Department machine learning talks: Interactively Building Mashups by Demonstration

Title: Interactively Building Mashups by Demonstration
Speaker: Dr. Craig A. Knoblock, University of Southern California
Time: 10:30am, May 25 (Tue), 2010
Place: Room 210, CSIE Building

Abstract:

There are a number of tools and services available now for building mashups on the Web. However, many of the tools for constructing mashups reply on a widget paradigm, where users must select, customize, and connect widgets to build the desired application. While this approach does not require programming, the users must still understand programming concepts to successfully create a mashup. In this talk I describe our programming-by-demonstration approach to building mashups by example. Instead of requiring a user to select and customize a set of widgets, the user simply demonstrates the integration task by example. I will describe how this approach addresses the problems of extracting data from various sources, cleaning and modeling the extracted data, integrating the data across sources, and visualizing the integrated results in a geospatial context. We implemented these ideas in a system called Karma and evaluated Karma on a set of 20 users and showed that compared to other mashup construction tools, Karma allowed more of the users to successfully build mashups and made it possible to build these mashups significantly faster compared to using a widget-based approach.

This research is joint work with Shubham Gupta, Pedro Szekely, and Rattapoom Tuchinda.

Short Biography:

Dr. Craig Knoblock is a Research Professor in Computer Science and a Senior Project Leader in the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California (USC). He received both his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and his B.S. from Syracuse University. His current research interests include information integration, information extraction, machine learning, users interfaces, constraint reasoning, geospatial data fusion, and bioinformatics. He has published one book and over 200 articles, book chapters, and conference papers on his research. He has served on the Senior Program Committees of the National Artificial Intelligence Conference, the International Joint Conference on AI, the International Semantic Web Conference, and the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. He was program co-chair for the 2008 AAAI track on AI and the Web and he is conference chair for the 2011 International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI). He is on the editorial board of Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Press, Computational Intelligence, and the Journal on Foundations and Trends in Web Science. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Distinguished Scientist of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), a Trustee of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), and past President of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). He has started two companies, Fetch Technologies and Geosemble Technologies, based on his research at USC.