OntologySummit2011: "Grand Challenges" synthesis    (2LKR)

Co-champions: RamSriram, ErnieLucier, AldenDima    (2SL8)

Overview    (2SL9)

The Grand Challenges Track had the following goals:    (2SLA)

Speakers and Domains Represented    (2SLI)

Our invited speakers represented three domains (Health Care, Social networks and Homeland Security):    (2SLJ)

Health Care    (2SLW)

Grand Challenge:    (2SLX)

Much of the Health Care domain presentations focused on IBM'S Watson which has captured much attention. It was built by IBM to advance QA (question answering) techniques. In a heavily publicized competition it won against two previous Jeopardy champions eventually but lost to Congressman Rush Holt. Its DeepQA components use the "Hypothesize-Score-Rank" strategy where the scoring (Evaluating) employs non-linguistic, ontology and background algorithms.    (2SLY)

Challenges were identified in two settings:    (2SLZ)

Helping the medical student    (2SM2)

Helping the physician    (2SM6)

The above challenges need advances in the following areas.    (2SMC)

Social Networking    (2SMI)

Social Life Networks (SLNs), which are instances of Net-centric societies, combine two evolving paradigms: computer-mediated social networks and Internet of things. Jain calls this "connecting people with resources," since an SLN can be viewed as a network of people and sensor objects, such as mobile phones and associated senors. In SLNs a considerable amount of data – image, text, other sensors -- passes through the network and should be converted into higher abstractions that can be used in appropriate reasoning.    (2SMJ)

The discussion of Social Networking focused on three themes:    (2SMK)

Several trends were identified as driving Social Networking:    (2SMO)

Challenges to be addressed in SLNs:    (2SMT)

Ontologies could help in developing strategies to address above challenges.    (2SMY)

Homeland Security    (2SMZ)

Homeland Security was the final domain to be presented. The DHS infrastructure and the needs for modeling, simulation and analysis were discussed. In this domain, the development, validation, acceptance, update, and integration of ontologies were seen as the key challenges. Other potential domains were identified: Sustainability, Emergency Response Management, and Financial Services. These domains are important but we were not able to cover them in our teleconference.    (2SN0)

Other Challenges    (2SN1)

Several other domains were identified during the summit. These include the following domains:    (2SN2)

Incentive for Progress    (2SN6)

The final portion of our discussion focused on developing incentive systems for moving forward in grand challenge areas. The X Prize was presented as an example of using prizes to motivate progress in key areas. The various attributes, models and development phases of prizes were presented. The $10M Ansari X Prize was offered as a successful example of using prizes. In the resulting competition, 26 teams from 7 nations spent over $100M to attempt to be the first privately-financed team to fly a spaceship capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometers altitude twice in two weeks. The next step for the community is to pick one domain and develop the appropriate X prize.    (2SN7)

Reference:    (2SN8)

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