneath it all there is a deeper question, whose answer may not be the one we think. What is it that we see in a mirror? Do we see enantiomorphic images of ourselves, or do we see ourselves enantiomorphically? Achille C. Varzi is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York (USA). A graduate of the University of Trento (Italy), he received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto (Canada) and has been at Columbia since 1995. His main research interests are in logic and metaphysics, including ontology, mereology, and the philosophy of space and time. A complete list of his publications, along with additional information, may be found on his web site at http://www.columbia.edu/~av72. Special Date: 16.06.2014 Time: 16:00 h Location: Cartesium, Bremen Speaker-URL: http://www.columbia.edu/~av72/

Information Grounds: A Place-based Framework for Understanding How People Experience Information in Informal Social Settings

Fri, 13 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Dr. Karen Fisher, University of Washington, Seattle, USA What is the role of place and spatial factors in how people experience information? How can we use an understanding of place to facilitate how people engage with each other, and improve lives? Such are the questions that drive Information Grounds—a place-based framework pioneered by Canadian information scientist Dr. Karen E. Fisher with colleagues at the University of Washington, Michigan, and Microsoft using varied methods over 20 years’ of study. Information Grounds is a lens for understanding information flow in informal social settings—informal, temporal social settings where people gather for a focal, instrumental purpose, and create, remix, and share information using degree technology of any degree. Information Grounds can occur anywhere—football match, hair salon, rock convert, at the beach, tailgate party, dog park. or pub; sometimes though people may not be there by personal choice as in the case of queues or waiting offices, classroom hallways; and disaster, crisis and refuge contexts. Most simply, Information Grounds are predicated on the presence of people (usually 2 or more) in any physical or online setting; however the quality of Information Grounds will range from abysmal to superb, depending on how well their collective attributes facilitate the creation and sharing of information among individuals. Information Grounds comprise a people-place-information trichotomy with 15 facets; it premises that by understanding the characteristics of the people present (e.g., demographics, motivation, number, connectedness, and social type), the characteristics of the place itself (e.g., victuals, safety, location, comfort) and the characteristics of the information experience (in broadest post-modernist sense), design options can be created to support that information ground for varied topics. At the University of Washington, Information Grounds is taught to all iSchool students from undergraduate to PhD; within information science, Information Grounds is widely respected as a robust approach to understanding and designing around people, place and information, be it for specific populations (e.g., aged, teens, people dealing with illness) or physical context (hair salon, library, shopping malls), or type of information (health, civic). Dr. Fisher will overview research on peoples’ everyday Information Grounds as well as those that arise during crisis and disaster, and discuss the implications for designing applications and policy. Her early research with immigrants/refugees in New York, work for the Gates Foundation/IMLS post-Katrina on the impact of computers in U.S. public libraries, and current mixed-methods design work with immigrant and refugee youth from Eastern Africa and South-East Asia suggest that Information Grounds are a universal phenomenon, and that interventions based around people-place-information factors hold great potential for strengthening social fabric. Date: 13.06.2014 Time: 15:30 h Location: Cartesium, Bremen Speaker-URL: http://ischool.uw.edu/people/faculty/fisher