U.S. Semantic Technologies Symposium Series
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Alessandro Oltramari
Keynote: Decision Making in the Cyber-Physical World
Alessandro Oltramari is President of the Carnegie Bosch Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and Senior Manager at Bosch Research Technology Center (RTC) in Pittsburgh (USA), where he leads the “Cyber-Physical AI & Reasoning” group. Alessandro’s expertise includes Neuro-Symbolic AI, Knowledge Engineering, Cognitive Architectures, Computational Linguistics. He joined Bosch Research in 2016, after working as a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. His primary research interest is to investigate how human cognition and knowledge can help machines make sense of the cyber-physical world. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Trento (Italy). He had a 10-year tenure at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council (ISTC-CNR); he was a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University, between 2005 and 2006, working on the WordNet lexical database. Alessandro’s esearch record lists about 100 publications. He received the Army Research Lab “Above and Beyond” award, received multiple “best paper” awards and has been featured in major news media outlets such as CNET and The New Scientist.
Prof. Jodi Schneider
Keynote: Building trust with automatically generated literature reviews
Jodi Schneider is Associate Professor of Information at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Information quality is a particular focus of Dr. Schneider’s research, using methods from argumentation theory, data science, and semantic web technologies. Her Alfred P. Sloan Foundation-funded project Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science led to a new industry information standard for communicating retractions of research. Her work has also been funded by the NIH, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, The Institute of Museum and Library Services, the European Commission, Science Foundation Ireland, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and an NSF CAREER award. Dr. Schneider completed her PhD in informatics at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway (“Enabling reuse of arguments and opinions from online social disputes”) and has degrees in library & information science (M.S. UIUC), mathematics (M.A. UT-Austin), and liberal arts (B.A., Great Books, St. John’s College). Currently she serves on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus committee on Corrections and Retractions: Upgrading the Scientific Record.