How Generative AI is transforming Teaching and Learning: Insights from KMi’s Prof John Domingue

Thursday 16 Jan 2025 | KMi News

Generative AI has the potential to revolutionise education in ways comparable to the industrial revolution or the advent of the internet, claims Prof John Domingue. Speaking at Fleksibel utdanning Norge’s recent conference in Norway, he explored how AI can reshape teaching, learning, and institutional practices to meet the needs of future generations.

Central to Prof Domingue’s discussion is the importance of equipping students with AI skills essential for future employment. He emphasised that educational institutions must embrace AI strategically or risk falling behind. This requires a robust infrastructure, such as enterprise-level platforms, that ensure data security and regulatory compliance. Institutions must also develop clear guidance on AI use for students, covering ethical considerations, privacy, and responsible utilisation.

AI’s transformative impact on education is already evident. Prof Domingue highlighted tools that support educators in creating materials collaboratively with AI, generating assessments, and identifying state-of-the-art research. In the delivery of education, AI-driven digital assistants, such as our own AIDA platform, offer personalised support to students, enhancing their learning experiences.

Assessment, a cornerstone of education, must also evolve to reflect AI’s influence. Prof Domingue suggested focusing on meta-skills like critical thinking and problem-solving, which remain uniquely human advantages in an AI-driven world.

While AI presents challenges, such as data privacy and bias, it offers unparalleled opportunities for innovation. By embracing experimentation and collaboration, educational institutions can harness the full potential of AI to enhance learning, ensuring both educators and students thrive in this new era.

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CORE receives funding for five years from Microsoft’s open data initiative to increase access to open scientific research

Wednesday 18 Dec 2024 | KMi News

CORE, an Open Access infrastructure operated by The Open University, has been awarded significant funding for the next five years from Microsoft, as part of its’ support for increasing access to data and scientific research.

Since 2020, Microsoft has worked to close the data divide and help organisations of all sizes realise the benefits of open data and the new technologies it powers. Microsoft aims to make the process of opening, sharing, and collaborating around data easier so that researchers and innovators can uncover new insights, make better decisions, and improve efficiencies when tackling some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

CORE indexes scholarly content from over 12,000 institutional repositories, preprint servers and journals and makes this available to the global community via a range of services built on top of the data. CORE currently delivers its services to over 30 million monthly users.

The funding will support CORE in:

Improving processes for indexing and increasing discoverability of Open Access content from repositories, journals and preprint services.
Developing technology to improve the quantity and quality of scholarly metadata in CORE, ensuring CORE significantly contributes to the delivery of a global scholarly knowledge graph.
Improving CORE services for better machine access to academic content, in line with the requirements of the OSTP memo, and in line with other OA policy requirements.
Conducting research on ethical and responsible ways of using academic content in the age of AI.
Developing an annual yearly statistical monitoring process for open access content growth.

Further, this funding will allow us to grow and strengthen the infrastructure that supports these services. CORE will remain a community-governed infrastructure, in line with its commitments as a signatory to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures (POSI).

Professor Petr Knoth, founder and team lead for CORE said;

“We are delighted to receive the support from Microsoft to deliver on our ongoing mission to become the most comprehensive index of open access scholarly documents. Open access, open science and open data are critical components of a fairer, more just world where access to scientific information is available to all. The team at CORE has been committed to this goal for over 10 years and it is fantastic to see this effort being recognised.”

Burton Davis, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, at Microsoft added;

“Microsoft is committed to increasing open access to scientific knowledge to help further research and fuel breakthroughs to address society’s greatest challenges, such as improving healthcare and the sustainability of our planet. We are proud to support CORE’s important work of making more scientific scholarly content openly available, helping foster innovation, including the responsible development of AI.”

Professor Nicholas Braithwaite, Executive Dean for the STEM Faculty said;

“I am delighted to witness CORE’s continued growth and success. CORE’s mission of making scientific knowledge open to students, researchers and the general public is engrained in The Open University’s DNA. What began as a research project has evolved into a world-leading service that serves 30 million users every month and advances not only the principles of Open Science, but also the global visibility and impact of The Open University.”

Professor Kevin Shakesheff, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research at The Open University added;

“CORE is a noteworthy example of how OU research can generate substantial value beyond academia for society and industry. This new cooperation with Microsoft as part of their Open Data Initiative highlights our ability to drive meaningful change through innovative research.”

Professor Harith Alani, Director of the Knowledge Media institute said;

“At KMi, we are proud to see our years of dedicated research and teamwork culminate in this significant investment. The success of CORE is a testament to the exceptional vision, capability, culture, and perseverance of KMi, whose efforts continue, against all odds, to shape the future of the OU and Higher Education through cutting-edge research and innovation.”

OU News related post
OU Life related post
Microsoft On the Issues related post

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Best Paper Award at EKAW 2024 for groundbreaking work on capturing the political discourse in the news

Tuesday 03 Dec 2024 | KMi News

A paper authored by KMi researchers Enrico Motta, Francesco Osborne, Angelo Salatino, and Iman Naja, and Martino Pulici from the Bosch Centre for Artificial Intelligence, has received the prestigious Best Research Paper Award at the 24th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 24). The EKAW series of conferences provides the premier European forum for research in Knowledge-Based Systems.

The paper, which is entitled Capturing the Viewpoint Dynamics in the News Domain, introduces an innovative approach to capturing the way the political debate around important topics is represented in news media. This is a very important issue, given that a healthy democracy requires a balanced news landscape, providing a fair account of the variety of political positions relevant to a particular issue. Indeed, in the past few years concerns about the lack of balance in the way the political debate is covered in UK’s news media have increased and this paper provides an innovative solution to analysing media coverage of the political discourse, allowing academics and practitioners to assess to what extent this media coverage provides a fair and balanced representation of the debate.

Technically, our solution employs a hybrid human-machine approach, which leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyse news, combining human expertise with AI. It identifies the spectrum of viewpoints within a debate and classifies claims in a news corpus according to these perspectives, enabling a comprehensive understanding of the narratives that shape public discourse.

In an age of misinformation and polarisation, such tools are invaluable for journalists, researchers, and policymakers. Indeed, the proposed solution has the potential for widespread societal impact, by enabling not just researchers but also regulatory authorities, policy actors, media organisations, and a wide range of civil society stakeholders to better monitor media performance, identify potential harms and fine tune policy, potentially contributing to improving the health of our media ecosystem, and therefore of our democracy.

This research was supported by a grant from the OU’s Open Societal Challenges Programme — Project 192, Unlocking computational media research: Innovative AI technologies to assess fairness, balance and diversity in the media

Related links:

Capturing the Viewpoint Dynamics in the News Domain – paper in Springer
Capturing the Viewpoint Dynamics in the News Domain – paper in ORO
Unlocking computational media research: Innovative AI technologies to assess fairness, balance and diversity in the media (OSC challenge 192) – link: Unlocking computational media research: Innovative AI technologies to assess fairness, balance and diversity in the media
24th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 24)

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Building Trust and Preempting Misinformation: Prof. Harith Alani on Combating Disinformation in Central Banking

Tuesday 26 Nov 2024 | KMi News

Harith Alani, Director of KMi, was interviewed by Central Banking journal about the growing disinformation threat faced by central banks. He highlighted that while disinformation often originates externally, its real damage arises when false claims are amplified locally. Alani emphasised the importance of proactive strategies, such as fostering trust and increasing transparency, to prevent false narratives from gaining traction, rather than relying only on reactive corrections.

Alani also underscores the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in both exacerbating and alleviating these issues. He warns that AI-driven deepfakes and misinformation will become more convincing, complicating efforts to combat disinformation. However, AI tools also present opportunities, as they can be used to predict, detect, and prevent misinformation, offering organisations new ways to protect their reputations. Furthermore, Alani suggests that central banks collaborate with existing fact-checking organisations rather than creating their own, thus pooling resources for a more effective response to misinformation.

KMi is one of the leading labs in developing advanced technologies for tracking and combating fake news and hate speech, and Alani’s insights underline the importance of central banks not only engaging with the public through communication but also preparing for potential disinformation crises with robust strategies. His emphasis on pre-emptive communication and building long-term trust offers a strategic approach to safeguarding institutions from the growing digital misinformation threat.

Related links:

Fake it ’til you break it: the battle against disinformation Transparency, beefed-up comms and AI are all being enlisted in central banks’ fight against falsehood – Central Banking Journal original article.

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KMi’s Paula Reyero-Lobo Passes Her PhD Viva with Flying Colours!

Thursday 21 Nov 2024 | KMi News

Congratulations to Paula Reyero-Lobo, who was passed her viva on 18 November 2024 for her thesis, “Addressing Bias in Hate Speech Detection: Enhancing Target Group Identification with Semantics.”

Paula’s research explored how to reduce bias in hate speech detection systems, particularly in identifying content targeting specific groups. AI systems often misclassify content from certain groups as hate speech or fail to effectively moderate harmful content directed at them. Paula tackled this challenge by investigating how semantics, including knowledge graphs and linguistic resources, can improve both human and machine understanding of the non-standard, slang, and domain-specific language frequently used in hate speech. Her findings offer a significant contribution to advancing fairer and more effective AI moderation tools.

Her thesis was supervised by Miriam Fernandez, Enrico Daga, and Harith Alani, with her defence committee including Haiming Liu (external), John Domingue (internal), and Soraya Kouadri (chair).

Looking ahead, Paula will join the Centre for Protecting Women Online at The Open University as an AI consultant. Working with the Ethical and Responsible Tech/AI Team, she will engage in collaborative research to address the unique challenges to women’s safety in online spaces.

We are excited to see the continued impact of Paula’s work and wish her every success in this important field!

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KMi researchers win Best Resource Paper Award at ISWC 2024

Wednesday 20 Nov 2024 | KMi News

Gregoire Burel and Harith Alani were honoured with the Best Resource Paper Award at the prestigious International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2024). Their groundbreaking work, CimpleKG, the largest knowledge graph of this type, is an innovative open and continuously updated semantic resource designed to combat online misinformation.

CimpleKG integrates data from 77 fact-checking organizations and over 217,000 documents, creating a comprehensive knowledge graph with over 15 million triples. By encompassing diverse topics, languages, and countries, it empowers researchers to delve deeper into misinformation trends and develop cutting-edge detection and verification tools. Its structured, enriched textual data provides a powerful foundation for building applications aimed at curbing the spread of false information online.

The data behind CimpleKG has been used in multiple research studies led by KMi researchers investigating the co-spread of fact-checks and misinformation online and the automatic correction of misinformation sharers on social media, and integrated into various applications such as the CimpleKG explorer, the Fact-checking observatory, the Iffy Index and the MisinfoMe bot.

We are incredibly proud of this achievement, which underscores KMi’s commitment to impactful, socially responsible research. Congratulations to the team for this remarkable recognition!

Related links:

Demographics and topics impact on the co-spread of COVID-19 misinformation and fact-checks on Twitter (paper on co-spread of fact-checks and misinformation online)
Exploring the impact of automated correction of misinformation in social media (paper on automatic correction of misinformation sharers on social media)
CimpleKG Explorer
Fact-checking Observatory
Iffy index
Knowledge Graph access
Data Explorer
MisinfoMe bot
CimpleKG: A continuously updated knowledge graph on misinformation, factors and fact-checks (Best Resource Paper Award page)
Conference website

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KMi at ISWC 2024: Advancing the Semantic Web with Knowledge Graphs and LLMs

Monday 18 Nov 2024 | KMi News

Last week, Francesco Osborne, Angelo Salatino, and Tanay Aggarwal attended the 23rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in Baltimore, Maryland. Widely regarded as the premier conference in the field of the Semantic Web, ISWC is renowned for its impact and for showcasing the latest trends and advancements in the domain.

The main theme of the conference focused on integrating Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GraphRAG and NL2SPARQL. There has been a significant debate on whether we should opt for one solution rather than the other to solve the ongoing challenges, including a dedicated panel session. The consensus is that “LLMs will help the Semantic Web, and Semantic Web technologies are absolutely needed to make LLMs succeed”, as also mentioned by Ora Lassila, during his keynote speech.

The attendees’ overall sentiment is that after a quarter of a century, the community is finally harvesting the fruits that they have been effortlessly planting throughout the years. Of course, now, new challenges have emerged: we can finally work toward the original vision of the Semantic Web, which meant knowledge representation and agents. And LLMs can definitely help. In sum, exciting times are ahead!

This year, KMi was actively involved in several conference initiatives. Francesco served as the Industry Track Chair and organised the Job Fair. Additionally, Angelo and Francesco co-organised the 4th International Workshop on “Scientific Knowledge: Representation, Discovery, and Assessment”, which was a remarkable success. The workshop featured nine paper presentations addressing various challenges in the scholarly knowledge domain. A standout moment was the keynote speech by Natasha Noy, Research Scientist at Google Research, on the theme “Linking Scientific Knowledge: A Dataset-Centric View.” She underscored the critical importance of accurate metadata in annotating datasets and emphasised the need for community-wide incentives to achieve this goal.

Tanay presented his paper titled “Identifying Semantic Relationships Between Research Topics Using Large Language Models in a Zero-Shot Learning Setting,” co-authored with Angelo, Francesco, and Prof. Enrico Motta.

Francesco also presented a paper titled “Assessing Large Language Models for SPARQL Query Generation in Scientific Question Answering,” co-authored with Antonello Meloni, Diego Reforgiato, Angelo Salatino, Enrico Motta, Sahar Vahdati, and Jens Lehmann.

Additionally, Gregoire Burel, Harith Alani, and former PhD student Martino Mensio contributed to the paper “CimpleKG: A Continuously Updated Knowledge Graph on Misinformation, Factors and Fact-Checks,” which was presented by Raphaël Troncy (EURECOM). This paper won the prestigious Best Resource Paper Award.

We are also grateful to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) for awarding Tanay a generous student grant of $2,800, enabling him to attend the conference and present his research paper. This support marks a significant milestone in his doctoral studies and reflects the conference’s commitment to inclusivity by providing financial assistance to foster students’ academic growth.

Looking ahead, ISWC 2025 will be held in Nara, Japan, where Angelo will serve as the Resource Track Chair. Looking forward to the next edition!

Related links:

Conference website
Sci-K 2024
Identifying Semantic Relationships Between Research Topics Using Large Language Models in a Zero-Shot Learning Setting (paper)
CimpleKG: A continuously updated knowledge graph on misinformation, factors and fact-checks (Best Resource Paper Award page)

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Exploring the Role of AI in Education: Benefits, Risks, and the Future of Learning

Friday 15 Nov 2024 | KMi News

Dr Aisling Third, KMi’s Research Fellow, recently joined the Academic Co-Leads for Generative AI in Learning, Teaching and Assessment, Dr Mirjam Hauck (Senior Lecturer at the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics) and Dr Michel Wermelinger (Senior Lecturer in Computing) for a podcast hosted by Pedagodzilla. The discussion focused on the intersection of AI and education, exploring both its potential benefits and risks.

The panelists highlighted how AI can enhance learning, such as helping students practice language skills without the pressure of speaking to humans, particularly for beginners. However, they also addressed concerns, stressing that AI’s misuse could have negative consequences, such as students relying on generative tools like ChatGPT for assessments. They emphasised the importance of critically engaging with AI outputs, rather than accepting them without question.

The conversation also explored the future of AI in education, suggesting that while AI may change certain educational skills, it also calls for a greater emphasis on human abilities such as prompting and evaluating AI-generated content. Overall, the researchers were cautiously optimistic, believing that AI can complement human interaction but should never fully replace it in educational settings.

Related links:

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Shifting Power: Artificial Intelligence Researchers’ Perspectives from the Margins

Thursday 14 Nov 2024 | KMi News

On Tuesday 5^th November, Dr Venetia Brown from the Shifting Power team gave a seminar presenting her research to the Centre for the Study of Global Development, a multidisciplinary centre within the Faculty of Wellbeing Education and Language Studies at The Open University. 105 people registered for the hybrid presentation, which examined a key theme: “How AI researchers and practitioners from low- and middle-income countries and marginalised researchers in higher-income countries conceptualise AI’s societal and cultural harms“. It explored the question, “What does the technology mean to these stakeholders?” while prompting the audience to consider its implications for those in the Global North, who have the resources and wealth to research, develop, deploy, and benefit from it.

The presentation examined the landscape of AI, exploring various explorations and critical works on AI and justice. It highlighted real-world harms, including environmental, socio-political and economic challenges and the difficulties faced by AI and sustainable development initiatives. Rich qualitative insights were provided into the personal and professional motivations of AI researchers and practitioners. The presentation also illustrated the dynamic interrelationships and complex factors influencing how marginalised stakeholders perceive AI, its impacts, and their lived experiences with real-world harms created by historical power dynamics and global inequalities.

We are still interested in talking to AI researchers and practitioners, especially from NGOs or industry, who live and work in low- and middle-income countries. If you want to take part in our study, please get in touch with Venetia Brown.

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Audrey Ekuban wins silver award at 2024 STEM 3-Minute-Thesis Conference

Tuesday 12 Nov 2024 | KMi News

KMi doctoral student Audrey Ekuban won second place, in the Year 3 and 4 category, at the STEM PhD Student 3-Minute-Thesis (3MT) Conference 2024 on 7 November in the Berrill Lecture Theatre. Audrey’s research presentation focused on student data privacy and self-sovereignty, exploring how universities can personalise learning experiences while preserving student privacy.

Her project, EMPRESS (Educational Models with Privacy Rights and Ethics for Student Self-Sovereignty), proposes a framework empowering students to control their data. Audrey introduced the concept of Structured Transparency, outlining data access guidelines based on necessity and timing to balance privacy and personalised support.

Audrey emphasised two core principles: Input Privacy and Output Privacy. Input Privacy can be attained by Federated Learning, a technique whereby models are directly trained on students’ devices without sharing raw data centrally. Output Privacy can be obtained by Differential Privacy, a technique that ensures individual data is obscured in aggregate outputs. Audrey plans further testing to refine these privacy-preserving techniques.

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Congratulations to Dr Shuang Ao on successfully defending her PhD

Friday 08 Nov 2024 | KMi News

KMi is thrilled to announce that Shuang Ao has successfully defended her PhD on 22 October 2024. Her thesis, titled “Building Trustworthy AI: Uncertainty Quantification and Failure Detection in Large Vision-Language Models,” addresses key challenges in making AI systems more reliable and trustworthy. Shuang’s research introduces new tools that help improve how well AI systems can assess their own accuracy and identify mistakes. These innovations are especially important for applications where safety is critical, as they help ensure AI systems are more dependable and better aligned with real-world needs, including natural language generation.

Under the supervision of Professors Advaith Siddharthan and Stefan Rueger, Shuang’s research offers important contributions to AI by helping align model confidence with accuracy and providing nuanced failure assessments.

Shuang has now embarked on her postdoctoral journey at the University of Southampton, where she is focused on building responsible large language models and vision-language models for healthcare. We wish her all the best in this exciting new chapter!

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Exploring the Future of Adult Learning: The Open University’s GenAI Conference at MKAIFest

Tuesday 05 Nov 2024 | KMi News

The Open University hosted the “GenAI: Adult Skills and Learning conference”, an in-person event forming part of the Milton Keynes City Council AI Festival (MKAIFest), sponsored by Infosys and with around 150 attendees. The conference was co-chaired by KMi’s Prof John Domingue and Esther Spring, showcasing the OU’s commitment to harnessing Generative AI (GenAI) to enhance educational practices. Prof Domingue also led the engaging panel “What is our end goal and how do we get there?”, steering meaningful discussions on setting strategic objectives in AI-driven education.

Pro Vice-Chancellor Ian Pickup opened the conference, which featured keynote speeches and panel discussions from leading figures, including Jacqueline de Rojas CBE (Chair of the Bletchley Park Trust, the Institute of Coding, and President Emeritus at techUK), Rose Luckin (Professor at University College London and Founder of Educate Ventures Research), Jason Till (leader of the ‘Services Industry Pod’ for AI at Infosys), Cris Bloomfield (Senior Industry Architect at Microsoft) and Rashik Parmar (Group Chief Executive of the British Computer Society). These talks emphasized empowering adult learners, addressing the skills gap, and responsibly managing the rapid development of GenAI. The conference underlined the OU’s longstanding mission to blend technology with education, as speakers explored AI’s role in both workforce training and formal education.

During the lunch break, an exhibition showcased KMi stands highlighting several projects, including the externally funded SAGE-RAI project, which aims to create an AI Digital Assistant to support teaching at the Open Data Institute, along with our own AI Digital Assistant, AI Module Writing Assistant projects, and OU Analyse. This exhibition celebrated the first anniversary of the AI Safety Summit, chaired by Rishi Sunak and attended by US Vice President Kamala Harris.

Key highlights included thought-provoking keynote sessions on the future of learning in the age of AI, discussions on human creativity versus machine capabilities, and considerations on ensuring equitable participation in AI-driven advancements. The day concluded with opportunities to network with OU staff, local government representatives, and industry leaders, including Microsoft and Infosys, fostering collaborations and sharing insights.

The event emphasized that while AI presents immense potential, a balanced approach is essential. The phrase “for the 8 billion, not 8 billionaires” resonated as a central takeaway, urging thoughtful integration of technology in education. This conference, building on the momentum of the 2023 AI Safety Summit, reinforced Milton Keynes’ position as a pivotal center for AI discourse and innovation.

Related links:

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KMi engages with Chengdu Open University for AI Collaboration

Monday 04 Nov 2024 | KMi News

This past Tuesday, The Open University welcomed a delegation from Chengdu Open University (CDOU), engaging in productive discussions centred on academic exchange and AI innovations.

Our director, Harith Alani, presented KMi’s history and expertise in research and innovation that are focused on bringing cutting-edge technology to higher education. KMi and CDOU discussed their strong interest and shared commitment to advancing personalised learning through AI and generative AI technologies, and agreed to explore opportunities for further collaboration.

Established in 1979, CDOU embraces modern, tech-driven learning, aligning with KMi’s mission to leverage cutting-edge AI solutions for impactful education.

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KMi’s Dr. Kwarteng talks on reclaiming digital narratives and combating misogynoir in online spaces

Thursday 31 Oct 2024 | KMi News

At the Black and Minority Ethnic Staff Network Conference for Black History Month, Dr. Joseph Kwarteng delivered a powerful presentation titled “Reclaiming Digital Narratives: Addressing Misogynoir in Online Spaces.” His research focuses on misogynoir—a form of intersectional hate that specifically targets Black women—exploring the impact of race and gender-based prejudice on digital platforms.

Dr. Kwarteng’s study highlights how online spaces like X (formerly Twitter) can amplify both marginalised voices and harmful narratives. His research identifies the challenges in detecting misogynoir on these platforms, where automated tools often fail to recognise its nuances and he advocates for context-sensitive systems that better capture and address this form of hate speech.

In line with the Black History Month theme of “Reclaiming Narratives,” Joseph’s talk emphasises the importance of empowering Black women to reclaim online spaces, combat stereotypes, and redefine digital discourse, calling for equitable digital platforms and stronger allyship. He highlights the power of digital resistance and how Black women are repurposing social media’s capitalist tools to build communities, share resources, and advocate for one another’s safety and well-being. The digital age has sparked the rise of #HashtagActivism, enabling networks rooted in race and gender justice to create spaces where silenced voices can be heard and uplifted.

The event opened with a warm welcome from Prof. Kevin Shakesheff, PVC for Research and Innovation, who highlighted The Open University’s enduring commitment to inclusivity and research that drives social change. Later on the PVC for Students Prof. Ian Pickup further underscored the university’s dedication to fostering an environment where diverse voices and perspectives thrive.

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Exploring Innovations in Education: A Seminar on AI and Learning

Wednesday 30 Oct 2024 | KMi News

On 23 October 2024, the OU Library Atrium hosted a compelling seminar featuring short presentations from leading researchers in the field of AI and education. The event, running from 13:00 to 14:00, showcased insights from several experts, including Dr Aisling Third and Prof Miriam Fernandez from KMi.

Dr. Third presented on the transformative potential of large language models (LLMs) in adult education, sharing exciting experiments conducted at the Open University. She demonstrated the AI Digital Assistant (AIDA) and AI Module Writing Assistant (AIMWA) projects, which explore the use of generative AI to support OU student learning and course development. AIDA is currently being trialled on the OU’s OpenLearn platform, enabling students to ask questions about their course, generate practice and revision activities, rephrase concepts in simpler or more detailed terms, and engage with live-generated AI video avatars. AIMWA has been successfully tested to support the development of materials for OU modules and short courses, drawing on existing material and scholarly publications. This helps course teams avoid the “blank page” problem, create alternative text versions for purposes such as accessibility, and generate practice activities like quizzes.

Prof Fernandez discussed the current work of the OUAnalyse team including: (i) the Early Alert Indicators Dashboard (EAID), a tool aimed at alerting our Associated Lectures when students are at risk, helping to increase student retention and address awarding gaps at the OU (ii) a student-facing version of the EAID, currently under the 2nd year pilot, aiming to help students monitor their progress, enhance learning motivation, and encourage remedial action to improve study habits and performance, (iii) an Equality Diversity and Inclusion Dashboard, aiming to provide module teams with actionable insights to reduce existing awarding gaps at the OU and (iv) a Responsible AI framework for Learning Analytics in HE, providing Higher Education Institutions with actionable guidance on hot incorporate responsible AI principles into their LA initiatives.

Additional presentations included contributions from David Hayes, Dr Michel Wermelinger, Dr Mirjam Hauck, and Dr Haider Ali, who collectively examined the challenges and opportunities posed by generative AI in learning and teaching. This engaging session fostered discussions on innovative strategies to enhance education through technology.

Related links:

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KMi’s Prof Enrico Motta and Prof John Domingue attend the launch of the Milton Keynes AI Festival at historic Bletchley Park

Tuesday 29 Oct 2024 | KMi News

KMi’s Prof. Enrico Motta and Prof. John Domingue participated in the launch event for the Milton Keynes Artificial Intelligence Festival, which took place on 28 October 2024 at Bletchley Park. The theme of the festival, “Celebrating the Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Ecosystem in Milton Keynes”, emphasises the historical role of MIlton Keynes as a city at the forefront of technology and innovation.

The festival brings together a range of activities designed to showcase AI’s potential across various fields. A particular highlight is the GenAI, Adult Learning and Skills Conference, which is organised by John Domingue and will take place on 30 October at The Open University. This conference focuses on the role of generative AI in adult education and skills development, reinforcing the OU’s commitment to driving innovation in AI research and education.

Other highlights of the festival include a Smart City Consultancy Hackathon, a workshop on Using, Building and Understanding Responsible AI, and an introductory session titled Launch a Career in Computing – Introduction to AI, aimed at inspiring the next generation of AI professionals. The hackathon, in particular, encourages participants to explore AI applications for urban challenges, furthering Milton Keynes’ vision as a model for smart city innovation.

KMi is proud to contribute to this significant initiative, which promotes responsible AI development and celebrates Milton Keynes’ role as a hub for smart city and technology excellence.

Related links:

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KMi’s OUAnalyse team honoured with the 2024 STEM Recognising Excellence Award for Groundbreaking Educational Innovations

Thursday 10 Oct 2024 | KMi News

We are thrilled to announce that a team of researchers, technology developers, pedagogical experts and tutors from KMi and The Open University have been awarded the prestigious 2024 STEM Recognising Excellence Award for their groundbreaking contributions to education. Their work, particularly the development and successful implementation of the Early Alert Indicators Dashboard (OUAnalyse), has transformed how tutors support students by leveraging predictive analytics.

The award-winning team includes (in alphabetical order): Vaclav Bayer, Jason Carvalho, Miriam Fernandez, Anna Gillespie, Olivia Hagen, Christothea Herodotou, Hayley Lang, John Lee, Claire Maguire, Alba Morales-Tirado, Paul Mulholland, Sarah White and Tamsin Wisher.

Nominated by Prof. Miriam Fernandez, the team was recognised for their efforts to improve student outcomes and promote inclusivity through data-driven innovation. Prof. Fernandez highlighted the significance of their contribution, stating:

“For revolutionising teaching practices through the Early Alert Indicators Dashboard (OUAnalyse), empowering tutors with predictive analytics to enhance student success and inclusivity, and setting a new standard in data-driven educational support.”

The award recipients were unveiled during the Faculty Assembly on 9th October 2024, an event held online.

This award not only acknowledges the team’s achievements but also highlights the vital role of training, collaboration, and sharing best practices in enabling the success of data-driven tools that can help enhance student performance and contribute to a more inclusive academic environment.

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Transforming Ideas into Impact: KMi tops £50M!

Tuesday 08 Oct 2024 | KMi News

KMi was founded in 1995, making this its 30th year. This year is particularly significant, not only because of the upcoming milestone anniversary but also because the external funding secured by KMi researchers since its inception has surpassed £50 million! This achievement, especially impressive in today’s highly competitive funding environment, reflects our commitment to advancing research in technology and education, with a focus on meaningful societal change. From pioneering smart city innovations that enhance urban living, to improving student success through learning analytics, our work is driven by inclusivity and positive social impact.

Crucially, these efforts are not mere academic pursuits; they are about fostering real-world change. Citizen science, for instance, allows people from all backgrounds to participate in research, while our equality and diversity initiatives ensure that technological advancements benefit everyone, not just a selected few.

External funding has been crucial to driving our innovation and forming lasting partnerships with research, commercial, governmental and third sector organizations. These collaborations not only push the boundaries of knowledge but also contribute to The Open University’s financial stability and its mission of achieving a global impact in research and education.

As we look ahead, we remain committed to leading in socially responsible research, confident that our continued partnerships with a variety of external organizations will drive further innovation and impact for years to come, and will continue to support the journey of a world-class KMi within a world-class University.

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KMi’s Prof.Advaith Siddharthan received £922,000 grant to revolutionize science education with haptic touch experiences

Wednesday 25 Sep 2024 | KMi News

Prof. Advaith Siddharthan’s project, ‘Feeling the Untouchable: Haptic touch experiences for naturalistic learning,’ has secured a £922,000 grant to enhance sensory learning through touch. Collaborating with Imperial College London and the University of Edinburgh, the project aims to revolutionize science education by integrating tactile experiences, making abstract concepts like electromagnetic forces more tangible for students. This approach will also support children with visual impairments, promoting inclusivity and accessibility in education.

Launching in October 2024, the project will develop digital haptic interfaces to facilitate touch-based learning both indoors and outdoors. Success will be evaluated through surveys assessing student engagement and attitudes toward science. The project aligns with the University’s Open Societal Challenges platform, advocating for a bottom-up, inclusive approach in education. By reclaiming the value of touch, it aims to make science more engaging and foster a deeper connection with the natural world.

Open Societal Challenges platform.

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Celebrating Research, Innovation, and Societal Impact at The Open University

Tuesday 24 Sep 2024 | KMi News

The Open University recently hosted its prestigious Research Excellence Awards ceremony at Unity Place in Central Milton Keynes, with over 250 attendees gathered to celebrate the remarkable research being conducted across the university. This year’s event, themed Shaping the Future, not only highlighted the excellence of OU’s research but also showcased the societal impact of our work through the Open Societal Challenges Awards and the relaunch of the Open Business Creators Fund competition. These initiatives underscore the university’s commitment to addressing the world’s most pressing challenges by fostering collaboration with businesses, policymakers, and communities.

KMi had a strong presence at the event with several nominees and a prominent role in the exhibition area.

The evening featured engaging exhibition stands, including KMi’s MK:Smart project, represented by Prof. Enrico Motta, Dr. Iman Naja, and Riccardo Pala. They showcased cutting-edge research on urban robotics in collaboration with Extend Robotics and Swift Robotics. Notably, Swift Robotics will partner with the OU in the newly awarded “Resilient Enterprise” initiative—a groundbreaking Eureka ITEA 4 project set to launch in November 2024. This project aims to enhance the resilience of robotic solutions used in commercial deliveries at MK University Hospital, enabling them to learn and adapt in real time.

(From left to right: Riccardo Pala, Enrico Motta, Harith Alani, and Iman Naja with their PAL TIAGo robot)

A special highlight of the evening was Prof. Miriam Fernandez’s recognition with the STEM Research Excellence Award for her outstanding contributions to postgraduate research supervision. Her commitment to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) and her transformative impact on students were acknowledged through this prestigious accolade.

(Image of KMi’ers who attended the awards that night)

Although they didn’t win, being shortlisted for these prestigious awards is an incredible accomplishment that speaks to the dedication and impact of the nominees. Prof John Domingue’s nomination for the Outstanding Leadership Award reflects his visionary guidance, which has been crucial to KMi’s ongoing success. Likewise, the shortlisting of Keyur Dave, Rachel Coignac-Smith, Abi Brooks, Ortenz Rose, and Jane Whild for the Outstanding Support Award highlights their invaluable contributions to KMi’s work. Joseph Kwarteng’s nomination for the PGR Student Award also emphasizes the significance of his research and his bright future as a scholar.

KMi is incredibly proud of all their achievements and the continued excellence they bring to KMi. Congratulations to all winners and nominees for their remarkable contributions.

Related links:

MK:Smart website https://www.mksmart.org/

Celebrating Excellence: Prof. Fernandez’s Impactful Leadership in PG Research Supervision https://kmi.open.ac.uk/news/article/26618

REA winners announced https://openuniv.sharepoint.com/sites/oulife/Pages/REA-winners-announced.aspx

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KMi presents and sponsors the ACM Hypertext & Social Media 2024 Conference

Monday 23 Sep 2024 | KMi News

This year’s ACM Hypertext and Social Media conference highlighted the exceptional contributions of KMi members, with many taking on key roles; Enrico Motta delivered a keynote speech at the opening ceremony on the 10th of September, setting a high tone for the event.

Several KMi colleagues played vital roles in organising this successful conference. As Programme Chair, Alessio Antonini took great pride in collaborating with Paul Mulholland as Track Chair, Iman Naja as Workshop Chair, and Angelo Salatino, who served as the Practitioners & Industry Chair. Their contributions were publicly acknowledged, with The Open University (OU) and KMi also recognized as conference sponsors, receiving praise for their exceptional efforts and support.

A group of people watching a 2-minute presentation during the opening of the exhibition of practitioners and industry demos

(Image caption: A 2-minute presentation during the opening of the exhibition of practitioners and industry demos.)

The picture above shows the opening of the demo session with individual 2-minute presentations of practitioners and industry systems and tools. The conference also hosted the first edition of the International Teaching and Research in Hypertext summer school, a practitioners and industry systems and tools exhibition with 11 demos and six curated exhibitions of electronic literature.

Sat with laptops open in dialogue with an author during the of electronic literature exhibition

(Image caption: Dialogue with an author during the of electronic literature exhibition)

Special mentions go to OU colleagues Edmund King and Andrew Gargett, both served as Track Chairs. Shafquat Towheed delivered a poignant Keynote, and Harriett Cornish designed the conference logo and website style.

OU Shafquat Towheed standing at the podium delivering his keynote on the Future of Reading

(Image caption: OU Shafquat Towheed keynote on the Future of Reading)

It is noteworthy that two of the four papers submitted by The OU were nominated for the prestigious ACM Hypertext Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award, highlighting KMi’s academic influence and leadership in interdisciplinary research at The OU.

The first paper, titled “@TellMeWhatUReadingbot: the Multi-modal Strategy of the READ-IT Project for Collecting Experiences of Reading,” is co-authored by Francesca Benatti, Shafquat Towheed (English and Creative Writing), Sally Blackburn-Daniels (formerly OU), and Alessio Antonini (KMi). This paper is a key outcome of the EU JPI-funded READ-IT project.

The second paper was written by Paul Mulholland, Jason Carvalho, and Enrico Daga from KMi, along with Peter van Kranenburg from the University of Utrecht. Titled “Supporting the End-User Curation of Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graphs,” it is a product of the EU Horizon Polifonia project.

This year’s conference not only showcased innovative research but also KMi’s commitment to advancing the field.

(Image caption: Picture of conference attendance at the end of the conference)

The ACM Hypertext & Social Media 2024 conference focuses on the latest research and advancements in hypertext, hypermedia, and social media. It explores topics such as content linking, data analytics, and online behaviour, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue in these fields.

Related links:

@TellMeWhatUReadingbot: the Multi-modal Strategy of the READ-IT Project for Collecting Experiences of Reading https://oro.open.ac.uk/99037/

Supporting the End-User Curation of Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graphs https://oro.open.ac.uk/99120/

Conference website https://ht.acm.org/ht2024/

International Teaching and Research in Hypertext https://ht.acm.org/ht2024/workshops/intr-ht-summer-school/

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KMi shines at SEMANTiCS 2024 conference

Friday 20 Sep 2024 | KMi News

KMi is delighted to showcase its influential participation at SEMANTiCS 2024. Dr. Angelo Salatino and Dr. Francesco Osborne were actively involved in organizing the conference, a process that spanned the past eight months.

This year, SEMANTiCS celebrated its twentieth anniversary, taking place from 17th to 19th September in Amsterdam, at the stunning Meervaart theatre.

The SEMANTiCS conference is a renowned hub where technology professionals, industry leaders, and researchers meet to share insights on emerging technologies, innovations, and real-world applications in the realms of Linked Data and Semantic AI. This edition emphasised research into Neuro-Symbolic AI, a field that blends the strengths of neural network-based methods (e.g., handling large datasets) and symbolic AI (e.g., reasoning, explainability).

Dr. Angelo Salatino’s role as Research and Innovation Track Chair was pivotal. His leadership was instrumental in shaping the track and ensuring the quality of the presented contributions exceeded expectations.

Likewise, Dr. Francesco Osborne made a significant contribution by chairing the poster and demo sessions. His work facilitated presentations and fostered engaging discussions with attendees.

Dr. Salatino also presented a poster titled “Classifying Scientific Topic Relationships with SciBERT”, describing the team’s current research about automatic ontology generation.

SEMANTiCS 2024 was an excellent platform for KMi to showcase our dedication to advancing semantic technologies and to engage with the wider research community. We look forward to sharing more about the innovative work we presented and our future research directions!

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Exploring AI and Data: a podcast with Prof. Domingue

Thursday 19 Sep 2024 | KMi News

On September 2nd, Prof John Domingue participated in a popular podcast, as an AI Expert, hosted by the Cripps Law firm, which shed light on the evolving relationship between AI and data in the legal context.

The discussion was designed for legal professionals and law students, demystifying complex topics related to artificial intelligence. In a brief introduction John outlined the key forms of AI, drawing from cognitive psychology and machine learning, to explain how AI systems simulate human thought processes and learn from data. He then answered questions from the online audience. Questions varied from the huge potential impact of AI on law, the future of lawyers and to concerns about AI’s growing role in society, particularly regarding data privacy and the weaknesses of the technology.

The session wrapped up with an important conclusion: AI is a powerful tool for processing and translating data, but it is not yet a substitute for human knowledge.

The session was very popular with far more questions received than normal.

Cripps is a law firm specializing in both business and personal legal services.

Related links:
Watch podcast: The AI and data show: September 2024

Website collating KMi and OU activities in the GenAI and education area https://genai.kmi.open.ac.uk/

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BBC Guernsey Radio interview with KMi Director

Wednesday 18 Sep 2024 | KMi News

BBC Guernsey Radio hosted Prof Harith Alani in a live interview to talk about the increasing shift of news readers from traditional TV broadcasting to social media platforms, a trend confirmed in a recent Ofcom report. Harith argued that getting news from social media is not inherently problematic if the information comes from trusted and reputable sources. However, the issue lies in social media platforms not taking adequate steps to help readers assess the trustworthiness and factuality of social media accounts, in spite of great advancements in such research and technology.

Through multiple research grants, Alani and his team develop tools to track widespread misinformation and fact-checks, and have been experimenting with using automated methods for sending misinformation corrections on social media platforms.

Harith also discusses the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the media, noting that while there are risks, such as the generation of harmful misinformation, AI is also a key tool in our technological efforts to counter these threats.

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Celebrating Excellence: Prof. Fernandez’s Impactful Leadership in PG Research Supervision

Tuesday 17 Sep 2024 | KMi News

KMi is thrilled to announce that one of our esteemed academics, Prof. Miriam Fernandez, has been honored with the STEM Research Excellence Award for her outstanding contributions to postgraduate research supervision at The Open University. This recognition is a testament to her unwavering dedication, innovative support strategies, and steadfast commitment to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI).

Miriam has consistently gone above and beyond in fostering a collaborative and nurturing environment for Postgraduate Researchers (PGRs). Her initiatives, such as the weekly “Coffee Catch-up” sessions, have created a space where students can share their experiences, support each other, and build a sense of community. These sessions have been instrumental in benefiting not only her direct supervisees but also other students across the university.

A group photo of a team within KMi. Prof. Miriam Fernandez is front and centre holding her reward

A strong advocate for professional development, she actively facilitates PGR participation in significant events and conferences. This engagement has proven invaluable, enhancing students’ employability and broadening the dissemination of their research. Under her guidance, many students have secured prestigious grants and scholarships, paving the way for their academic and professional growth. Examples include, Joseph: Melete Scholarship, Angel and Joseph: Web Science Conference grant, Vaclav: Singapore Summer Institute, Angel and Paula: International Semantic Web Summer School, and Oxford ML Summer School.

Miriam’s leadership extends to impactful research projects, including the pioneering Early Alert Indicators dashboard. This project is significantly improving student success rates and contributing to the reduction of existing awarding gaps. By addressing the diverse needs of students and supporting interactions relevant to their modes of study, her work benefits not only doctoral students but the wider student community as well.

Her commitment to EDI is particularly noteworthy. Miriam champions initiatives that foster equality and diversity within higher education. Her students are engaged in groundbreaking research on critical societal issues such as hate speech and bias in AI systems, reflecting her dedication to making a positive societal impact. As an Athena SWAN champion, she tirelessly works to promote gender equality and support underrepresented groups within the academic community.

Miriam’s exceptional leadership, innovative approaches, and commitment to fostering an inclusive and supportive research environment make her a true asset to The Open University. We are proud to celebrate her achievements and look forward to the continued positive impact of her work on the PGR community.

Congratulations on this well-deserved recognition! Your dedication and hard work inspire us all.

People: Miri, Angel, Joseph, Vaclav, Paula

Projects: ???

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Farewell to Prof Stefan Rueger: a reflection on his legacy of pioneering in Knowledge Media

Monday 09 Sep 2024 | KMi News

This past Tuesday, KMi announced Prof. Stefan Rueger’s retirement; we all gathered to celebrate his contributions to computer science and multimedia research in a career that spanned several decades. Stefan has had a significant impact in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning and visual processing.

Stefan’s journey began with a degree in physics at the Freie Universität Berlin and a PhD in computer science at the Technische Universität Berlin, where his work on artificial neural networks laid the groundwork for his future development with a highly prestigious EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship at Imperial College London. In 2006, he joined KMi as a Professor in Knowledge Media.

Stefan’s research has had a broad impact, particularly in the field of automated multimedia understanding, with applications that range from image recognition to machine learning insights. Applied insights include multimedia mining of large datasets such as TV news archives and his work on commonly seen secondary images has opened up new ways to bridge gaps between the real and digital worlds.

(Prof. Rueger and KMiers after his valedictory lecture.)

Throughout his time at KMi, Stefan has not only been a passionate researcher but also an exceptional leader, serving as Director of Research from 2010 to 2021, spearheading two submissions to the Research Excellence Framework. In this role, he was instrumental in shaping the strategic direction of the institute’s research agenda, fostering innovation and collaboration across multidisciplinary teams nationally and internationally. In addition to his research, Stefan has been an excellent mentor; eager to support and guide researchers to climb the challenging academic ladder.

KMi Director; Harith Alani said “Stefan is a professor with a beautiful mind, vision, scientific rigour, and altruistic nature, who has significantly contributed to KMi at every level for nearly 20 years.“ Harith also said that “Stefan’s contributions to KMi, The OU and the wider world of science will certainly continue through his new Emeritus Professor status here at the OU.”

We wish you Stefan a very happy and fulfilling retirement!

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Fieldcast team wins prestigious award

Thursday 29 Aug 2024 | KMi News

The Fieldcast team, in which KMi’s Trevor Collins and Ben Hawkridge participate, won the Advance HE Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE) for their innovative use of Open University’s OpenSTEM Labs to enhance fieldwork learning for distance-learning students.

Their efforts have significantly improved student engagement and influenced fieldwork education in the UK. The team’s collaborative approach, which includes academics, technical, and pedagogical experts, has made fieldwork accessible and inclusive, benefiting thousands of students.

The award will help them further promote their methods and integrate Fieldcasts into the Open Living Lab, fostering more community involvement and environmental research.

Related links:

Vice Chancellor’s office: Fieldcast team – CATE
AdvanceHE website: Fieldcast Team
AdvanceHE website: Collaborative Awards for Teaching Excellence

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Dr. Joseph Kwarteng Inspires Final-Year Students at “Beyond the Degree Summit” on Career Transition and Innovation

Wednesday 28 Aug 2024 | KMi News

KMi’s Dr. Joseph Kwarteng recently contributed as a guest speaker at the highly anticipated “Beyond the Degree Summit,” an event organised in collaboration with the ICT Education, University of Education, Winneba (UEW), Ghana. The summit, held under the theme: “From Campus to Career: Leveraging Technology for Career Growth in the Digital Age”, was designed specifically for final-year students, focusing on equipping them with the knowledge and skills necessary to successfully transition from campus to career life in today’s digital age.

Key topics, such as career development, the role of technology in professional growth, and the importance of lifelong learning, were addressed.

Dr. Kwarteng’s virtual presentation, centred on the vast opportunities available to students through scholarships and grants, and how these financial aids can be strategically navigated to support their career aspirations. He emphasised the importance of innovation in achieving career success, highlighting how leveraging new technologies and creative problem-solving approaches can set students apart in a competitive job market.

In his address, Dr. Kwarteng also discussed the critical role of continuous learning and upskilling in the digital age. He encouraged students to remain proactive in seeking out new opportunities for professional development and to view their degree as the foundation of a lifelong journey of learning and growth.

Reflecting on the event, Dr. Kwarteng said, “The transition from campus to career is a pivotal moment for students, and it’s essential that they are equipped with the right tools and knowledge to navigate this shift. Through initiatives like the ‘Beyond the Degree Summit,’ we are able to provide valuable insights that can help shape their future careers and ensure they are prepared for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.“

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Celebrating AI at the Ghana Data Science Summit 2024: Dr. Joseph Kwarteng Explores the Future of Education with Large Language Models

Tuesday 27 Aug 2024 | KMi News

The 5th annual Ghana Data Science Summit (IndabaX Ghana), held 17-19 July 2024, at the iconic Great Hall of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, was a vibrant celebration of innovation, knowledge-sharing, and grassroots engagement. Under the theme “Unleashing the Potential of AI through Grassroots Engagement,” the event brought together data science enthusiasts, professionals, and academics from across the globe to explore the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI) in various sectors.

This year’s summit was packed with activities including insightful keynotes, interactive hands-on training sessions, thought-provoking panel discussions, inspiring poster presentations, and a hackathon. It served as a melting pot for ideas, collaborations, and networking, driving forward Ghana’s leadership in data science and AI on the continent.

KMi’s very own Dr. Joseph Kwarteng represented the institute at this year’s Ghana Data Science Summit as part of the Shifting Power project. He had the privilege of participating in a dynamic panel discussion titled “Navigating the Future: The Role of Large Language Models in Shaping Education.” The session was moderated by the renowned media personality Emmanuel Kwasi Debrah, with esteemed Dr. Francisca Adoma Acheampong as a co-panelist. The panel discussion centred on the profound impact of large language models (LLMs) on the educational landscape, delving into how these advanced AI tools are revolutionizing learning experiences by offering personalised educational content, enhancing students’ access to information, and equipping them for a technology-driven world.

The panel also touched upon the potential challenges posed by the growing dependence on LLMs. The conversation highlighted concerns regarding the risk of diminishing students’ creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills if these technologies are not integrated thoughtfully into educational practices. The panel underscored the importance of balancing technological advancement with the cultivation of essential human skills to ensure a holistic approach to education in the AI era.

Dr Kwarteng said; “The Ghana Data Science Summit 2024 was a testament to the power of community-driven initiatives in advancing AI and data science in Africa. The event not only showcased cutting-edge research and applications but also emphasised the importance of grassroots engagement in driving sustainable and inclusive growth in the field. It was truly an inspiring experience to be part of this landmark event and to contribute to the conversations shaping the future of AI and education.”

For more information about the event, visit IndabaX Ghana.

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KMi’s AI Module Writing Assistant shortlisted for best paper award

Monday 05 Aug 2024 | KMi News

KMi’s Senior Research Fellow Alexander Mikroyannidis has presented a paper at the 24^th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT). This flagship educational technology conference is organised annually by the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Technical Community on Learning Technology. ICALT brings together people who are working on the design, development, use, and evaluation of technologies that will be the foundation of the next generation of e-learning systems and technology-enhanced learning environments.

Alexander presented a paper about the use of Generative AI and ChatGPT for improving the production of distance learning materials. The paper introduced KMi’s AI Module Writing Assistant (AIMWA), which can instantly generate introductions and summaries of course material, automatically generate quizzes and tests, as well as automatically identify, categorise, and transform learning activities. An evaluation performed with OU course production teams indicated that in 40% of cases AI generated text of 250-500 words is suitable for use in distance learning materials. Overall, the evaluation participants welcomed this use of Generative AI, but expressed concerns mainly centred on potential for bias, misinformation, and copyright infringement in the generated learning materials.

The novelty and potential of this work was recognised by the conference committee, which shortlisted this paper for the best full paper award. The accepted version of the paper is available to download from ORO: Using Generative AI and ChatGPT for improving the production of distance learning materials.

Riots, misinformation, and social media

Sunday 04 Aug 2024 | KMi News

KMi’s Director; Prof Harith Alani, was interviewed by The National newspaper who sought his views on the role of misinformation in fueling the recent riots across the UK. Harith and his team in KMi have been researching misinformation for many years, focusing on the patterns in which misinformation and their fact-check spread online.

Misinformation played a critical role in the spread of violence following the fatal incident. Harith criticised social media platforms for not doing enough to curb the spread of misinformation and far-right rhetoric. Harith argued that social media platforms can introduce more proactive AI methods for the detection of potential fake news before they are published by users, and to restrict the visibility of users who regularly promote false information and spread hatred. KMi is one of the leading labs in developing advanced technologies for detecting fake news and hate speech.

Harith warns that our current challenges in curbing online disinformation will worsen as AI-generated content becomes more advanced and harder to detect. Harith said that “with generative AI, the next wave of misinformation is going to be far more powerful in terms of convincing populations of false claims. Platforms, governments and society really need to get ready for that”.

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Harmonizing Musical Heritage: The Polifonia Project’s Innovative Approach

Tuesday 23 Jul 2024 | KMi News

The Polifonia project has recently joined forces with the EuropeanaTech community and the Europeana PRO platform to further the digital harmonization of musical heritage knowledge.

Through this partnership, a webinar took place featuring KMi’s Alba Morales Tirado, who discussed the MEETUPS pilot, and touched upon the critical infrastructure aspects, including the Ecosystem and Data Management.

The insights shared during the webinar highlight Polifonia’s mission to create a cohesive digital environment that preserves and enhances access to Europe’s rich musical heritage.

You can watch the full webinar here and read more about our journey on the Europeana PRO platform’s blog here.

Related links: Paper on MEETUPS in ORO repository.

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New EDI Learning Analytics Dashboard Paves the Way for Greater Inclusivity in Higher Education

Tuesday 16 Jul 2024 | KMi News

In a groundbreaking study published in the prestigious British Journal of Educational Technologies, KMi researchers have introduced a cutting-edge Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Learning Analytics (LA) dashboard designed to tackle awarding gaps in higher education. This innovative tool, co-created with diverse educational stakeholders, aims to transform how institutions across the UK, including the Open University, identify and address educational disparities among traditionally underrepresented groups.

Educational outcomes for students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds have consistently lagged behind their more advantaged peers, a disparity known as the awarding gap. Unlike the term “attainment gap,” which suggests a student-centered deficiency, “awarding gap” acknowledges the broader systemic issues at play. Addressing this complex, multi-dimensional problem requires more than individual effort; it demands institutional and systemic intervention.

The new EDI LA dashboard responds to this challenge by providing fine-grained insights and course-level analysis. Traditional LA dashboards have often been criticised for their lack of stakeholder involvement and insufficient support for institutional EDI leads and educators. This pioneering dashboard overcomes these limitations by being co-designed with stakeholders, ensuring it meets the practical needs of those who use it.

The introduction of this EDI LA dashboard has profound implications for practice and policy within higher education. The insights from this study provide a roadmap for practitioners, designers, and developers aiming to create AI-based educational systems targeting awarding gaps. By offering detailed and actionable insights, the dashboard empowers institutions to implement more effective strategies to close awarding gaps. Additionally, the tool enhances the ability of EDI leads to pinpoint and address disparities, promoting a more inclusive educational environment.

For the Open University and other UK institutions, this dashboard represents a significant step forward in the ongoing effort to promote equality, diversity, and inclusion. The ability to analyse awarding gaps at a granular level allows for targeted interventions, ensuring that all students, regardless of their background, have the opportunity to succeed. This research not only advances the field of Learning Analytics but also provides a crucial resource in the fight against systemic educational disparities.

Fostering Synergies: C&C and KMi research & innovation event

Tuesday 16 Jul 2024 | KMi News

C&C (The School of Computing and Communication) and KMi arranged a research festival designed to celebrate the research and innovations in these two units with the STEM Faculty, here at The Open University. The event showcased a taster of their latest research highlights and innovations. This face-to-face event provided a platform for networking and knowledge sharing, aiming to foster future collaborations, external bidding potential and to celebrate their research!

The event was divided into two main parts; a series of lightning talks from KMi and C&C researchers and; a research showcase of 18 stands highlighting a taster of what both subunits are working on.

The lightning talks began with a warm welcome from the KMi Director, Harith Alani and John Woodthorpe, the Head of School for C&C. They set the tone for a morning filled with inspiring talks from some of our leading researchers highlighting new research funding, live research grants and an insight into the scope of some research groups.

The research showcase opened at noon, following the talks segment. This soon became a vibrant, busy session as researchers and academics from both units and from throughout the university started engaging with the 18 stands which were available to interact with.

The stands were presenting research from a variety of groups ranging from OU Analyse, Collective Intelligence & Deliberation Technologies, Learning with Haptics, Responsible AI & Social Justice, Animal Computer Interaction, Resilient Autonomous Systems, Scholarly Knowledge, Digital Health Lab, Gratitude Tree, CORE , Opening up minds, Generative AI & Education, and the Polifonia Project.

Stay tuned for more updates on our collaborative projects and upcoming events!

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Shifting Power Group Successfully Hosts The Second Workshop on Ecology of AI at HHAI 2024 Conference

Monday 15 Jul 2024 | KMi News

KMi’s research group Shifting Power participated in the International Conference Series on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence (HHAI) 2024, held from June 10th to 14th in Malmö, Sweden with a workshop event.

This 2nd Ecology of AI (EcAI) 2024 workshop aimed to extend the dialogue from last year’s successful event, further exploring the extensive impacts of AI technologies. Again this year, , the workshop sought to illuminate the broader ecosystems and global structures involved in AI implementation and its influence on world systems, which was motivated by the acknowledgment that “ethical” or “responsible” AI and “AI for Social Good” are often framed through global powerhouse lenses.

Led by Dr. Retno Larasati, together with Dr. Tracie Farrell and Dr. Venetia Brown from the Shifting Power group and supported by Dr. Soraya Kouadri Mostefaoui and Dr. Syed Mustafa Ali from the School of Computing and Communication, the team organised this workshop with the aim to focus on reflection and critical analysis of AI’s impacts and implications. The workshop aimed to facilitate discussions on emerging questions about AI’s societal and environmental impacts, considering current socio-political and economic realities.

The workshop featured keynote presentations from distinguished experts in their fields. Dr. Theodora Dryer delivered an engaging talk titled “Water is Not Data and Water Rights are Not an Algorithm,” examining the complexities of water justice in the context of AI. Her talk confronted water innovation and water law, and highlighted the historical legacies of colonial and apartheid water control, emphasising the dual processes of abstraction and extraction facilitated by AI innovations in water management.

Dr. Dan McQuillan followed with his talk on “Resisting AI,” providing a critical perspective on the necessity of resistance against certain AI applications with their societal and ecological consequences. His talk delved into the link between AI technological advancement to the contemporary political and social currents such as global austerity and the rise of the far right.

Still on the same ecological impact thread, the next presentation was given by Dr. Joanna Boehnert and Alistair Alexander on “The Ecological AI in Fictions and Futures.” Their insights into the narrative and ecological aspects of AI added a valuable dimension to the workshop.

The workshop saw the participation of 42 people in total, both online and on-site, underscoring the significant interest and engagement in these critical topics. The workshop’s format allowed for a group discussion, in which all participants engaged in the reflection exercise on what questions should AI researchers and developers be asking themselves if they want to consider the larger global structures that impact and will be impacted by their work.

The EcAI 2024 workshop’s success underscores the importance of initiatives that provide a platform for researchers to broaden their perspectives on AI. By facilitating discussions that challenge prevailing narratives and highlight not only the good but also the bad of AI technologies, the Shifting Power group continues to contribute significantly to the ongoing discourse on AI’s role in society.

For more information about the workshop and to access recordings, please visit the Shifting Power website.

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Exploring AI, Ethics, and Law: Insights from the OU Artificial Intelligence Event

Friday 12 Jul 2024 | KMi News

The OU’s newly created AI Steering Group recently ran its first official event titled “AI, Ethics and Law – your questions answered” which was very successful with 315 attendees and 200 questions submitted. The event had three main parts and was supported by two KMi staff.

Introduction – What is AI and Why It’s a Big Deal

The event kicked off and was hosted by John Domingue who is the Community Engagement lead on the AI Steering Group. In the introduction he gave a brief overview of what AI is, how it is ubiquitous today, the underlying machinery, and gave some examples of how it is being explored across the OU. John emphasized the rapid advancements in AI technology and its profound implications for society, from enhancing productivity to raising new ethical and legal challenges.

The AI Steering Group and How You Can Engage with Their Work

David Hayes, Chief Data Officer and Chair of the AI Steering Group, followed with an overview of the AI Steering Group’s mission and activities. Hayes discussed the group’s role in guiding AI research and implementation at the OU, ensuring that AI development aligns with ethical standards and regulatory requirements. He also encouraged attendees to engage with the steering group’s work, highlighting opportunities for collaboration and input from the wider community.

AI, Ethics, and Law: Panel Presentation and Conversation

The core of the event was a panel presentation and conversation featuring distinguished experts who delved into the regulatory and ethical considerations surrounding AI and was comprised of the following OU staff:

– Rebecca Ward, Data Protection Officer

– Chris Wigglesworth, Chief Information Security Officer

– Guy Lavender, Head of Intellectual Property

– Tracie Farrell, Research Fellow in KMi

Tracie was invited onto the panel because she leads the prestigious UK Future Leaders Project Shifting Power which investigates AI and ethics.

Closing Remarks

The event concluded with closing remarks from John Domingue, who reiterated the importance of ongoing dialogue and collaboration in addressing the ethical and legal challenges posed by AI.

The event underscored the critical need for interdisciplinary discussions as this radically transformative technology continues to evolve. By bringing together experts in data protection, information security, intellectual property, and ethics, the OU provided a platform for addressing the multifaceted challenges of AI. As AI technology advances, such conversations will be essential in shaping a future where AI is developed and deployed responsibly and ethically at the OU and beyond.

Related links:

AI Steering Group Intranet page
Tracie Farrell’s UKRI Future Leaders project on AI and Justice
OU’s externally facing Generative AI page

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KMi’s Polifonia project Completes Successfully: Unlocking Europe’s Musical Heritage

Thursday 11 Jul 2024 | KMi News

After four years of diligent work, the Polifonia project team, including 10 partners from Italy, the Netherlands, France, England, and Ireland, is proud to unveil the Polifonia Ecosystem, which publishes the complete collection of software and data outputs of the project.

The Polifonia project, led by the University of Bologna (Italy), established Knowledge Graphs as an essential cornerstone for cultural heritage preservation and engagement.

The project yielded an extensive suite of open-source software, datasets, and ontologies. These components, collectively known as the Polifonia Ecosystem, are now available on GitHub, enabling the community to build upon and integrate these tools into their own research and applications.

The Polifonia outputs are designed in close connection with domain experts, musicologists, historians, and the industry, with the objective of supporting serendipitous discoveries, and harmonizing information from various sources to uncover hidden connections within the musical landscape.

Technical coordination was led by Enrico Daga, who also served as the Principal Investigator for the OU. A key aspect of the project was the use of SPARQL Anything for data integration, enhancing the ability to link and access diverse music datasets seamlessly.

The Musical Meetups Knowledge Graph (MMKG), detailed in an ESWC resource paper by Alba Morales, provides a sophisticated tool for historical social network analysis, shedding light on the interconnectedness of musical communities.

Collaboration played a crucial role throughout the project. The work involved contributions from the University of Bologna, the University of Galway, and King’s College London, and utilized numerous datasets including the Listening Experience Database (LED), musoW, the Musical Meetups Knowledge Graph (MMKG), as well as general purpose sources such as Wikidata. The collaboration extended to academics of the FASS Music Department, Helen Barlow, Naomi Barker, and Trevor Herbert, where the Polifonia outputs are explored for novel scholarship as well as for enriching educational experiences.

The Polifonia project also encompassed significant research and development efforts.

Paul Mulholland coordinated the Human-Computer Interaction work package, focusing on multi-modal experiences that mix art and music. His research on Deep Listening aims to create immersive experiences that engage multiple senses. Additionally, workshops with the C&C Music Computing Lab, led by Simon Holland and assisted by Nicholas Canny, explored the use of haptic devices to make music more accessible to hearing-impaired audiences.

The Polifonia Web Portal marks a significant milestone in the accessibility and exploration of Europe’s musical heritage, providing a powerful tool for researchers and enthusiasts alike.

It demonstrates knowledge graphs’ potential to revolutionize the discoverability of Europe’s rich musical heritage, enabling the development of a central hub for music historical data, melodic patterns, chord libraries, and more. Users, ranging from casual enthusiasts to expert musicologists, can now perform comprehensive research across multiple sources with ease.

Polifonia researchers have also made notable academic contributions, publishing papers addressing Semantic Web challenges and issues within Music Information Retrieval. Their work was recognized with the Best Research Paper Award at the Extended Semantic Web Conference 2023 and published in the Scientific Data journal, part of the Nature Portfolio. All research outputs are accessible via Zenodo.

Related links:

Barclay’s Eagle Lab offers support to two KMiers to build their digital product

Tuesday 25 Jun 2024 | KMi News

Vaclav Bayer and Riccardo Pala have been chosen for the Product Builder Programme, powered by Barclays Eagle Labs and funded by the UK Government. This initiative, delivered by Plexal, provides a unique opportunity to design a digital product, test it with users, validate the idea with industry experts, and prepare it for market launch. This recognition underscores their innovative vision and commitment to advancing digital solutions.

Their participation in this program will not only enhance their professional development but also align with The Open University’s commitment to cutting-edge research and innovation. We look forward to witnessing their journey and the impactful results of their work and wish them the best of luck!

Alexander Mikroyannidis presents SAGE-RAI at the 2024 Intelligent Tutoring Systems conference

Monday 17 Jun 2024 | KMi News

KMi’s Senior Research Fellow Alexander Mikroyannidis has given a presentation at the 20th international conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS2024). This renowned event addresses a wide range of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) topics, including Computer and Cognitive Sciences, Artificial Intelligence, as well as Deep Learning in Tutoring and Education. ITS is evolving to a new concept of Artificial Intelligence, which can be found in various disciplines and can serve human education and well-being. This new concept is named: Generative Intelligence. Generative Intelligence concerns various AI systems, techniques, architectures, methods, or tools based on deep and machine learning which can be used to generate texts, images, solutions, and environments, able to enhance human intelligence, cognitive capacities, memory, and learning. Instead of trying to reproduce human behaviour or recognise human traits using artificial intelligence techniques or learning analytics, Generative Intelligence provides means to increase human cognitive potential.

Alexander presented a paper about the ongoing UKRI funded project SAGE-RAI, which aims to responsibly deploy Generative AI for smart assessment and guided education. Inspired by Bloom’s seminal work on the efficacy of personalised learning, the SAGE-RAI project aims to leverage responsible Generative AI towards transforming teaching and learning practices for improved student outcomes. By exploring the integration of Generative AI into tutoring processes, we seek to provide scalable, personalised learning experiences for large cohorts of students. Our research focuses on harnessing Generative AI to offer tailored educational content and generate constructive feedback for students. By applying responsible AI practices, we aim to mitigate issues such as misinformation, copyright infringement, and bias.

Empowering Innovation: Highlights from GenAI & Amazon Bedrock Immersion Day at KMi

Thursday 13 Jun 2024 | KMi News

On June 11th, KMi hosted the highly anticipated GenAI & Amazon Bedrock Immersion Day, a comprehensive, one-day event dedicated to exploring the transformative capabilities of Generative AI (GenAI) and Amazon Bedrock. With 18 attendees joining us in person and 2 participating virtually, the event was a remarkable success, offering a blend of hands-on learning, expert insights, and valuable networking opportunities.

The event was designed to provide a deep dive into GenAI technologies through a series of hands-on labs and interactive sessions. Attendees had the opportunity to engage in practical labs, applying GenAI across various domains, including question answering, image generation, code development, and entity extraction. Labs encompassed both generative-only models and those employing Retrieval Augmented Generation methodologies. These sessions were crafted to empower participants with the skills and knowledge needed to leverage GenAI effectively in their projects and organizations.

Senior Solution Architects from Amazon Web Services led insightful discussions, sharing their knowledge on implementing GenAI solutions. Their expertise provided attendees with practical strategies and techniques for integrating GenAI into their business processes, enhancing product offerings, and optimizing operations.

The GenAI & Amazon Bedrock Immersion Day provided attendees with a gateway to unlocking the potential of Generative AI. Whether the goal is to acquire deeper expertise, or explore new research avenues, the insights and practical experience gained from this event are invaluable.

Thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to the success of GenAI & Amazon Bedrock Immersion Day. We look forward to seeing how you leverage the power of GenAI to revolutionize problem-solving within your research.

Stay tuned for future events and continue to push the boundaries of innovation with GenAI!

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KMi Researchers Make Significant Contributions at ESWC 2024 Conference

Wednesday 12 Jun 2024 | KMi News

Doctors Enrico Daga, Francesco Osborne, Angelo Salatino, Prof John Domingue and PhD student Marco Ratta recently attended the 2024 edition of the Extended Semantic Web Conference, where they showcased their significant contributions to the field through various research papers and workshops as well as contributing to the leadership of the entire ESWC Community. Although Prof. Motta was unable to attend the conference, he had a contribution as well.

ESWC is a premier international conference focusing on semantic web technologies, artificial intelligence, and knowledge graphs. With a mission to connect researchers, practitioners, and industry leaders, ESWC provides a platform for sharing groundbreaking advancements, fostering collaboration, and stimulating innovation in the field of linked data and semantic technologies. The 2024 edition, themed “Fabrics of Knowledge: Knowledge Graphs and Generative AI,” specifically highlighted the growing significance of knowledge graphs and their convergence with Generative AI (GenAI). This emphasis reflects the increasing importance of structured knowledge representation and its application in driving intelligent systems and applications. ESWC 2024 showcased the latest research in areas such as knowledge graph construction, natural language processing, machine learning, and reasoning, with a particular focus on how these technologies intersect with GenAI to create more intelligent and context-aware applications.

Main conference

At the main conference, Doctors Salatino and Osborne presented a research paper in the main track titled “Large Language Models for Scientific Question Answering: an Extensive Analysis of the SciQA Benchmark.” This paper explores the effectiveness of large language models in answering scientific questions, offering a comprehensive analysis of the SciQA benchmark.

Dr. Daga presented a resource paper titled “Musical Meetups Knowledge Graph (MMKG): A Collection of Evidence for Historical Social Network Analysis“, a flagship output of the EU project Polifonia. Although the primary author, Alba Morales Tirado, could not attend due to visa issues, Dr. Daga effectively represented the team’s work. This paper provides a valuable resource for analyzing historical social networks through the lens of musical meetups, offering insights into the cultural and social dynamics of the past.

Satellite events

In addition to his main track, KMi was extensively involved in satellite events.

Dr. Salatino was involved in two impactful workshop papers:

– Investigating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Discussions in News: A Knowledge Graph Analysis Empowered by AI: This paper delves into how AI and knowledge graph analysis can be used to investigate ESG discussions in news media.

– Leveraging Language Models for Generating Ontologies of Research Topics: This research focuses on how language models can be utilized to generate ontologies for various research topics, providing valuable insights into the organization and categorization of research areas.

Dr. Osborne made additional significant contributions to the ESWC conference.

He co-organized two influential workshops:

– 3rd International Workshop on Knowledge Graph Generation from Text (Text2KG): This workshop focused on the latest advancements in generating knowledge graphs from textual data.

– 2nd International Workshop on Semantic Technologies and Deep Learning Models for Scientific, Technical and Legal Data (SemTech4STLD): This event explored the intersection of semantic technologies and deep learning models, particularly in the context of scientific, technical, and legal data.

Dr. Osborne also delivered a keynote speech at the Natural Scientific Language Processing and Research Knowledge Graphs (NSLP 2024), where he shared his insights and expertise on the integration of natural language processing and knowledge graphs in scientific research.

Furthermore, Dr. Osborne was involved in two additional papers:

– Automating Citation Placement with Natural Language Processing and Transformers: This paper discusses the use of NLP and transformer models to automate the placement of citations in academic writing.

– Knowledge Graphs for Digital Transformation Monitoring in Social Media: This research examines how knowledge graphs can be leveraged to monitor digital transformation trends on social media platforms.

Marco Ratta presented his work on “AI Supported Knowledge Graph Design & Generation” at the PhD Symposium. This presentation focused on leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance the design and generation of knowledge graphs, which are essential for organizing and connecting information in meaningful ways.

Dr. Daga was actively involved in several aspects of the conference:

– SemTech4STLD Workshop: Dr. Daga presented a paper titled “Extracting Licence Information from Web Resources with a Large Language Model“. This research explores how large language models can be used to extract and manage license information from various web resources, highlighting the potential for AI to simplify legal and technical data management.

– SemDH Workshop Panel: Dr. Daga was also invited as a panel member at the “First International Workshop of Semantic Digital Humanities (SemDH)”. This workshop focused on the application of semantic technologies in the digital humanities, discussing the latest trends and challenges in the field.

Both Dr. Daga and Marco Ratta presented the “PySPARQL Anything Showcase“, a demo that garnered significant attention at the conference. This innovative tool extends SPARQL, a query language for databases, enabling more versatile data querying capabilities. The demo’s success was highlighted in a LinkedIn post by Dr. Daga, capturing the interest and excitement of the ESWC community. You can check out the LinkedIn post for more details.

Prof. Motta, organized a workshop titled “Actionable Knowledge Representation and Reasoning for Robots (AKR³).” The workshop focused on how robots can be endowed with common sense reasoning to better navigate and perform tasks in dynamic home environments.

Vision and Leadership

A new ESWC Steering Committee was setup during the conference which Prof Domingue will Chair. The Steering Committee Vice Chairs are: Prof. Dr. Dieter Fensel of the University of Innsbruck, Dr. Valentina Presutti Associate Professor at the University of Bologna, Prof. Dr. Harald Sack Vice President Information Service Engineering at FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure and Professor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Prof. Dr. Rudi Studer former President of the Semantic Web Association, and Dr. Raphael Troncy, Associate Professor at Eurocom. The ESWC Steering Committee will handle all matters related to the scientific future ESWC including the selection of the Conference Chair.

Next year, ESWC will take place in Portorož (Slovenia) and we look forward to contributing to another brilliant edition.

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KMi’s Prof. Fernandez insightful presentation at WEBSCI’24: Tackling Misinformation Spread through Recommendation Algorithms

Monday 10 Jun 2024 | KMi News

Prof. Miriam Fernandez recently attended the prestigious WEBSCI’24, the 16th ACM Web Science Conference, where she presented her latest research paper titled “Analysing the Effect of Recommendation Algorithms on the Spread of Misinformation.”

In the digital age, recommendation algorithms play a crucial role in shaping the information we see online. These algorithms are designed to suggest content that aligns with our interests, but they are often blamed for spreading misinformation. It is however still unclear which particular recommendation approaches are more prone to suggest misinforming items, or which internal parameters of the algorithms could be influencing more on their misinformation propagation capacity.

Prof.Fernandez research aims to fill these knowledge gaps by analysing how some of the most popular recommendation algorithms affect the spread of misinformation. Her work delves into the mechanics of these algorithms to identify which approaches are more prone to spreading false information and what internal parameters might influence their behaviour.

Based on her analysis and a comprehensive review of existing research, Prof. Fernandez presented a set of guidelines to help improve recommendation algorithms. These guidelines are designed to reduce the spread of misinformation by adjusting the algorithms to be more discerning in their content suggestions.

The conference, organised this year by the University of Stuttgart is a significant event that brings together experts from various fields to discuss how the web influences and is influenced by society, technology, and culture.

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Access publication in Open Research Online: Analysing the Effect of Recommendation Algorithms on the Spread of Misinformation.

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Who/What/When is After AI?

Wednesday 22 May 2024 | KMi News

On Friday May 17th, the Shifting Power team in KMi, alongside Dr. Justin Hunt from Queen Mary University and Arts Council England, and Dr. Ben Sweeting from the Radical Research Methodologies group at the University of Brighton, held an online post-disciplinary symposium on artificial intelligence. The “After AI?” Symposium used the concept of “after” as an index of both time and an object of inquiry – something that may come about following another event and something we are chasing. The symposium tackled topics such as: How might we imagine our futures within and without AI (as it is coming to be known, or will be known)? Will the dreams and nightmares all come to pass? What can we recognise right now and from the past that makes this future happen?

The idea of making this event post-disciplinary was a response to the apparent silos in which thinking about the impacts of artificial intelligence takes place, the lack of representation for some stakeholders within the scientific literature, and the general need for a broader set of techniques and methodologies for answering key questions around artificial intelligence.

Panel sessions attracted over 100 attendees throughout the day. Speakers explored concepts of play in connection to what AI might do now and in the future, in the context of the ecological costs that make the possibility of a future sustainable AI less likely (or even improbable) without serious intervention. They surfaced the political, economic and social entanglements of AI, particularly around dystopian or apocalyptic visions and how this connects to other concepts of colonialism, race and class. Others drew connections with the past, ancestral knowledge and activity, and how this may intervene or connect with understandings of ‘progress’. Finally, speakers explored impacts on and through different “cultures” and the cultural artefact of AI, as it looks now and how it might look in the future.

This After AI? symposium demonstrated the knowledge exchange and synergies that can emerge from a post-disciplinary exploration of AI, connecting artists, researchers and activists to consider its far-reaching influence and the need for thoughtful imagined futures.

The full symposium program can be found online here. Recordings will also be made available on the symposium website and on the Shifting Power website.

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KMi celebrated Mental Health Awareness week!

Tuesday 21 May 2024 | KMi News

Mental health and wellbeing are vital aspects of our lives that often get overlooked in the hustle and bustle of our daily routines. During Mental Health Awareness Week, it’s an opportunity for us to reflect on the importance of taking care of our mental health and to explore the various ways we can maintain and improve our wellbeing. At KMi, we asked staff how they manage their mental health, and their responses were both inspiring and insightful.

Creativity emerged as a powerful outlet for many. One staff member shared, “I like to draw,” while another mentioned, “my way to cope is art, mermaids more recently.” Engaging in creative activities allows us to express our emotions, reduce stress, and find joy in the process of making something new.

Physical activity is another common and effective way to enhance mental wellbeing. One colleague finds solace in nature: “I go for a run. The best way to free up my mind from all the noise, running.” Another enjoys the calming presence of their pet: “I go to the beach with my dog and watch her enjoy wallowing in the sand.” Whether it’s running, dancing, or spending time outdoors, movement helps to clear the mind and boost our mood.

Support networks and professional help play crucial roles in maintaining mental health. One of our team members highlighted the importance of relationships: “I support others and surround myself with people who support me.” Another has found long-term benefit in therapy: “I have been doing psychotherapy for over a decade now.” These responses remind us that we don’t have to face our struggles alone—seeking support from loved ones or professionals can make a significant difference.

Spirituality also provides comfort and strength for some. One person shared, “I have struggled with mental health issues for a few years, I find solace only through spirituality. Reciting and listening to the Quran works best for me.” Spiritual practices can offer a sense of peace and a way to connect with something greater than ourselves.

Other methods of self-care mentioned by our staff include enjoying a healthy treat after exercise: “Exercise for half an hour and then treat myself to an ice-cold banana and turmeric smoothie,” and immersing in nature while gardening: “Do some gardening when the sun is out, with headphones on, for hours.” These activities highlight the importance of rewarding ourselves and spending time in environments that rejuvenate us.

Mental Health Awareness Week serves as a crucial reminder to prioritize our mental health and wellbeing. However, it’s important to remember that taking care of ourselves is a year-round endeavor. By integrating these practices into our daily lives, we can foster a more balanced, healthy, and fulfilling life.

Let’s continue to support each other, seek help when needed, and find joy in the activities that nurture our minds and souls. Together, we can create a community where mental health is always a priority.

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mental health awareness week

KMi welcomes Vice Chancellor to sample our world-leading Research and Innovations

Thursday 16 May 2024 | KMi News

This past Wednesday The Open University’s Vice Chancellor (VC), Prof Tim Blackman, visited KMi marking a significant moment of recognition for the groundbreaking work being conducted by our dedicated researchers. The Vice Chancellor was shown many demos, posters and presentations on current projects, highlighting innovative advancements across various fields and success in external funding. From cutting-edge developments in artificial intelligence to pioneering projects in smart cities and citizen science, the visit underscored the institute’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of knowledge and contributing meaningful solutions to Higher Education and various global challenges.

During the visit, the VC engaged with KMi’s staff, researchers and post-doctoral students, creating an atmosphere of collaboration and inspiration. The open discussions provided valuable insights into the future direction of our research and innovation initiatives and reinforced the university’s support for fostering an environment where academic excellence thrives. The VC’s positive feedback and encouragement were well-received, reaffirming the institute’s role as a cornerstone of the university’s research endeavours and its impact on both the academic community and broader society.

To continue this momentum, we are excited to announce a joint research showcase that will take place on the 2nd of July 2024. KMi and C&C (School of Computing and Communications) will be organising a face-to-face event that will allow both units to showcase their research and innovations, providing a valuable opportunity for networking and knowledge sharing. Come join us to foster future synergies and enhance our potential for collaborative research.

VC being updated from the Collective Intelligence team.

VC with the CORE team, on the latest developments in Open Science.

VC hears about the latest developments in Smart Cities.

VC is informed about the OUAnalyse developments.

VC learns about the most recent updates at the Shifting Power project.

VC being updated on the Digital Assistant and AI.

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Adaptive Education – Harnessing AI for Academic Progress

Tuesday 14 May 2024 | KMi News

KMi’s Senior Research Fellow Alexander Mikroyannidis has given a presentation at the workshop organised by Ulster University: Adaptive Education – Harnessing AI for Academic Progress. This workshop was dedicated to exploring the innovative and transformative role of Generative AI in education. This event has served as an international platform for sharing insights, research, and practical use cases of AI-driven future-leaning approaches in teaching practices.

Alexander presented the latest KMi research initiatives on the use of Generative AI for teaching and learning. In particular, Alexander shared results from ongoing work within the Open University, aiming to investigate the use of Generative AI for improving the production of learning materials and for providing students with personal digital assistants. Additionally, Alexander presented the new UKRI funded project SAGE-RAI, which aims to responsibly deploy Generative AI for smart assessment and guided education.

Watch the recording of this presentation

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KMi researchers recognised as top scientists in Computer Science

Monday 29 Apr 2024 | KMi News

According to the recently published Research.com ranking, Professors Enrico Motta, John Domingue, and Harith Alani from KMi have been acknowledged as top scientists in Computer Science at the OU, occupying three of the top four positions in the ranking. In fact, according to the OU’s Open Research Online, Prof Motta is the top-cited professor in STEM of all time.

In addition to KMi, the Research.com top list of Computer Science researchers at the OU also includes two researchers from the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) and another two from Computing & Communications (C&C).

Research.com utilises open citation data to calculate the h-index for each researcher, considering publication and citation metrics. This is further refined with a discipline-specific D-index, focusing solely on publications within the researcher’s field. This approach facilitates the ranking of leading scientists within each field, where the recognition is predicated on meeting a particular D-index threshold, which varies based on the discipline.

Related links: Open University – Computer Science Ranking

KMi’s Generative AI mini-Scotland Tour

Tuesday 16 Apr 2024 | KMi News

KMi’s John Domingue and Aisling Third have just completed a mini tour of Scotland, arranged in conjunction with OU in Scotland, which was a great success. Specifically, they gave two presentations on “Generative AI: Hopes and fears”, in Dumfries (at Easterbrook Hall) and in Edinburgh (at The Royal Society of Edinburgh).

The Dumfries event was a collaboration with the South of Scotland Enterprise (SOSE) a development agency for businesses and enterprising communities throughout Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders. Michael Gardiner, Digital Development Specialist for SOSE outlined how AI could greatly enhance local business if challenges associated with a lack of awareness and skills could be addressed.

The Edinburgh talk, similarly, was a collaboration with the Scottish Artificial Intelligence Alliance, a partnership between The Data Lab and the Scottish Government, led by a Minister-appointed Chair and tasked with the delivery of Scotland’s AI Strategy. Gordon Johnstone, Communications Manager at the Scottish AI Alliance outlined how openness, transparency, ethics and community engagement were a key part of Scotland’s AI strategy.

John and Aisling provided an overview of AI’s evolution, from its origins to its contemporary applications in areas such as automotive technology, social media, and mapping services. They delved into topics such as knowledge representation and the fundamentals of ChatGPT, with a particular emphasis on neural networks. They additionally showcased examples like the OU’s AI Digital Assistant for student support and AI applications in image and video generation. Furthermore, they explored both the optimistic and pessimistic aspects of AI, engaging in discussions surrounding ethics, copyright issues, legal considerations, and potential misuse.

Both events drew significant attendance, fostering lively discussions around hopes and fears, the rights of artists and the implications for the future of humanity. Predicting the future of species-level shifts based on technology is never easy but it is clear to us that engaging with the broader public is key to ensuring that the enormous potential benefits that AI will generate allow all to prosper fully.

(Photography by Ronnie Galloway.)

(Photography by Ryan Hughes.)

Related links:
Transforming Education with Artificial Intelligence

Generative AI: Hopes and Fears – Dumfries
Generative AI: Hopes and Fears – Edinburgh

Generative AI website
SAGE-RAI website

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AI for the Research Ecosystem workshop #AI4RE

Wednesday 27 Mar 2024 | KMi News

On March 22, 2024, the AI for the Research Ecosystem workshop (#AI4RE) took place in London, kindly hosted by UCL in the wonderful surroundings of Chandler House. The workshop was part of the Turing Institue’s AI UK Fringe series of events which took place around the U.K. The workshop focused on the intersection of the recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, such as Large Language Models and Deep Learning, and how these developments will impact current research practices.

The packed programme opened with a keynote by Prof. David De Roure of the University of Oxford, exploring knowledge infrastructures, social machines and how, and if, we can measure the rate of innovation – and whether it is increasing.

There were two sessions of invited talks featuring a range of impressive speakers from academia and industry. Dr Phil Gooch, from Scholarcy, looked at how AI can help make research more accessible for the widest range of users. Professor Mike Thelwall, University of Sheffield, examined whether using AI in research assessment can be beneficial, and impartial. Simon Porter, VP futures at Digital Science, gave a service provider’s perspective on how they are adapting and adopting these new technologies. Professor Andrew French, University of Nottingham, showed some amazing work their group have been doing for over 20 years using machine learning for identifying the phenotype of plants. He also introduced AIBIO-UK, a community-building project that brings together AI and core bioscience researchers to unravel biological fundamentals and tackle impeding societal challenges.

KMi were represented by Professor Petr Knoth discussing CORE and why AI needs open data and open infrastructures, and by Dr Angelo Salatino who gave a detailed overview of his team’s work investigating the role of AI in literature reviews, hypothesis generation, expert diversity and scientific question / answering.

The workshop’s themes address highly relevant issues, attracting significant interest from stakeholders like the European Commission and UK Research and Innovation. Ben Steyn, head of metascience at the Department for Science Innovation and Technology (DSIT) gave an impromptu lightning talk, introducing the combined DSIT / UKRI Metascience unit and presented their efforts in developing a global community of practice for metascience.

There was also a poster session, with 6 accepted posters gathering a crowd during the networking session, and the day rounded off with a wide-ranging panel session where the panellists had a lively discussion on AI’s applications in study design, literature reviews, and data analysis. The panel also covered ethical considerations and the democratisation of AI technologies.

The workshop aimed to foster a collaborative learning community among researchers, institutions, and policymakers and by this measure was a resounding success.

We are extremely grateful to all of the speakers and participants for being a part of the AI4RE workshop. You can view all of the slides and posters from the day on the AI4RE website

KMi congratulates Dr. Joseph Kwarteng for successfully defending his doctoral thesis

Wednesday 27 Mar 2024 | KMi News

On 19th March 2024, Dr. Joseph Kwarteng successfully defended his doctoral thesis, “Understanding Misogynoir: Challenges in Identifying Intersectional Hate”.

His PhD focuses on the phenomenon of “Misogynoir,” an intersectional hate speech, highlighting the combined racial and gender-based prejudices specifically targeting Black women and girls. It explores the challenges in identifying and understanding Misogynoir within digital spaces, employing a comprehensive study that converges both qualitative and quantitative analyses. The research emphasises the nuanced and context-dependent nature of Misogynoir, evaluating the effectiveness of current automated hate speech detection tools and the impact of annotator identities on interpreting such hate speech. Through detailed analysis and evaluation, the thesis aims to advance our understanding and knowledge of intersectionality in hate speech and also advocates for the creation of more sophisticated, context-sensitive tools for detecting intersectional hate speech, thereby contributing towards creating a safer and more equitable online environment for Black women.

His PhD supervisors were Professor Miriam Fernandez, Dr Tracie Farrell and Dr Aisling Third. Prof. Fernandez said that “Working with Joseph during his PhD journey has been an absolute pleasure! His dedication to exploring the fascinating topic of Misogynoir was inspiring, and his performance during the defence, especially in the Q&A, was outstanding. Joseph has a bright future ahead and wish him all the very best!”

Dr. Farrell mentioned that “Joseph has been an outstanding student and a joy to work with. He has proved he has the ability to accept the challenge of a very demanding and socially significant topic and we know he has great things ahead of him.”

Dr. Third commented that “It’s been a delight to work with Joseph and to watch him succeed in a very difficult and hugely important area, and we’re all looking forward to seeing him thrive in his future work. Congratulations, Joseph!”

The chair of Joseph’s examination committee was Dr. Patrick Wong – Senior Lecturer in Computing & Communications, The Open University. His external examiner was, Dr Arkaitz Zubiaga – Senior Lecturer and Director of Graduate Studies (Research), Queens Mary University of London and internal examiner, Dr. Jenny Douglas – Senior Lecturer in Health Promotion, Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies, The Open University.

Dr. Zubiaga said that: “Joseph has made a significant contribution to the understudied problem of misogynoir online. Where research has primarily focused on more general types of online abuse such as sexism and racism, Joseph’s research brings a new angle to the problem by looking at how intersectional hate in the form of misogynoir is shaped online. His thesis provides new insights into better understanding the problem, as well as unearthing the current limitations towards building AI models for automatically detecting this type of online abuse.”

Dr. Douglas mentioned: “This is an excellent PhD study that contributes to an understanding of the phenomenon of mysogynoir and the complexities associated with intersectional hate speech drawing on social science, humanities, and computational approaches designed for hate speech detection. The thesis makes a significant contribution to the field, exploring the complexities of misogynoir online and demonstrating ways in which intersectional hate speech can be identified and understood. Joseph Kwarteng gave a very articulate and robust defence of his thesis at his viva.”

Dr. Joseph Kwarteng is set to further his research endeavours in KMi, taking on the role of Research Associate. Working with Professor John Domingue, Joseph will contribute to the Smart Assessment and Guided Education with Responsible AI (SAGE-RAI) project. Their investigation will focus on exploring the potential of responsible Generative AI in revolutionizing tutoring by providing more personalized learning experiences and generating tailored feedback for students.

From left to right: Prof. Miriam Fernandez, Dr. Joseph Kwarteg and Dr.Tracie Farrell.

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New grant from the Open Societal Challenges programme to support research into innovative AI methods for assessing equity, balance, and inclusivity in the media landscape

Tuesday 26 Mar 2024 | KMi News

KMi’s grant from the Open Societal Challenge (OSC) aims to enhance our capacity to model the ebb and flow of perspectives within news narratives. Despite the prevalence of social media, traditional news outlets remain essential for informing the public and ideally presenting a balanced array of viewpoints pertinent to democratic discourse. This diversity of perspectives, crucial for a democratic media landscape, is often lacking in the UK’s media environment, where hyper-partisan sources dominate the agenda.

This imbalance not only perpetuates societal inequalities but also distorts public discourse, as seen in the disproportionate circulation of pro-Brexit newspapers during the Brexit campaign. While these issues have been subject to scrutiny in social sciences and humanities, manual content analysis remains the norm, hindering comprehensive assessments of media fairness.

The OSC initiative seeks to bridge this gap by harnessing AI to analyze news content at scale. By accurately identifying various actors and positions expressed in media, clustering them into meaningful categories, and tracking their evolution over time, the project aims to provide valuable insights for researchers, policymakers, and media watchdogs. These innovations have the potential to enhance media accountability, inform policy decisions, and ultimately bolster democratic discourse.

For more information visit the Challenge page.

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Alexander Mikroyannidis gives invited talk at UNESCO event

Wednesday 20 Mar 2024 | KMi News

KMi’s Senior Research Fellow Alexander Mikroyannidis has given an invited talk at the event organised by UNESCO: Unlocking Knowledge: OER DC Webinar for Open Education Week – Exploring the Future of Education with AI and Blockchain. This annual event serves as a platform for global collaboration and learning in the field of Open Education. The aim of the 2024 event has been to explore the evolving landscape of education in the digital age, focusing on the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain technology, aligning with UNESCO’s 2019 Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER).

In his talk, Alexander discussed the challenges and opportunities of AI and Blockchain for lifelong learning and open education. In particular, Alexander shared results from ongoing work within the Open University, aiming to investigate the use of Generative AI for improving the production of learning materials and for providing students with personal digital assistants. Additionally, Alexander presented the new UKRI project SAGE-RAI, which aims to responsibly deploy Generative AI for smart assessment and guided education. Alexander also presented the lessons learned from the European Horizon 2020 project QualiChain and specifically from the lifelong learning pilot that he has conducted in the context of this project.

Other invited speakers in this event included:

Aras Bozkurt, Associate Professor of Distance Education, Anadolu University
Anthony F. Camilleri, Senior Partner, Knowledge Innovation
Perrine de Coëtlogon, Chargée de mission Blockchain & Open Education, University of Lille

The recording of this event has been published on the UNESCO YouTube channel: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOaETlVQCL4?si=-siN1t0LdcXlEtzL]

The Partnership between the OU and City Council Puts City Innovation in the spotlight

Wednesday 20 Mar 2024 | KMi News

Milton Keynes City Council and The Open University are collaborating once again on the MK:Smart initiative, aiming to strengthen Milton Keynes’ position as a leading smart city globally. Led by the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute , MK:Smart involved over 20 organizations, focusing on technology trials to enhance city living standards, particularly in sustainable transport, energy, and water usage. MK:Smart pioneered initiatives such as the UK’s first driverless car trial and laid the groundwork for innovations like robotic infrastructure.

Funded in part by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, MK:Smart concluded officially in 2017 but left a legacy of ongoing high-tech research endeavors in Milton Keynes. Recent projects include trials of self-driving shuttles and delivery drones, as well as the establishment of a dedicated 5G network for research purposes.

The partners are reigniting MK:Smart to emphasize Milton Keynes as an ideal location for conducting experimental tests and trials. A new MK:Smart website, located at www.mksmart.org, serves as a hub for smart city information in Milton Keynes, building upon the original project’s legacy.

The OU has introduced the Challenge Us! competition, inviting businesses and charities to propose societal challenges for OU academics worldwide to address. These challenges encompass three themes: Sustainability, Living Well, and Tackling Inequalities. The competition deadline is May 15th, encouraging collaborative problem-solving to further enhance city innovation.

Cabinet Member for Innovation, Cllr Shanika Mahendran said:

“Over the last ten years Milton Keynes has welcomed academics, city leaders and businesses from around the world as they seek new solutions for green and modern cities. We rightly have an incredible international reputation as the home of innovation and as a place that enables large scale trials. MK:Smart was the catalyst for some of this ground-breaking work and we’re delighted to revive our partnership with the OU and find new projects that keep us at the forefront of innovation.”

Professor Enrico Motta from The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute said:

“The highly successful MK:Smart initiative demonstrated that excellent results can be achieved when academia, business and government come together to foster innovation and promote economic growth. Ten years after the launch of the original MK:Smart project, it is exciting to see the OU and MK City Council renewing their partnership to progress the Smart City agenda in Milton Keynes and contribute to tackling major societal challenges. I am very much looking forward to the next developments in this collaboration.”

Transforming Education with Artificial Intelligence

Wednesday 20 Mar 2024 | KMi News

Ahead of interactive public events in Scotland exploring Artificial Intelligence (AI), Open University (OU) Professor of Computer Science John Domingue shares the latest developments in AI at the OU and beyond.

Within the past decade or so Artificial Intelligence has come to the fore in higher education, with The Open University leading the way.

Over 40 years ago, as a computer science graduate with a fascination with Artificial Intelligence, I joined the OU’s AI centre within its Psychology Department.

With fellow PhD students and IT staff, our group crafted new AI tools and rigorously evaluated their impact on test subjects, before deploying the tools within the Cognitive Psychology course. My own PhD – focused on building an AI Tutor – contributed to our joint endeavour.

Read more at The Open University blog…

Transforming education with Artificial Intelligence

Happy International Women’s Day 2024!

Wednesday 20 Mar 2024 | KMi News

KMi’s excellence in research and innovation would not be possible without the extraordinary women working and studying here. We invited the women of KMi to be featured in this update of our annual commemorative poster.

The theme of International Women’s Day this year is “Inspire Inclusion”. Inclusivity is a guiding principle in everything we do, and we believe that world-leading research is impossible outside of an inclusive and diverse environment. We take great pride in being an open and welcoming lab, and we are constantly working to improve and ensure that everyone has the space to flourish here.

We are one of a handful of computer science units with Athena Swan Silver awards. This award, received in 2022, recognises the positive impacts of our actions over the past five years to tackle gender inclusivity head on, and motivates us to continue our journey towards a Gold award, and beyond. Some of the many highlights of KMi’s gender equality work in the past five years have included:

An increased percentage of women, and diversity of women, among our students, our academic staff and our professional and support staff
Gender balance in our Promotions, our recruitment of PhD students, and our allocation of leadership roles within KMi

KMi’s engagement with the Athena Swan charter has been an important opportunity for us to reflect on our practices and strengthen our commitment to equal opportunities for all, and to establish a shared vision aligned to the Athena Swan charter and embedded into our practices and procedures.

You can download an anonymised copy of our Silver Submission as a pdf here: KMi Athena Swan Silver Report and also see the status of our Athena Swan actions here: KMi Athena Swan Action Plan.

CORE at Open Repositories 2024

Wednesday 20 Mar 2024 | KMi News

This summer the 19th annual Open Repositories Conference will take place from June 3rd to 6th at the Clarion Post Hotel in Gothenburg, Sweden. Over 300 submissions were received this year and the CORE team will be in attendance, presenting several areas of the work we have been undertaking over the last few months.

We will be introducing our work as coordinators for the SoFAIR (Making Software FAIR: A machine-assisted workflow for the research software lifecycle) project, a two-year CHIST-ERA funded project which will improve and semi-automate the process for identifying, describing, registering and archiving research software.

Also to be presented is some of the latest technical work the CORE team has been doing to deliver a range of new tools and services including identifying and extracting authors’ Rights Retention Statements from full text academic articles and the automatic detection of duplicate records in institutional repositories. The CORE team will also present their recent award-winning work on CORE-GPT, a retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG) based framework for providing answers to users’ questions, with the answers drawn from scientific documents hosted by CORE.

Professor Petr Knoth and Dr George MacGregor from the University of Glasgow will present recent developments with the latest updates to the Rioxx protocol. This presentation will explore how custodianship is reflected in the Rioxx schema, and demonstrate how such modelling benefits both repositories and external software agents (such as harvesters and aggregators). The presentation will also demonstrate how Rioxx can be used to underpin aspects of open research policy monitoring.

CORE will host a panel session on ‘How to make repository content indexed and discoverable’ with Martin Klein (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Paul Walk (Antleaf), and Jhon Rhendel (University of Glasgow) along with Petr Knoth and Matteo Cancellieiri.

Finally, we’ll have a poster presentation covering the recently commenced US Repositories Network Discovery Pilot. As part of the project, CORE will aggregate the metadata and full text of articles from a subset of US repositories, allowing them to be findable through a centralised discovery service with prominent links back to the original full text of the repository.
All in all it’ll be an exciting and busy few days, as Open Repositories always is! We hope to see some of you in Gothenburg this Summer.

About Open Repositories

The annual international Open Repositories (OR) Conference occupies a unique place in the landscape of open knowledge, open source and digital preservation conferences.

Acknowledging institutional interests in the vital role open repositories play in preserving and creating access to scholarly outputs, the OR focus on “how to” rather than “how come” has made it a favourite among librarians, developers and repository managers among others.

KMi is the organiser of three events for AI UK Fringe 2024

Wednesday 20 Mar 2024 | KMi News

During a sequence of events from March 4th to March 29th, 2024, AI UK Fringe assembles influential figures from academia within the UK’s AI landscape to showcase, present, and share advancements in their pioneering endeavors. Participants in our AI UK Fringe events will have the opportunity to connect with fellow professionals in their local community, engage in specialized discussions, and participate in roundtable sessions.

KMi is pleased to announce that, no fewer than, three events have been accepted for the AI UK Fringe 2024.

AI, Big Data and Democracy – Thursday, 7th March 2024

AI and Big Data play a pivotal role in shaping democratic governance and communication in society. Despite their influence, there is a concern that AI and Big Data could create an anti-democratic environment. The “AI, Big Data, and Democracy Task Force” consists of projects like AI4Gov, ITHACA, KT4D, and ORBIS, funded to address the challenges associated with responsible AI. Operating within an interdisciplinary framework, the Task Force integrates ethical and socio-technical considerations to align AI development with human values.Informed by democratic theory, the Task Force emphasises principles of participation, representation, and deliberation, while also exploring governance models and innovation theories to effectively manage emerging technologies.

The event is online and free, but registration is required.

Thursday 7 March, @11:00 – 15:00T, Online.

Find out more and register.

Navigating the Future – AI’s Impact on Education

The AI UK 2024 Fringe event focuses on exploring the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in education (AIEd) by leveraging personalized teaching inspired by Bloom’s 1984 paper. The initiative aims to overcome socioeconomic barriers and provide widespread personalized education, aligning with the ethos of equality to enhance learning outcomes for diverse learners. The in-person workshop, running from 10 am to 4 pm, includes two 45-minute keynote sessions on the state of the art in AIEd. Two discussion segments provide a platform for exploring AI applications in assessment, teaching delivery, and educational content production, fostering dialogue among researchers, developers, practitioners, and policymakers. The workshop also features a poster session, a coffee break, and a lunch break to promote networking and collaboration among the 50 to 100 diverse participants, including AI researchers, developers, educational researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. Overall, the event aims to contribute significantly to the discourse on AI in education through its comprehensive structure.

Friday 22 March, @9:50, Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), London.

Find out more and register.

AI for the Research Ecosystem

AI, particularly through technologies like deep learning and large language models, is rapidly transforming various stages of the research process, including study design, literature reviews, code development, data analysis, dissemination, peer review, and research assessment. The “AI for the Research Ecosystem” (AI4RE) workshop aims to provide insights from experts in the field, involving stakeholders such as researchers, institutions, policy makers, funders, and commercial entities. The event serves as a catalyst for addressing fundamental questions about leveraging AI technologies in research. Key considerations include organizing stakeholders to maximize the benefits of AI, ensuring responsible and ethical design by establishing clear guidelines, and democratizing AI technologies to make them accessible to a broad audience beyond those with financial means. Engaging ethicists, policymakers, and ongoing dialogues are crucial for addressing ethical dilemmas and societal impacts related to AI in research.

Friday 22 March, @9am, Chandler House, UCL, London.

Find out more and register.

AI UK Fringe 2024: Navigating the Future – AI’s Impact on Education

Wednesday 20 Mar 2024 | KMi News

The AI UK 2024 Fringe event aims to explore the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence in education (AIEd), drawing inspiration from Bloom’s 1984 paper on personalized teaching. The event focuses on using AI to overcome socioeconomic barriers and provide personalized education on a large scale, aligning with the ethos of equality. The in-person workshop, scheduled from 10 am to 4 pm, includes two keynote sessions, discussions on AI applications in assessment and teaching, and a poster session for networking and showcasing work. With a diverse audience of 50 to 100 participants, including AI researchers, developers, educators, and policymakers, the event aims to foster collaboration and contribute to the discourse on AI in education.

The two keynote speakers are Rose Luckin, Professor of Learner Centred Design, UCL Knowledge Lab and Donald Clark, CEO, WildFire Learning.

The event will take place at the Royal Geographical Society with IBG, in London, at 9:50am – 4pm.

Visit the workshop page and register for the event.

The GATEKEEPER project concludes with outstanding success after a four-year duration

Wednesday 20 Mar 2024 | KMi News

The GATEKEEPER is one of four EU flagship projects tasked to develop the European Health Data Space, taking on the challenge of developing AI for prevention and chronic conditions. On the 23rd of February, GATEKEEPER had its successful end-of-project review for the exceptional quality of our work and the project’s achievements.

The feedback from the reviewers was as follows:

“ … You got beyond the expectations, also including all the COVID challenges and that you work in the health field. We believe you have well-defined exploitable results; you have demonstrated this point of strength. You’ve really done well. It was our absolute pleasure to review this project. You demonstrated team spirit and camaraderie since day 1 in this very large and diverse project. Well done, looking to see something forward in the future.”

The OU was responsible for leading research on community technology, robotics and the UK pilot in Milton Keynes and Bangor. To know more about the project results please check the recording of the final event and the GATEKEEPER playlist on the KMi YouTube channel where you can find about the technology and aims of the UK pilot.

AI for the Research Ecosystem: a KMi workshop at the AI UK Fringe 2024

Wednesday 20 Mar 2024 | KMi News

The “AI for the Research Ecosystem” (AI4RE) workshop highlights the rapid evolution of AI and its significant impact on the entire research process. Technologies like deep learning and large language models are poised to transform various stages of research, including study design, literature reviews, code design, data collection and analysis, dissemination, peer review, and research assessment. The workshop aims to provide insights from expert speakers across the research spectrum, involving researchers, institutions, policymakers, funders, and commercial entities. The event serves as a catalyst for addressing fundamental questions about the implications of AI developments for the research community, emphasizing the need for responsible and ethical AI design and usage. Additionally, the workshop aims to explore how stakeholders can best organize and democratize these AI technologies for the benefit of the research ecosystem.

The event will take place on Friday 22nd March, at 9am, at the Chandler House (UCL), London. Find out more and register: https://ai4re.github.io/.

KMi’s Prof Advaith Siddharthan on: How society ought to engage with nature, science and technology

Wednesday 20 Mar 2024 | KMi News

In his inaugural lecture on February 13, 2024, Prof. Advaith Siddharthan, addressed the consequences of contemporary culture’s detachment from nature. He proposed the use of citizen science methodologies as a means to address this issue. Prof Siddharthan also advocated for incorporating outdoor field studies into science education to actively involve students in practical scientific experiences. Additionally, he highlighted examples of how digital technologies could paradoxically contribute to reconnecting people with nature.

Click to watch Prof.Siddhartan’s presentation.

OU’s Early Alert Indicators Dashboard (EAID) earns High Commendation at HESPA awards

Thursday 08 Feb 2024 | KMi News

The OU has been highly commended at the Higher Education Strategic Planners Association (HESPA) Awards for its innovative use of data to enhance student success. The institution’s pioneering project, the Early Alert Indicators Dashboard (EAID), popularly known as OU Analyse (OUA), was recognised for its transformative impact on student outcomes in remote learning environments.

With over 200,000 students worldwide, the OU faces the challenge of ensuring student retention and performance in a distance learning setting. Traditional face-to-face interactions are limited, necessitating proactive measures to identify and support struggling students.

Ideated at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) by OU’s emeritus professor Zdenek Zdrahal, the EAID was developed to address this challenge by leveraging data analytics to identify students at risk of dropping out or underperforming. Extensive pilot programs and research have validated the effectiveness of the EAID, with significant improvements in student completion and passing rates observed.

Vice Chancellor, Tim Blackman, has championed the integration of the EAID university-wide, emphasising the importance of technological innovation in enhancing student learning outcomes. Educators have highlighted the EAID as a valuable tool for refining teaching methods and maintaining a proactive approach to student progress.

The success of the EAID underscores the importance of a holistic approach to technology integration in education, with ongoing support and collaboration between teachers, pedagogical experts and technologists. As the OU continues to innovate in educational practices, the EAID serves as a model for enhancing student support and performance on a large scale.

Receiving high commendation at the HESPA Awards is a testament to the OU’s commitment to leveraging data-driven insights for the benefit of its students, reaffirming its position as a leader in Learning Analytics.

Professor Miriam Fernandez, who leads this work, has said “This award highlights the impact of more than a decade of research and innovation at the OU and serves as a testament to the tireless dedication of colleagues who have collectively designed, developed, evaluated, and championed this project. I also want to emphasise the vital role of our ALs, STs, and Module Teams in utilising this system to support our students, as their work and contributions are instrumental in supporting our students and driving them towards success.”

The Open University among the four winners of the Prestigious AI Fairness Innovation Challenge

Wednesday 07 Feb 2024 | KMi News

The Open University proudly announces its success in the highly competitive AI Fairness Innovation Challenge delivered by the UK’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and Innovate UK. Out of 75 submissions nationwide, only four were selected for funding, with The Open University emerging as one of the coveted winners. This achievement underscores our institution’s pioneering role in Learning Analytics and positions the OU as a frontrunner in shaping the future of education through AI-driven solutions.

The successful proposal is led by Professor Miriam Fernandez and her team. This team is behind the research, development and implementation of the Early Alert Indicators Dashboard (EAID), popularly known as OU Analyse. This cutting-edge system, currently utilised by around 2,000 staff members at the OU, plays a pivotal role in enhancing student retention and reducing awarding gaps, thus furthering the OU’s mission of providing accessible and inclusive education.

The project aims to advance fairness in Higher Education (HE) by addressing bias and discrimination in AI-driven learning analytics systems. Leveraging a decade of experience behind the research and development of the EAID, the project seeks to establish a framework of best practices and compliance with UK regulations, guiding HE institutions in developing digital strategies emphasising fairness and responsible AI.

Organised around pillars of Fairness, Explainability, Transparency, Accountability, and Social Justice, the project will examine Predictive Learning Analytics’s performance across diverse student cohorts, aiming to enhance system fairness and transparency. With a focus on Responsible AI implementation, the project will collaborate with regulatory bodies to ensure compliance and promote Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), contributing to a socially inclusive educational landscape.

Professor Miriam Fernandez, Principal Investigator behind the proposal said “The Open University’s success in the AI Fairness Innovation Challenge is a testament to our institution’s unwavering commitment to excellence, innovation, and educational advancement. Through collaboration with regulatory bodies and engagement with the broader education community, we seek to disseminate knowledge, share best practices, and contribute to the ongoing discourse on responsible AI implementation. Our project is not just about algorithms; it’s about empowering students, enhancing the educational experience, and creating a ripple effect of positive change in society. As we navigate the intricate intersection of technology and education, our mission is clear — to create and share knowledge and pave the way for a more inclusive, fair, and transformative educational landscape.”

Related Links:

The AI Module Writing Assistant and AI Digital Assistant presented at Bett UK

Thursday 01 Feb 2024 | KMi News

On January 26th, John Domingue presented the most recent OU Experiments on Generative AI at Bett UK – the largest EdTech exhibition event in the world. This year Bett UK attracted over 30,000 attendees from the global education community to the ExCel in London to see the latest innovations in the education space. John showcased two of the latest OU technologies on Generative AI, the “AI Module Writing Assistant” and the “AI Digital Assistant”. He also actively engaged in discussions surrounding the integration of AI in education, emphasizing the potential benefits for the whole community. The focus was on how Generative AI based tools could enhance both the educational content creation process and the student experience through personalised learning.

John also presented KMi’s “SAGE-RAI: Smart Assessment and Guided Education with RAI” project, whose primary objective is to develop and implement an AI Digital Assistant to support professional training at the Open Data Institute, with a focus on a formal evaluation to ensure enhanced student learning and satisfaction. The SAGE-RAI initiative will investigate how Generative AI can be used responsibly and project outputs include a comprehensive business case, along with structural and process models, demonstrating the potential of using GenAI to improve student outcomes without significant resource burdens.

The presentation was a success with John having to stay an extra 20 minutes to deal with the queue of questions and offers of collaboration.

Related Links:

Generative AI: Experiments at the Open University

CORE invited to UNESCO workshop on Building an Open Science Monitoring Framework

Wednesday 31 Jan 2024 | KMi News

Professor Petr Knoth, founder and team lead for CORE was recently invited to participate in a workshop entitled ‘Building an Open Science Monitoring Framework with open technologies’ hosted by UNESCO at their Paris headquarters.

With many public and funder policies now mandating Open Access deposit of funded research, the need for tracking and measuring the impact of these policies becomes more pressing. This international workshop brought together more than 50 experts from research organisations, universities, nonprofits and national agencies to discuss how open technologies can best help in this effort and work towards monitoring the progress of open science itself.

For full coverage of the workshop, see the UNESCO article here:

‘Building an Open Science Monitoring Framework with open technologies’ : UNESCO workshop – 19/12/23

KMi proudly acknowledges the presence of another Doctor among us, Dr. Martino Mensio

Wednesday 31 Jan 2024 | KMi News

On Friday January 26th Dr. Martino Mensio successfully defended his PhD thesis, with the title “Persuasion across the Political Spectrum: Quantifying Differences in Parallel News Reports”. Dr. Mensio’s PhD thesis delves into computational studies on News Media, focusing on parallel news reports, persuasion techniques, political leaning, and topics. The research examines language and persuasion techniques across diverse political leanings and topics in parallel news articles. Key contributions include improving political leaning classification, identifying how propaganda changes across the political spectrum, and identifying imbalances in propaganda detection datasets.

Harith Alani (KMi Director) and Alistair Willis (Senior Computer Lecturer at the OU), supervised his thesis, with Dr. Alessio Antonini (KMi Research Fellow) and Dr. Kieron O’Hara (Associate Professor in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton) serving on his PhD committee.

Dr. Mensio anticipates transitioning to a career in applied Natural Language Processing within the industry.

OU Analyse has been highlighted in the inaugural issue of Academic Quality Standards

Wednesday 31 Jan 2024 | KMi News

KMi’s OU Analyse, also known as the Early Alert Indicators Dashboard (EAID), is widely used at the OU to enhance student retention and has been highlighted as part of the inaugural issue of Academic Quality & Standards.

In this issue, Janet Hunter, a senior lecturer at the OU, described how she utilised the EAID to pinpoint students showing lower engagement with the module. At the outset of the module, an email was dispatched to Associate Lecturers (ALs), reminding them of their EAID access and urging its utilisation to gauge student engagement. ALs could then direct their attention to individual students, referring to those who exhibited no response to Student Support Teams.

This proactive strategy yielded higher completion and pass rates in the 2021J term compared to other Level 1 modules in the School. ALs acknowledged the effectiveness of the nudges, motivating them to check on students with whom they might not have regular interactions. The positive outcomes prompted a higher engagement with the EAID across departments, involving AL ‘super-users’ to identify at-risk students and notify ALs. Hunter suggests using the filtering capabilities of the EAID to concentrate on specific student groups for each module.

The success story of OU Analyse (EAID) represents a significant step forward in enhancing student success and academic achievement at the Open University.

Miriam Fernandez, Professor of Responsible Artificial Intelligence, and part of the team behind the research and development of the EAID, said: “It is fantastic to see how colleagues around the university are using the EAID to support our students and help them towards success. We are very grateful for the continuous feedback and support from colleagues around the OU and want to encourage everyone to use it!”

Related Links:

QME recent developments and updates

KMi doctoral students participate at the Alan Turing PhD networking event

Tuesday 30 Jan 2024 | KMi News

On Friday 26th, doctoral students Paula Reyero-Lobo and Angel Pavon-Perez participated at the Alan Turing PhD networking event. The overarching initiative aims to create a more interconnected network of doctoral students across various organizations, improve student skills by supplementing PhD program activities, and offer opportunities for greater awareness and connection to real-world challenges and applications.

Paula had the opportunity to present her work on applying semantics to mitigate bias in hate speech detection systems, whereas Angel participated in presentations by fellow PhD students, engaging in conversations to establish connections. Both of them had the chance to discuss the challenges inherent in their research and the broader aspects of academia, such as the current structure and publication processes.

The Alan Turing Institute is a leading UK-based research center focused on data science and artificial intelligence. It brings together researchers from various disciplines to address real-world challenges and advance cutting-edge research in data science and AI. Named after the renowned mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, the institute collaborates with academia, industry, and government to drive innovation and provide expertise in data-driven technologies.

Springer Nature and KMi launch a new phase of their collaboration

Thursday 25 Jan 2024 | KMi News

Following the signing of a new contract, which extends the collaboration between KMi and Springer Nature (SN) to December 2025, KMi researchers Enrico Motta, Francesco Osborne and Angelo Salatino spent two days at the SN campus in London. The purpose of the workshop was to gather all the relevant stakeholders from the various SN scientific sectors around the world to touch base on the state of the collaboration and to plan the activities associated with the new contract. Another important motivation for the event was to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the partnership, which formally started in 2014. This is indeed a magnificent achievement and a rare one in the context of industry-academia collaborations.

The workshop started with a presentation by Prof Enrico Motta and Dr Alex Birukou (SN), which told the story of how the partnership was conceived over 10 years ago, and how it has evolved over the years. In particular, there was strong consensus that a key factor underlying the success of the collaboration was the ability of the two teams to negotiate shared goals collaboratively and dynamically over the years, moving away from reductive and prone to failure collaboration models where academics are simply expected to address problems specified by the commercial partner.

The workshop ended with a collaborative design task, where ideas for future activities were generated and discussed by the participants.

In sum, even after 10 years, the collaboration between KMi and Springer Nature is going from strength to strength and we very much look forward to future developments.

Related Links:

KMi Research Group on Scholarly Analytics

KMi receives DSIT funding for Mark – Milton Keynes 5G project

Monday 22 Jan 2024 | KMi News

The Mark – Milton Keynes 5G project kickstarted in November 2023 and will end in March 2025. The project’s primary objective is to create and showcase cutting-edge 5G neutral infrastructure tailored for high-density urban environments. The infrastructure’s practical application will be demonstrated at the MK Stadium, incorporating innovative technologies like autonomous shuttles and delivery robots, while providing resilient connection to critical services like emergency, security and remote control of vehicles.

KMi is taking the lead of formulating current and future scenarios and use cases that will guide the design of this novel 5G infrastructure. Additionally, KMi has oversight of the WP1, which is responsible for groundwork activities such as architectural design, defining requirements, and the sustainability plan.

The project has received funding from the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).

KMi’s Director discusses AI and misinformation at the Government Business magazine

Thursday 18 Jan 2024 | KMi News

In an article for Government Business magazine, Prof. Harith Alani discusses the dual potential of AI, emphasising its ability to be both beneficial and detrimental. He underscores AI’s significance as a tool for analysing misinformation, experimenting with preventive measures, and mitigating its effects. Utilising historical data, AI can effectively identify misinformation by recognising previously debunked claims and recurring patterns.

Currently, KMi is actively examining the mechanics and consequences of corrective actions. Prof. Alani advocates for a combination of self-regulation by social media platforms and the establishment of legal frameworks.

The Government Business audience receives regular updates to stay in sync with changing roles in local authorities and the broader public sector.

Related Links:

AI misinformation (pages 98-100) – Government Business

KMi’s former Director Prof. Peter Scott has been appointed new President and CEO of COL

Monday 15 Jan 2024 | KMi News

Professor Peter Scott has been appointed as the new President and CEO of the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), starting on January 8, 2024, following an extensive global search.

With a distinguished 40-year career in open and distance learning, Professor Scott aims to continue COL’s mission of providing quality education globally. The announcement acknowledges the significant contributions of outgoing President Professor Asha Kanwar, who led the organization for over 11 years, and expresses gratitude for her impact on education, particularly for women and girls across the Commonwealth. Professor Kanwar wishes success to Professor Scott and emphasizes the importance of COL’s continued innovation and commitment to expanding access to education.

Related Links:

Professor Peter Scott named new President and CEO, Commonwealth of Learning

KMi’s co-founder Kitty Chisholm wins STEM’s 3 minutes thesis competition

Wednesday 20 Dec 2023 | KMi News

On December 4, Kitty Chisholm gave a 3-minute talk, titled "Can Belief in Brain Plasticity Really Enhance One’s Career?", which was based on her work towards a PhD. Her presentation was an introduction to her dissertation which looks at the power of growth mindset interventions over a longer period of time. The intervention is delivered via Immersive Reflection —a web application designed to stimulate reflection— and seeks to inspire and motivate managers to learn and apply that knowledge over time.

Embracing a growth mindset brings benefits such as increased persistence, resilience, a stronger appetite for challenges, and heightened motivation to learn. Managers with a growth mindset are more likely to coach subordinates, resulting in direct reports displaying enhanced organizational citizenship behaviors, voluntarily exceeding their job specifications. The project’s goal is to investigate not just shifts in mindset but also to assess how these changes lead to observable and lasting improvements in management behaviours over time in real-world situations.

Kitty’s doctoral experiment was inspired by KMI’s Democratic Reflection, an IDEA project—evolved from collaboration in collective intelligence and online thinking. This project was geared towards helping citizens sharpen their critical thinking and challenge previous assumptions as they engage with political debates.

Related Links:

IDEA project

KMi Congratulates Dr. Suchetha Nambanoor-Kunnath for Completing her PhD

Monday 04 Dec 2023 | KMi News

Many congratulations to Dr. Suchetha Nambanoor-Kunnath for successfully defending her PhD thesis with the title: “Language Models for Citation Classification”. Her PhD topic focused on large language models for citation classification and how this can impact several areas including research evaluation, literature discovery and summary generation.

Suchetha’s panel was chaired by Prof. Bart Rienties, while Professors Enrico Motta, from KMi, and Silvio Peroni, from the University of Bologna, were her two examiners.

Prof. Silvio Peroni commented that he was particularly impressed with the literature review, which was published as a stand-alone piece of work in the Journal of Qualitative Scientific Studies this past December.

Her supervisors, Prof. Petr Knoth and Dr David Pride, commented: “We are extremely proud of Suchetha and her dedication to her studies. She arrived in the U.K. at the start of a global pandemic, and she coped amazingly well with the additional challenges this presented. Her body of work represents a significant contribution to this important area of study.”

Suchetha is set to advance her professional career in KMi, taking on a role at CORE as a postdoctoral researcher. Initially her work will include developing language models for the classification of research papers according to the U.N.’s 17 Special Development Goals. This will aid institutions in mapping how their research is helping meet these goals.

Related Links:

A meta-analysis of semantic classification of citations

SPARC funds CORE in a new research project to enhance the discoverability of Open Access content

Friday 17 Nov 2023 | KMi News

An interoperable and well-functioning network of repositories is an essential component of US national research infrastructure and will play a crucial role in creating a more open and equitable global scholarly communications system. With the advent of the recent OSTP Memorandum requiring Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research, there is a need to help repositories identify tools and practices to ensure that they can become an effective compliance option for this policy

In November, the US Repository Network (USRN) will launch a pilot project aimed at improving the discoverability of articles in repositories. This pilot project involves the use of services from CORE, a not-for-profit aggregator based at Open University in the UK, to evaluate and improve local repository practices. Additional technical support will be provided by Antleaf Ltd.

Professor Petr Knoth, Head of CORE, says: “I am very excited by this cooperation which will see many US institutions benefiting from the experience that CORE has developed working with UK academic institutions over the last decade. As part of the project, we will adapt tools used by UK universities to the US environment, including tools to facilitate OA compliance with the OSTP Nelson memo, and assist institutions in driving increased interoperability and FAIRness of US repositories. ”

To find out more about the project and USRN, read more on the SPARC website:

https://sparcopen.org/news/2023/us-repository-network-launches-pilot-to-enhance-discoverability-of-open-access-content-in-repositories/

CORE presents at UKRI workshop on research article PIDs and their role in the UKRI OA policy

Friday 17 Nov 2023 | KMi News

In November, there was a whole-day workshop held at the headquarters of United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) in London on the topic of article-level persistent identifiers (PIDs) in the context of the UKRI OA Policy. There were representatives from HEIs, UKRI, and scholarly services providers, including Crossref and Cosector (host repositories). Professor Petr Knoth, together with Dr George Macgregor from the University of Glasgow, gave a presentation on the use of article-level identifiers in repositories.

To be considered compliant with UKRI’s open access requirements, research articles made available via repositories are required to be associated with article- level identifiers. The objective of the workshop was to discuss the options available to repositories in meeting that requirement.

The presenters demonstrated the benefits of having identifiers for repository records that resolve directly to the landing pages in repositories rather than to the publisher’s website and discussed the challenges in meeting this requirement. They then demonstrated that OAI identifiers constitute a practical solution that meets the UKRI requirements. Overall, there are several requirements for repository record identifiers:

Dereferencing to the repository: An identifier should resolve (dereference) to the splash page of the resource in a given repository.
Identifier of the repository record rather than of the scholarly work: ability to identify metadata only and metadata with research outputs records.
High adoption rate: needs to be widely adopted across the network of repositories so that all repository records could be uniquely identified.

OAI identifiers were created by the Open Archives Initiative over 20 years ago as part of the OAI-PMH protocol and are universally adopted across repositories. In CORE, 100% of records have an OAI identifier. As these identifiers can be configured to resolve by default to repositories rather than to publishers, this approach has the potential to increase the importance of repositories in the process of disseminating knowledge. OAI identifiers identify records in repositories and thus complement the DOI system, providing the ability to link repository records to objects identified by a DOI, e.g. the Version of Record of a manuscript on a publishers website (especially for multi-author, multi-institution deposits).

The strength of the OAI solution is that it constitutes a cost-free, decentralised mechanism for minting PIDs which is already universally adopted and it is therefore perhaps the easiest way to enable repositories to satisfy the article-level PIDs requirement set by the UKRI OA Policy.

CORE works with over 12,000 data providers (repositories) and, via the CORE Dashboard, provides the ability for repositories to map their OAI prefix to the repository URL, thus ensuring that the OAI-Id links directly to the article landing page in the hosting repository. Further, CORE delivers a free OAI resolver that provides a mechanism for resolving these identifiers to repository landing pages.

Dr George Macgregor stated;

“A plurality of solutions is necessary to deliver the PID-based ecosystem UKRI are trying to encourage. And as we discussed at the workshop, there are circumstances in which several PID types may usefully co-exist or, within specific communities of practice, be completely necessary. OAI IDs are an exciting contribution to this plurality, while also complementing other identifier schemes and providing a low-barrier persistence solution for some research organisations”

Professor Petr Knoth added;

“OAI IDs offer a decentralised and cost-free solution to minting PIDs for repository records. OAI IDs are a natural solution for repositories as they have already been universally adopted, retain control of article-level PIDs inside repositories and resolve to the repository landing page, rather than to publishers’ websites. This ensures repositories remain central in the scholarly dissemination process and guards against the danger of a PIDs vendor lock-in, i.e. a situation in which a repository has no other option but to work with a single entity and pay them for the registration of its own research assets.”

KMi at ISWC 2023

Tuesday 14 Nov 2023 | KMi News

The 22nd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2023), a leading global event for the Semantic Web and Knowledge Graph Community, has successfully wrapped up, marked by notable involvement from KMi researchers.

The ISWC series of conferences is coordinated by the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA), whose Vice-President is KMi’s Harith Alani. Professor Alani is also leading a new initiative for making the conference more environmentally friendly and offsetting its carbon footprint. SWSA has already allocated a budget for carbon offsetting of ISWC 2023 and 2024, and agreed to include this budget item in all future occurrences of the conference.

In this year’s edition, KMi was well represented in the main conference committees, including the Senior Research Track PC (Francesco Osborne), the Senior Resource Track PC (Enrico Daga), and the Research Track PC (Angelo Salatino). KMi-ers were also involved in workshop organisation, with Francesco Osborne co-organising the Workshop on Deep Learning for Knowledge Graphs (DL4KG). Additionally, Dr Osborne will serve as the co-chair of the Industry Track at ISWC 2024.

In addition to playing key organisational roles, KMi-ers also presented new scientific results at the conference, in both the main programme and associated workshops. For example, John Domingue was a Keynote in the ISWC Doctoral Consortium where he gave a talk entitled "Spending as Much Time as Possible on the Beach: Reflections on an Academic Career" covering a number of tips based on his research experiences within KMi.

The following contributions were presented at the conference (in bold the KMi authors):

Meloni, A., Angioni, S., Salatino, A., Osborne, F., Birukou, A., Reforgiato Recupero, D. and Motta, E. AIDA-Bot 2.0: Enhancing Conversational Agents with Knowledge Graphs for Analysing the Research Landscape. In-Use Track.

Cadeddu, A., Chessa, A., De Leo, V., Fenu, G., Motta, E., Osborne, F., Reforgiato Recupero, D., Salatino, A., Secchi, L. Leveraging Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models for Classification Tasks in the Tourism Domain. The Workshop on Deep Learning for Knowledge Graphs (DL4KG).

Cadeddu, A., Chessa, A., De Leo, V., Fenu, G., Motta, E., Osborne, F., Reforgiato Recupero, D., Salatino, A., Secchi, L. Enhancing Scholarly Understanding: A Comparison of Knowledge Injection Strategies in Large Language Models. The Workshop on Deep Learning for Knowledge Graphs (DL4KG).

More details about ISWC 2023 are available at https://iswc2023.semanticweb.org

Related Links:

More details about ISWC 2023

SoFAIR: CORE to Coordinate New Project to Facilitate the Reproducibility of research studies

Tuesday 07 Nov 2023 | KMi News

We are pleased to announce that the Open University has just been awarded a new research grant in the international CHISTERA Open Research Data & Software Call which aims to enhance the discoverability and reusability of open research software.

Open research software and data are pivotal for scientific innovation and transparency, but are often not cited as first-class bibliographic records. Much of these software mentions therefore remain concealed within the text of research papers, hampering their discoverability, attribution, and reuse. This, in turn, makes it harder to reproduce research studies.

The SoFAIR project (from Making Software FAIR) aims to address this critical issue by enhancing the management of the research software lifecycle and ensuring research software and data adhere to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. The project will build on the existing capabilities of the open scholarly infrastructures operated by the project partners. SoFAIR is a Euro 499k international project coordinated by (1) The Open University in partnership with (2) INRIA, France; (3) Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic; (4) the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), Poland; and (5) The European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), United Kingdom. SoFAIR is funded under the 2022 CHIST-ERA Open and Reusable Research Data and Software (ORD) call.

The project will build on the existing capabilities of the open scholarly infrastructures operated by the project partners, specifically the CORE aggregator (operated by The Open University), the HAL repository and the Software Heritage Foundation archive operated by INRIA and Europe PMC operated by EMBL-EBI. The project’s overarching goal is a comprehensive solution consisting of several interlinked components encompassing machine learning-assisted identification of research software within scholarly manuscripts, validation by authors and subsequent registration with persistent identifiers (PIDs), culminating in permanent archival.

The project’s overall approach is fundamentally rooted in the idea of extending, adapting and linking existing open scholarly infrastructures, including (a) CORE, leveraging its extensive corpus of scholarly literature and its position as a nexus for the global open repositories network, (b) The Software Heritage Foundation universal software archive, and (c) open source tools (GROBID / Softcite) using existing open protocols to support the entire research software assets lifecycle.

Validation of the developed tools and workflow will occur through three distinct use cases supported by project partners PAN, INRIA (HAL) and EMBL-EBI: (1) a life sciences demonstrator, (2) a multi-disciplinary demonstrator for institutional repositories, and (3) a digital humanities case study. These diverse applications underscore the project’s commitment to versatility and comprehensive coverage SoFAIR will deliver a step-change in the way research software is identified, validated, registered and archived for the long term. From a broader perspective, SoFAIR aligns with the FAIR agenda and Horizon Europe initiatives on open research data and software. The project will foster integration with European infrastructures such as EOSC, CLARIN, and DARIAH, ensuring robust connectivity across the research landscape.

Professor Petr Knoth, Project Coordinator and Head of CORE said: “SoFAIR will demonstrate the significant value that can be achieved by open scholarly infrastructures working in synergy to deliver a new AI-supported solution for identifying, discovering and archiving research software mentioned in research manuscripts. This will constitute an important contribution towards increasing reproducibility of research studies and making research assets FAIR.“

Harith Alani, KMi director added “As the director of KMi, I am proud to see our CORE technology and AI expertise converge in SoFAIR, exemplifying the commitment of KMi and The Open University to open research software. SoFAIR will foster greater reproducibility and accessibility in research, paving the way for a more transparent and inclusive academic landscape.“

In essence, SoFAIR is paving the way for a transformative shift in how research software is discovered, accessed, and referenced. By increasing the number of research software assets that can be registered with PIDs, and thus made citable, the project will not just facilitate software reuse and reproducibility; it can incentivise the creation of innovative research software, thereby contributing to the broader scientific community’s collective progress.

KMi’s Director Harith Alani presents at LINKS final project event

Monday 30 Oct 2023 | KMi News

Prof. Harith Alani, presented on “Live Misinformation Correction: Lessons Learnt” and participated in a panel discussion on misinformation and disinformation in crisis management, concerning the utilisation of social media and crowdsourcing during disaster situations. His presentation related to the older (January 2016 – December 2018) COMRADES project, in which Prof. Alani served as a project coordinator, examining the processing of social media information during a crisis.

The participants of this event, delved on key insights derived from the LINKS project and deliberated on strategies for organisations involved in disaster and crisis management to mitigate the threats associated with inaccurate information. The panel drew from real-world scenarios offering a variety of regional and sector-specific viewpoints.

The LINKS project, funded by the EU to strengthen technologies and society for European disaster resilience, had its final project event on 16-17 October 2023. LINKS sets out to understand and assess the effects of social media and crowd-sourcing (SMCS) on European disaster resilience.

The event was hosted by the Save the Children organisation, who launched during the event their “Feel Safe” initiative that aims to bring a “Child-Centred approach to disaster and risk reduction”.

Related Links:

Live Misinformation Correction: Lessons Learnt (presentation)

KMi’s Knowledge Makers attended the MK Innovates Festival for the STEM

Thursday 19 Oct 2023 | KMi News

Last Friday, the Knowledge Makers from KMi were out in force at the MK Innovates Festival for the STEM in Schools Day. The makers group showcased an array of demonstrations ranging from innovative robots and intriguing puzzles to Lego and electronics projects.

The spotlight however was undeniably on the ‘Crack the code’ challenge. This captivating contest had participants, young and old, wracking their brains to unlock a treasure chest teeming with chocolates and sweets. Throughout the day, hundreds of eager participants took their turn, hoping to decipher the code and claim their prize. It was truly wonderful to see clusters of children collaborating, their heads put together, pooling their collective knowledge to solve the puzzle. Their excitement was obvious (and loud!) when they successfully unlocked the treasure and shared the sweet spoils amongst themselves. Some even resorted to the age-old tools of pencil and paper in their quest for success. Seeing the tenacity and teamwork of the next generation as they worked together to solve the puzzle was a great reward in itself for the makers. Overall, an exhausting, fun and extremely successful day!

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KMi Summer Scholarships for Black Students at the MK Innovates Festival for the STEM

Thursday 19 Oct 2023 | KMi News

The KMi Summer Scholarships for Black Students stand at the MK Innovates Festival attracted interest and engagement from schoolteachers, parents, college lecturers, young people, and even the local job centre.

School teachers were particularly interested in the program, with many expressing their desire to have us come and talk to their 16-year-old students who are doing their A Levels. We also spoke with parents and young people at the stand, and it was clear that there is a strong appetite for programs like this. Many of the young people we spoke to were into technology and interested in learning more about AI, and they were eager to hear about the opportunities that are available to them.

A staff member from the job centre also asked us to consult with their team that works with young, unemployed people. This collaboration would provide the opportunity to reach out to a group of young people who may not be aware of the opportunities that are available. With the initial support of their employment adviser, the scholarship could create a pathway to employment.

Overall, the KMi Summer Scholarships for Black Students stand was a success and generated great networking. A wide range of people visited the stand, and there was a lot of curiosity and engagement. We are excited to continue this program in 2024, and to help more young people from underrepresented backgrounds pursue a career in computer science and to show them that there is a place for them in this field.

Related Links:

KMi Summer Scholarships for Black Students at the MK Innovates Festival for the STEM

Thursday 19 Oct 2023 | KMi News

The KMi Summer Scholarships for Black Students stand at the MK Innovates Festival attracted interest and engagement from schoolteachers, parents, college lecturers, young people, and even the local job centre.

School teachers were particularly interested in the program, with many expressing their desire to have us come and talk to their 16-year-old students who are doing their A Levels. We also spoke with parents and young people at the stand, and it was clear that there is a strong appetite for programs like this. Many of the young people we spoke to were into technology and interested in learning more about AI, and they were eager to hear about the opportunities that are available to them.

A staff member from the job centre also asked us to consult with their team that works with young, unemployed people. This collaboration would provide the opportunity to reach out to a group of young people who may not be aware of the opportunities that are available. With the initial support of their employment adviser, the scholarship could create a pathway to employment.

Overall, the KMi Summer Scholarships for Black Students stand was a success and generated great networking. A wide range of people visited the stand, and there was a lot of curiosity and engagement. We are excited to continue this program in 2024, and to help more young people from underrepresented backgrounds pursue a career in computer science and to show them that there is a place for them in this field.

Related Links:

KMi’s Polifonia team presented a Music Meets Machines workshop at the MK Innovates Festival

Thursday 19 Oct 2023 | KMi News

The "Music Meets Machines workshop" presented by the Polifonia team gave a look into cutting-edge technologies used to represent music history.

Led by Alba Morales and Jason Carvalho, the event brought together local school students in Milton Keynes to learn about generative AI and music knowledge graphs. Through this exploration of music heritage information, attendees were inspired to explore connections between personalities in European musical history.

The event was an opportunity to disseminate the work carried out as part of the MEETUPS Pilot that explores music personalities and their encounters over centuries.

The workshop left participants with a deeper understanding of the boundless possibilities that emerge when knowledge graphs, music, and generative AI harmoniously converge."

Related Links:

KMi participated at the MK Innovates Festival for the STEM in Schools Day

Thursday 19 Oct 2023 | KMi News

KMi was represented by three activities at the “MK Innovates Festival for the STEM in Schools Day”. The Knowledge Makers showcased an array of demonstrations ranging from innovative robots and intriguing puzzles to Lego and electronics projects, the Polifonia team presented a workshop on "Music Meets Machines", where it gave a look into cutting-edge technologies used to represent music history and the Summer Scholarships for Black Students attracted interest and engagement from school teachers, parents, young people, and the local job centre.

The day was an exceptional chance for STEM-focused organisations to provide enrichment and advancement opportunities to schools, communities, and colleges in the local area. The event aimed to highlight various technologies and career paths designed for adult audiences, with particular emphasis on women and younger individuals.

Related Links:

KMi presented at the Decentralised Knowledge Graph Conference (DKGcon) about Generative AI at the OU

Monday 09 Oct 2023 | KMi News

Prof. John Domingue was invited to DKGcon (October 9, Ljubljana, Slovenia) where he gave a presentation on “How Decentralisation, Knowledge Graphs and Generative AI will Transform Adult Learning: Experiments at the Open University”. He also was part of a panel on “Trusted AI for media and education”.

The first DKGcon conference aimed to unite pioneers in internet, blockchain, and AI fields to leverage the potential of a trusted knowledge foundation, and sought to enhance how humanity generates, maintains, and shares knowledge in a reliable and inclusive way. It gathered industry and research leaders – Bob Metcalfe, Ethernet inventor and “Metcalf’s Law” was also one of the other invited speakers – from various sectors like supply chains, healthcare, construction, and the metaverse to promote the use of trusted data as a fundamental element of humanity’s security and prosperity.

Related Links:

GenAI at the OU

New OU research platform invites collaboration on societal challenges

Tuesday 03 Oct 2023 | KMi News

A new OU research platform is open for collaboration on some of the most important challenges of our time.

The Open Societal Challenges Online Platform that will enable those outside The Open University (OU) to work with our researchers on society’s most pressing issues, is launching this month (October 2023).

The Platform is based on a concept introduced by Professor Kevin Shakesheff, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (PVC) for Research & Innovation, in 2021, when a consultation led to opening up challenges to OU staff and students under the themes of Sustainability, Living Well and Tackling Inequalities.

It already hosts over 130 Open Societal Challenges (OSC) projects spanning these themes.

Some of the proposals aim to combat the climate crisis while protecting people’s rights and improving living conditions now and in the future; others propose new models for living well, and many overlap across themes as they redress inequalities across the world such as religious intolerance, gender-based violence, and unequal opportunities for people with disabilities.

Speaking at the first anniversary showcase of the OSC projects, Professor Shakesheff said:

“I’m really pleased with how this initiative has gone with this ability to bring people together to work in teams.

“We are starting to make an impact outside of the OU and are ready to draw people into the work we are doing.”

The OSC team is keen to work with organisations such as universities, research centres, charities, businesses, third sector organisations, policy thinktanks and councils across all four nations.

The Platform, which was designed by a team led by KMi’s Professor Anna De Liddo, makes it possible for these organisations to request involvement in the existing challenges or to submit a new one.

Commenting on the design of the new Open Societal Challenges Online Platform, Professor De Liddo said:

“It is always exciting to be part of the architects and witnesses of innovative projects where technology facilitates new organisational change.

“It took great vision on the part of our PVC, a focus on people and practices on the part of the OU’s Research and Enterprise Strategy team, and the experience and commitment of our Knowledge Media Institute in delivering technological innovations with real social impact, to develop what is, without doubt, a unique digital platform for strategic research development and collaboration.

“To design the Open Societal Challenges Platform, we drew on the theories and practices of the study of Collective Intelligence in Computer Science and combined them with the Theory of Change and a careful attention to the User Experience. The main aim of the digital platform was to catalyse our research efforts at university level, engage all our researchers and students, in an open, ubiquitous and democratic way and across all our four faculties. We wanted to create a ‘showcase’ that would allow external collaborators to get a holistic but accurate view of the university’s expertise and direction of impact. Our aim from the outset was to increase collaboration and identify synergies both internally and with other universities, founders and research partners. An ambitious and unique vision, realised with a simple digital interactive experience that could be used by everyone, more or less experienced.

“In the classic OU tradition, we have been blunt and passionate about disrupting and innovating the way we learn and collaborate, and we are proud to have once again demonstrated The Open University’s ability to surprise and unite with distributed technologies.”

To learn more about the OU’s Open Societal Challenges Programme read more here.

CORE Team wins Best Paper award at TPDL2023

Monday 02 Oct 2023 | KMi News

The CORE team, represented by David Pride and Petr Knoth, were at The University of Zadar in Croatia last week for the 27th International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) where they were presented with the Best Paper award for their submission entitled ‘CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access research and large language models for credible, trustworthy question answering’

The team are incredibly proud to have their work recognised in this way at this prestigious international conference.

CORE-GPT: Bridging the Trust Gap

The paper first provides an experimental study showing that about 80% of references provided by ChatGPT3.5 and ChatGPT4.0 are non-existent or conflated then provides a practical solution based on retrieval augmented generation to counter this problem.

CORE-GPT combines the language generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and the 34 million research papers in CORE to provide evidence backed answers to users queries along with citations to the papers from which the answer content is composed. CORE-GPT’s performance was evaluated on a dataset of 100 questions covering the top 20 scientific domains in CORE. Two evaluators assessed the quality of the answers and the relevance of the provided papers. The answers were judged in terms of Comprehensiveness, Trustworthiness and Utility, and the references were judged on their relevance to the user’s question. CORE-GPT scored highly across the majority of scientific domains, demonstrating the practical application of the system.

The CORE team is now working on scaling the platform to make it available to the 30 million people who use CORE on a monthly basis. Future developments for the platform include making the service available as an endpoint for the CORE API, allowing answers and references to be retrieved programmatically. Further, based on the feedback received from some of our data providers, we are now looking for ways in which CORE-GPT could be adapted to local content and made available to CORE Members, delivering a question-answering system where the answers are drawn from the knowledge base of a specific institution.

Prof Petr Knoth, Head of CORE said: “CORE-GPT highlights the value of the open access repositories network as a trustable source of knowledge from research papers. In the age of generative AI, this creates both a huge opportunity for improving the way we do research as well as a critical defence mechanism against online misinformation.”

About TPDL

The highly regarded International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) is a yearly date for researchers on Digital Libraries and related topics. The conference draws from a broad and multidisciplinary array of research areas including computer science, information science, librarianship, archival science and practice, museum studies and practice, technology, social sciences, cultural heritage and humanities, and scientific communities. Now in its twenty-seventh year, TPDL has been an international reference forum focused on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. This year its focus was on bridging the wide field of Research and Information Science with the related field of Digital Libraries.

OU joins the Turing University Network focussing on data science and AI

Monday 02 Oct 2023 | KMi News

The Open University (OU) has joined a growing list of universities in The Alan Turing Institute’s network.

The Turing University Network offers UK universities, with an interest in data science and AI, the opportunity to engage and collaborate both with the Institute and its broader networks in academia, industry and the public sector.

It will also connect universities across the data science and AI ecosystem, provide access to bespoke network activity and encourage collaborations as opportunities arise.

Since its launch the OU has been at the forefront of pedagogical and technological innovation. Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, in particular, play a crucial enabling role in support of our educational and social mission, as shown by our innovations in Learning Analytics. Both the OU and the Turing share a commitment to building skills for the future, advancing open world-class research and applying it to key societal challenges. Membership of the network will facilitate research collaboration and knowledge exchange between the two organizations.

The OU’s work with the network will be led by its Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), a diverse and multidisciplinary research and development lab that, since its launch in 1995, has been at the forefront of international R&D in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Educational Technologies.

An open call for new members of the Network was launched by Turing University in early summer 2023. It is a key component of The Alan Turing Institute’s strategy and supports the Institute in achieving its three ambitious goals: advance world-class research and apply it to national and global challenges, build skills for the future, and drive an informed public conversation.

Professor Kevin Shakesheff, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Research & Innovation at the OU, said:

“The OU’s Research Plan (2022-2017) focuses on generating long-term transformative societal impact through Open Societal Challenges. Our academics are collaborating to tackle challenges under the themes of sustainability, living well and tackling inequality which align with the Turing Institute’s grand challenges. Joining the network provides a great opportunity to collaborate on tackling these challenges.”

Dr Jean Innes, Chief Executive Officer of The Alan Turing Institute, said:

“We’re really pleased to welcome our new members to the network. We hope that they will benefit from being part of our data science and AI group and find opportunities for new, meaningful collaborations across the data science and AI landscape.”

KMi at All-Party Parliamentary Group to Discuss Generative AI and Assessment

Tuesday 26 Sep 2023 | KMi News

On September 12th, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Data Analytics and the Higher Education Commission delved into Generative AI and HE. In this roundtable session, which was chaired by Daniel Zeichner MP, the participants debated the influence of Generative AI on assessment and feedback within education.

Speakers at the event emphasized the impact of novel technology and software used by educators to evaluate students. They advocated for a reevaluation and innovation of the current approach to assessment and feedback, with a reduced emphasis on mere knowledge acquisition and a greater emphasis on assessing skills and capabilities. The roundtable participants strongly recommended a responsive government-led intervention that can support curriculum and pedagogy throughout the entire higher education sector.

The insights gathered from this roundtable discussion will be channeled into the ongoing inquiry by the Higher Education Commission concerning the digital transformation of education. Additionally, the findings will contribute to the Department for Education’s Call for Evidence on the utilization of Generative AI in the realm of education.

This work relates to a range of on-going Generative AI projects across the OU, including an AI Digital Assistant and AI Content Generator, whose construction is being led by KMi.

Related Links:

Generative AI at the OU

KMi presence at SEMANTiCS 2023

Tuesday 26 Sep 2023 | KMi News

Last week, the Semantic Web Community gathered once again for another yearly top-notch event: the 19th International Conference on Semantic Systems; commonly known as SEMANTiCS 2023. The SEMANTiCS conference is a leading European conference focusing on Machine Learning, Data Science, Linked Data and Natural Language Processing.

Over the years, SEMANTiCS has established itself as the forum for researchers, industry experts and business leaders, to connect, develop new ideas, and transfer knowledge. This year’s edition took place in Leipzig (Germany) from 20 to 22 September.

From KMi, Francesco Osborne, Paula Reyero-Lobo, and Angelo Salatino attended the conference.

Specifically, Francesco Osborne has been invited to give a talk on the topic: “Knowledge Graphs for Scientific Discovery: Opportunities and Challenges”. Francesco discussed how Open Science and AI can work together to create knowledge graphs for helping scientists with various tasks such as finding relevant literature, generating hypotheses, and conducting experiments. Specifically, he showcased some examples of resources, such as the Computer Science Knowledge Graph, and shared his vision on the future direction of this research field. Francesco guided the audience through various methods and approaches used in constructing these knowledge graphs. He also touched upon the integration of these graphs with Large Language Models to reduce their tendencies to produce hallucinations.

Paula Reyero-Lobo presented her paper “Knowledge-Grounded Target Group Language Recognition in Hate Speech”, written in collaboration with her supervision team Enrico Daga, Harith Alani, and Miriam Fernandez, describing the latest advances of her PhD studies.

In particular, her paper presents a novel approach for detecting online hate speech that considers the language and identity of the target groups, especially those related to gender and sexual orientation. The method leverages a Knowledge Graph describing how different groups express themselves and how they are attacked by hate speech. Crucially, this method can be used to understand and reduce the biases in data and hate speech detection systems.

Paula’s paper also received the Best Paper Award at the Research and Innovation Track. The whole KMi is really proud of Paula and impressed by her amazing work. Her paper is available here: https://ebooks.iospress.nl/volumearticle/64009

Finally, Angelo Salatino played a crucial role in organising this conference edition as both Publicity Chair and leader of the Technical Team. For the former, he was involved in disseminating all the relevant information about the conference (e.g., call for papers, sponsors’ information, keynote speeches, press releases, etc.) to the appropriate audience. For the latter, he was responsible for setting up the equipment for the hybrid sessions and ensuring an excellent experience for both in-person and online attendees.

Alexander Mikroyannidis gives invited talk on the use of Generative AI in distance education

Thursday 21 Sep 2023 | KMi News

KMi’s Senior Research Fellow Alexander Mikroyannidis has given an invited talk at an event organised by the Erasmus+ project D-ChallengHE and hosted by the Hellenic Open University. The event was attended by educators and researchers from across the D-ChallengHE consortium, i.e., Slovenia, Italy, Greece, Romania, and Lithuania. The D-ChallengHE project is building a generative network among universities, research centres, and stakeholders engaged in the digital transformation in Higher Education (HE), in order to develop a flexible approach for online and blended delivery of study programmes. The project is also developing innovative teaching-learning methodologies and tools in HE, as well as guidelines for supporting the flexibility of university policies in the design, organisation and delivery of study programmes.

In his talk, Alexander discussed the positive and negative impacts that Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) can have in distance and higher education. Alexander presented the pedagogical use cases of Generative AI that can enhance the learning experience for students pursuing HE remotely. In particular, Alexander discussed the deployment of Generative AI as a personal tutor for empowering remote HE students with a tailored and interactive learning experience, catering to their individual needs and fostering self-regulated learning. Additionally, Alexander shared results from ongoing work within the Open University, aiming to investigate the use of Generative AI for improving the production of learning materials and for providing students with personal digital assistants.

KMis Successful Twinning Event within the GATEKEEPER Project

Tuesday 05 Sep 2023 | KMi News

The GATEKEEPER project is a European multi-centric large-scale pilot on smart living environments. Funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020, the project focuses on smart data-driven solutions for personalized early risk detection and intervention. As part of the project, the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) hosted a three-day twinning event, a mechanism which facilitates the transfer of innovation and knowledge and contribution to the scaling up of best practices and key outcomes from the GATEKEEPER project to other regions and adopters in Europe. The report to the Reference Site Collaborative Network was submitted yesterday detailing the success of the event, highlighting outcomes, and spotlighting few collaborations.

The event took place between the 20 and 22 June 2023. Eleven participants visited from five countries and nine institutions: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), Atendo, Ayuda a Domicilio – Centro Intergeneracional (Spain), Bangor University (UK), Connected Health and Wellbeing Cluster Ireland (Ireland), Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (Greece), Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria Valdecilla (Spain), Technische Universitaet Dresden (Germany), Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (Greece), Health and Social Care Northern Ireland (UK), Connected Health and Wellbeing Cluster Ireland (Ireland), Health Region Cologne Bonn (Germany), and Atendo, Ayuda a Domicilio – Centro Intergeneracional (Spain)., Health and Social Care Northern Ireland (UK), Health Region Cologne Bonn (Germany), and Technische Universitaet Dresden (Germany).

The twinning revolved around digital healthcare and wellbeing, upscaling community support, and robotics and AI for healthcare and facilitated knowledge sharing and exchange, international cooperation, and showcasing KMi’s innovative and cutting-edge research with the adopters. Activities ranged from presentations about the research and lessons learned on stakeholder-centred design and robotics in GATEKEEPER. They also included a workshop on leveraging robotic interventions and visits to Woughton Community Council and Smart City Consultancy.

The attendees also joined the LHCS-KMi research collaboration workshop on 20 June and the KMi-FBL research fest at the OU library on 22 June, where they had the opportunity to learn about ground-breaking research at the OU and discuss potential collaborations. During the research fest, the visitors had the opportunity to control the TIAGo robot (developed by the PAL robotics) using virtual reality and make it move around and manipulate objects.

Also making use of the opportunity of having visitors from leading organisations in the UK and the EU, the attendees, along with other OU staff, participated in a networking event on 21 June which aimed at developing project ideas and fostering future international collaborations. One attendee summed it up by stating "A very well organised event that allowed Open University/KMi to leverage its European contacts and promote international collaboration"

Feedback from participants about this twinning event was overwhelmingly positive indicating high satisfaction, with one attendee commenting "Thank you to all the team involved in the twinning exercise. It was a brilliant experience, well organised and informative."

Peter Scott Visits KMi

Wednesday 30 Aug 2023 | KMi News

Professor Peter Scott today paid a flying visit to KMi, the department he was director of from 2007 to 2015, and spoke with our current Vice Chancellor Prof. Tim Blackman and two other ex-directors, Prof. John Domingue and Prof. Enrico Motta, as well as other long-term KMi staff.

Renowned for his transformational leadership in learning innovation, Peter left the OU and went on to even greater things, becoming Pro Vice-Chancellor (Education) of the University of Technology Sydney, Australia and then President of Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada.

When he left KMi, he said that "it was an honour to serve this team for so long!" It was good to see our old boss again – for the first time in 8 years – and realise that Peter still has that strong ambition for innovation in learning and teaching that he brought to us as leader back in 2007.

Alexander Mikroyannidis co-authors editorial on the future of openness in education

Monday 14 Aug 2023 | KMi News

KMi’s Senior Research Fellow Alexander Mikroyannidis has co-authored a journal editorial on the current state and the future of openness in education. The editorial is entitled “Openness in Education as a Praxis: From Individual Testimonials to Collective Voices” and has been published in the latest issue of the Open Praxis journal. This has been a collaborative publication organised by Aras Bozkurt, and it comprises a reflection of the views of several renowned experts in the field of open education, including Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin, Maren Deepwell, Martin Ebner, Robert Farrow, Leo Havemann, Alan Tait, Martin Weller, and more.

Alexander’s contribution to this editorial is focused on the instrumental role of openness in addressing the needs of lifelong learners and job seekers to upskill or reskill. The emergence of novel decentralisation technologies, particularly Blockchain and Web 3.0, offers opportunities to transform open education and open upskilling/reskilling, by influencing how open educational content is produced and shared, as well as by equipping lifelong learners and job seekers with open and immutable accreditation.

Alexander has led a successful pilot for facilitating lifelong learning using blockchain technologies, in the context of the QualiChain project. In particular, he has been in charge of deploying and evaluating decentralised education and employment qualifications with learners and educators within various lifelong learning contexts. The outcomes of this work indicate that decentralisation technologies hold great potential towards revolutionising open education and lifelong learning.

Congratulations Dr Lucas Anastasiou, on your PhD success

Tuesday 25 Jul 2023 | KMi News

Many congratulations to Dr Lucas Anastasiou on the successful defence of his thesis entitled: “Computational Argumentation Approaches to Improve Sensemaking and Evidence-based Reasoning in Online Deliberation Systems.

Under the supervision of Prof Anna De Liddo and Prof Petr Knoth, Lucas’s study explored how computational methods can advance the current state of online discussion. His investigation specifically focused on computational argumentation mining to improve participants’ sensemaking and the overall quality of debate happening online.

The examiners, Dr Aisling Third (Chair), Prof. John Domingue and Dr Elena Musi (External examiner, University of Liverpool) praised Lucas’s work, commenting that “Lucas, you are now a world expert in the field of computational argumentation for public deliberation and you owe it to others to show us ‘what to do next’, so be adventurous!"

Prof De Liddo with great pride announced to KMi yesterday the news of our newest Doctor in the lab; we joined together both in-person and remotely for some bubbly and cake to say cheers to Lucas’ success.

Lucas has chosen to continue his career at the Open University and is looking forward to taking up the role of postdoctoral researcher in Prof. De Liddo’s Ideation and Deliberation in Society Research Group. He will work on the EU-funded grant, ORBIS, which aims to shape and support new democratic models developed through deliberative democracy processes.

Shifting Power Group Organised Successful Workshop on Ecology of AI at HHAI 2023 Conference

Thursday 20 Jul 2023 | KMi News

Last week, the research group "Shifting Power" from the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University visited the International Conference Series on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence (HHAI) 2023, held from June 26th to 30th in Munich. Their organised workshop on the Ecology of AI (EcAI) 2023 garnered attention from conference participants and sparked insightful discussions among AI researchers from around the world.

The EcAI 2023 workshop aimed to broaden the perspectives of AI researchers and delve into the farther-reaching impacts of their own work. Motivated by the acknowledgement that “ethical” or “responsible” AI and “AI for Social Good” are typically informed by Western European notions of morality, the workshop organisers hoped to highlight the much larger ecosystem involved in the implementation of AI and the world systems that it may influence.

Led by Dr. Retno Larasati, and assisted by Dr. Tracie Farrell and Dr. Venetia Brown, alongside colleagues Dr. Soraya Kouadri Mostefaoui and Dr. Syed Mustafa Ali from School of Computing and Communication, the group coordinated a reflection-focused workshop that facilitated discussions on the emerging questions surrounding AI’s impacts and the likelihood of those impacts given current socio-political and economic realities.

The keynote presenter, Dr. Mustafa Ali offered an insightful presentation on "The Political {Economy, Ecology, Theology} of AI, that touched on the assumption of inevitability of AI, its relationship to the legacy of colonialism, industrial power and Whiteness, and the importance of understanding resistance to this technology. The insightful talk enriched the discussions, shedding light on the intersection of AI impacts in various fields from different angles. The workshop attendees, both in person and virtually, comprising researchers from diverse backgrounds and nations, actively participated by presenting their own research and engaging in fruitful conversations.

Dr. Tracie Farrell presented her talk on "Protected Characteristics and Abuse Detection," reflecting on the reliance on legal definitions of who is in need of protection and how this can interfere with talking about community harm in meaningful ways. Dr. Retno Larasati shared her reflections on "AI in Healthcare – Reflection on Potential Harms and Impacts," highlighting the potential risks and benefits of AI implementation in the healthcare sector, especially AI healthcare as a billion dollar business and how its impacts racial industrial capitalism.

The discussions held during the EcAI workshop centred around timely and complex debates in how AI could (or is more likely to) impact global power asymmetries or consolidate and strengthen existing harms, and the importance of having a more nuanced perspective on the proposed benefits to society. Participants explored the ethical considerations, societal implications, and ways to mitigate potential negative impacts, fostering an environment of collaboration and critical thinking.

As the world navigates the rapidly evolving landscape of AI, initiatives like the EcAI workshop provide a crucial platform for researchers to broaden their perspectives and foster responsible AI development. The Shifting Power group’s contributions will undoubtedly contribute to the ongoing discourse and shape the future direction of AI research.

OU Analyse Team wins prestigious Education Dataset Prize

Tuesday 18 Jul 2023 | KMi News

The OU Analyse team, which works to identify students at the university who may need extra support, has been awarded the prestigious Educational Dataset Prize by the Educational Data Mining Society for their remarkable work with the ‘OULAD’ dataset.

OU Analyse is a system powered by machine learning methods for early identification of students at risk of failing. All students at risk of failing their next assignment are updated weekly and made available to the course tutors and the Student Support Teams to consider appropriate support.

The OULAD dataset, which consists of anonymised student interactions with the Virtual Learning Environment at the OU, combined with demographics and study results, has had a major impact on the field of learning analytics.

Related Links:

Learning and Networking at The Groups Network Summer Workshop

Monday 10 Jul 2023 | KMi News

I recently had the opportunity to attend The Groups Network summer workshop at the splendid Lost and Found Club in Leeds. UKRI’s FLF Development Network supported the event, led by Dr Martha Newson and Dr Anne Templeton. Groups is an interdisciplinary network for researchers whose expertise lies in understanding group formation, collective experiences and group behaviours, and this year’s theme was reflecting on the future of groups: ideas, questions and concerns. Other attendees were PhD students, ECRs and Research Fellows from philosophy, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and artificial intelligence.

The two-day workshops focused on sharing common research interests and challenges and discussing ways to cultivate positive research culture. Through a series of breakout sessions, we discussed questions on the biggest challenges faced by society and the ways we could design research to solve them.

One of our goals on the Shifting Power project is to explore how AI might contribute to existing inequalities among marginalised groups. Within my breakout group, I proposed questions on how AI and digital technologies might continue to impact the social dynamics of communities. While AI and its technologies can help to connect people and communities and help to empower communities by using digital platforms to help organise and advocate for their rights, algorithms can be used to discriminate and exploit particular communities and spread misinformation and propaganda.

The workshop helped me to reflect on the impact of communities in the context of world power from an industrial, capitalistic paradigm. AL and digital technologies create new forms of power and are often more decentralised and diffused, making it challenging to track and control. Its benefits are not always evenly distributed. How do we persuade those in positions of power to be equitable? How can communities use AI to create or balance new dynamics? As always, there were no easy answers to these complex questions. However, I came away with a more unifying perspective of individual and collective values in the context of group interests and an appreciation for how researchers use group formation and collaboration in intentional and purposeful ways.

Related Links:

https://shiftingpower.kmi.open.ac.uk/

CORE published in Nature Scientific Data

Wednesday 21 Jun 2023 | KMi News

The CORE team are proud and excited to announce that our paper entitled ‘CORE: a Global aggregation Service for Open access Papers’, was accepted for publication and is now available as an open access article via Nature.com.

This paper is the culmination of work by the whole CORE team, with contributions from team members both past and present. It discusses how CORE has grown from a research project initiated by Dr. Petr Knoth in 2010 to the service it is today, serving over 30 million unique users each month. The paper then elaborates on the continuously growing CORE dataset and details the systematic challenges associated with gathering research papers from thousands of data providers worldwide at an unprecedented scale and the novel solutions developed to address these challenges.

CORE’s initial mission centred on fostering scientific discovery through enabling text and data mining of scientific literature. However, its use has expanded beyond these initial borders, extending into multiple sectors including higher education, industry, and not-for-profit organisations. CORE’s services support a wide range of stakeholders in providing scalable access to a vast and comprehensive collection of data, for researchers, academic institutions, developers, funders as well as companies from a diverse range of sectors.

Dr Petr Knoth, Senior Research Fellow in Text and Data Mining at The Knowledge Media Institute, and leader of the CORE team added; “I am extremely proud of the work the whole CORE team has put in to making this publication a reality, it has been a significant task, but the results speak for themselves. Further, the paper is a valuable source article for anyone wishing to know more about CORE.”

You can read the full story on the Nature website:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-023-02208-w.pdf

Related Links:

Read the full article

KMi Research Fellow Tracie Farrell Discusses Ethical AI with ITV

Tuesday 20 Jun 2023 | KMi News

Research Fellow Dr. Tracie Farrell spoke with ITV on Tuesday afternoon, July 13th, about the consequences of Artificial Intelligence on society and her research team’s efforts to reframe the conversation around ethical AI as an “Ecology of AI”.

Dr. Farrell is the Principle Investigator of “Shifting Power”, a project funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to explore how AI may impact matters of justice. One priorioty of the team is understanding the environment of AI – the major players, their motivations, and the political, social and regulatory conditions under which it is developed and deployed. This includes the legacy of colonialism, existing power asymmetries and global inequality. Along with post-doctoral researchers Dr. Venetia Brown, Dr. Retno Larasati, and colleagues Dr. Soraya Kouadri Mostéfaoui and Dr. Syed Mustafa Ali from the Open University School of Computing and Communications, the team will explore the environment of AI and the interdependencies and relationships between each environmental element that create an Ecology of Artificial Intelligence and its impacts.

Dr. Farrell shared with ITV that an Ecology of AI involves understanding how social, political and economic factors influence what is likely to happen with AI in the future, given what we understand about the past and present.

“In order to understand the impact [of AI] on the economy, you need to know – how does the economy work now? Who is it working for and who is it not working for?

“Because if the system in which [we] want to deploy AI is already biased or prejudiced or leads to inequalities, AI is not going to fix that, it’s probably going to make it worse”

Dr. Farrell explained that understanding the trajectory of AI (given its current environment) is an important piece of the puzzle to clarify in order to prioritise where regulation needs to happen. Understanding how developments in AI could facilitate the consolidation of power and influence (or potentially help society to subvert these forces), is a key focus of her team’s research.

If you are interested in this topic and want to get involved in shaping this piece of research, consider joining the team at a workshop during the HHAI 2023 conference in Munich, Germany (or remotely). You can also contact Dr. Tracie Farrell at the following address: tracie.farrell@open.ac.uk.

Investigating the use of Generative AI for improving course production

Friday 09 Jun 2023 | KMi News

KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis has given an invited talk at the EmpowerED webinar series, with the title: “Investigating the use of Generative AI for improving course production”. The EmpowerED webinar series is aimed at developing and fostering an academic Community of Practice (CoP). It is an opportunity to celebrate and share success stories, showcase good practice exemplars, and discuss the adoption of innovative approaches within teaching and learning with colleagues across the wider education sector.

In his talk, Alexander shared initial results from an ongoing internal project at the Open University, aiming to investigate the use of Generative AI for improving the production of learning materials. In particular, Alexander discussed the views of different teams of academics that are involved in course production at the Open University, on how Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, can potentially assist them and help make course production more agile and efficient.

Watch the recording of this talk:

Investigating the use of Generative AI for improving course production

Friday 09 Jun 2023 | KMi News

KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis has given an invited talk at the EmpowerED webinar series, with the title: “Investigating the use of Generative AI for improving course production”. The EmpowerED webinar series is aimed at developing and fostering an academic Community of Practice (CoP). It is an opportunity to celebrate and share success stories, showcase good practice exemplars, and discuss the adoption of innovative approaches within teaching and learning with colleagues across the wider education sector.

In his talk, Alexander shared initial results from an ongoing internal project at the Open University, aiming to investigate the use of Generative AI for improving the production of learning materials. In particular, Alexander discussed the views of different teams of academics that are involved in course production at the Open University, on how Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, can potentially assist them and help make course production more agile and efficient.

Watch the recording of this talk:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEnF87iFDDs]

Anna De Liddo co-organises Critical Deliberative Democracy Tech Workshop at the CT2023 Conference

Thursday 08 Jun 2023 | KMi News

The biennial Communities and Technologies (C&T) conference (C&T 2023) took place last week in Lahti, Finland. This conference provides an unparalleled platform for interdisciplinary dialogue amongst researchers, practitioners, industry experts, and community advocates living in the intersection of communities and technology. The five-day event had a diverse program of research presentations, workshops, insightful panel discussions, and a showcase of emerging technologies giving the opportunity for participants to discuss the latest developments, innovations, and research results in the field.

The main conference chair (and amazing host(!)) was our very own Dr. Annika Wolf, a former member of KMi, who is currently an Assistant Professor in User-centred Software Engineering at LUT University.

Co-located with the conference, Prof. Anna De Liddo organised the workshop “Critical Deliberative Democracy Tech: Questions, Tensions, Norms and Directions for Working with Institutions, Communities and Technologies to Scale Up Democratic Innovations”. The workshop was a real success (!) attracted multiple experts in public deliberation and digital governance around the world and marked the first international event of the ORBIS project (a 3M, 3 yrs project just funded by the EU on the Democracy.01 call) You can find the full workshop programme here: https://events.kmi.open.ac.uk/ct-2023/ and read more about the ORBIS project at: https://orbis-project.eu/

The Workshop programme included a talk Could Generative AI Augment Reflection, Deliberation and Argumentation? by KMi alumnus, Professor Simon Buckingham Shum, who is now at the Connected Intelligence Centre, University of Technology Sydney.

Last but not least, one of our amazing PhD Students, Lucas Anastasiou, presented a paper titled “A Tale of Struggles: An Evaluation Framework for Transitioning from Individually Usable to Community-Useful Online Deliberation Tools”. This paper presented an evaluation framework for assessing the impact and efficacy of online deliberation tools while taking into account challenges to deploying those in real communities to make a real impact in achieving community needs. This presentation also signed a great milestone for Lucas who just submitted his thesis the day before C&T took place! A great week with many things to celebrate for the KMi lab!

You can find the conference’s full proceedings in ACM Digital Library here: https://dl-acm-org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3593743

HEROS Project Concludes Final Stakeholder Conference, Showcasing Research in the Context of COVID-19

Monday 05 Jun 2023 | KMi News

The HEROS Project recently wrapped up its final stakeholder conference, presenting its innovative actionable knowledge that contributes to improving pandemic response under four areas: governance, models in epidemics, medical supply chain management, and social media analytics.

HERoS aims to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the response to the Covid-19 outbreak. HERoS is a Horizon 2020 project funded under the ‘SC1-PHE-CORONAVIRUS-2020 – Advancing knowledge for the clinical and public health response to the 2019-nCoV epidemic’ call. HERoS addresses the need to understand the social dynamics of the outbreak and the related public health response

KMi led the research for creating novel insights and evidence into the impact of fact-checks on the sharing dynamics of COVID-19 misinformation, and how these dynamics change over time, topics, and demographics. The HERoS final conference on 25th May was attended by Gregoire Burel and Harith Alani as representatives of the HERoS OU team. Gregoire; the lead KMi researcher on HERoS, said, “This project allowed us to bring our expertise in misinformation research to supporting Covid-19 response.” Harith, who was the OU’s principal investigator on the project, stated that “this was a very impactful project in terms of scientific output and media attention, thanks to all the KMi researchers, developers, and support staff who contributed so much to the success of this project”.

The HERoS consortium consisted of humanitarian logistics and supply chain management (Hanken, Finland), epidemiological modelling and policy design (TUDelft, The Netherlands), crisis governance (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands); machine learning and information sciences (Open University, UK), public health services (Nordic Healthcare Group, Finland), space research and geoinformation (Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland), UAV development (Squadron, Poland) and health emergency responders (Polish Center for International Aid, Italian Red Cross, Project HOPE). ARTTIC managed the project.

Related Links:

Extended Semantic Web Conference 20th Anniversary

Friday 02 Jun 2023 | KMi News

The Semantic Web Community gathered in Crete for the 20th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2023) to hear the latest results in research, technologies, and applications in its field. This is a major venue for discussing the latest scientific results and technology innovations around semantic technologies. In addition to a technical program organized over numerous tracks, the five-day event featured workshops and tutorials, system descriptions and demos, a posters exhibition and a doctoral symposium.

As usual, there was a strong representation from KMi at this year’s event.

Professor John Domingue, President of STI International which runs the conference series, opened the PhD symposium with a keynote talk entitled “Spending as Much Time as Possible on the Beach: Reflections on an Academic Career”. John also chaired two special events:

The 20th Anniversary Panel featuring Dieter Fensel, Asunción Gómez-Pérez, Ian Horrocks and Stefan Decker, who are some of the key players in establishing the field of Semantic Web. The Panel exchanged perspectives about the past and looked ahead to the future.
The annual STI International Board meeting which oversees the ESWC Conference series.

KMi members co-organised or participated in six workshops:

Aisling Third and John Domingue co-organised Trusting Decentralised Knowledge Graphs and Web Data (TrusDeKW). This was last of three distinct workshops to bring researchers together to discuss the problems of data centralisation and diverse approaches for decentralising data, such as federated querying and distributed ledgers. The workshop included two talks by KMi members: Ethics and Executability: Tracing Decency in Decentralised Knowledge Graph Applications, by Aisling Third and John Domingue and An Architecture for a Decentralised Learning Analytics Platform, by Audrey Ekuban and John Domingue.
Angelo Salatino presented his work on “Untangling Robots’ Cultural Norms” co-authored with Enrico Motta and Agnese Chiatti at the “2043 track: The next 20 years – ESWC 2043 papers.” This session featured presentations also from KMi alumni: Marta Sabou and Mathieu d’Aquin.
Francesco Osborne Co-Chaired the Semantic Technologies for Scientific, Technical, and Legal Data Workshop and Angelo Salatino sat on the Programme Committee.
Alba Morales Tirado Co-organised The 6th International Workshop on Semantic Web solutions for large-scale biomedical data analytics – SeWeBMeDA-2023
Francesco Osborne Co-chaired the Knowledge Graph Generation from Text – TEXT2KG Workshop. Also involved in the workshop organisation were Enrico Motta (Advisory Committee) and Angelo Salatino (Programme Committee).
At the Semantic Methods for Events and Stories Workshop (SEMMES) Alba Morales Tirado presented the paper Musical Meetups: a Knowledge Graph Approach for Historical Social Network Analysis which she co-authored with Jason Carvalho, Paul Mulholland and Enrico Daga. Their paper features the work carried as part of the MEETUPS pilot, which focuses on supporting music historians and teachers by providing a Web tool that enables the exploration and visualisation of encounters between people in the musical world in Europe from c.1800 to c.1945, relying on information. MEETUPS is one of the pilots developed as part of the Polifonia project.

John Domingue said: “It has been a privilege to collaborate with the Semantic Web community over the past two decades. It was exciting to contemplate what we may achieve together in the next twenty years”.

#ESWC2023

Publications:

Tirado, A., Carvalho, J., Mulholland, P. and Daga, E. (2023) Musical Meetups: a Knowledge Graph approach for Historical Social Network Analysis, Proceedings of the ESWC 2023 Workshops and Tutorials. Semantic Methods for Events and Stories (SEMMES), Hersonissos, Greece

Enrico Motta, Angelo Antonio Salatino, Agnese Chiatti (2023). Untangling Robots’ Cultural Norms. In ESWC 2043: The Next 20 Years Track at the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2023), Crete, June 2023.

Under this link, Springer has made the proceedings available open access for 4 weeks from 1st June.

Related Links:

ESWC23 Website

KMi Team take part in Annual Running Club Relay

Thursday 11 May 2023 | KMi News

Well done to the Knowledge Media Runners, Harith Alani, Jason Carvalho, Rachel Coignac-Smith, Alba Morales-Tirado, who finished in the top half of the rankings – 29th out of 61 teams – in the annual OU Running Club Relay Race. This was the first race held since 2019 due to things being on hold for a couple of years over the pandemic.

Competitors were made up of mixed teams of four with each member running the same 1.1 mile course, around the cricket pitch, up the Ouzel Valley towards Willen, before crossing the river and returning back to the start via the path on the other side of the river. The event was open to all abilities with the emphasis being on fun; these have traditionally included Open University staff, retired runners and those from running/athletics clubs, businesses and colleges in the surrounding area.

Although the ground was damp from recent heavy rainfall, the rain held off and it was a perfect temperature for running. There were plenty of supporters cheering the teams on. It was great that so many teams and supporters turned out on the day. Many thanks to Jason for organising the KMi team.

The OU Running Club usually run at lunchtimes and often meet each other by informal arrangement at the pavilion. There are twice weekly organised sessions: a fartlek session (based on effort and recovery intervals) on Tuesdays and an interval training session around the Woughton Playing Fields on Fridays. Staff and students who are interested can find out more on the Club website.

Related Links:

OU Running Club

Shifting Power: Launching our UKRI FLF Project on AI and Justice

Tuesday 09 May 2023 | KMi News

KMi is happy to announce the official launch of “Shifting Power”, a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship-funded project investigating the impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Justice. The project focuses on the perspectives of those with intersectional and/or non-normative identities that go underrepresented in AI research.

At the moment, the team is running two parallel studies. One study is gathering perspectives from AI Researchers primarily educated and professionalised in the WANA Region, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia and Malaysia. The purpose of this study is to understand how those less represented in the research literature and in the media feel about the impacts of AI technology. The second study is looking to capture the insights of queer identified AI researchers and enthusiasts, particularly those with other marginalised/peripheralised, intersecting identities, to explore what this technology could mean for society in the future. If you feel you are a good candidate for either of these studies, feel free to contact Dr. Tracie Farrell at the following address: tracie.farrell@open.ac.uk.

The other emerging area of research is in the “Ecology of AI”, mapping the various impacts of AI from an ecological perspective, in the short-, medium-, and long-term. This includes understanding how social, political and economic factors influence what is likely to happen with AI in the future, given what we understand about the past and present. If you are interested in this topic and want to get involved in shaping this piece of research, consider joining the team at a workshop during the HHAI 2023 conference in Munich, Germany (or remotely). This work is pursued alongside collaborators from the Open University School of Computing and Communication, Dr. Soraya Kouadri Mostéfaoui and Dr. Syed Mustafa Ali, and Dr. Suzanne Pierre from the Critical Ecology Lab in California.

The KMi Shifting Power team includes core team members Dr. Tracie Farrell (PI of the project), Dr. Venetia Brown (qualitative and mixed-methods research) and Dr. Retno Larasati (explainable AI). Prof. Miriam Fernandez is the technical mentor on the project. Currently, the team is also collaborating with Dr. R. Justin Hunt on conceptualisations of harm and ethics within queer communities. In the future, the project will be collaborating with Serena Coppolino Perfumi on the sociology of AI and artist Liz Rosenfeld on queer future-making within the context of AI. The team is open to collaborations and is happy to be in touch with those who are working on similar or complementary issues.

Related Links:

Shifting Power Website

KMi Doctoral Students present their research in Austin, Texas

Tuesday 09 May 2023 | KMi News

Congratulations to three KMi’s Doctoral Students who presented their research to the international community in Austin Texas last week.

Ángel Pavón Pérez and Joseph Kwarteng presented papers at the 15th ACM Web Science Conference 2023 (WebSci 2023) in Austin Texas on 1st May. Each student were lead authors representing their co-author teams.

Ángel took part in Paper Session 4: Fairness and Bias which was chaired by KMi’s Director, Harith Alani. Tracking Machine Learning Bias Creep in Traditional and Online Learning Systems with Covariance Analysis. His paper summarised his doctoral research into algorithms used in online banking services, which can sometimes in unfair decisions toward certain groups.

Joseph participated in Paper Session 5: Harmful and Problematic Behaviour which was chaired by Giuseppe Russo. His paper, Understanding Misogynoir: A Study of Annotators’ Perspectives, demonstrated the challenge of using online methods to detect misogynoir due to the subjectivity and intersectional nature of people’s opinions and interpretations of hate speech.

Doctoral Student, Em Dean, presented their paper to the PhD Symposium at The Web Conference 2023 which was co-located with WebSci’23. Em’s paper entitled A Bridge over the Troll: Non-Complementary Activism Online looks at attempts by marginalised communities to use online media to generate organic engagement in activism.

Also attending the events in Texas was John Domingue who, with Aisling Third, had co-organised the Trusting Decentralised Knowledge Graphs and Web Data Workshop (TrusDeKW). This was the second of three distinct workshops being convened in 2023 for the Web Community to explore decentralised approaches for web data and Knowledge Graphs.

Harith Alani said: “I was very proud to see such an active representation of KMi at this world-leading event. It was a valuable opportunity to show the community our latest research, and for our researchers to connect and collaborate with peers from around the world.”

A highlight of the trip was when the team attended this year’s Turing Lecture delivered by Bob Metcalfe, Emeritus UT Austin Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Professor Metcalfe is the co-inventor of Ethernet, co-founded 3Com, and formulated Metcalfe’s law, which describes the effect of a telecommunications network.

WebSci’2023 was co-located with the prestigious The Web Conference 2023 (TheWebConf 2023) which was formerly known as International World Wide Web Conference, abbreviated as WWW. TheWebConf is a yearly international academic conference on the topic of the future direction of the World Wide Web. For over three decades this conference has been the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of the topics related to the Web. Since 2022, the event has been integrated with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Hypertext and the Web (SIGWEB) and is managed by a new steering committee within ACM. WebSci’24 will be held in Stuttgart, Germany. ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges.

Read the papers here:

Pavón Pérez, Á., Fernandez, M., Al-Madfai, H., Burel, G., Alani, H.(2023) Tracking Machine Learning Bias Creep in Traditional and Online Learning Systems with Covariance Analysis 15th ACM Web Science Conference 2023 (WebSci23), Evanston, TX, USA
Kwarteng, J., Farrell, T., Third, A., Burel, G. and Fernandez, M. (2023) Understanding Misogynoir: A Study of Annotators’ Perspectives, 15th ACM Web Science Conference 2023 (WebSci23), Evanston, TX, USA
Dean, E., A Bridge over the Troll: Non-Complementary Activism Online, A Bridge over the Troll: Non-Complementary Activism Online, ACM Web Conference, 2023, Evanston, TX, USA
Trusting Decentralised Knowledge Graphs and Web Data (TrusDeKW) Organizers: John Domingue, Aisling Third, Juan Cano, Andrea Cimmino, Ruben Verborgh, Philipp Rohde, Maria-Esther Vidal, ACM Web Conference, 2023, Evanston, TX, USA

Related Links:

The OU presents the output of the SPICE project at the Extended Intelligence for Cultural Engagement

Monday 24 Apr 2023 | KMi News

Researchers from the Knowledge Media Institute participated in the Extended Intelligence for Cultural Engagement (ExICE) conference in Bologna, showcasing the outputs of the EU H2020 project SPICE "Social Cohesion, Participation, and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement". The team, led by PI Paul Mulholland, included Enrico Daga, Jason Carvalho, and Chukwudi Uwasomba.

SPICE is an EU H2020 project dedicated to research on novel methods for “citizen curation” of cultural heritage through an ecosystem of tools co-designed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers, technologists, and museum engagement professionals, and user communities.

In the SPICE project, the OU team collaborated with museum professionals from the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) to design “Deep Viewpoints”, a mobile application supporting citizens in curating their own responses to the museum’s collection and exhibitions. The citizen curation process has been carried out by community groups traditionally under-served by the cultural sector to introduce new citizen voices into the curatorial process. Participating communities include black and black queer advocacy groups, asylum seekers, young people in custody, migrant women, and young people living with long-term illness.

KMi research demonstrates how citizen curation opens critical challenges for data integration and reuse in the cultural heritage sector. The SPICE Linked Data Hub integrates data from museum collections and user-generated content from applications, leveraging a multiplicity of semantic viewpoints, using a novel system for Knowledge Graph Construction (KGC) designed in KMi: SPARQL Anything.

Furthermore, the SPICE Linked Data Hub gives citizen curation partner organisations (e.g. museums or companies in the tourism sector) meaningful control over their data, by expressing fine-grained, user-tailored licenses and terms of use and by developing an approach to dealing with privacy violations and hate speech in user-contributed content.

The SPICE project is successfully ending in April 2023 after three challenging years for museums, affected by the pandemic. Digital methods allowed for alternative communication channels to be explored, transforming the limitations or the lock-down into an opportunity for new developments.

Related Links:

Spice Project

Ahead in the Cloud: Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI

Thursday 20 Apr 2023 | KMi News

Professor John Domingue is featured in a podcast where he discusses Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI with researcher and writer Chad Watt. The podcast is the latest in the Ahead in the Cloud series hosted by the Infosys Knowledge Institute where business leaders share what they’ve learned on their cloud journey.

In the discussion, John outlines the innovative approach to open learning at the Open University and the "knowlege acquisition bottleneck" experienced in the early AI days. He explains how evolving AI technology is now democratising education by allowing the customisation of more than 300 courses at the Open University.

John’s advice to his younger self:
“Today is the slowest that technology will progress for the rest of your life.
Be confident, you are really going to make it.
Take care of your network; the size and quality of your network will be really important to you. ”

Related Links:

The podcast and transcription are available here.

Update on Delivering the CORE Membership Programme

Monday 03 Apr 2023 | KMi News

We’re keen to update you with the latest developments as we continue to welcome more CORE Members and keep improving the tools and support for our members while delivering on our mission to index all open access research worldwide.

In March, we welcomed another six new institutions who have joined CORE as Supporting and Sustaining members; University of Exeter, Cardiff University, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Hull, University of Nottingham and University of Strathclyde. A huge thank you goes out to all of these amazing folks!

We see this support as instrumental and essential for the future of open access and open research. We’re delighted at the level of support shown by the community as it represents a significant contribution to the ongoing sustainability of CORE.

Our technical team has been making significant progress in improving both the user experience and documentation for the CORE Dashboard, the platform used by hundreds of CORE members and institutional repositories. The Dashboard gives repository managers a suite of tools for managing their Open Access content indexed by CORE, dealing with issues with metadata issues, and checking compliance with OA funder policies, specifically, we are working hard on updating the Dashboard for compliance with the UKRI OA policy and looking for other policies beyond the UK.

Within the CORE Dashboard, we have introduced a new tutorial that shows users how they can benefit from the tools provided by the Dashboard.

Our aim with these developments is to signify the ongoing growth and dedication of CORE in promoting open access and transforming the landscape of scholarly communication. We have been reaching out to UK institutions, working with them gathering feedback and this will be incorporated into a public wish list of features. We keep our Board of Supporters updated about this wish list and work with them to help us determine the community priorities. The first date for the Board of Supporters to convene is being finalised, and we expect this to take place in the second part of June.

We have a number events lined up where we will be presenting CORE and we will be delighted if you can join us:

Charleston Conference: “THE FUTURE OF SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION IN A CHATGPT WORLD” April 4-5 (Virtual Conference)
ILIDE2023: Innovative Libraries in the Digital Era 2023 Conference 24-26 April, Jasna, Slovakia
OR2023: 18th International Open Repositories Conference (OR2023) 12-15 June, Stellenbosch, South Africa
UKCORR: CORE will be hosting a webinar for members of the United Kingdom Council of Open Research and Repositories (UKCORR) towards the end of April 2023, exact date to be announced shortly.

Stay tuned for more exciting news and developments from CORE in the months to come!

KMi article among the top 10 most downloaded in 2022 for International Journal of Social Robotics

Tuesday 28 Mar 2023 | KMi News

Congratulations to Gianluca Bardaro, Alessio Antonini & Enrico Motta whose article Robots for Elderly Care in the Home: A Landscape Analysis and Co-Design Toolkit has been announced as one of the Top 10 Downloaded Articles in the International Journal of Social Robotics in 2022.

The article, published in August 2021, was based on a case study for the EU large-scale pilot of the EU H2020 GATEKEEPER project. In it, the authors propose a novel co-design toolkit, which uses an ecological framework for robot interventions in the healthcare domain. Their approach connects robot capabilities with known geriatric factors, to create a holistic view encompassing both the physical platform and the logic of the deployment.

Related Links:

Robots for Elderly Care in the Home: A Landscape Analysis and Co-Design Toolkit

Top 10 Downloaded Articles 2022

Tiff Leek is awarded a Social Microbe Residency

Tuesday 28 Mar 2023 | KMi News

Congratulations to Tiff Leek, a member of the STEM Technical Services Team, on being awarded a Social Microbes Residency. Social Microbes is a new collaboration between Then Try This and Dr. Elze Hesse, funded by Elze’s UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.

Tiff is a research software developer and animal computer interaction researcher, maker and artist. Her residency will be an exploration of local microbial life in the form of workshops, imagery, and a raku fired accessible ceramic relief wall mural. The mural will be of microbes and microbe colonies at various magnifications, and the landscape local to Wheal Martyn, showing the microbes that live in the soil in the local mining landscape, and providing information on how they work together. As well as a visual treat, this will provide a tactile picture for the vision impaired and a rubbing surface to allow visitors to make composite pictures of the various elements. You can find Tiff on Mastodon, Instagram and Twitter.

This is one of three Social Microbes residencies, with each resident based at a different collaborating host organisation in Cornwall. The host organisations are all very different to each other: Wheal Martyn – a museum based within two Victorian china clay works, Soul Farm– a food-justice orientated market garden farm, and Fish Factory – a community arts venue.

We’re looking forward to seeing Tiff’s mural and as well as the outputs from the other Social Microbes residencies.

Related Links:

Introducing Social Microbes Residents

ChatGPT and Friends: How Generative AI is Going to Change Everything

Monday 27 Mar 2023 | KMi News

On March 23, 2023, KMi hosted an open forum called "How Generative AI is Going to Change Everything." The event was about ChatGPT and related technologies such as DALL E 2 and Stable Diffussion. It aimed to explain what lies underneath this type of AI, including its limitations, facilitate discussions and see if there was sufficient interest in holding an ethical workshop. The talks covered a wide range of areas, from technical underpinnings, testing against OU module assignments, ethical, diversity and inclusivity issues and how this technology might be deployed.

The hybrid event, which was supported by the KMi Knowledgemakers, was a huge success, with over 40 attendees at the KMi Podium and 220 online attendees from across the University. There were presentations on the basics of ChatGPT/GPT-3/GPT-4, the difference between the different versions of GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer), and some pointers towards the future. The meeting chat was buzzing with comments, discussion and pointers to examples.

John Domingue, Professor of Computer Science, opened the event describing the technology as a very sophisticated text predictor, with GPT3 being described as "a text predictor on steroids." He introduced the differences between the different versions of GPT, including the amount of text they can process and generate. John shared a slide describing the OU’s AI agents ecosystem which is effectively an AI strategy for the OU.

John said afterwards: “The forum showed the wide range of stimulating work going on in this area across the OU. See the presentation slides on the GenAI website”.

He praised the organising team for smooth planning and running of the event: Lucas Anastasiou (PhD Research Student), Shuang Ao (PhD Research Student), Matteo Cancellieri (Lead Developer – Open Research), John Domingue, David Pride (Research Associate) and Aisling Third (Research Fellow). Thanks also to Ben Hawkridge (AV project Officer).

KMi is continuously looking to improve how we work and manage change with effective technologies using data and evidence. Follow our GenAI website for future events on this area.

Finally, if you missed the event, Chris Douce (Senior Lecturer in School of Computing & Communications) has written a blog post summarising some of the presentations.

Thanks to the presenters from KMi, C&C, E&I, IET, LAL & Student Support Innovations who contributed to the forum’s success. The list of presentations and the WORKSHOP REPLAY can be seen on the GenAI Webpage.

Story Credits: With thanks to Chris Douce and ChatGPT.

Related Links:

GenAI Website

Ada Lovelace Day Event at Somerset House

Tuesday 14 Mar 2023 | KMi News

On Monday, 13th March 2023 I attended an event hosted by the Kindness Studio to commemorate Ada Lovelace which was supported by the University of Warwick and The Alan Turing Institute. Lovelace, a 19th century mathematics, and computer science pioneer is celebrated globally as a role model for women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). In March 2022, a statue of Ada Lovelace was unveiled by St Edward in Millbank Quarter at the City of Westminster.

The event discussed how the sculpture could elevate woman progressing in STEM.

The event featured Mary & Etienne Millner (artists of the Ada Lovelace statue), Elisabeth Rounis (neurologist) and Aidan Meller (creator of Ai-Da). The Q&A informed the audience of the message and rationale of the Lovelace statue located in the Millbank Quarter development in Westminster.

The event supplied an open network to speak on the struggles of women in the sciences. The outcome of this event was to promote creativity in art and science and encourage an open discussion on widening the door to gender inclusivity in STEM. The event launched at a time when, according to the UK education hub, women account for only 11.4% of STEM starts (2019/20).

By attending this event I learned about women’s progression in STEM, got networking opportunities with fellow women and got involved in a healthy and mindful discussion about AI technology. It was interesting to know that people are not just aware about but asking questions and exchanging ideas without any fear and trying to learn creativity through art and science and encouraging gender inclusivity withing STEM community.

Summer Scholarships for Young Black People – The 2023 Call is Open

Monday 13 Mar 2023 | KMi News

Since 2020, KMi have provided financial support to Black scholars to enable them to experiment in a cutting-edge field, that can help to change the world. Hot technology topics previously covered include: Misinformation, Robotics, Human Computer Interaction, Blockchain and Knowledge Graphs.

The 4th call is now open. Three successful applicants will receive financial support with a bursary of £2,700, alongside the experience to build up their careers as young members in STEM.

Applicants this year can choose to apply for one of four challenges which use hot technologies to solve societal challenges and positively impact the world around us. Projects start on 1st July and run for 9 weeks until the end of August. The activities can be conducted online or at the Open University campus:

Challenge 1: Should I read this? How do we know when a scientific paper is really good?
Challenge 2: Exploring the Hallucinations of ChatGPT and Friends
Challenge 3: When AI creativity interacts with haptic touch, what will happen?
Challenge 4: World Domination with Raspberry Pi and The Internet of Things

In addition to the bursary, each scholar will receive mentoring and support from KMi researchers, students and technicians who work in our project spaces.

The benefits

KMi Scholars will create a story for future generations. The KMi team aim to make Black students feel at home in a computer science research environment and demonstrate what computing careers can offer. A scholarship could be a step forward in career development. It can provide skills and evidence which can be included in applications to study at university or for employment.

See the how to apply, eligibility and deadlines on the call web page. Please share the call in any networks where young people who qualify can be reached.

Related Links:

Summer Scholarships 2023

Happy International Women’s Day 2023

Monday 06 Mar 2023 | KMi News

Happy International Women’s Day 2023! We invited women in KMi to be featured in this update of our annual commemorative poster.

KMi are proud to #EmbraceEquity throughout the year. We are one of a handful of computer science units with Athena Swan silver awards. This award, received in 2022, recognises the positive impacts of our actions over the past five years to tackle gender iniquity head on, and motivates us to continue our journey. Some of the many highlights of KMi’s gender equality work in the past five years have included:

An increased percentage of women among our students, our academic staff and our professional and support staff
Gender balance in our Promotions, our recruitment of PhD students, and our allocation of leadership roles within KMi

KMi’s engagement with the Athena Swan charter has been an important opportunity for us to reflect on our practices and strengthen our commitment to equal opportunities for all, and to establish a shared vision aligned to the Athena Swan charter and embedded into our practices and procedures.

You can download an anonymised copy of our Silver Submission as a pdf here: KMi Athena Swan Silver Report and also see the status of our Athena Swan actions here: KMi Athena Swan Action Plan.

CORE Welcomes 10 New Members

Friday 03 Mar 2023 | KMi News

As part of our ongoing sustainability plan, in December 2022, we launched the CORE Membership program for data providers. CORE is a not-for-profit service dedicated to the open access mission and one of the signatories of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures POSI. Following the recently announced changes to our status, to remain free for public use, CORE is leveraging a membership model to help sustain its operations.

We are therefore delighted today to announce that, in the very short time since the membership programme has launched, we have already welcomed ten institutions who have made a public and financial commitment to supporting Open Access infrastructure by becoming Supporting or Sustaining members of CORE.

The support of our members is vital in ensuring the sustainability of the CORE service and we value their participation greatly and are immensely grateful for their help. Members receive public recognition for their support and are also invited to join the Board of Supporters, which meets bi-annually and helps shape the future roadmap for CORE. Only by listening to the community can we best serve its needs.

We thank our new members again, and appeal to other institutions to follow their lead. By joining the membership program, you will help us to continue to grow and serve the scholarly community with high-quality Open Access research literature. Together, we can build a stronger, more open scholarly infrastructure that supports the advancement of science and knowledge for all.

Our new members

University of Oxford
University of St Andrews
The University of Huddersfield
University of Lancaster
White Rose Research (University of Leeds, The University of Sheffield and University of York)
University of Bristol
Queen’s University Belfast
University of Birmingham
Anglia Ruskin University
University of Chicago

You can read more details about CORE Membership for data providers here:

https://core.ac.uk/membership

KMi Research Fellow co-authors Erasmus funded publication on creativity

Thursday 09 Feb 2023 | KMi News

Dr. Tracie Farrell, a Research Fellow at KMi and winner of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (Round 6), has announced a new publication today on LinkedIn outlining a methodology that individuals and groups can use to develop their creative practice, particularly when engaging with large, complex problems.

The “Kinetic Method” is the result of more than 10 years of collaboration with co-authors Karolina Iwa and Zora Csalagovits, and provides readers with a contextual background to the project and its principles, concrete descriptions of methods, and shared best practices of applying these methods “in the field”. The publication was funded by the European Commission through the Erasmus+ programme (Key Action 2) and is free to download from the project website, where you will also find more information about the wider aims of the project, a short podcast series on the main themes in the book and an initial assessment tool on basic creative skills (Observation, Inquiry and Interpretation).

If you are interested in some of the scientific research associated with the Kinetic Method, you can read more about Question-based Dialogue in the following publications (done in partnership with the University of Aachen):

Farrell Frey, T., Gkotsis, G., & Mikroyannidis, A. (2016). Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Representing metacognition with question-based dialogue. In CEUR Workshop Proceedings (Vol. 1736, pp. 51-58).

de Lange, P., Göschlberger, B., Farrell, T., Neumann, A. T., & Klamma, R. (2019). Decentralized learning infrastructures for community knowledge building. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, 13(3), 516-529.

Dr. Farrell and her colleagues look forward to any feedback or questions about the material. For more information you can contact her at tracie.farrell@open.ac.uk.

Scaling-up community care with MK:Communities

Monday 09 Jan 2023 | KMi News

On the 24th of January 2023, the Woughton Community Council is hosting an event for local volunteer groups showcasing how the MK:Community App can be used to support activities in the neighbourhood. The app is the result of a joint effort, a co-design activity started in October 2021 with WCC, the SME Spirocco and KMi in the context of the H2020 GATEKEEPER project. The app enables local residents to request and answer requests about activities of daily living like walking together or driving to doctor appointments. Now, the App latest version includes an "offer" functionality for groups that organize socialization and other forms of activities. The event will describe the first application of this functionality with the Tinkers Bridge Resident Association followed by a hands-on session to support the setup and use of the app for both residents and organizations.

Related Links:

Registration

No corrections required for Agnese’s PhD Thesis!

Friday 09 Dec 2022 | KMi News

Congratulations to Dr. Agnese Chiatti, who brilliantly defended her PhD Thesis, entitled "Visually Intelligent Agents – Improving Sensemaking in Service Robotics”.

Agnese’s thesis, carried out under the supervision of Prof Enrico Motta and Dr Enrico Daga, tackled the problem of service robots operating in the real world, which need to interpret correctly the environment around them. In particular, Agnese’s approach focuses on the sense of vision, developing new Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies that significantly improve a robot’s ability to use its vision sensors to make sense of the world. These new AI technologies are integrated in an architecture called RAVI, which stands for “Robot Architecture for Visual Intelligence”. RAVI augments a Deep Learning module with knowledge-based components, which realise common sense reasoning capabilities, including size and spatial reasoning. The architecture was evaluated in the context of deploying a robot able to identify Health and Safety risks in an office environment, demonstrating a significant advance over the state of the art.

The Examination Panel comprised Prof. Alan Winfield (UWE Bristol – External Examiner), Prof. Stefan Rueger (KMi – Internal Examiner) and Prof. Anna De Liddo (KMi – Panel Chair).

The examiners were extremely complimentary about Agnese’s work, emphasizing the exceptional quality of the thesis. In particular, Prof Winfield stated in his report:

“This is one of the finest PhD dissertations of the many I have read over the last 30 years. If not the finest. It is, in my view, a truly exceptional piece of work, and I will recommend the work is published as a book. The care that Agnese takes in providing both context and background for every aspect of her work is outstanding, to the extent that the thesis is a wonderful tutorial on the subject of visual sensemaking. Agnese’s experimental work is a model of best practice; from the care with which she has constructed a set of research questions, to the carefully defined experiments, and the rigour and thoroughness of both the execution and analysis of those experiments”.

Indeed, the thesis was regarded by the examiners as a work of such good quality that no corrections were deemed necessary. This is a truly exceptional and extremely rare achievement, which evidences the extraordinary quality of Agnese’s work.

Following the completion of her PhD, Agnese is continuing her research in KMi as a part-time Postdoctoral Researcher in Robotics, contributing to the Gatekeeper project. In addition, she also holds a highly prestigious L’Oreal-Unesco Women in Science Fellowship, which is funding her work as Visiting Researcher at Milan Polythecnic.

Related Links:

Agnese’s Home Page

KMi’s Robotics team deploys robot in real home environment

Wednesday 07 Dec 2022 | KMi News

Earlier today, the Robotics team of KMi’s Intelligent Systems and Data Science group conducted experimental activities with the TIAGo robot in Northamptonshire. The robot was deployed for the first time in a real home environment, in the context of our research in the EU-funded GATEKEEPER project.

Specifically, our work focuses on developing robots that can assist older adults and fragile patients in their homes. For instance, patients with limited mobility may need help collecting objects that have fallen on the floor, without risking getting injured. Robots can also autonomously detect the presence of health and safety risks, e.g., tripping hazards caused by objects left on the floor. Moreover, patients affected by dementia may misplace their personal items (wallets, keys, glasses, TV remotes) due to forgetfulness. With access to a fine-grained map of the environment and by mapping and monitoring the position of objects in the home, the robot can assist patients in locating their personal items.

The objective of these experiments was to test the robot’s ability to autonomously reconstruct a 3D map of the home environment and retrieve a set of key personal items. Concurrently, the team also tested the integration of the robot platform with a telepresence module developed in partnership with Extend Robotics. The telepresence module is operated through a Virtual Reality (VR) visor, which makes it possible to control the navigation and manipulation of the robot remotely. This feature allows caregivers to check on the patients through a digital twin replica of the robot assistant and to deliver timely intervention remotely.

The team comprised Agnese Chiatti, Riccardo Pala, Enrico Motta and Gianluca Bardaro (courtesy of Milan Polytechnic), with Alessio Antonini providing input remotely from KMi.

Very big thanks to Ian Pulford (Smart City Consultancy Ltd.) and Brian Matthews (MK City Council) for providing crucial logistical support for this work.

Dr Retno Larasati achieves PhD success!

Tuesday 06 Dec 2022 | KMi News

We are delighted to announce that Dr Retno Larasati successfully defended her thesis today.

Retno’s study was entitled: Trust and Explanation in Artificial Intelligence Systems: A Healthcare Application in Disease Detection and Preliminary Diagnosis.

In her work, Retno has looked at the extent to which explanations and interactions can help non-expert users properly calibrate trust in AI systems, specifically AI for disease detection and preliminary diagnosis. This means reducing trust when users tend to over-trust an unreliable system and increasing trust if the system can be shown to work well. The three fundamental contributions to knowledge are, first, informing how to construct explanations that non-expert users can make sense of (meaningful explanations). Second, it contextualises current AI explanation research in healthcare, informing how explanations should be designed for AI-assisted disease detection and preliminary diagnosis systems (Explanation Design Guidelines). Third, it provides preliminary insights into the importance of the interaction modality of explanations in influencing trust. Her preliminary findings can inform and promote future research on XAI by shifting the focus of current research from explanation content design to explanation delivery and interaction design.

The examiners, Dr. Paul Mulholland and Dr. Simone Stumpf (University of Glasgow), said they were impressed with Retno’s work and her contribution to knowledge.

Her supervisors were Professor Anna De Liddo and Professor Enrico Motta. They said: “There is nothing more rewarding for a supervisor than to see a student grow in confidence and achieve what they have worked so hard for. Retno has demonstrated a level of resilience and strength that, no doubt, will allow her to make a great contribution to any research group in the future. Well done, Retno, we are very proud of you!”

Looking ahead, Retno will take a Post-Doc position at KMi working with Dr. Tracie Farrell as part of her UKRI Future Leader Fellowship to study how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help create a more "just" society, specifically examining the impact on marginalized groups.

This will no doubt give Retno the opportunity to maintain close ties with the IDea (Intelligent Deliberation team) within which she developed her doctoral work and with which she intends to continue collaborating in the future.

We are very happy to have retained Retno’s brilliant mind for a while longer in our network of young talents at KMi!

Time for the Lab to celebrate another great success!

The Future Use of Self Sovereign Identity and Verifiable Credentials

Friday 02 Dec 2022 | KMi News

KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis gave an invited talk at the event “The Future Use of Self Sovereign Identity and Verifiable Credentials”, organised by the European Horizon 2020 project TOKEN. The event took place online on November 30, 2022. Alexander presented the lessons learned from the European Horizon 2020 project QualiChain and specifically from the lifelong learning pilot that he has conducted in the context of this project. QualiChain has targeted the creation, piloting and evaluation of a decentralised platform for storing, sharing and verifying education and employment qualifications and has focused on the assessment of the potential of blockchain technology. The lifelong learning pilot led by Alexander has explored the use of decentralisation technologies towards providing lifelong learners with transparent and immutable educational accreditation.

Other invited talks in this event included speakers from FundingBox, the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI), and Walt.id:

Introduction to the Token project, by Token consortium representatives
Improving the Public Funding Distribution Process in Competitive Open calls using DLT, by Lynda O’Mahony, Project Manager at FundingBox
Decentralized KYC for cross-border investment, by Xabier Chao, CEO FundingBox
Self Sovereign Identity and EBSI, by Daniël Du Seuil, Convenor European Self Sovereign Identity Framework (EBSI) at European Blockchain Partnership
Walt.id: Holistic open source solutions for a wallet-centric world, by Dominik Beron, founder of wallet-centric solutions at walt.id
Qualichain Project: Decentralised Qualifications’ Verification and Management for Learner Empowerment, Education Reengineering and Public Sector Transformation, by Dr. Alexander Mikroyannidis, Associate Professor in the Knowledge Media Institute of The Open University
The future use of SSI and verifiable credentials – Round table and Q&A (all speakers)
Wrap-up and closing remarks, by Lynda O’Mahony

Vice-Chancellor endorses the EAI Dashboard

Tuesday 22 Nov 2022 | KMi News

The Vice-Chancellor has issued a video message to Associate Lecturers via internal channels to explain the importance of using the Early Alert Indicators Dashboard (EAID). In his video message, Tim Blackman said: "We want to highlight to you the Early Alert Indicators Dashboard and, if you are not using it, ask you to use it"

Powered by Machine Learning methods, the dashboard, which integrates OU Analyse and the Student Probability model, focuses on the early identification of students at risk of failing, helping Associate Lectures, Staff Tutors, Student Support Teams, Module Chairs, and Module Teams, to proactively monitor students and intervene early in the process. The wide body of research behind this tool indicates how proactive use helps to increase student retention and to reduce the OU’s existing awarding gaps.

The dashboard was envisioned more than a decade ago by the now emeritus professor Zdenek Zdrahal. Led by the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), the EAI Dashboard was refined for more than a decade in collaboration with Machine Learning and Data experts, pedagogical experts from the Institute of Educational Technologies (IET), Associate Lectures, Staff Tutors, Module Chairs, students, and other relevant university stakeholders, being a fantastic example of collaborative research put into practice.

The dashboard is accessible internally only via the OU Analyse website (https://analyse.kmi.open.ac.uk/AnalyseDashboard), where you can also find relevant research about the tool. Users of the Dashboard can access documentation, videos, training sessions, and a forum, created and monitored by the teams’ AL champions (https://learn3.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=300628). The EAID team advises users to watch out for the new newsletter in the New Year, which will include regular stories from our users, new features, and additional support.

Related Links:

OU Analyse Project Page

PhD success for Dr Alba Morales Tirado

Wednesday 16 Nov 2022 | KMi News

Congratulations to Doctor Alba Morales Tirado, who successfully defended her thesis today. Alba’s PhD was entitled "Health condition evolution for effective use of electronic records: knowledge representation, acquisition, and reasoning”.

Recently, there has been a growing interest in aspects of smart living, particularly due to the increasing adoption and use of Electronic Health Records (EHR). Her research set out to improve how data can be used to support Smart Cities services. During her research work, she studied how to support the identification of relevant health information about people involved in an emergency, such as a fire evacuation. During her PhD, Alba designed the Health Condition Evolution Ontology (HECON) and extended the SNOMED concept taxonomy to incorporate information of health event evolution. Furthermore, she designed a methodology for generating a Knowledge Graph of health condition evolution from natural language resources, combined with a human-in-the-loop workflow. She then applied the knowledge graph for reasoning on health condition evolution for detecting vulnerable people in emergency settings. Finally, an end-to-end demonstrator, the Condition Evolution Radar (CONRAD), shows how such methods can effectively support decision-making in an emergency scenario.

The examiners were Professor Dave Robertson (University of Edinburgh) and Professor John Domingue (KMi) and the panel was chaired by Professor Anna De Liddo. They commented that Alba did an excellent job in balancing the knowledge and system engineering perspectives with scientific rigor, which is typically not an easy thing to do. Furthermore, they noted the potential value of Alba’s contributions for healthcare analytics, beyond the emergency context.

Alba’s supervisors were Dr Enrico Daga and Professor Enrico Motta. Enrico D said: “We are extremely proud of Alba. Her work is the first to explore a general approach to represent condition evolution and opened important challenges for future research in this area”.

Alba will continue her work at KMi as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Knowledge Engineering, investigating hybrid methods for the generation of Knowledge Graphs within the context of the EU-funded projects SPICE and Polifonia.

AIDA Dashboard team wins Best In-use Paper Award at ISWC 2022

Friday 28 Oct 2022 | KMi News

Members of KMi’s Scholarly Knowledge Modelling Research Group have been announced as winners of the In-Use Paper Award at the International Semantic Web Conference, which is the premiere scientific venue for the Semantic Web and Knowledge Graphs community.

The award was given for the paper entitled Leveraging Knowledge Graph Technologies to Assess Journals and Conferences at Springer Nature, a 3-way collaboration between KMi, Springer Nature, and the University of Cagliari. It is co-authored by Simone Angioni, Angelo Salatino, Francesco Osborne, Alex Birukou, Diego Reforgiato Recupero, and Enrico Motta, who will share the 1500 USD prize associated with the award.

The paper describes the AIDA Dashboard, an innovative application which allows users to access analytics about scientific venues, including both journals and conferences, to gain insights about what topics are covered in these venues, the scientific impact of the contributions, industry participation, scientific trends and other types of scholarly data. The Dashboard is currently being deployed within Springer Nature, to support editorial decision making and marketing initiatives within the company. The AIDA Dashboard builds on AIDA-KG, a large-scale knowledge graph that includes over 1.5B RDF triples and was produced by integrating information from 25M research articles and 8M patents.

The AIDA Dashboard can be accessed at http://aida.kmi.open.ac.uk/dashboard, while the award-winning paper can be found at http://oro.open.ac.uk/84363/.

Massive congratulations to all members of the team!

Related Links:

KMi paper wins the 2022 SWSA Ten-Year Award

Tuesday 25 Oct 2022 | KMi News

Congratulations to Hassan Saif, Yulan He and Harith Alani on winning the prestigious Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) Ten-Year Award. The prize was announced at the opening ceremony of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2022) on 25th October.

The Award recognizes the highest impact papers from the ISWC proceedings ten years prior. The decision is based primarily, but not exclusively, on the number of citations to the papers from the proceedings in the intervening decade.

The winning paper was:
Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Twitter, ISWC 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7649. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35176-1_32

The award committee is chaired by the President of the Semantic Web Science Association and consists of the general chair and program chairs for ISWC 2022.

Awardees are invited to write a short note for the Journal of Web Semantics reflecting on their work being honored and its impact on the field and their own research. The winning paper receives an award of $1000 and each author will receive a certificate.

Well done to the authors.

Related Links:

Semantic sentiment analysis of twitter – paper on ORO

KMi at ISWC 2022

Monday 24 Oct 2022 | KMi News

The 21st International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2022), the premier international forum for the Semantic Web and Knowledge Graph Community, is currently underway and, as in previous editions, is characterised by a significant participation from KMi researchers.

The ISWC series of conferences is co-ordinated by the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA), whose Vice-President is KMi’s Harith Alani.

In this year’s edition, KMi is also well represented in the main conference committees, including the Senior Research Track Program Committee (Francesco Osborne), the Research Track Program Committee (Angelo Salatino), the Resource Track Program Committee (Enrico Daga), the In-Use Track Program Committee (Francesco Osborne) and the Poster & Demo Track Program Committee (Francesco Osborne). KMi-ers are also involved in workshop organization, with Francesco Osborne a co-organiser of the Workshop on Deep Learning for Knowledge Graphs (DL4KG) and Enrico Daga a co-organiser of the Workshop on Musical Heritage Knowledge Graphs. Finally, both Enrico Daga and Francesco Osborne are also session chairs for the Research Track.

In addition to playing key organizational roles, KMi-ers are also presenting new scientific results at the conference, in both the main programme and associated workshops. In particular, the following contributions will be presented at the conference:

Ratta, M. and Daga, E. Knowledge Graph Construction From MusicXML: An Empirical Investigation with SPARQL Anything.
[Workshop on Musical Heritage Knowledge Graphs]

Chiatti, A. and Daga, E. Neuro-symbolic learning for dealing with sparsity in cultural heritage image archives: an empirical journey.
[Workshop on Deep Learning for Knowledge Graphs]

Angioni, S., Salatino, A. A., Osborne, F., Birukou, A., Reforgiato, D. and Motta, E. Leveraging Knowledge Graph Technologies to Assess Journals and Conferences at Springer Nature
[In-Use Track]

Dessì, D., Osborne, F., Reforgiato, D., Buscaldi, D., Motta, E. CS-KG: A Large-Scale Knowledge Graph of Research Entities and Claims in Computer Science
[Resource Track]

More details about ISWC 2022 can be found at https://iswc2022.semanticweb.org.

Related Links:

Aida Dashboard

Tags:

AITag

Summer Scholar Samuel Kwaku Antwi identifies influential misinformation about vaccines

Tuesday 18 Oct 2022 | KMi News

As part of KMi’s third cohort of summer scholars, Samuel Kwaku Antwi was researching the subject of misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine online. Specifically, Sam was interested in understanding how vaccine-related misinformation was impacting young people from Ghana. This fresh topic addressed gaps in the literature on young people’s responses to misinformation, particularly about health-related topics like the COVID-19 vaccine. As part of his research he conducted a small-scale study with young Ghanaians on their perceptions about the vaccine and misinformation topics that influenced those perceptions. He also analysed the International Fact-checking Network (IFCN) database from Poynter to understand what vaccine misinformation topics appeared to be spreading most in Ghana in general.

The poster he developed about his project can be viewed here, but we also caught up with Sam to ask him about his topic and his experience as a scholar with KMi.

Sam, can you tell us a little bit about why you were interested in looking at misinformation about the vaccine spreading in Ghana? Why is this an important topic to research?

I chose vaccine misinformation spreading in Ghana because there have been many articles (news), social media posts, and word of mouth communication that misled young people. It creates confusion and distracts them from getting the vaccine. The topic of vaccine misinformation is very essential as it helps to know the opinions of the young people about taking the vaccine.

In your research, you focused on younger people’s perceptions of the vaccine. Do you think scientific research on misinformation considers young people’s views enough? Why should we talk to young people more often about misinformation?

Scientific researchers have not considered young people’s views. They consider young people as “Gen Z” and think this generation is full of chaos and computer world which makes them lazy and does not seem to show effort in anything. But I want scientific researchers to consider young people’s views…they also face all this misinformation so they must be considered.

So true! In your findings, you say that young people were particularly worried about the impacts of the vaccine on fertility and other long-term health complications. That was such a fresh new insight for us. Did you find any evidence that young people are also positively influenced when they see fact-checks or corrective information about the vaccine?

Yes, they were much concerned about fertility and long-term predicaments. They are concerned about the generation after them, and that misinformation grips their soul and puts them in custody of fear. Of course, young people have been positively influenced when fact checkers proved those misinformation false with correct information. Now we can have the vaccine and still give birth without any predicament.

After researching this topic, How do you think we should be communicating to young people about misinformation about the vaccine?

Young people should be communicated with facts and proof, and also they tend to use social media platforms more often, so I suggest these communications could be turned into ads which will randomly appear to them any time they go on the internet.

Finally, what was it like to conduct academic research for you? Did you enjoy doing it? Which things were most difficult? Which things were most interesting?

I loved doing this research. It shows me new things. Things that I never thought of. It was sometimes difficult when I needed qualitative data, difficult to get people to participate in the survey and when they participated, they didn’t give as much information as I wanted from them. Analysing the data collected was the most interesting part. It makes me understand the topic more.

Totally hear you, Sam, about trying to collect qualitative data! We’re really glad you enjoyed your research with us. Is there anything else you would like to share about your experience of conducting research at the Open University?

The research with Open University has exposed me to things that have never come across my mind. It has helped me to learn more about myself and has improved my research skills. These are the things we need for our generation that will grant us interest in doing such, to be useful in our generation. Thank you OU! Thank you KMi! board, Thank you my Supervisors!!!

Thank YOU so much for talking to us today – and for conducting such great research!

Vaccine misinformation in Ghana and young peoples opinions

[Download the Poster]

Congratulations Dr Venetia Brown, on your PhD Success!

Friday 14 Oct 2022 | KMi News

Congratulations to KMi’s newest Doctor, Venetia Brown, who has successfully defended her thesis "The role of interactive web broadcasts in fostering distance learning students’ engagement with practical lab and fieldwork".

Chaired by Dr Aisling Third, the examiners, Professor Eileen Scanlon (WELS, IET) and Dr Lynda Yorke (Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography, Bangor University), commented on the potential value of Venetia’s contributions for professional development, and for distance learning beyond the OU context.

Dr Trevor Collins and Professor Nick Braithwaite celebrated Venetia’s PhD success. They supervised her study, which used a qualitatively driven mixed-methods approach to investigate how large-scale Interactive Web Broadcasts support practical lab and fieldwork across STEM disciplines. Venetia’s research explored the purposes for using web broadcasts, the strategies and types of interactions that staff and students used to engage and interact with one another, and how the web broadcasts benefit the stakeholders who produce, present and participate in them.

Venetia will continue her work at KMi as a Postdoctoral Researcher in mixed-methods research, investigating the pedagogy around ethics and fairness within Dr Tracie Farrrell’s Research Team, who is investigating how AI could contribute to creating a more just society.

The Role of Web 3.0 and Blockchain in the Future of Education

Tuesday 11 Oct 2022 | KMi News

KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis gave a keynote talk at the 7th panhellenic scientific conference “Integration and Use of ICT in Education”, organised by the University of Patras in Greece. The event was very well attended by researchers and educators from higher and secondary education. Participants exchanged best practices on the effective use of ICT in different stages of the teaching and learning process.

Alexander’s keynote talk was entitled: “The Role of Web 3.0 and Blockchain in the Future of Education”. In his talk, Alexander discussed the potential impact that emerging decentralisation technologies, such as Web 3.0 and Blockchain, can have on the future of education. In particular, Alexander presented the pilot that he has led in the context of the European project QualiChain. Within this pilot, Alexander has investigated the use of decentralisation technologies towards providing lifelong learners with transparent and immutable educational accreditation.

A key output of this pilot is the Badged Open Course (BOC): “Decentralising Education Using Blockchain Technology”, which introduces Blockchain technology and its potential for decentralising and transforming education. The course is available on the Open University’s OpenLearn Create platform and is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0, which allows the reuse and adaptation of the course materials for non-commercial purposes. Upon completion of the course, learners earn a free statement of participation.

CORE runner-up at Open University Research Excellence Awards 2022

Tuesday 04 Oct 2022 | KMi News

The annual OU Research Excellence Awards highlight the diverse research undertaken at the OU and recognise the impact that this research has for the economy, the environment, and society as a whole. More than 250 Open University (OU) staff, students, funders and partners came together in London on the 22nd September for this year’s awards.

CORE was announced as a runner-up in the category Best External Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange.

We are extremely pleased that the CORE team was announced as runner-up in the highly-contested ‘Best External Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange Award’ for its knowledge exchange activities with a diverse range of external partners spanning from innovators, AI technology companies, digital library providers, plagiarism detection providers, academic social networks, funders and others, including its over decade long partnership with Jisc, the digital solutions provider for UK education and research. CORE received a small financial award to support research activities from the OU in recognition of this achievement.

CORE provides a wide range of services to support U.K. Higher Education Institutions via their Jisc membership, including the CORE Repository Dashboard which provides tools for repository management, content enrichment, metadata quality assessment and open access compliance checking with the UKRI OA policies. Additionally, CORE supports other Jisc projects such as OpenAthens and IRUS (Institutional Repository Usage Statistics) which enables institutions to demonstrate the value and impact of their institutional repositories.

Present at the ceremony was Dr. Petr Knoth, founder and head of the CORE project, who commented, “We are delighted that the work we undertake at CORE has again been recognised for the wide-ranging impact it delivers, in this case in the area of our knowledge exchange activities. Our close partnership with Jisc over the last ten years has allowed us to sustain and grow the services delivered by CORE and support all U.K. Higher Education Institutes with a range of critical services for their repository infrastructures.”

CORE has a strong history at these awards, including winning the overall Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity award in 2019 for its delivery of Open Access services to over 30 million monthly users from 165 countries across the globe.

OU Research Excellence Awards 2022

Tuesday 27 Sep 2022 | KMi News

KMi members were among the 250 attendees who gathered in London on 22nd September for the OU Research Excellence Awards 2022.

The evening was a celebration of research across the OU and also saw the launch of the new OU Strategy. We are delighted that KMi members were recognised as winners in two award categories. These were:

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion: Judges recognised Professor Anna De Liddo and the Knowledge Media Institute team with the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Award for their success in placing EDI at the heart of research methodology, outcomes and impact, making a significant contribution to the EDI agenda. Professor Advaith Siddharthan, Tracie Farrell and Charlotte Hamilton from the team collected the prize.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFzB38Uicao]

Environmental Sustainability Award: The Citizen Science and Artificial Intelligence Research Group received this award which recognised research or enterprise activity with sustainability at the heart of its methodology, outcomes and impact, making a significant contribution to the sustainability agenda. Professor Advaith Siddharthan, Professor Stefan Reuger, Janice Ansine and Rachel Redford collected the prize on behalf of the whole STEM cross-faculty team.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irKY0WlhXZ0]

We are also proud that KMi people and teams were runners-up in three other categories:

Dr Petr Knoth for Best External Collaboration Knowledge Exchange.
Professor Harith Alani and team in the Covid-19 Award for research into Covid-19-related behavioural dynamics, misinformation spread and supply chain disruption.
Professor Enrico Motta for Outstanding Supervisor Award.

Professor Harith Alani was also part of the Centre for Policing Research and Learning Team lead by Prof. Jean Hartley that collected an award from the Best External Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange.

Huge congratulations to all the nominees. To see the list of winners and runners-up, click the link at the bottom of the page.

Related Links:

OU celebrates Research Excellence Awards 2022

John Domingue at EDUtech_EUROPE 2022

Tuesday 27 Sep 2022 | KMi News

KMi’s John Domingue attended the EDUtech_EUROPE 2022 conference that was held in Amsterdam between 5-6th October. The event brought together more than 3000 educators, 250 speakers and 200 edtech providers from across Europe to present stories, showcase innovation and inspire educators across the region. There were four event themes:

T1: Schools Leaders and Hybrid Learning
T2: Schools IT & Digital Leaders and Digital Pedagogy
T3: Higher Education Leaders – Leaders and People
T4: Higher Education IT & Digital Leaders and Next Gen Learning.

John Domingue took part in the T4 Panel with Pierre Boulet, Vice President of Digital Transformation at University of Lille entitled: Digital Credentialing: the 21st-century approach to documenting learning. It was moderated by Rajarshi Chakraborty, MD of Erasmus Centre for Data Analytics. Their discussion focused on:

Giving students control over secure, validated and machine-readable credentials
An expendable solution to learning documentation
Articulating your vision and designing pilots for innovative blockchain and NFTs.

Browse the conference hashtag #EdutechEurope to learn more about the event.

Related Links:

EDTECH EUROPE 2022

CORE Membership launching soon!

Monday 05 Sep 2022 | KMi News

CORE (core.ac.uk), a not-for-profit service delivered by The Open University in partnership with Jisc, has been serving the scholarly community since 2011 and in that time has experienced phenomenal growth in every way. CORE collates Open Access research from over 10,500 data providers across the world and is now the largest collection of open access research literature. Over 30 million users each month access CORE, either via search or one of our services. We have also worked hard to develop services for our data providers and support them with tools to help better manage the content in their repositories, including improving discoverability, registering unique persistent identifiers, enriching content with data such as missing DOIs and helping monitor that their content remains compliant with Open Access policies and mandates.

We’re hugely excited to announce the pre-launch of the CORE Membership program, designed exclusively for organisations such as academic institutions and data providers.

Read our full blog post on the Jisc Research blog.

Related Links:

Read more.

KMi Researchers Launch the AIDA Dashboard

Thursday 01 Sep 2022 | KMi News

In partnership with Springer Nature and the University of Cagliari, the Scholarly Knowledge Research Group at The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute has developed the AIDA Dashboard, an innovative tool for exploring and making sense of the dynamics of research topics, scientific conferences and journals in Computer Science. These capabilities can be used to provide insights about scientific trends and developments to a variety of users, including researchers, scientific editors, policy makers, funding bodies, and other relevant stakeholders.

The AIDA Dashboard is freely available and can be browsed at https://w3id.org/aida/dashboard. The research data processed by the dashboard is also freely available under a CC-BY 4.0 license on https://w3id.org/aida/downloads.

By means of the AIDA Dashboard, users can explore either a conference or journal venue (e.g., the International Semantic Web Conference or Scientometrics) or a research field (e.g., semantic web). When selecting a conference or a journal the user can visualise a variety of metrics associated with the venue, including number of publications and citations over time, top authors, top organisations, top countries, industry participation, and others. In addition, the dashboard also allows users to perform comparative analyses of scientific venues that cover the same research fields. In particular, when selecting a research field, the dashboard allows the user to rank and compare all the venues in the field according to a variety of metrics, such as, average citations, CORE rank, LiveSHINE, Scimago Journal Rank and others.

Future versions of the dashboard will include both new types of entities, e.g., to provide country-level analytics, as well as new functionalities, e.g., to support predictions of near-future research developments.

AR born in KMi to schools in Brazil

Tuesday 19 Jul 2022 | KMi News

KMi’s Dr Lara Piccolo hosted a visit yesterday by Prof Alexandre Marino Costa, from Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. Alexandre last visited KMi in 2016 when he collaborated with Dr Ale Okada and Paul Hogan to develop Augmented Reality applications (AR) for education.

Lara said: “I am very happy to share that this collaboration was very fruitful and now Alexandre partnered with the Ministry of Sciences and Technology in Brazil to disseminate this technology to schools. They have more than 8,000 users!”

Related Links:

See here for more information

KMi at the ISWS 2022 Summer School

Friday 15 Jul 2022 | KMi News

During the 3rd-9th July KMi’s Agnese Chiatti, Paula Reyero Lobo, Angel Pavon Perez, and John Domingue attended the International Semantic Web Research Summer School (ISWS 2022) which was held in a castle in the small medieval hilltop town of Bertinoro, Italy.

ISWS is held in the University Residential Center and is a well-known opportunity to learn from mentors and peers, network and have fun! ISWS offers the opportunity to learn more about current topics, trends, and applications of Semantic Web technologies, while allowing participants to exchange ideas and gain some feedback about their PhD research.

KMi Director John Domingue was a Tutorial Speaker at the event, where he explored how decentralised technologies such as blockchains and Solid (from Sir Tim Berners-Lee) can empower citizens to take control of their data.

Agnese Chiatti, Paula Reyero Lobo and Angel Pavon Perez attended ISWS as participants, and presented their doctoral research works during the poster session: Agnese presented “RAVI: a Robotic Architecture for Visual Intelligence”, Angel presented Bias in AI models in financial services and Bias in Toxicity Detection alongside Paula.

All participants wanted to thank those involved with the tutorials, keynotes, and in-depth pill sessions that the school had to offer, the students learned the key concepts and current challenges of the many sub-fields of the Semantic Web, including but not limited to Knowledge Graph engineering, Blockchain, and NLP. They were also challenged to work in teams with people they had not met prior to the event, and to come up with novel ideas to tackle a specific research question, as well as to produce a paper and a presentation illustrating their ideas, in just a few days.

Agnese was part of the team who placed first in the overall ranking, after considering participation and outcomes of the different activities. Ángel was part of the team who placed second in the best paper ranking. Paula was part of the team who placed second in the best presentation ranking, and third in the best team ranking.

Alongside professional development, our fellow KMiers were able to go through a lot of personal development, through the daily yoga workouts, riddles, or socialising by the pool. They even put on their dancing shoes and enjoyed a surprise Swing dance class that took place in the main village square!!

KMi and EEES at Howe Park Wood

Friday 15 Jul 2022 | KMi News

The OU’s Citizen Science and AI Research group had a stand at the Parks Trust Love Nature event on the 4th of July. The group sported a fantastic number of activities throughout the day: Rachel Redford, Citizen Science Project Officer, engaged with children and adults alike about the fascinating world of moth eco-systems; Nirwan Sharma, Research Associate, demonstrated a range of his hands-on apps about pollinators (bumble bees and butterflies) that uniquely are supported by AI for species identification to foster learning about them; Senior Project Manager Janice Ansine gave overviews of our Citizen Science projects in the biodiversity sphere (and recruited many a new enthusiast for the 14-year old iSpot project that allows anyone to share and discuss nature observations on the platform ispotnature.org); Mike Dodd, iSpot’s curator, was on hand for tricky questions about species; KMi’s Advaith Siddharthan discussed the X-Polli:Nation school projects in which students as young as six contribute to national biodiversity counts on garden patches in schools; KMi’s Stefan Rueger showcased the AI Camera trap developed by a project partner DynAikon Ltd in one of our EU projects on biodiversity, Cos4Cloud.

Rachel commented, "We had some wonderful families, couples, children and lone lovers of nature visit our stand and hopefully go away buzzing about all the incredible citizen science projects we have and the huge benefits that being a Citizen Scientist can be for us, nature, our planet and science. I think we will definitely have some new recruits coming through to iSpot, X-Polli:Nation, Treezilla, Treescapes/Branching Out and DynAIkon. I know I loved waxing lyrical about all of our citizen science and AI projects, as did the entire team too … and we all definitely need to set up our own mini camera traps in our gardens to see what we get creeping in!" In preparation for the day, Rachel had set up an iSpot project centred on Howe Park Wood.

Overall, the day was an excellent opportunity for our team to present OU Citizen Science research to the public and network with the other exhibitors that day.

The Citizen Science and AI Research group spans KMi and the School of Environment, Earth and Ecosystem Sciences.

KMi members pay tribute to outgoing Director, John Domingue

Friday 15 Jul 2022 | KMi News

KMi staff and doctoral students met on campus on this week for the first large face-to-face gathering since the 2020 lockdown. The afternoon event was held outdoors at the OU Pavilion in glorious sunshine. For members who joined KMi in the last two years this was opportunity to meet other lab members in person. People brought along a picnic lunch, chatted and played games in the sunshine.

The highlight of the afternoon were tributes from KMi members past and present to outgoing KMi Director, John Domingue, celebrating his seven years of service. These included video messages from alumni Simon Buckingham Shum and previous Director, Peter Scott, and a recorded performance by the KMi band.

John responded to staff:

“I am stunned!

Thanks for the cake.

Thanks for the many kind words on the card

Thanks for collecting all the written, image and video messages.

Thanks to the whole team so that we could go into ‘outside broadcast’ mode to include those who could not attend in person.

Thanks to the whole team that created the wonderful poster of my personal timeline

Thanks to the Knowledge Media Instruments for my fabulous song!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8oSfKZltHA&w=560&h=315]

You are all REALLY REALLY SPECIAL and it has been the honour of my life to serve as your Director these last 7 years.

I’m really looking forward to what the next 7 years will bring under Harith’s leadership.

A special thanks to my Executive Assistant, Rachel, for organising this gathering today and for her superb support over my term as Director.”

Harith Alani, who takes over the Directorship in August said: “KMi is indeed an amazing group, with amazing people, and you’ve been a truly amazing director.”

First Melete Scholarships for KMi Research Students Awarded

Wednesday 29 Jun 2022 | KMi News

KMi is delighted to announce PhD Research Students Shuang Ao and Joseph Kwarteng are the first-ever recipients of the prestigious Melete Scholarships. The Melete Scholarship will provide Shuang and Joseph with the opportunity to have the extra financial freedom to realise their talent through their project proposals

Melete was founded in 2019 by John & Kitty Chisholm. The scheme’s mission is to seek out and support talented PhD students as they become the next generation of visionary innovators driven to create significant societal impact.

Shuang’s project is focused on a multi-Sensory Storybook for Blind Children, she commented ‘It is a great encouragement for my research, which allows me to look at my research practically. Also, it will enable me to discover my capabilities in a way I can never imagine!’

Joseph is using the scholarship to further his research on Intersectional Hate Detection: A Case of Misogynoir, he commented ‘I am honoured to have received this scholarship. I am grateful to the Melete Foundation and Sir John and Lady Kitty for providing this funding to support PhD researchers at KMi to pursue their dreams and ideas to improve the world.’

KMi Director John Domingue mentioned Sir John and Lady Kitty Chisholm were very impressed by the entrepreneurial spirit and passion of both Shuang and Joseph, and by their amazing ideas.

Related Links:

Melete Website

Meet Shuang and Joseph, the next generation of visionary innovators

NISO vision interview with CORE’s Petr Knoth on the role of text mining in scholarly communication

Wednesday 29 Jun 2022 | KMi News

This Vision Interview with Petr Knoth, Senior Research Fellow in Text and Data Mining at the Open University and Head of CORE (core.ac.uk), served as the opening segment of the NISO Hot Topic virtual conference, Text and Data Mining, held on May 25, 2022. Todd Carpenter spoke at length with Knoth about the many ways in which text and data mining impacts the present as well as the future. They discussed just how innovative this technology can be for the needs of researchers in the information community.

Continue reading on the Jisc Research blog.

- Read more…

The Digital Development Services Team receive STEM Excellence Award

Thursday 23 Jun 2022 | KMi News

Congratulations to The Digital Development Team Services Team on receiving a STEM ‘Recognising Excellence’ Award at the Faculty Assembly on 22nd June.

Tracie Farrell led the nomination, citing the team’s Support with new and ongoing initiatives within KMi and STEM and exemplary attitude to providing support: "The team is proactive, enthusiastic and supportive. The team go above and beyond what is expected of their roles to enhance the collegiality within KMi and STEM. They all, as individuals and a team, are a credit to KMi and STEM."

Damian Dadswell, Senior Digital Development Sevices Manager accepted the award on behalf of the team members: Namrata Londhe, Chris Valentine, Olivia Hagen, Harriett Cornish and Chris Sanders.

KMi Director, John Domingue, said: "A thoroughly deserved award. This team has been for many years a cornerstone of what makes KMi such a fabulous impactful place to work!"

Damian said "The team and I are humbled and thankful to be recognised by our colleagues and the Faculty for this award."

Shuang Ao wins Judges’ first prize at OU Grad School Poster Competition

Friday 17 Jun 2022 | KMi News

Congratulations to our PhD Research Student, Shuang Ao, who won the Judges 1st Choice at this year’s OU Grad School Social PhD poster competition. The awards ceremony took place at an in-person event in the Hub Theatre at The Open University Campus on the 15th of June. All the winners and runners-up were announced in a tweet by @OUGradSchool.

Responding to colleagues’ congratulatory messages Shuang commented: ‘Thanks, everyone! It was an exciting experience!’.

Shuang’s Poster can be viewed here.

Related Links:

Dr Tracie Farrell Awarded A Future Leaders Fellowship

Friday 17 Jun 2022 | KMi News

Dr Tracie Farrell has been announced among 84 promising future leaders as part of a sweep of research and innovation awarded fellowships given funding totalling £98 million.

These 84 most promising science and research leaders will benefit from £97.8m to tackle major global issues and to commercialise their innovations in the UK, Science Minister George Freeman has announced.

Their research will tackle global issues ranging from climate change to the exploitation of women in global garment supply chains and it will help bring researchers’ innovative ideas from lab to market.

Read the full article here, on OU News.

Congratulations to KMi’s Newest Doctor, Zeeshan Jan!

Tuesday 14 Jun 2022 | KMi News

KMi would like to congratulate our newest Doctor, Zeeshan Jan. Formerly a PhD Research Student, Zeeshan has been a part of KMi for over four years. His thesis, entitled ‘Peer-review on a Decentralised Web’, was supervised by John Domingue, Aisling Third and Tracie Farrell. The paper was reviewed by examiners Tobias Kuhn and Bart Rienties, who stressed how much they enjoyed reading the thesis for the interesting content and writing style.

KMi Director John Domingue commented, “I’m really proud of how you defended, with clear and completely frank answers”.

Zeeshan said “I am indebted to my supervisors, John, Aisling, and Tracie, for their unwavering support and guidance. I am also grateful to our KMi fraternity; you are an incredible asset”.

A huge Congratulations to Zeeshan from the whole KMi Team.

KMi’s Agnese Chiatti wins prestigious L’Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science

Monday 13 Jun 2022 | KMi News

At a ceremony held this morning in Milan, Agnese Chiatti has received the “L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science” prize, in recognition of the excellence of her research in Robotics.

This award, which was established in October 2002 by L’Oréal Italia, in collaboration with the Italian National Commission for UNESCO, provides six scholarships of €20,000 each to female researchers under the age of 35, who have completed or are currently pursuing a PhD in the following scientific-disciplinary areas: Life Sciences; Environmental Sciences; Mathematics; Computer and Information Science; Physics; Chemistry; Engineering and Technologies. This year, over 240 applications were received, from which 6 winners were selected.

Agnese is currently completing her PhD in KMi, under the supervision of Prof Enrico Motta and Dr Enrico Daga, working on improving the ability of robots to make sense of the environment in which they are deployed. In particular, she has developed a prototype of an innovative Health and Safety Robot Inspector (HanS), which is able to patrol the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) to try and identify possible violations to Health and Safety rules – e.g., flammable items being too close to electrical appliances. In order to do so, HanS uses an innovative architecture for visual intelligence, which combines the latest approaches to object recognition based on neural networks with other modules inspired by human cognition, which aim to equip HanS with the kind of commonsense reasoning that human beings routinely use to interpret the world around them.

The L’Oréal-UNESCO Award will allow Agnese to explore new avenues for her research in Robotics at the Robotics Lab of the Politecnico di Milano in Italy, a group that has collaborated with KMi for a number of years. During her stay in Italy, Agnese will investigate applications of her research in the agricultural sector, in particular exploring ways to improve a robot’s ability to inspect crops, e.g., for an early detection of crop diseases

Related Links:

Athena Swan Silver Award Success

Wednesday 08 Jun 2022 | KMi News

KMi is delighted to announce that we have received an Athena Swan Silver Award following our recent submission to Advance HE.

The Athena Swan Self-Assessment (SAT) Team had membership drawn from our academic, professional services and doctoral students. Prof Advaith Siddharthan, who led SAT’s submission over the past year, said: “Our most compelling narratives were around how we achieved gender equality in promotions and how our research increasingly reflects our growing awareness of EDIA issues. Such achievements result from leadership and hard work across KMi over several years.”

In his endorsement of the submission outgoing Director, Professor John Domingue highlighted how the SAT and the management board have engaged with the whole department to establish a shared vision aligned to the Athena Swan charter and embedded into our practices and procedures. He said: “This work has created a supportive culture in the department that promotes flexible working practices and fair career progression opportunities.”

Incoming director, Professor Harith Alani said, “Congratulations to the SAT team. I am very much looking forward to working very closely with them and I offer them my unconditional support to implement our Silver action plan and guide KMi towards the next Athena Swan award.”

Meet HanS, the Health and Safety Robot Inspector

Friday 27 May 2022 | KMi News

The Intelligent Systems and Data Science (ISDS) robotics team has developed HanS, a Health and Safety Robot Inspector. HanS is an experiment in service robotics and has been designed to be able to patrol KMi to try and identify possible violations to Health and Safety rules. For instance, typical rules check that all fire extinguishers are in place and that emergency exits are free of obstacles and clearly labelled through the correct signs.

The HanS robotic prototype originated as a practical application of Agnese Chiatti’s PhD research, with the contribution of Dr. Gianluca Bardaro, and supervisors Prof. Enrico Motta and Dr. Enrico Daga. Indeed, the deployment of a mobile robot that can make sense of real-world, dynamic environments brings about several research challenges.

To tackle these challenges, the team developed a modular robotic platform, which relies on standard Robot Operating System (ROS) modules for robot navigation and localisation, while also introducing novel customised components for visual sensemaking and commonsense reasoning. Specifically, HanS was trained to recognise 60 object classes that are commonly found in KMi from only a few training examples. An Edge TPU accelerator is mounted on the robot, to ensure fast learning times. An important innovation developed for HanS is that the robot is also aware of the typical sizes and spatial relations between objects, as well as the common-sense facts about these objects. For example, it knows that paper is flammable and that flammable objects may cause a fire, if placed near electrical devices. These properties were autonomously extracted and summarised from a number of Knowledge Bases, including WordNet [1], ShapeNet [2], Visual Genome [3], Amazon product information, and Quasimodo [4]. These capabilities improve HanS’ sensemaking ability and also allow it to maintain a semantic map of the KMi space, where observations that refer to the same object are aggregated and updated over time, to reflect changes in the environment.

A demo that showcases HanS’ capabilities can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8sZgLt_KQw.

[1] Miller, G. A. (1995). WordNet: a lexical database for English. CACM, 38(11), 39-41.
[2] Savva, M., Chang, A. X., & Hanrahan, P. (2015). Semantically-enriched 3D models for common-sense knowledge. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (pp. 24-31).
[3] Krishna, R., Zhu, Y., Groth, O., Johnson, J., Hata, K., … & Fei-Fei, L. (2017). Visual genome: Connecting language and vision using crowdsourced dense image annotations. International journal of computer vision, 123(1), 32-73.
[4] Romero, J., Razniewski, S., Pal, K., Z. Pan, J., Sakhadeo, A., & Weikum, G. (2019, November). Commonsense properties from query logs and question answering forums. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (pp. 1411-1420).

Related Links:

More information about HanS

CORE: Our commitment to The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure

Monday 23 May 2022 | KMi News

The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) offer a set of guidelines by which open scholarly infrastructure organisations and initiatives that support the research community can be operated and sustained. In this post, we demonstrate CORE’s commitment to adhere to these principles and show our current progress in achieving these aims. The principles are divided into three main categories; Governance, Sustainability and Insurance. More about it is in our blog post.

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KMi Research is Published in The Conversation

Monday 16 May 2022 | KMi News

The Conversation UK is an independent source of news analysis, and informed comment written by academic experts, working with professional journalists who help share their knowledge with the world.

KMi’s Social Data Science Group members, Prof Harith Alani, Dr Gregoire Burel, and Dr Tracie Farrell have co-authored a piece in The Conversation. The article titled Elon Musk could roll back social media moderation – just as we’re learning how it can stop misinformation, explains why Musk’s purchase of Twitter has many people worried. The concern is that following the potential takeover by the “free speech absolutist”, the site could start moderating content less and spreading misinformation more, especially after his announcement that he would reverse the former US President Donald Trump’s ban.

The KMi team have been studying how misinformation and corresponding fact checks spread on Twitter since 2016. In the article, they draw on their research findings to explain the challenges with moderating unreliable content and the different approaches available to Twitter, some of which have already proved effective in slowing the spread of some misinformation.

Read the article Here

REF 2021 recognises 82% of OU research impact as world-leading or internationally excellent

Thursday 12 May 2022 | KMi News

The Research Excellence Framework 2021 results are out! KMi contributed to several units of assessment, the biggest of which was Computer Science and Informatics, which submitted 45 full-time equivalent staff, 44% more than in 2014.

The Open University’s Computing Research is ranked 27 out of 90, for Research Power, which puts us in the top 30% of UK submissions. 73% of our research papers and 100% of our research environment were assessed as world-leading or internationally excellent. A great result!

Computing Research achieved the third-highest result with respect to the Research Power ranking of the 21 subjects submitted by the OU, and the highest Research Power ranking within the OU’s STEM faculty.

The Strategy co-chairs for REF 2021 in Computer Science and Informatics, Prof. Stefan Rueger and Prof. Andrea Zisman, would like to thank all of our researchers, with a special thanks to those who offered and authored impact case studies, to Prof. Janet van der Linden and Prof. Enrico Motta for coordinating impact case studies, to all OU B11 panel members for being a sounding board throughout the submission period and for assessing and selecting our research outputs, and to our dedicated professional support teams.

Related Links:

The OU REF21 Article

Harith Alani Presented a Keynote at BeyondFacts 2022 on Misinformation

Thursday 05 May 2022 | KMi News

BeyondFacts 2022 is a leading international workshop on the topic of misinformation, which was collocated with The Web Conference in Lyon. The workshop provides a venue for sharing and discussing the latest scientific research on a range of related topics, such as social media mining, computational fact-checking, and misinformation spread analysis.

Prof Harith Alani, our soon-to-be Director, is the interdisciplinary Social Data Science research group leader, focusing on applying AI and computational social science methods to study various socio-technical challenges online. Recently, Prof Alani concentrated on studying online misinformation, through projects such as Co-Inform for co-creating misinformation-countering strategies, to HERoS, which studies COVID19 related misinformation, to CIMPLE, which investigates knowledge-based explanations of misinformation detection techniques.

Harith presented a keynote at the BeyondFacts workshop on the 26th of April. Prof Alani explored how misinformation has always been part of humankind’s information ecosystem and emphasised the need for boosting the spread of corrective information on social media platforms. During the presentation, Harith discussed the development of tools and methods for automatically assessing the credibility of individuals and drawing their attention to relevant corrective information online.

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View the slides here

CORE update for January to March 2022

Thursday 28 Apr 2022 | KMi News

The first quarter of the new year was very productive for the CORE team with a number of new releases.

First, we have been working hard on improving the user interface and experience of the website and its performance on technical, visual communication and usability levels. In January, we released a new homepage and redesigned the CORE services page.

More about it can be found on the Jisc Research blog.

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KMi Researchers Take Part in DATATHON AGAINST RACISM

Tuesday 26 Apr 2022 | KMi News

We are an incredibly diverse research lab, with around 20 nationalities within our 60-80 personnel. KMi’s Joseph Kwarteng, Angel Pavon-Perez, Martino Mensio, and Paula Reyero-Lobo competed in a challenge to build a model that can detect racist language over text messages, against 9 other teams. The Datathon was hosted by BCN Analytics, and kicked off on the 25th of March 2022 in Barcelona, and ended on the 1st of April.

The main challenge for the Datathon was to build a model that can automatically classify text messages as Racist or not Racist. These messages were provided in Spanish, and every team had a week to complete their model. The Datathon gave KMi’s members the opportunity to showcase the labs’ expertise and our ethics, which is a huge facet of KMi culture, as we are committed to continually improving how we promote fairness and equality. KMi researcher Paula Reyero-Lobo said, “I feel privileged to work with such a diverse team that shares the same values. I am grateful for this project, as I feel we have been able to take another step towards more inclusive technology”.

The outcomes of the Datathon will be promoted for positive social impact and KMi’s contribution will be available to any organization that may wish to use it. We are incredibly proud of KMi members’ work to fulfil the lab’s values and constantly strive for equality, diversity, and inclusivity.

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DATATHON AGAINST RACISM

KMi’s Next Director is Finally Announced!

Thursday 07 Apr 2022 | KMi News

KMi is excited to announce that Professor Harith Alani has been appointed as KMi’s 5th director. Harith will be taking up his post on the 1st of August, once Professor John Domingue steps down after seven years as director. Harith joined KMi in 2009 as a Senior Lecturer, then progressed to full Professor a few years later and became KMi’s Deputy Director in 2021. Harith is a Professor of Web Science and founder of the interdisciplinary Social Data Science group in KMi. He has published nearly 170 refereed scientific articles in the areas of the semantic web, web science, and computational social science. Harith holds a first degree in civil engineering from the University of Baghdad and an MSc and PhD in computer science from the University of South Wales. Prior to joining KMi, he was a senior research fellow at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.

"KMi has always been an inspiring place, offering world-leading research and innovation within a truly diverse and friendly environment and culture," said Professor Alani. "I am honoured and delighted to take over as the Director of KMi, and I look forward to serving this fantastic organisation and its wonderful team."

The Open University’s Executive Dean (STEM), Professor Nicholas Braithwaite, said, "I am delighted to announce that following successful recruitment, Professor Harith Alani will take up the position of KMi Director."

Our current Director, John Domingue, said, "I am extremely happy that Harith will take over after my tenure finishes – never has the phrase ‘to go from strength to strength’ been truer. I’m really looking forward to revolutionary, ground-breaking innovations in knowledge, learning and media that will come out of this wonderful lab over the next few years under his tenure."

A huge Congratulations to Harith from the whole KMi Team.

Major update of CORE search

Thursday 24 Mar 2022 | KMi News

CORE has just released a major update to its search engine, including a sleek new user interface and upgraded search functionality driven by the new CORE API V3.0.

CORE Search is the engine that researchers, librarians, scholars and others turn to for open access research papers from around the world and for staying up to date on the latest scientific literature.

CORE constantly evaluates feedback from users and integrates this feedback as a part of the ongoing roadmap for CORE’s continued development. Working with our users and data providers to deliver a consistently improving user experience is a key component in CORE’s ongoing success.

All the details are described on the Jisc Research blog.

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Agnese presents her research on robots with common sense at the AAAI Spring Symposium

Thursday 24 Mar 2022 | KMi News

The 2022 AAAI Symposium on Machine Learning and Knowledge Engineering for Hybrid Intelligence (AAAI-MAKE) took place on March 21-23. The symposium is aimed at bringing together researchers and practitioners that are exploring the integration of Machine Learning methods with knowledge-based systems, to improve the explainability, performance and data efficiency of existing solutions.

This year, the symposium was run as a hybrid event, with the option to attend in person at Stanford University or to join from remote, via Zoom. Agnese presented her work titled “Robots with Commonsense: Improving Object Recognition through Size and Spatial Awareness” remotely. The work presented in this paper is part of her PhD research, supervised by Enrico Motta and Enrico Daga. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to extract knowledge of the typical sizes and spatial relations of objects from large-scale, general-purpose Knowledge Bases. Experiments on images collected by the HanS robot in KMi, which depict 60 object classes commonly found in our Lab, show that the introduced awareness of size and spatial knowledge can significantly augment object recognition methods that are solely based on Deep Learning.

In addition to the robotic applications that Agnese has presented, this year’s program covered a variety of use-cases, including, for example, applications geared towards the healthcare domain, Augmented Reality platforms designed for manufacturing domains, and human-in-the-loop solutions aimed at explaining Law cases. The program and proceedings of the symposium are available at https://www.aaai-make.info/program/

Call for Summer Scholarships for Young Black People is launched

Tuesday 22 Mar 2022 | KMi News

KMi has launched our 3rd year’s range of Summer Scholarships for Young Black People, offering to provide financial support with a bursary of £2,700, alongside the experience to build up their careers as young members in STEM.

We are offering three challenges to this year’s applicants. These topics aim to use hot technologies to solve societal challenges and positively impact the world around us. Each project will last between 6 to 8 weeks and may be conducted online or at the Open University campus:

Challenge 1: How to tell people they’re wrong: Explaining misinformation on social media
Challenge 2: Building musical knowledge graphs
Challenge 3: Turning TikTok Content into NFTs

Each scholar will receive mentoring and support from KMi researchers, students and technicians who work in our project spaces. In past scholarships, KMi has provided opportunities to improve representation in Computer Science; for example, our first intern Azizah Blackwood, helped us develop a voice skill for Alexa by creating our first ever fact-checking chatbot. One of last year’s scholars, Kaushal Kumar, worked on Robot Assistants in the Wild, where he proposed rethinking and creating a more Ergonomic Workstation.

See the full details and deadlines on the call web page.

The call will be promoted on our social media channels and we invite everyone to share these in their networks where young people who qualify can be reached.

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PT Anywhere used for remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic

Monday 21 Mar 2022 | KMi News

PT Anywhere, a flagship KMi technology, has played a vital role in remote teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Several universities from across the world have incorporated PT Anywhere in their curricula and have been using it for remote laboratory sessions with their students. PT Anywhere is also featured in the UK Government’s Digital Skills Toolkit, which is preparing the UK for the post-COVID economy by offering essential digital skills to job seekers.

PT Anywhere is a novel educational tool for teaching computer networking skills by performing network simulations on any device. PT Anywhere has been jointly developed by the Open University and Cisco and is based on Cisco’s renowned Packet Tracer network simulator.

The results of using PT Anywhere in a higher education context during the COVID-19 pandemic have been recently published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL2021). This study, conducted in the Department of Informatics at the University of Piraeus in Greece, has investigated the pedagogical effectiveness of PT Anywhere, as applied in the teaching of computer networking courses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The results of this study verify that the use of remote online learning environments positively improves learning outcomes. More specifically, the study highlights the pedagogical effectiveness of PT Anywhere in positively activating students in distance learning and teaching situations. In the classrooms that PT Anywhere was used, a high degree of participation was recorded, as well as a high degree of satisfaction of students from their involvement with this software. Some of the benefits of using PT Anywhere in the context of this study have been the following:
•   Helping students understand the basic concepts of computer network design
•   Helping students design composite networking scenarios precisely
•   Helping students create multiple representations of computer network topologies
•   Motivating students to further explore computer network design

ON-MERRIT project has been featured in Nature

Thursday 17 Mar 2022 | KMi News

We are proud to announce that the work in our EU-funded project ON-MERRIT that aims to analyse and deliver a set of evidence-based recommendations for science policies, indicators, and incentives, which could address and mitigate cumulative (dis)advantages in Open Science has been mentioned in a Nature news article.

The work of the Open University, which is a partner in this project, focuses on the investigation of the role of Open Science in promotion and tenure policies, practices, and incentives within academia. At the OU, the project is led by the Big Scientific Data and Text Analytics Group (BSDTAg) with Dr. Petr Knoth (PI) supported by Dr. Nancy Pontika, David Pride, and Matteo Cancellieri.

Enjoy reading the full article on the Nature blog.

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Read more.

A successful conclusion for QualiChain

Tuesday 15 Mar 2022 | KMi News

Last week saw the final review of the QualiChain project. Starting in January 2019, QualiChain has targeted the creation, piloting and evaluation of a decentralised platform for storing, sharing and verifying education and employment qualifications. The project pilots have targeted 4 key areas: (i) lifelong learning; (ii) smart curriculum design; (iii) staffing the public sector; (iv) providing HR consultancy and competency management services.

The final review of the project was a complete success, with the reviewers and the project officer praising the overall efforts and various outcomes of the project. More specifically, the review panel recognised the potential of the QualiChain platform, as well as the usefulness of the results of the project pilots. The reviewers and the project officers urged the QualiChain consortium to engage into post-project exploitation activities, in order to scale up the adoption of the project’s outputs. The project partners were also urged to build upon the project results in order to influence and support policy making.

KMi was represented by Alexander Mikroyannidis and Aisling Third. Alexander presented the pilot that he has conducted on the theme of supporting lifelong learning, as well as the dissemination and communication activities of the project. Aisling presented the landscape analysis and concept definition of the project. All presentations were very well received and led to useful discussions and suggestions.

MK:5G Connect – Showcasing the ISDS robotic research

Sunday 13 Mar 2022 | KMi News

On the 14th of February, the Marshal Area hosted the MK:5G Connect: an expo of all technologies and advancements connected with the 5G pilot in Milton Keynes. We participated as ISDS group with a stall presenting the research of Agnese and Gianluca, our TiaGo robot and the upcoming GATEKEEPER pilot in MK about robotic intervention at home.

The expo included SMEs operating in different fields of robot autonomy, such as self-driving pods and busses, hospitality, as well robotic vision and AI for security and monitoring. This event gave the opportunity to meet in person the large network of organizations connected to the 5G pilot and the amazing sandbox for AI service that is now the MK:Dons Stadium.

Battling misinformation about the Ukraine-Russian war

Tuesday 08 Mar 2022 | KMi News

Modern world conflicts are increasingly influenced by misinformation and propaganda. Martino Mensio from the Social Data Group at KMi collected over 800 claims so far about the Russian invasion of Ukraine that were debunked or flagged as unreliable by many registered fact-checking organisations around the world. Gregoire Burel then began monitoring the appearance of these claims on Twitter and the fact-checks that accompanied them in order to better understand their spread patterns and potential impact.

So far, Gregoire found that only a small number of live tweets mention the misinforming claims, while tweets containing links to the official fact-checks exceeded 18 thousand. This was based on an exhaustive search of nearly 150 misinforming claims up to 3 March 2022. Despite not being final, the results do reveal a pattern that contrasts with what is typically found in other crises situations, where the spread of false claims far outweighs those of corrective ones.

Professor Harith Alani discussed the research and findings of the group on Bloomberg Newsroom radio from New York on Monday morning. He praised the apparent success of social media in removing inaccurate content from their platforms but acknowledged the potential impact of social media bans within and from Russia. In the interview, Prof Alani also asked why these platforms did not show the same enthusiasm and ability to quickly remove misinformation and block offending accounts in other crises contexts, such as COVID19 or other military conflicts. He argues that this raises a variety of technical and ethical issues that should be incorporated into future research, legislation, and policies.

The work above was funded by two ongoing projects; HERoS, funded by the European Commission to research behavioural dynamics and misinformation spread during COVID19, and CIMPLE; funded by EPSRC to explore knowledge-driven detection and explainability of misinformation.

Joseph Kwarteng has launched the first-ever research platform capture experiences of Misogynoir

Tuesday 08 Mar 2022 | KMi News

Joseph Kwarteng, a second-year PhD student in the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMI), has launched Misogynoir Online, a website that invites Black women to share their stories of misogynoir by posting them on the platform.

The term ‘Misogynoir’ was coined in 2008 by Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey. It is used to describe the unique form of misogyny and racialised oppression of Black women.Joseph launched Misogynoir Online the day before International Women’s Day (8 March 2022) – this year’s theme is ‘break the bias.’

Read the full article here.

Related Links:

Follow Misogynoir Online on Twitter

Misogynoir Online

KMi Director Presented a Keynote at 60,000 Mobile World Congress

Monday 07 Mar 2022 | KMi News

On Wednesday, 2nd March, Professor John Domingue gave a keynote in the EdTech stream of one of the most significant events globally. The Mobile World Congress (MWC), held in Barcelona, attracted more than 60,000 attendees from almost 200 countries. Other speakers in the same stream included a partner in Europe’s leading EdTech Venture Capitalist company, a founder of an EdTech unicorn and the Head of Google Education in Europe

John’s Keynote covered the blockchain research and innovation that the KMi team have been involved in since 2015, funded by several EU (QualiChain, EU Observatory, DEL4All) and OfS (Institute of Coding) projects.

The key take-home messages from the event were: a) funding for EdTech startups is booming with $2.5B in 2021 alone; b) globally, there is a $2.7T EdTech funding gap caused by the gap in the amount of time learning is online (50%) vs the amount of spending in online (5%). If the incumbent educational institutions do not begin to adapt to the new reality, they will go the same way as the high street.

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KMi Celebrates International Women’s Day 2022

Monday 07 Mar 2022 | KMi News

Happy International Women’s Day 2022! This year’s theme is #BreakTheBias and we invite you to join in the many missions in KMi and around The Open University.

KMi’s IWD 2022 celebrations
For this year’s celebrations, we have created an all-new #BreakTheBias page where all KMi members were invited to make a pledge to make the world around us more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. KMi has also created an IWD poster to celebrate the Women of KMi, and their amazing contributions, both in their professional and personal life.

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Three KMi Researchers Listed in Prestigious Computer Scientist Ranking

Monday 07 Mar 2022 | KMi News

We are very proud to be able to announce that three KMiers have been placed into the top 300 nationally of a new prestigious ranking of computer science researchers. The ranking, published by Research.com, is based on a strenuous examination of more than 9,724 scientists on Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Graph. In particular, the inclusion criteria for scholars to be considered into the ranking of top scientists are based on the discipline h-index, the proportion of the contributions made within the given discipline, in addition to several esteem factors.

Congratulations to Harith Alani, John Domingue and Enrico Motta!

“This external objective ranking is just another indicator of the overall quality of KMi’s research. It is our culture and team-based approach to research where the contributions of academics at all stages of their career (including PhD students), developers, systems and web support staff and professional service staff are recognised and valued. Diversity in all its meanings is a cornerstone for how we operate, and I know that many, many more success stories will follow this latest one.”
KMi’s Director

Related Links:

Top Computer Science Scientists in United Kingdom

A plea from CORE to Russian and Belarusian academic community to help stop the war in Ukraine

Wednesday 02 Mar 2022 | KMi News

This post is our personal story of how members of the CORE team have been affected and caught up in the armed conflict in Ukraine. It is one of the many testaments to the implications of war and a plea to the Russian and Belarusian academic community to help stop this violence.

Follow this link to read the full story on the CORE blog.

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Iris.ai and CORE cooperate to build AI Chemist

Tuesday 22 Feb 2022 | KMi News

CORE and Iris.ai are extremely pleased to announce the initiation of a new research collaboration funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

Discovering scientific insights about a specific topic is challenging, particularly in an area like chemistry which is one of the top-five most published fields with over 11 million publications and 307,000 patents. The team at Iris.ai have spent the last 5 years building an award-winning AI engine for scientific text understanding. Their patented algorithms for identifying text similarity, extracting tabular data, and creating domain-specific entity representations mean they are world leaders in this domain.

Follow this link and read the full blog post about this cooperation on the Jisc Research blog.

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Using open access research in our battle against misinformation

Monday 21 Feb 2022 | KMi News

Our society is facing significant challenges due to the widespread misinformation, in particular on social media, substantially influencing public opinion. As a result, we are seeing a lot of demand for innovative text processing methods to fact check and provide an automatic assessment of trustworthiness and credibility. Machine learning and natural language processing have started to be widely used to address this problem.

While scientific papers have been traditionally seen as a source of mostly trustworthy information, their use within automated tools in the fight against misinformation, such as related to vaccine effectiveness or climate changes, has been rather limited.

Read the full blog post about it on the Jisc Research Blog.

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KMi Blockchain work featured in OpenLearn

Wednesday 16 Feb 2022 | KMi News

A series of articles featuring KMi’s Blockchain work have been published in OpenLearn. The articles have been authored by John Domingue and Alexander Mikroyannidis and address the following topics:

What is Blockchain?
Professor John Domingue and Doctor Alexander Mikroyannidis help decode the meaning of "blockchain". How do blockchain technologies work, and what do they do? Read the article to find the answers.

Blockchain in Education
Blockchain technologies brought new solutions to the world of finance. Will education see similar changes? Read this article by Professor John Domingue and Doctor Alexander Mikroyannidis to start exploring the possibilities of blockchain in education.

Supporting Lifelong Learning with Blockchain
Can blockchain technologies help lifelong learners? Read this article by Professor John Domingue and Doctor Alexander Mikroyannidis to discover the answers and solutions which blockchain can bring to education.

OpenLearn is the Open University’s free learning portal, providing free courses and other learning resources that support the Open University’s mission of opening up educational opportunities to more people in more places. OpenLearn currently offers more than 1,000 free courses, over 15,000 articles and other learning materials, and receives an average of 1 million visitors per month.

Open Access Helper gets CORE API v3 boost

Thursday 10 Feb 2022 | KMi News

We are always excited to announce new releases of tools that support Open Access and use the CORE services.

This time there is a release from our friends at the Open Access Helper. This is a tool that helps everyone discover a legal Open Access version of research outputs around the web.

What is new with this version is the application’s ability to bring to researchers proactive notifications on their iPad and iPhone whenever they are browsing articles behind a paywall.

We are really excited about this release because it is integrating our brand new CORE API (v3).

Find out more about this integration on the Jisc Research blog.

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Open Educational Resources and Practices in Language Learning and Teaching

Friday 04 Feb 2022 | KMi News

The Multiplier Event of the Erasmus+ project OPENLang Network [Open Languages & Cultures Network], entitled: “Open Educational Resources and Practices in Language Learning and Teaching” has taken place online on December 10, 2021. The event was organised by Alexander Mikroyannidis and presented the lessons learned from the 3-year OPENLang Network project regarding the use of open educational resources and practices for language teaching and learning.

The Keynote Speakers of this event were:

Ms Kate Borthwick MA Hons, MA, FHEA, Principal Enterprise Fellow (Educational innovation), University of Southampton, UK. Keynote speech title: Community and context: the power and purpose in developing OEP.
Dr Rob Farrow BA (Hons), MA, PhD, Pg.CHEP, FHEA, MAODE, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, UK. Keynote speech title: Innovation with Open Educational Resources: The State of the Art.

More details about this event are available here. Watch the recording of the event:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv6dwjKLLeY]

KMi Director Invited to Speak at two International Conferences on the Same Day!

Monday 31 Jan 2022 | KMi News

On Thursday 27th January, Professor John Domingue was an invited speaker and panellist at two online International Conferences hosted in India and Saudi Arabia.

In the morning (GMT), John attended the 12th International Confluence 2022 Conference on Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering organised by Amity University, where he is an honorary Professor. At Confluence-2022, John gave a Keynote “Transforming Higher Education through AI: Ongoing work at The Open University”. The conference discussed the constant pace of change in the technology industry, which is being incorporated in everything and everywhere, including the Higher Education sector. John’s keynote outlined the OU’s emerging AI strategy for teaching and learning, how blockchains could support student learning records and how a combination of both can be an automated career coach able to guide students to find their dream jobs.

Later that day, John participated in a panel discussion on Micro-Credentials at The International Conference on “eLearning for Human Capability Development” organised by the National E-Learning Centre in Saudi Arabia. This conference aimed to align with the Kingdom’s Saudi Vision 2030; enhance digital transformation in education, invest in digital transformation technologies, and ensure the quality of eLearning to become a sustainable and trusted modality of learning and training in achieving the human capabilities development objectives. The panel discussed the importance of Micro-Credentials at this current time and the role of Micro-Credentials in stimulating and closing the skills gap between the academic environment and the labour market. John joined the panel, made up of experts from academia and industry from both the UK and Saudi Arabia.

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KMi Elects Co-Chair ahead of EDI Board inauguration

Tuesday 25 Jan 2022 | KMi News

Many congratulations to Charlotte Hamilton who has been elected Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Co-Chair for KMi. Charlotte is a Senior Research Manager in our Professional Services Team and a member of the Athena Swan Self Assessment Team. She will serve for a term of 2 years and work with Jane Whild to set up an EDI Board for the Unit. Jane was appointed as KMi EDI lead in August 2021 and will serve for a year. Going forwards, there will be one co-chair election per year which will provide continuity to the leadership. Many thanks to runners-up Aisling Third and Alessio Antonini, who were strong contenders for the role.

This was the first election of its type held in KMi, and it was well-supported by KMi members, with a 60% turnout. All staff members were invited to self-nominate for the position and to provide a candidate statement about what they would bring to the role. Each KMi staff member or student was then invited to cast their vote for the candidate of their choice and the one with the most votes was elected. We will watch with interest to see if this model for electing EDI chairs will be adopted across the STEM Faculty Schools or the rest of the University.

Our EDI Board will be convened in February 2022 and will be comprised of KMi’s existing Athena Swan SAT members, who will automatically be co-opted to the Board. The Board will be led by a management team, comprised of the EDI co-chairs and the Athena Swan SAT co-chairs, Profs Miriam Fernandez and Advaith Siddharthan. The management team’s first action will be to agree on terms of reference with the Board, following which KMi members will receive regular updates on the Board’s development and action plan.

Access the worlds research outputs through the CORE API

Wednesday 19 Jan 2022 | KMi News

On Thursday 13th January 2022, Petr Knoth, Head of CORE and Matteo Cancellieri, Lead Developer, gave a webinar describing the new CORE APIv3 features. There were 72 attendees. In the first part, we introduced new features in the API, and the second part provided live coding examples followed by answering questions from the audience.

Read about this webinar more on the Jisc Research blog.

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KMi’s John Domingue Featured in THE Campus on Developing Interdisciplinary Research Teams

Monday 17 Jan 2022 | KMi News

THE Campus is a platform that Times Higher Education launched; THE Campus presents advice from academics and professionals on an international perspective in key areas of higher education. From teaching and learning; equity, diversity and inclusion; internationalisation; Sustainable Development Goals; early-career research and research management.

John Domingue discusses ever-growing Interdisciplinary research and its challenges. Domingue’s article explores what makes an overall successful research lab, from making researchers feel empowered and giving them a more fluid way of working within their team.

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Find out more about what makes a successful Developing Interdisciplinary Research Team

EDSA featured in the EU Data Market Study 2021-2023

Tuesday 21 Dec 2021 | KMi News

The EDSA project has been featured in the European Data Market study 2021-2023. The latest European Data Market study demonstrates that the demand for data professionals is expected to grow with 8.7% in the next 5 years, while in 2019 there were an estimated six million data professionals in the EU27. However, still as a result of a shortage of skills, digital transformation initiatives in Europe are often delayed by 8.1 months on average, and for every second company, the skills gap has had a substantial impact on both revenue creation and the ability to deliver products and services to the market.

The European Data Science Academy (EDSA) has been a Horizon 2020 EU project that ran between February 2015 and January 2018. The objective of the EDSA project was to deliver the learning tools that are crucially needed to close the skills gap in Data Science in the EU. The project was looking to bridge the European Data Science skills gap by developing multimodal open courseware tailored to the real needs of data practitioners. The latest European Data Market presents the EDSA approach and results, featuring also the main business benefits derived from this project, as well as the main challenges addressed.

OpenLang Network Multiplier Events

Tuesday 21 Dec 2021 | KMi News

The Multiplier Event of the Erasmus+ project OPENLang Network [Open Languages & Cultures Network], entitled: "Open Educational Resources and Practices in Language Learning and Teaching" will take place online on December 10, 2021, 9:00-13:30 GMT. The event is organised by The Open University and will present the lessons learned from the 3-year OPENLang Network project regarding the use of OEP and OER for language teaching and learning.

The Keynote Speakers of this event are:

Ms Kate Borthwick MA Hons, MA, FHEA, Principal Enterprise Fellow (Educational innovation), University of Southampton, UK
Dr Rob Farrow BA (Hons), MA, PhD, Pg.CHEP, FHEA, MAODE, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, UK

More details about this event are available here.

The OPENLang Network project is also organising two more Multiplier Events on December 13 and 15, 2021. More details about these events are available here and here.

KMi at MoodleMoot 2021

Monday 29 Nov 2021 | KMi News

MoodleMoot Greece 2021 took place online on November 26-27, 2021. The purpose of this annual event is to promote a fruitful and creative dialogue in the educational community about the use of Moodle, to highlight its good practices in Greece, as well as to present innovative uses of Moodle operations in Greece and internationally.

Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi and presented his Erasmus+ project OpenLang Network, together with the project coordinator Maria Perifanou (University of Macedonia, Greece). The OpenLang Network project is building a network among all Erasmus+ KA1 Mobility Participants within an open and highly interactive online environment for supporting more efficiently their efforts to develop their language skills of the target mobility EU languages. Alexander Mikroyannidis is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Open University, in charge of the project’s online platform. This is a key output for the project as a whole, as it offers the technological foundations for the success and sustainability of the project’s language learning network.

Alexander Mikroyannidis presented the OpenLang Network platform, which is an open and collaborative Moodle-based environment for networking between language learners and teachers across Europe. Additionally, Maria Perifanou presented the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that has been recently launched on this platform, entitled: "Exploring how to (re)use Language Open Educational Resources (OERs)". This 4-week MOOC aims at guiding participants through the discovery, use, and reuse of OER for teaching purposes in language education.

Alba Morales’ Paper Presented at K-CAP 2021

Monday 29 Nov 2021 | KMi News

KMi PhD student Alba Morales attended the 11th KCap Online Conference which took place on 2nd to 3rd December. Alba presented a paper entitled: "Reasoning on Health Condition Evolution for Enhanced Detection of Vulnerable People in Emergency Settings" which she co-authored with Dr. Enrico Daga and Prof. Enrico Motta.

The International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP) is one of the reference venues for researchers in Knowledge Engineering and its applications in areas such as Artificial Intelligence, including knowledge representation, knowledge acquisition and machine learning, as well as research in knowledge extraction, reuse and integration of data in application areas such as healthcare and cyber-infrastructures.

KMi Research Fellows, Francesco Osborne and Enrico Daga also attended the conference, as they had served on the KCap Programme Committee.

Alba is conducting her PhD research to improve how data can be used to support Smart Cities services. Specifically, her research aims to use healthcare data and provide first responders with helpful information about vulnerable people during an emergency event. In this paper, she explores the use of health records and proposes a solution for representing and reasoning on medical events. Her objective is to design a representation of health evolution that facilitates Intelligent Systems reason on medical events to devise an accurate picture of people’s health status.

The paper introduced a methodology for identifying relevant information from health records in supporting emergency services. This methodology introduces the concept of Condition Evolution Statement (CES) representation, a sophisticated and elaborated description of the recovery process, which supports the definition of the convalescence period according to the type of health issue, and therefore allowing the detection of ongoing medical events at a given point in time. Their approach integrates semantic technologies and machine learning to represent and reason on health condition evolution. The paper evaluates the precision of an Intelligent System that uses health records to identify vulnerable people during a fire emergency. They incorporate the CES representation in the Intelligent Systems, and the results of the experiments reported clear evidence of an increase in precision in all cases. Their contributions include a database of condition evolution annotations and a novel representation and reasoning of condition evolution for supporting the detection of vulnerable people in emergency response.

Related Links:

Alba’s paper: Reasoning on health condition evolution for enhanced detection of vulnerable people in emergency settings

KMi’s Social Data Scientists are featured in the Finnish Press

Thursday 25 Nov 2021 | KMi News

Congratulations to our Social Data Science Researchers whose work received wide coverage in the Finnish press this week and in an OU News story.

The research, led by Gregoire Burel, Tracie Farrell, and Harith Alani, aimed to examine misinformation about COVID-19 online to improve the effectiveness of the response to the pandemic. The group’s work on HERoS Project has found that the amount of misinformation related to COVID-19 is disproportionately higher than content produced by fact-checkers on Twitter. COVID misinformation also maintains attention and engagement for longer online than fact-check content.

Over 350,000 tweets that shared misinforming or fact-checking content related to COVID-19 between December 2019 to January 2021 were studied. It was found that fact-checking may not be as successful as expected in reducing misinformation spread on Twitter. The amount of misinformation on COVID-19 was shared on Twitter around 3.5 times more than content trying to correct misinformation.

Dr Grégoire Burel, the data science researcher behind this study, called for fact-checkers to combat this:

“Fact-checkers should, accordingly, be more ready to republish and boost the spread of fact-checking content. Social media platforms also could take a bigger responsibility and identify misinformation faster.”

Dr Tracie Farrell, one of the key researchers in the project, commented on the impact that being exposed to correct information can have on people’s likelihood to follow Government guidelines or advice:

“While these results may seem disheartening, we know from extensive previous research that correcting misinformation with facts about COVID-19 may help to reduce the exposure they get on social media platforms. Access to correct information on COVID-19 makes people better at following government guidelines on social distancing, recommendations on hygiene, and it also improves vaccine acceptance. Understanding how we can correct misinformation online can help us save lives.”

Prof Harith Alani led the study as part of the HERoS-project (Health Emergency Response in Interconnected Systems) coordinated by Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki. The overall objective of HERoS is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

This highlighted the importance of fact-checkers making their content attractive and eye-catching to social media users – thereby more shareable and likely to gain traction on platforms.

The full detail of the study above was published in the Journal of Information Processing & Management, in November 2021. Read the Publication here.

The story received coverage from the Finnish media outlets below:

Related Links:

Best Paper Awarded to Joseph Kwarteng at ASONAM 2021

Friday 19 Nov 2021 | KMi News

Congratulations to Joseph Kwarteng, our PhD Research Student who has won Best Paper at ASONAM, for his publication: "Misogynoir: Public Online Response Towards Self-Reported Misogynoir", alongside his co-authors Tracie Farrell, Miriam Fernandez and Serena Coppolino Perfumi. This paper investigates Misogynoir – a portmanteau coined by Moya Bailey in 2008 to describe the specific forms of misogyny that Black women experience in visual and digital culture, coupled with racism and normative expressions of gender. [1] Bailey, M., and Trudy, "On misogynoir: Citation, erasure, and plagiarism," Feminist Media Studies, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 762-768, 2018

As explained by Bailey, ‘it is particular and has to do with the ways that anti-Blackness and misogyny combine to malign Black women in our world".

This paper aims to: i) understand and characterise how misogynoir is manifested online and ii) investigate potential tools and methods to identify this type of hate automatically; it highlights four recent cases involving four prominent Black women in Tech. They were former employees of two large technology companies, Google and Pinterest and were reporting experiences of misogynoir at these firms on their Twitter platform. We followed the reactions to these cases (both supportive and non-supportive responses). We categorised them within a model of misogynoir that highlights experiences of Tone Policing, White Centring, Racial Gaslighting and Defensiveness.

The international conference on the 8th-11th November brought researchers and practitioners from various fields together virtually to promote collaborations to share ideas and practices. The 2021 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2021) addressed important aspects focussing on emerging trends and industry needs.

Tracie Farrell, Joseph’s PhD supervisor, said, "Intersectional hate is a very challenging topic, both on- and offline. We appreciated Joseph’s mixed-methods approach in dealing with this topic in his paper."

KMi at the Innovate Learning Summit 2021

Thursday 18 Nov 2021 | KMi News

The Innovate Learning Summit took place online on November 9-11, 2021. The conference was organised by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education and was attended by over 600 participants from more than 40 countries. The Innovate Learning Summit provides a unique forum for education and training professionals to discuss the latest research, development, applications, issues, and strategies, to explore new technologies, and to identify solutions for today’s challenges related to online learning.

Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi and the QualiChain project, and delivered a hands-on workshop entitled “Decentralising Education Using Blockchain Technology”. The workshop explored the different aspects of education that are affected by decentralisation. Participants had the opportunity to try out and evaluate the online platform offered by the QualiChain project for the Blockchain-based award and verification of education and employment qualifications. The outcomes of this workshop will provide useful feedback for the QualiChain pilot led by Alexander in the area of lifelong learning.

Angel’s Spotlight Story: A New KMi Member

Wednesday 10 Nov 2021 | KMi News

This week’s Spotlight Interview features Angel Pavon Perez, a new member of KMi. Angel is a PhD Research Student, who focuses on biases in artificial intelligence (AI).

What is your background?

I am a computer scientist from the University of Cordoba with a master’s degree in artificial intelligence from the Polytechnic University of Madrid. Since I started in artificial intelligence, my research has been linked to applying AI techniques in current social issues. In this way, my previous research has focused on detecting fake news with AI methods and the propagation of information in radicalised groups in the manosphere.

Apart from my research, I also enjoy other activities outside the university such as hiking in nature and martial arts training. In fact, this year I won the Spanish national hapkido tournament in the black belt teams’ category.

What can you tell us about your research?

AI systems are nowadays widely used in many areas of our society to achieve more efficient and unbiased decision-making systems. However, it has been shown that these systems can replicate the biases embedded in our society, thus perpetuating inequalities and injustices. Along these lines, my research will aim to study the discriminations that can arise from these artificial intelligence models, with a particular focus on financial services.

What exactly are you researching?

My research is about exploring the different types of biases within these financial services models to explore other techniques to identify and mitigate them to obtain fairer models. In this way, thanks to the collaboration with Visa Europe, we will analyse the biases and try to mitigate them in artificial intelligence systems that are currently being used in financial services.

Why is it important?

Over the past few years, there have been high-profile discrimination cases by artificial intelligence, such as the Apple credit card, which gave higher credit limits to men than to women. However, this work is important not only because of the injustice of some groups being treated differently because of their gender but also because of all the implications that discrimination can have on financial services. In fact, it has been shown that in the United States, there is a possible link between institutional racism (through mortgage discrimination) and health access among black women. Therefore, I believe that this project is important to mitigate this type of injustice and thus make our society fairer.

What would be your predictions for your study area in the future?

Hopefully, this research will provide more knowledge in the area as well as a framework for companies and organisations in the sector to develop or refine their artificial intelligence systems to make them fairer and not repeat past inequalities and injustices.

Thank you, Angel. We look forward to hearing more about your study over the next few years.

If you enjoyed this article and are interested to study a PhD at KMi, we will be advertising here for applicants in early 2022 for an Oct 2022 start.

KMi’s Maven of the Month: Prof. Viola Schiaffonati

Wednesday 03 Nov 2021 | KMi News

The KMi Maven of the Month initiative originated back in 1995, as a collaboration between the Knowledge Media Institute and the BBC’s Open University Production Unit. It was one of the first Internet Radio in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_talk_radio), that used state of the art technologies (for the time…), including RealAudio, CU-SeeMe, Netscape browser and chat windows, as well as standard telephone landlines.

This year, KMi has relaunched the initiative, as a series of virtual Q&A sessions with top experts (mavens or connoisseurs) on major socio-technological topics. These pervasive topics call for an inclusive discussion, across different departments and disciplines. Colleagues from the different OU Faculties are welcome to join the discussion!

On December 2nd at 11 AM (GMT), Prof. Viola Schiaffonati from Politecnico di Milano will present a special session on "Computers, Robots and Experiments". Below you will find an overview of the themes of this session, as well as the Maven’s bio.

Prof. Schiaffonati will kick off the event with a 20 min presentation of her perspective on the topic. Then, 25-30 min will be devoted to the Q&A, with a combination of curated questions from the event hosts (Prof. Enrico Motta and Agnese Chiatti from KMi), as well as live questions from the audience. To get a better sense of what to expect from this event, you can check out the recording of the previous Maven of the Month episode, at this link.

Be sure to register for the event through this Eventbrite link to collect your free ticket ahead of time*, and to receive updates and links for joining the session!

* Participation is limited to OU staff and students.

Maven: Prof. Viola Schiaffonati

Event Title: Computers, robots, and experiments

Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics technologies are revolutionizing our lives and one of the most difficult challenges is to shape them in accordance with human values and needs. In this talk, I will argue that to achieve this goal an epistemic and methodological dimension should be added to the ethical one usually discussed. In particular, I will claim that the traditional notion of controlled experiment needs to be revised in the case of AI and robotics, and the novel framework of explorative experiment introduced. This framework sets the ground not only for new epistemic categories but also for reconsidering the traditional moral principles guiding experimentation in the case of AI and robotics, where uncertainty about their impacts and risks is very high.

Maven’s Bio: Viola Schiaffonati is an associate professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at Politecnico di Milano, Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering. She holds a PhD in Philosophy of Science from Università di Genova. She has been visiting scholar at the Department of Philosophy of the University of California at Berkeley and visiting researcher at the Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology of the Stanford University. Viola Schiaffonati is the director of the CINI National Laboratory on Informatics & Society (IeS), Editor-in-Chief of Mondo Digitale, a magazine published by AICA (Italian Association of Computing), and Associated Editor of the Springer journal Science and Engineering Ethics. She currently serves as expert in the European Commission expert group on Artificial Intelligence and Data in education and training. Her research interests are in the philosophy of AI and robotics, the epistemology and methodology of experiments in computer engineering and autonomous robotics, the ethical issues of intelligent and autonomous systems.

The Semantic Web Community Celebrates its 20th Birthday

Thursday 28 Oct 2021 | KMi News

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the ‘official’ birth of the Semantic Web community, as 2001 saw both the publication of the landmark paper on the Semantic Web by Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler, and Ora Lassila, as well as the staging of the 1St Semantic Web Symposium (the precursor to the International Semantic Web Conference series), which took place at Stanford, California, in July 2001.

To celebrate this 20th birthday, the programme for the 2021 edition of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) included a panel on the topic “Semantic Web Vision and Revision”, which saw the participation of KMi’s Enrico Motta, alongside Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler (Panel Chair), and Deborah McGuinness. The goal of the panel was to bring together four ‘old timers’, people who have been involved in Semantic Web research since the very beginning, to assess the current state of the area. In particular, the discussion centred on a number of issues, including: i) what were the panellists’ hopes and expectations for this topic back in 2001; ii) to what extent these ambitions have been achieved over the last 20 years; iii) what are the current challenges facing Semantic Web research and iv) what the panellists expect it will happen in the future.

More than 200 people tuned in to the event, which provided a very lively debate on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks for the Semantic Web community. The themes that were highlighted include the work of Tim Berners-Lee on the Solid platform, the growing importance of hybrid architectures combining semantic representations with neural network algorithms, the role of semantic technologies in fighting disinformation, and the importance of better tools for both application developers and users of Semantic Web solutions.

Overall, the panel was very successful, with an excellent level of audience participation. And the final message from the panellists was very clear: while the past 20 years have been great, the future for the Semantic Web community promises to be even more exciting and fun.

Related Links:

ISWC 2021

Partnership Announcement: Cypris and CORE

Friday 15 Oct 2021 | KMi News

We’re delighted to announce a new partnership between CORE and Cypris, a leading AI-driven, market intelligence platform that connects research & development (R&D) teams with innovation data and trends in their field.

The partnership will provide Cypris with unlimited access to over 210 million open access articles to further enhance their platform and regularly add live market data to provide R&D teams with the most up-to-date research in their fields of interest.

Continue reading this news on the Jisc Research Blog.

Related Links:

Read more.

Mano’s Spotlight Story: KMi Blockchain video attracts more than 120,000 views

Friday 15 Oct 2021 | KMi News

I have an exciting story to share about a recent event where I was invited to deliver a guest lecture on the future of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies in India. It was an online event organised by the Youth United Council of India (Tamil Nadu Branch). Due to the higher number of registrations received (more than 1000), the organisers decided to host it as a live event via my YouTube channel (Crypto Tamil). I was expecting less than 500 people to turn up for the event, but more than 3000 people joined the live stream when we went live. I was pretty surprised by the people’s interest in Blockchain technology in India. Most of the people who joined the live stream were Undergraduate and Postgraduate students from various disciplines. The crowd was very live, and the chatbox was scrolling fast with questions and comments. The event time was originally planned for 1 hour. Still, due to the higher number of questions, it was extended 30 minutes more. I answered the questions selectively as there was no way to answer them all in the given time. After the event, the live recording got published on my channel, and more than 10,000 people have watched the event video so far. I was amazed by the support I received from the people, and I was pleased to interact with them live.

CryptoIndy video – (10,000+ views)

The best part is yet to come. After this event, many people asked me to do a follow-up video where they wanted me to explain Blockchain in detail, Tamil Nadu Blockchain policy and Blockchain-based job opportunities. I did make a video about it later and posted it. THE VIDEO WENT VIRAL! The video got shared by many Universities in Tamil Nadu. I started getting a lot of emails, comments, and requests to deliver more guest lectures in different Universities. So far, more than 120,000 people have watched it, and the views are still going up! I was not expecting this at all! The Tamil Nadu government has a separate department called the Tamil Nadu e-governance agency, which controls all the e-governance related activities in the state. The e-governance agency contacted me to set up a Blockchain community in Tamil Nadu. I did set up a community group in telegram, and more than 1200 people have joined it so far. The Blockchain community is thriving at speed more than I expected. It is now acting as a hub for people to find developers, get help with Blockchain development, and even find coding buddies.

Follow up video -(120,000+ views)

Crypto Tamil Developer Community

I also got requests to make a video about Blockchain development which I started making recently during my free time.

Blockchain Tutorial Video Links:

(42,000+ views)

(19,000+ views)

Blockchain is not just a technology but a revolution. I joined John’s team in 2018 after getting inspired by their work using Blockchain technology. I have learnt a lot from them, and the experience of working with various Blockchain-based projects made me who I am today. I carried that inspiration and created awareness about Blockchain to the Tamil speaking community, and the rest is history.

‘It’s not what we do that matters. It’s what we inspire others to do that matters’.

Congratulations to Peter Scott, President-Designate of Athabasca University!

Wednesday 13 Oct 2021 | KMi News

We are excited to hear that Prof Peter Scott, who was KMi Director from 2007 to 2015, has been announced as President-designate of Athabasca University.

In the announcement video, Peter said, “AU’s Imagine plan has created a fantastic new platform for change, so I will be joining a team that is already well on its way along this journey.”

On hearing the news, KMi’s current director John Domingue reflected that: “Peter said during our 20th Anniversary Symposium “The only thing you need to do to make Knowledge Media happen is to have a great team”, I couldn’t agree more, but you also need an inspirational leader, which we certainly had in Peter. Peter, KMi are so proud of your achievements – Athabasca University will thrive under your leadership.”

Peter left KMi to join the University of Technology Sydney, Australia where he is currently Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education).

Professor Scott will take up the role of10th president of Canada’s Online University on 4th Jan 2022 and the KMi Team wish him every success in his new role.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpVw5SrYAlw]

Related Links:

Prof Peter Scott named AUs 10th president

New Badged Open Course: Decentralising Education Using Blockchain Technology

Monday 11 Oct 2021 | KMi News

KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis has developed the new badged open course: Decentralising Education Using Blockchain Technology. The course introduces Blockchain technology and its potential for decentralising and transforming education. The course also presents the work carried out by the QualiChain project for the decentralised management and verification of education and employment qualifications, specifically in the context of lifelong learning. Finally, the course offers an opportunity to learners to try the online platform developed by QualiChain and earn a Blockchain-based Smart Badge. The course is available on the Open University’s OpenLearn Create platform and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which allows the reuse and adaptation of the course materials for non-commercial purposes. Upon completion of the course, learners earn a free statement of participation.

The course was officially launched during the Open Education Global 2021 conference, which took place online between September 27 – October 1, 2021. The purpose of the Open Education Global Conference 2021 & 2022 is to support the implementation of the UNESCO OER Recommendation, from commitment to action. The 2021 & 2022 conference series brings the global open education community together to collectively work on advancing the implementation of the UNESCO OER Recommendation in actions associated with all five action areas: Capacity Building, Policy, Access, Sustainability, and International Cooperation.

KMi collaborates with WELS and BlueScreenIT in new Blockchain project

Wednesday 06 Oct 2021 | KMi News

KMi has initiated a new project with WELS and the external company BlueScreenIT on leveraging Blockchain technology for OpenSTEM Africa. The project, led by WELS and funded by HEIF, is developing a business case and implementation model that leverages Blockchain capacity to create a smart and sustainable future for OpenSTEM Africa, BlueScreenIT’s education offerings and explores the wider potential for this model across the Open University.

Alexander Mikroyannidis represents KMi in this project and will be working on the technical specifications for the use of Blockchain in education contexts in the low resource and low connectivity regions of OpenSTEM Africa. On 28 September 2021, Alexander held a workshop between KMi’s Open Blockchain group and the OpenSTEM Africa Blockchain project. This workshop has initiated a discussion between KMi and the new project in order to understand and outline the scenarios for the efficient use of Blockchain in this challenging educational context.

KMi participating in COP26 green zone event

Friday 01 Oct 2021 | KMi News

See Full programme here: https://ukcop26.org/the-conference/green-zone-programme-of-events/

Ancient Knowledge and Modern Thinking: Climate Perspectives in Folk Art

13:00 – 14:30, 07 Nov 2021
The Open University and Glasgow Life

How can art and science come together to inform the future of climate action? How can we utilise learnings from Indigenous communities to inspire nature-based solutions?

In a fascinating event, Indigenous artists and experts from The Open University and Glasgow Life will explore the connections between culture, citizens, and climate by examining three works of art from Glasgow Museums’ World Cultures collection.

Indigenous artists will discuss the meaning behind these artworks in a series of three short films, which bring to life some of the cultural and creative practices in India, Ecuador and the Arctic. The in-person academic panel will examine the local climate adaptation actions championed by communities in these locations and invite participants to consider how the resilience they show can inspire a more sustainable way of life.

In a unique session which intersects the worlds of culture, science and technology, attendees will have the opportunity to speak directly with experts and to understand the bold actions we can all take locally to support global climate adaptation.

Leading researchers will share the technological innovations which citizens can use to record and protect local nature and explain how everyone can be empowered to play their role in combatting the climate emergency.

Compere:
Dr Heather Reid, Meteorologist and Science Education Consultant
Our contributors:
Advaith Siddharthan, Professor of Computer Science and Society, The Open University
Duncan Dornan, Head of Museums and Collections at Glasgow Life
Janice Ansine, Senior Project Manager Citizen Science, The Open University
Mark Brandon MBE, Professor in Polar Oceanography, The Open University
Susan Stewart, Director of The Open University in Scotland

Featuring film contributions from:
Gustavo Toaquiza Ugsha, Kichwa artist, Ecuador
Inuit artist or representative
Patricia Allan, Curator of World Cultures at Glasgow Museums, Glasgow Life
Rajesh Chaitya Vangad, Warli artist, India

Related Links:

Go Green – COP26 Green Zone Preview

Watch Advaith talking at COP26 Time stamp:20.25

Co-inform Combatting Misinformation Event before The 55th ICA Conference

Thursday 30 Sep 2021 | KMi News

Co-Inform, a European collaborative project with KMi as a key partner, had an event on the 29th-30th September to present the project’s tools and results, which were developed to foster critical thinking and digital literacy towards a better-informed society. These tools were designed and tested with policymakers, journalists, and citizens in 3 different EU countries.

Martino Mensio gave a demo of the Co-inform tool Misinfo.me. Misinfo.me is a web tool to enable users to assess any Twitter account for its credibility, based on the level of interaction with misinformation detected for that account over time.

Harith Alani presented the Co-inform Twitter Bot, MisinfoBot, aimed at proactively sending fact-check information to senders of misinforming Tweets. The presentation included an introduction of the design and results of the Bot, followed by an overview of future directions for combatting misinformation on social media based on the Co-inform experiences.

Tracie Farrell and Lara Piccolo presented their work on the role of Human Values and misinformation sharing behaviour, and Gregoire Burel introduced his work on the influence of demographics on the spread of misinformation.

Following this event, attendees were invited to join the 55th ICA Conference themed: The New Normal:" A radical leap to digital, one giant step for digital society", where Co-Inform was collocated with.

KMi at ICL2021

Wednesday 29 Sep 2021 | KMi News

The 24th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL2021) took place as a hybrid event on September 22-24, 2021. This interdisciplinary conference is focused on the exchange of relevant trends and research results, as well as the presentation of practical experiences in Interactive Collaborative Learning and Engineering Pedagogy.

KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis presented a paper on the current status and latest results of the QualiChain pilot that he is leading in the area of lifelong learning. This pilot uses Blockchain technology in order to provide lifelong learners with transparent and immutable educational accreditation in the form of Smart Blockchain Badges. Additionally, within this pilot lifelong learners are provided with personalised recommendations that help them reach their personal and professional learning goals.

The conference proceedings will be published as ICL2021 Proceedings with Springer in the series Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems.

KMi Admin Team Set Sail on an Away Day

Wednesday 29 Sep 2021 | KMi News

Since the pandemic the Admin Team have been working from home, like most staff and students at the Open University. Now we are permitted to meet, last week the team took the opportunity to all meet in person for the first time since March 2020.

Their team building afternoon took place aboard Electra, The Milton Keynes Community Boat, on the Grand Union Canal. Electra is a brand-new, 54-foot narrowboat that operates out of Campbell Wharf in the centre of Milton Keynes. She is the only fully-electric community narrowboat in the country. She can accommodate up to 12 passengers normally, but only 8 passengers during current COVID restrictions.

The team were delighted to be together after so long and spent time discussing how we can support the KMi Members during the coming months as we make the transition to new ways of working.

Our Admin Manager, Jane Whild, is one of Electra’s volunteer skippers. Jane said: “This is a relaxing and green way to travel around Milton Keynes, in contrast to moving around by road which is highly stressful this week as motorists are having to queue and compete for fuel.”

The Bedford and Milton Keynes Waterways Trust are looking for 3 Skippers and 5 new Cabin Hosts to join Electra’s Volunteer Team for training in November & December in time for the start of the 2022 season. Click here to find out more.

Investigating Learning Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Friday 17 Sep 2021 | KMi News

Milton Keynes, UK: Along with other colleagues at the OU, Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum in Germany, Carnegie Mellon University in the USA, EPFL in Switzerland and Diversync Limited in the UK, KMi will be hosting a workshop at the annual European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) on the subject of learning technologies for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). The workshop, entitled: “Designing Learning Technologies for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion”, will address issues such as normativity in understanding learning experiences, the impacts and utility of learning technology for students belonging to ethnic or cultural minorities, the intersection of multiple identities in learning environments, accessibility, fairness and equity in learning technology, and how to involve learners directly in the development of learning technology and evaluating its impact. The purpose of the workshop is to foster critical educational research and reflection, for the next generation of learning technology, researchers and practitioners.

KMi staff are currently running an eSTEeM project within The Open University that addresses these topics within the context of learning analytics. More specifically, we’re investigating how learning analytics can help to shed light on issues like retention and the degree awarding gap for students who are Black, Asian or who have another minority ethnic background. We’ll be examining the extent to which learning analytics reflects the normative experience of the student body, and the steps we can take to ensure that the data we can gather through learning analytics will be relevant to other student demographic groups as well as those falling into the majority demographic of White, British students. For this project, we’ll be working to disaggregate some of the patterns we can observe with our award-winning learning analytics platform OUAnalyse by demographic group, and to work with students on how these patterns can be best interpreted to support learners. Our early results, conducted on a variety of different configurations of existing LA predictive models, show that creating individual models for subgroups of students within specific protected attributes (ethnicity, gender, disability) do harm the accuracy and fairness of the predictions. On the other hand, removing the protected attributes from model training helps to enhance the fairness of these models for some subgroups. We plan to share some of the early results of this project at the workshop.

Call for Action

We are hoping this workshop brings insight into different challenges that are faced by students from different backgrounds and how technology can support (or harm) learners. If you have research you would like to share, we encourage you to participate in our workshop. Details for how to take part can be found on our event website.

Important dates

July 14th: Submission deadline for applications/submissions

August 1st: Send out notifications of acceptance

September 20th – 21st: Workshops are held online

How does CORE substitute Microsoft Academic Graph?

Friday 17 Sep 2021 | KMi News

The forest chatter has been clamorous since Microsoft’s announcement to retire Microsoft Academic (MAG) at the end of 2021. Like many others, at CORE, we have used MAG for a number of tasks including data quality enhancement and enrichment, to obtain citation data, for our research in semantic typing of citations and to enrich MAG and Microsoft Academic Search by supplying direct links to full-text content (in a similar way we do for PubMed).

Continue reading this blog post on the Jisc Research Blog.

Related Links:

Read more.

Past and Present KMi Research Stars Take Centre Stage at Semantics 2021

Thursday 16 Sep 2021 | KMi News

Last week saw the latest edition of the Semantics series of conferences, Semantics 2021, which took place in Amsterdam, Holland. Since 2005, the Semantics conferences provide the main European forum covering both advanced academic research in semantic technologies, as well as the state of the art in the relevant industrial applications.

Semantics 2021 saw a very strong presence of KMi researchers, both past and present!

Prof Enrico Motta gave the inaugural keynote of the conference, presenting a talk entitled “Combining Deep Learning and Common-Sense Reasoning in Visually Intelligent Robots”. The presentation centred on the PhD research carried out by Agnese Chiatti, a member of Enrico’s research group, who is investigating the use of common-sense reasoning to improve a robot’s ability to make sense of its environment – see https://robots.kmi.open.ac.uk for more details. This work is led by Agnese, with contributions coming also from Dr Enrico Daga and Dr Gianluca Bardaro.

Enrico’s keynote was followed by a session focusing on novel research advances related to the SPARQL query language and the first presentation in this session was given by Enrico Daga, who presented a paper entitled "Facade-X: an Opinionated Approach to SPARQL Anything". This contribution offered an original perspective to the problem of Knowledge Graph Construction. This work, which is supported by two EU grants, SPICE and Polifonia, was carried out in collaboration with another KMi-er, Dr Paul Mulholland, as well as researchers from the University of Bologna in Italy.

A few days later Enrico Daga gave another talk during the DBpedia Day at the conference, which was entitled "Capturing the semantics of documentary evidence of humanities research". The talk illustrated a hybrid method, combining machine learning and knowledge engineering, for identifying "themed" evidence in books, with case studies from the music domain. This line of research started during the Listening Experience Database (LED) project and is currently progressing in Polifonia.

Finally, the participation of KMi’s present and past research stars was completed by a keynote by Dr Vanessa Lopez, formerly a researcher in KMi and now at the IBM Research Centre in Dublin. Vanessa’s presentation, entitled “Knowledge Graphs for Social Good: Protecting Vital Health and Social Programs”, focused on the problem of realising computer programs that can correctly implement government policy, e.g., in the provision of healthcare services.

Tiff’s Summer Spotlight: Working in the Software and Innovation Engineering Service team

Tuesday 14 Sep 2021 | KMi News

What can you tell us about your role?

I work on all kinds of projects with the researchers here at the OU; this means I can be working on project spec and design, frontend and backend web development, electronics and other physical computing projects – whatever development is needed.

What are you working on right now?

I’m currently working on some Arduino-based electronics and e-textile research and learning about AR technologies.

What do you enjoy most about your job?

The part of my job I enjoy the most is creating new things, with learning new technologies a close and very related second.

What things have you made recently?

The most recent thing I made was a user interface and architecture for deploying an artificial tissue growth simulator made by one of our researchers, Dr Jim Hague. He developed CONDOR – a predictive biophysical method for modelling cell self-organisation in artificial tissues for improved design of moulds and scaffolds. However, CONDOR ran on the command line with programmatically generated moulds, and he wanted to be able to deploy it to end-users. I designed and implemented a cloud-based product that allows users to upload 2D drawings as mould designs and spins up Amazon AWS servers to run the models.

This creates a sustainable model that’s easier to update and doesn’t require a huge upfront investment on the part of the software users (as previous scientific modelling software tended to). It provides a framework that can be used to distribute and run similar physics models, as the modelling code itself is independent of the distribution framework.

We’re now seeking partners and early adopters to beta test. Plans for the development of CONDOR involve simulating complex 3D scaffolds, co-cultures and vascularisation to model more complex tissues such as organoids. More information on the physics model can be found at Hague et al. (2020) Phys. Rev. Research 2.

Related Links:

Predicting Cell Organisation in Artificial Tissue

The ALT Annual Conference 2021: Shared Experience, Different Perspectives

Monday 13 Sep 2021 | KMi News

The ALT Annual Conference took place online on September 7-9, 2021. The conference was organised by the Association for Learning Technology and was attended by nearly 400 participants from 24 countries. This year’s conference offered an opportunity to bring together educators, learners, managers, senior leaders and policy writers, in order to reflect on the shared experience from their different perspectives on the lessons learned from the pandemic.

KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis served on the conference committee and delivered a pre-conference workshop entitled “Decentralising Education Using Blockchain Technology”. The workshop explored the different aspects of education that are affected by decentralisation. Participants had the opportunity to try out and evaluate the online platform offered by the QualiChain project for the Blockchain-based award and verification of education and employment qualifications. The outcomes of this workshop will provide useful feedback for the QualiChain pilot led by Alexander in the area of lifelong learning.

Watch the recording of this workshop:

KMi team win at the SciRoc 2021 challenge

Monday 13 Sep 2021 | KMi News

Last week, from the 6th to the 10th of September, the 2nd International Smart Cities and Robotics Challenge (SciRoc) was held in Bologna (Italy) in the historic location of Palazzo Re Enzo. As a part of the European Robotics League (ERL), the event was aimed at showcasing the integration of robots in smart urban environments and followed the successful first edition of the competition, which took place in the MK Centre in 2019. As in the prior edition, the SciRoc challenge included many robotic tasks, or “episodes”. Teams from Europe and the UK were called to compete on several different robotic challenges, including serving orders at a coffee shop, correctly grasping and placing supermarket products on shelves, and even manoeuvring a shopping trolley.

The robotics team led by Gianluca Bardaro (Research Associate at KMi) and Agnese Chiatti (PhD student at KMi) won the shopping cart episode. The task of correctly pushing a trolley along a given trajectory, which is trivial for us humans, is in fact very challenging for a robot to perform. To succeed in this task, a robot needs robust navigation and obstacle avoidance capabilities to navigate the arena, as well as the ability to perceive the trolley location and orientation as it moves over time, and, last but not least, a sophisticated automation model to adapt the movements of the robot based on the behaviour of the trolley.

To tackle a challenge that entails such diverse areas of expertise, team leaders Gianluca and Agnese had to form an equally diverse team. As a result, Team Hybots (from “Hybrid Robots”) came to light: a joint collaboration between the ISDS Lab at KMi and AIRLab at Politecnico di Milano. With the help of team members Filippo Betti, Chiara Bigi and Stefano Gatti (Master Students in Automation and Control Engineering), the team developed a hybrid robotic architecture which integrates different navigation, perception and control components. The solution was deployed on a PAL Robotics’ Tiago robot, i.e., the de facto sixth member of the team.

Thanks to the team’s win, the Knowledge Media Institute went from successfully organising the Milton Keynes event in 2019 to winning as one of the participating teams in 2021.
Congratulations to the whole team!

Joseph Kwarteng’s Spotlight Story on Misogynoir

Tuesday 24 Aug 2021 | KMi News

What could you tell us about your research?

My research is about intersectionality in hate speech detection, focusing on "Misogynoir" – a particular kind of hate that black women experience. Moya Bailey coined the term "Misogynoir" to describe "the specific hatred, dislike, distrust, and prejudice directed toward Black women". It is misogyny against black women with the intersection of race and gender. The concept of misogynoir is exclusive to Black womanhood, and women of other races cannot experience it, but individuals of any gender or ethnicity can perpetuate it. For instance, the hyper sexualisation of Black women and stereotypes that characterise Black women, particularly as angry, unreasonable, or extraordinarily strong, are examples of misogynoir that impact the health, safety and well-being of Black women and girls. For example, actress and comedian Leslie Jones had to quit the social media platform Twitter after receiving a disproportionate number of hateful remarks in reaction to her part in the all-female Ghostbusters film remake. A qualitative content analysis of the abusive comments revealed multiple forms of misogynoir in these comments relating to Jones’s attractiveness to men or perceived "masculine" features, a gendered and racist comment that Black women are more likely to experience.

What exactly are you researching?

My research aims to explore how misogynoir manifests online and how it could be mitigated since existing technologies for hate speech detection do not accurately identify this type of hate and protect black women accordingly. The methodology we are considering for this research is multidisciplinary, combining social, computational and linguistic approaches.

Why is this important?

This study is vital because these targeted abuses can destroy lives and cause people to lose their self-esteem and confidence to speak up. According to an Amnesty International survey, 41 per cent of women who had encountered online bullying or violence said that, on at least one occasion, these online encounters made them believe that their physical protection was compromised. Moreover, as most online social networking platforms ban hate speech, the sheer scale of their networks and web applications makes it very difficult to monitor all of their content. Although these platforms have created automated techniques for detecting hate speech, research has shown that these approaches do not perform as effectively for specific marginalised groups such as Black women or types of hate speech that are intersectional, such as Islamophobia and Antisemitism. Therefore, exploring ways to help platforms reduce the amount of hate Black women receive is crucial.

What would be your predictions for your study area in the future?

The future prediction for this study is to have a state-of-the-art detection model that recognises the different types and characteristics of misogynoir. Moreover, an automated model that can accurately identify misogynoir online. In addition, the study will help inform policies around hateful conduct online and expand knowledge around intersectional hate.

What is something you have learned about that you did not expect to?

This research has helped me recognise that multiple social categorisations like race, gender, class and others combine to produce a distinct model that might subject one to oppression. Moreover, misogynoir is not synonymous with racism or misogyny as single components but instead exists at the intersection of the two in unique ways to Black women. It is very contextual, and we, therefore, need to educate ourselves about it and learn to recognise it.

Partnership Announcement: ADRI and CORE

Thursday 19 Aug 2021 | KMi News

We’re delighted to announce a new partnership between CORE and Arabic Digital Reform Institute (ADRI), providing services to researchers to store, share and access Arabic academia online.

The partnership will provide ADRI with unlimited access to millions of open access articles to provide research platform and repository services to academics all over the world.

The detailed information about this is available on the Jisc Research blog.

Related Links:

Read more.

Kaushal’s Spotlight Story: My Summer Project in KMi

Tuesday 03 Aug 2021 | KMi News

This week’s Spotlight Interview features Kaushal Kumar, a recipient of our Summer Scholarship, who tells us about the 6-week project he is doing in KMi. Kaushal is a Sixth Form Student studying Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Further Maths and he starts his final year in September. He hopes to study either Mechanical Engineering or Main Level Engineering at university.

What can you tell us about your project?

I found this summer scholarship through a friend and was immediately interested in the topic ‘Robot Assistants in the Wild’. My project idea is to create an Ergonomic Workstation.

How does that work?

The project relies on sensors which are commonly used for robot perception – namely RGB and depth cameras – to extract key information from the environment that can be helpful to assist people with their daily tasks. I am interested in promoting users’ good posture and in implementing a system that can guide the users in setting up their own Ergonomic Workstation. The system will use perceptual sensors to collect the user’s biometric information (e.g. – their height and body measurements) through Vision, and derive their optimal workstation setup, based on these data.

What is the likely outcome of your project?

This is a topical issue. Many people are seeking to improve their workspaces at home, as what was once a temporary way of working is now becoming part of people’s lifestyle.

I am learning more about the Robot Operating System (ROS) and how it interfaces with the robot’s sensors. I expect the scholarship will also give me an insight into the process of academic enquiry and develop my research skills.

I hope that my system may be modularly integrated into an ‘embodied’ robot assistant in the future.

KMi’s Summer Scholarship was launched in 2020. It aims to improve diversity in STEM by providing a professional opportunity with a tangible outcome for young students coming from communities that have been under-represented in STEM and computing. KMi invited applications from UK Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic applicants aged 16 to 20 to carry out a short computer science project in KMi, lasting up to 6 weeks during June-August. Kaushal is one of two successful applicants to be awarded a scholarship, which provides grant funding of £4,000 and mentorship from KMi Academic Researchers and / or PhD Students to carry out their project.

Related Links:

The Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) Annual Summer Scholarship for people from a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Background.

A spotlight on Vaclav: OUAnalyse

Wednesday 28 Jul 2021 | KMi News

This week the spotlight shines on Vaclav Bayer who is a Full-Stack Developer in our Learning Analytics Team. Watch this video to hear Vaclav explaining his work.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc5VAz-SglA]

What can you tell us about your research?

UniversitiesUK and AdvanceHE reports show a 13% degree-awarding gap for Black, Asian and Minority ethnicity students in the UK. Similar issues are found for female and disabled students.

What does it mean in practice?

There is evidence that Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students at the Open University put more effort and spend more time studying, they are, however, less likely to complete, pass or achieve an excellent grade compared to White students.

My research aims to address these awarding gaps in Higher Education. I will use state-of-art Learning Analytics methods for doing so.

What exactly are you researching?

I am currently looking into KMi award-winning project OUAnalyse. It’s a Learning Analytics Predictive system that provides the tutors at The Open University with predictions on students’ success in submitting their upcoming assignments. The predictions help tutors to target in-time and cost-effective interventions. I am investigating if the generated predictions are fair and accurate for all students equally, and if not, what are the reasons and how we can avoid them.

Why is this important?

Awarding gaps translate into socio-economic gaps and further inequalities. Educated people are less dependent on public aid and are more resistant to economic downturns.

In terms of Learning Analytics predictions, we have evidence that the use of the predictions increases the students’ chances to pass the module by 7%. However, if students are wrongly predicted that they will submit their upcoming assignment, but, they don’t manage to submit it, the tutors will most likely miss the opportunity to provide the required support.

What have you learned that you did not expect to?

This type of research made me realise how combining qualitative and quantitative approaches is important as everything cannot be sometimes done by only one approach. Especially when we talk about the awarding gap mitigation, it may take years to evaluate the steps taken to reduce the gaps.

Thank you, Vaclav

Congratulations to our new Professors!

Tuesday 27 Jul 2021 | KMi News

We are delighted that our colleagues Anna De Liddo and Miriam Fernandez have been awarded their chairs. The promotions, which take immediate effect, were announced by STEM Executive Dean, Professor Nick Braithwaite.

Anna De Liddo is promoted to Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, this reflects her excellent research portfolio and the societal impact of her technologies. Anna leads KMi’s IDea Group an interaction design research group which investigates theories, methods, and tools to enhance participatory discourse and deliberation in public engagement, urban informatics, e-democracy and social innovation contexts. Her work focuses on the socio-technical factors influencing the design and uptake of Collective Intelligence solutions. In the past 10 years, Anna has led the development of 8 different Collective Intelligence technologies (Cohere, The Evidence Hub, LiteMap, DebateHub, CIdashboard, Democratic Reflection, Democratic Replay, and Bcause.app), and launched the Collective Intelligence for The Common Good Open Research and Action Community Network (ci4cg.org). Anna is also taking up the role of KMi Director of Research in place of Professor Stefan Rueger.

Miriam Fernandez is promoted to Professor in Responsible Artificial Intelligence, reflecting her excellent leadership in research and technology development for tackling societal challenges. Miriam is a senior member of KMi’s Social Data Science and OUAnalyse Groups, conducting research into online grooming, radicalisation, misinformation, and misogyny; and investigating the large-scale application of Learning Analytics to address existing inequalities in Higher Education, particularly within the OU context. Miriam is our Athena SWAN champion, leading key initiatives to increase equality and diversity in KMi and across the University. She has led a refreshed commitment in KMi since 2017 (where the department successfully achieved a bronze Athena SWAN award) to put diversity, equality, and engagement in advancing careers transparently, in particular for women, at the forefront of our agenda.

KMi Deputy Director, Professor Harith Alani, said: “Massive CONGRATULATIONS to you, Miriam and Anna, for the very well-deserved titles and recognition of all your super hard work over the years. Your contributions to KMi are invaluable!”

Personal tributes to Anna and Miriam have been pouring in from KMi colleagues, students and mentees who all look forward to the time that we can celebrate in person, hopefully, that will be very soon.

To find out more about their work and projects, visit their profile pages:

Anna’s profile

Miriam’s profile

Pasquale’s Spotlight story

Tuesday 20 Jul 2021 | KMi News

In this week’s summer series of Spotlight Interviews with KMi people, Pasquale Iero tells us about his work in KMi

What is your role?

I joined KMi as a Research Assistant in 2019 after nearly two decades of working in the software industry. I support the researchers in the Open Blockchain Research Team. My tasks may involve coding software, writing documents, or providing comments for some paper, according to my previous experience. I also perform research tasks, that is, tasks intended to answer research questions.

What are you working on?

So far, I have worked on two projects:

Up To University (Up2U) (https://learn.up2university.eu) which aims to bridge the gap between study at secondary schools and higher education. The UP2U platform helps teachers to customise courses so they can be delivered online. The platform offers a new approach to learning in that it allows students to do things they wouldn’t do in normal classes, for instance, interacting with digital artefacts. The KMi team worked on the technical part of the platform.

I am now working on the Qualichain project (https://qualichain-project.eu/) which aims to build a decentralised platform for storing, sharing, and verifying education and employment qualifications. This platform allows participating agents to earn and endorse microcredentials from and to other participants. Employers can use those credentials, and together with the skills already on the cv of the agent, they can match a person to particular job specifications. The KMi team are ensuring that we can trust the microcredentials.

Is this the only role you have?

As well as being a full-time Research Assistant in KMi, I am also a part-time PhD student studying with the Centre of Computing & Communications at the Open University.

What is your PhD topic?

The research I am doing is about "Deduction in Question Generation". I am adding a form of inference to automated question generation. This has applications in, for instance, MOOCS, the work of teachers, automated agents, and Q&A platforms.

How does the research environment compare to working in industry?

In industry, you work based on the interaction with your clients, and projects are shaped according to their gradual requests. In the research field, projects seek to answer research questions, so they need more flexibility and agility to radically change direction quickly, if necessary.

APIv3: Announcing a new API to access CORE data

Thursday 15 Jul 2021 | KMi News

Since the start (10 years ago!) CORE’s mission has been to aggregate and facilitate access to Open Access scientific research at an unprecedented scale to both humans and machines. To achieve this aim, we are always refining and improving our methods for access and use of the CORE data.

A key consideration in making improvements is that CORE users hail from many different backgrounds and are applying the CORE tools in a variety of use-cases. At last count, we had over 40 broad industry types (including academic research, education, publishing, software, and technology companies) applying the CORE tools to their work across the world. Applications of CORE tools and data are growing and constantly changing.

Read the continuation of this story on the Jisc Research blog.

Related Links:

Read more.

Zeeshan’s Spotlight story: PeerMiles Recognising Academic Reviewers

Tuesday 13 Jul 2021 | KMi News

As part of our summer series of interviews with KMi people, this week’s spotlight falls on Zeeshan Jan, PhD Student

What are you researching right now?

I am in the final phase of conducting my research about the academic peer-reviewing process, which is thesis write-up. The peer-reviewing process is perceived as the backbone of academic research publishing. Researchers leading this hectic task are rarely acknowledged and incentivised. My study aims to accumulate their scattered work, recognise and appreciate their reviewing activity, and incentivise their invaluable efforts. For more information, please visit the website.

Peer reviewers are essential to science. What makes a good peer reviewer?

The perception of being a good reviewer varies with how researchers consider different aspects while assessing reviews and peer-reviewers. For example, these aspects include:

The level of constructive criticism by reviewers
How detailed a review is
How complete an inspection is
If a study has recommendations and suggestions for improvements
The length and tone of a review.

What have you learned about what drives them and makes them want to contribute?

Researchers take peer-reviewing as their moral obligation to give back to the research community. They spend an enormous amount of time reviewing articles written by other researchers. Their reviewing activity brings more knowledge to them about new research. It informs them about the state of the art of different research areas. Researchers’ reviewing activity usually gets mentioned on their CVs and the websites of conferences they participate in. This is how research proceeds.

What’s your solution?

The websites of different journals, conferences and workshops mention their reviewing committee members, so a researcher’s reviewing activity may spread across multiple places on the web. PeerMiles enables conference management to accumulate, acknowledge and incentivise peer-reviewers’ contributions using disruptive technologies. Suppose anyone has doubts about the integrity of a researcher’s reviewing contributions; in that case, they can verify these contributions with a simple mouse click.

Now, we know this is a doctoral research project, but do you think people will use it?

As it directly impacts researchers (involved in both peer-reviewing and conference management) in establishing their peer-reviewing contributions across multiple journals, conferences and workshops, they will use it. My work also brings decentralisation at a certain level, enabling conference management to act independently. This independence will help conference management record reviewers’ services without depending upon a centralised platform. Then researchers would be able to access/use their verifiable history without depending upon any platform. It does not keep confidential information (passwords/keys); therefore, researchers would trust the system.

Well, that sounds pretty promising! What’s next for you after your PhD?

I would want to continue my journey and quest to investigate concerns in academia and address them using disruptive technologies. I would like to focus on exploring decentralised technologies, including distributed ledgers and blockchains, and see if they could help address the issues pertinent to academia.

Now, we know this is a doctoral research project, but do you think people will use it?

As it directly impacts researchers (involved in both peer-reviewing and conference management) in establishing their peer-reviewing contributions across multiple journals, conferences and workshops, they will use it. My work also brings decentralisation at a certain level, enabling conference management to act independently. This independence will help conference management record reviewers’ services without depending upon a centralised platform. Then researchers would be able to access/use their verifiable history without depending upon any platform. It does not keep confidential information (passwords/keys); therefore, researchers would trust the system.

CORE updates for January to June 2021

Wednesday 07 Jul 2021 | KMi News

Much of CORE Team’s focus involves developing services that underpin open research. The updates for this half-year include numerous examples of this in action. You can find details about these and more news on the Jisc Research blog.

Related Links:

Read more.

Spotlight Story: Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning

Monday 05 Jul 2021 | KMi News

As part of our summer series of interviews with KMi people, this week’s spotlight falls on Audrey Ekuban, who tells us about her PhD research on privacy in Educational Analytics.

What can you tell us about your PhD research?

I am exploring the solution space of Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning with the intention of creating a usable framework for Educational Analytics.

What is Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning?

Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning is an emerging suite of techniques that enables a machine learning model to be trained on raw data that it does not have direct access to. In reality, a combination of these techniques could be used, with each technique having some limitations. The trade-offs of each technique need to be understood so that the best fit for a specific project being undertaken can be communicated.

Why is this important in the field of Educational Analytics?

There is general agreement that Learning Analytics, for instance, if used correctly, can be beneficial to both students and academic institutions. However, as Learning Analytics leaves the controlled area of research and enters the mainstream and commercial space, various sociotechnical concerns have been raised. I believe that my work can alleviate some of those concerns.

What are the main concerns of Learning Analytics that you are hoping to address?

Learning Analytics requires personalised learning activity data. This presents an ethical dilemma, especially as the learner does not have the ability to switch the collection off. This means that a learner cannot opt into or opt out of the data collection. In addition, the learner does not have access to the data that is collected.

There are also concerns surrounding who has access to the data, who owns the data, where the data is stored and how long the data should be stored for.

What can you see this research area leading?

Currently, there is a large open-source community involved in both research and development of Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning solutions. In addition, anonymisation of data does not give the protection that it used to provide. These two factors lead me to believe that we are at the start of something that has a tremendous capacity for growth.

What is the end goal of your research?

The end goal of my research is to realise the value in learning activity data for the benefits of both educators and students in an ethical manner. With Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning, the benefits from Educational Analytics can be achieved without the concerns of data privacy.

Do you think that potential benefits to a student can outweigh the right of students to control their own data?

More and more organisations in more and more countries are entering the Learning Analytics space. There is the potential that students will be harmed by organisations using learning activity data for purposes other than Learning Analytics. Students having the right to share what they wish to share, whom they wish to share it with and when they wish to share it, I believe, will minimise that harm.

Would this control introduce algorithmic biases and impact the students who need it most?

Educational Analytics is also of benefit to the institution. In fairness to students, there should be incentives for them to take part in the training of machine learning models.

KMi at SLERD 2021 and EKDDA info day

Friday 02 Jul 2021 | KMi News

KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis recently gave two invited talks at the SLERD 2021 conference and at an info day organised by EKDDA. The first event took place online on June 25th. Alexander was invited as speaker on the panel “Towards Learning Ecosystems Based on Competences: the promise of the micro-credentials” panel, in the context of the 6th conference on Smart Learning Ecosystems and Regional Development (SLERD). The talks of the panellists sparked discussions around the potential of micro-credentials beyond being a useful tool for bridging formal and informal education, towards revolutionising the educational system into developing true competences. Alexander presented his latest work on transforming micro-credentials through decentralisation solutions, conducted in the context of the QualiChain project. The recording of this panel will be made available on the YouTube ASLERD channel.

The second event took place online on June 30th and was organised by the National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government (EKDDA) in Greece. The theme of this info day was focused on “Smart Digital Services for the Public Sector” and featured invited talks from academics and civil servants in Greece and abroad. Alexander presented the case studies investigated by the QualiChain project in transforming education and public sector recruitment using blockchain technologies.

Investigating Learning Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Tuesday 29 Jun 2021 | KMi News

Milton Keynes, UK: Along with other colleagues at the OU, Ruhr- Universität Bochum in Germany, Carnegie Mellon University in the USA, EPFL in Switzerland and Diversync Limited in the UK, KMi will be hosting a workshop at the annual European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) on the subject of learning technologies for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). The workshop, entitled: "Designing Learning Technologies for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion", will address issues such as normativity in understanding learning experiences, the impacts and utility of learning technology for students belonging to ethnic or cultural minorities, the intersection of multiple identities in learning environments, accessibility, fairness and equity in learning technology, and how to involve learners directly in the development of learning technology and evaluating its impact. The workshop’s purpose is to foster critical educational research and reflection for the next generation of learning technology, researchers and practitioners.

KMi staff are currently running an eSTEeM project within The Open University that addresses these topics within learning analytics. More specifically, we’re investigating how learning analytics can help shed light on retention and the degree awarding gap for students who are Black, Asian, or have another minority ethnic background. We’ll be examining the extent to which learning analytics reflects the normative experience of the student body and the steps we can take to ensure that the data we can gather through learning analytics will be relevant to other student demographic groups as well as those falling into the majority demographic of White, British students. For this project, we’ll be working to disaggregate some of the patterns we can observe with our award-winning learning analytics platform OUAnalyse by demographic group and work with students on how these patterns can be best interpreted to support learners. Our early results, conducted on various configurations of existing LA predictive models, show that creating individual models for subgroups of students within specific protected attributes (ethnicity, gender, disability) harms the accuracy and fairness of the predictions. On the other hand, removing the protected attributes from model training helps enhance the right of these models for some subgroups. We plan to share some of the early results of this project at the workshop.

Call for Action

We hope this workshop brings insight into different challenges students from diverse backgrounds face and how technology can support (or harm) learners. If you have research you would like to share; we encourage you to participate in our workshop. Details for how to take part can be found on our event website.

Important dates

July 14th: Submission deadline for applications/submissions

August 1st: Send out notifications of acceptance

September 20th – 21st: Workshops are held online

Second SDP 3C Shared Task – Evaluating Automated Methods for Citation Classification

Tuesday 29 Jun 2021 | KMi News

The need for administering automated methods for evaluating research is gaining more attention lately. The primary motivation for this is to replace the regular, more exhausting exercises like peer-reviewing and the not so sophisticated, less accepted ways of ranking research works like Impact Factors, which solely depends on the citation-frequency. One such proposition is the utilisation of other citation aspects, such as function or importance, for redefining the current research evaluation decision frameworks, The recently concluded 3C citation context classification shared task organised by the researchers at Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), The Open University, UK and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), US and is one such effort aimed at providing a unifying platform for researchers in this domain, to push research further in this direction. Read the continuation on Jisc Research blog.

Related Links:

Read more.

CORE, the worlds largest collection of open access research papers, turns ten

Tuesday 29 Jun 2021 | KMi News

It all started in 2010 when the then PhD student at the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University, Dr. Petr Knoth wanted to collect a large corpus of academic papers to explore related research content. It was a frustrating job as he realised that there not only wasn’t a readily available corpus of all research papers, but that collecting this information for machine processing was particularly difficult. While reading about Open Access, he came up with the idea to create a tool that harvests both metadata and full text from all research repositories on a global scale enabling unrestricted access to all content.

Continue reading this birthday story on the Jisc Research Blog.

Related Links:

Read more.

Agnese presents at the ESWC 2021 PhD Symposium

Tuesday 15 Jun 2021 | KMi News

Every year the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) is one of the leading destinations for many researchers in the Semantic Web community. The ESWC event also offers a PhD symposium: a forum for PhD students in the area to present their work and an opportunity to receive constructive criticism from mentors and peers. This year’s edition of the symposium was organised by Dr Ilaria Tiddi (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and Claudia D’Amato (Università di Bari, Italy). Agnese Chiatti, PhD Research Student at KMi, presented a technical overview of her PhD work titled "Towards Visually Intelligent Agents (VIA): a Hybrid Approach".

Agnese’s PhD work proposes a framework of epistemic requirements for developing Visually Intelligent Agents, i.e., to support the ability of service robots to make sense of the environment through their vision system, reasoning components and background knowledge. Intermediate results from this work show that a hybrid reasoning architecture that introduces awareness of objects’ typical size can significantly augment object recognition solutions purely based on Deep Learning. Agnese also presented a novel First Order Logic framework to represent the typical Qualitative Spatial Relations between objects which can be fully implemented through Geographic Information Systems (GIS) libraries. This spatial component will be used further to augment the proposed hybrid architecture on visual reasoning tasks.

Agnese’s virtual presentation of her work received great interest from the symposium audience, leading to a very engaging Q&A session that spanned for 40 minutes after the presentation. The ESWC PhD symposium is an excellent opportunity for students to receive valuable feedback and practice defending their work in a friendly and engaging environment. KMi has a long history of students and scholars who have actively participated in this event, and many present and future KMi students may benefit from joining this initiative.

KMi Maven of the Month is back

Thursday 10 Jun 2021 | KMi News

Maven of the Month was a pioneering initiative launched by the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) back in 1995, in collaboration with the BBC’s Open University Production Unit. This was one of the first Internet Talk Radio anywhere in the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_talk_radio), which used state of the art technologies (for the time), including RealAudio, CU-SeeMe, Netscape browser and chat windows, as well as standard telephone landlines.

26 years later, KMi is relaunching this initiative, inviting top experts from around the world to discuss major socio-technological topics with an audience that comprises both members of the Knowledge Media Institute, as well as the wider staff at The Open University.

The key feature of this event is that, differently from a more traditional seminar format, it is mainly focused on creating a dialogue between the invited speaker and the audience on major socio-technological topics. Thus, each presentation by the invited Maven will be followed by an extended Q&A session, with questions curated by both the hosts and the audience.

Attendees will be given a chance to suggest a question before the event, to ensure that everyone is engaged and that the pool of questions captures as many voices as possible. However, there will also be room for impromptu questions during the event. People posting a question will have the option to either ask their question directly, in a “BBC Question Time” fashion, or have the event hosts ask the question on their behalf.

The initiative will kick off June 22, 2021, @4-5PM (BST), with a session on “Ethics in AI: a challenging task”, led by Prof. Ricardo Baeza-Yates and co-hosted by Agnese Chiatti (PhD research student in KMi) and Prof. Enrico Motta. Further information about the event can be found at the official event page.

If you would like to attend this event, be sure to email agnese.chiatti@open.ac.uk before the end of the working day on the 21st June 2021.

Webinar: Facilitating lifelong learning through the use of blockchain technology

Friday 28 May 2021 | KMi News

On 26 May 2021, Alexander Mikroyannidis (The Open University, UK) delivered the webinar Facilitating lifelong learning through the use of blockchain technology as part of the CPD webinar series of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT). In this webinar, Alexander presented the QualiChain project and the lifelong learning pilot that he is leading. This pilot aims at supporting lifelong learning through the use of Blockchain technology. In particular, this pilot uses Blockchain technology in order to provide lifelong learners with transparent and immutable educational accreditation in the form of Smart Blockchain Badges. Additionally, within this pilot lifelong learners are provided with personalised recommendations that help them reach their personal and professional learning goals. The slides of this webinar are available here.

Watch the recording of the webinar:

OUAnalyse among 4 Best Projects for using AI in Education by UNESCO

Wednesday 26 May 2021 | KMi News

OUAnalyse, The Open University Predictive Learning Analytics system, was selected as a finalist and among the four best projects for the 2020 edition of the UNESCO Prize in education.

Since 2005, UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize for the Use of ICT in Education rewards each year the best projects focused on education. Specifically, it highlights projects using technology to provide learning opportunities for everyone in the world. This is one of the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals – Leading SDG 4 – Education 2030 (unesco.org) to achieve by 2030. The 2020 theme was dedicated to using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance the continuity and quality of learning.

OUAnalyse was first selected in the national round as a representative from the UK and shortlisted among other 73 applications worldwide. OUAnalyse was chosen together with "One College Student Per Village" by the Open University of China, collaborative education platform "ViLLE" by the Centre for Learning Analytics, University of Turku, Finland and "eShuri Platform" by the Data Systems Ltd, Rwanda.

OUAnalyse, a university Predictive Learning Analytics project, was set up at Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) in 2013 and is a result of fruitful collaborative efforts of KMi, Institute of Educational Technology (IET), Data and Student Analytics (DSA) and all the university faculties. Every week it provides machine learning-powered predictions of whether students will submit their assignments via a dashboard application. This dashboard is available to all the staff responsible for the module production, including tutors, staff tutors and module chairs.

Dr Christothea Herodotou from IET and Dr Martin Hlosta from KMi commented on the story published by UNESCO. Dr Herodotou highlighted the strong body of evidence that showed the positive impact of using OUAnalyse on student performance in the evaluation of 1,222 teachers and 23,180 students in 231 modules. Dr Hlosta revealed the current direction of using OUAnalyse to understand and reduce the existing awarding gaps for Black, Asian and minor ethnics groups and also students coming from low socio-economic areas.

Special Issue on Blockchain-Based Decentralised Solutions

Thursday 13 May 2021 | KMi News

KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis is the managing guest editor of a special issue on Blockchain-Based Decentralised Solutions for Learner Empowerment, Education Reengineering and Public Sector Transformation. This special issue will be published in the new Elsevier journal Blockchain: Research and Applications.

This special issue explores how learner empowerment, education reengineering and public sector transformation can be achieved via blockchain-based decentralised solutions. These solutions cover a wide range of applications within education and employment, including the storing, sharing and verification of education and employment qualifications. Particular emphasis is given on the assessment of the potential of blockchain technology, algorithmic techniques and computational intelligence for disrupting the domain of public education, as well as its interfaces with private education, the labour market, public sector administrative procedures and the wider socio-economic developments.

Scope

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Methodologies and decentralised technological solutions for the archiving, management and verification of education and employment qualifications.
Applications of blockchain technology and decentralisation in lifelong learning for transparent and immutable educational accreditation.
Applications of blockchain technology and decentralisation in higher education processes for smart curriculum design and student accreditation.
Applications of blockchain technology and decentralisation in public and private sector recruitment processes.
Provision of competency management services and skill development services via blockchain-based decentralised solutions.
Evaluation methodologies and impact assessment of blockchain-based decentralised solutions, algorithmic techniques and computational intelligence.

Manuscript Preparation and Submission Instructions

This journal is a peer reviewed, open access journal. For all articles submitted, Zhejiang University and Zhejiang University Press will cover the OA fee. Authors do not have to pay any open access publication fee.

Authors should follow the guidelines in “Guide for Authors” in the Blockchain: Research and Applications: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/blockchain-research-and-applications/. The papers submitted to this special issue will be reviewed following the standard peer-review procedures of the journal.

All manuscripts should be submitted in electronic form through the Editorial Manager web site: https://www.editorialmanager.com/bcra/default.aspx. When submitting your manuscript through the submission portal, please select the Article Type: “QualiChain”.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: February 28, 2022

Final decisions: May 1, 2022

Managing Guest Editor

Dr Alexander Mikroyannidis, The Open University, UK. alexander.mikroyannidis@open.ac.uk

Other Guest Editors

Dr Panagiotis Kokkinakos, National Technical University of Athens, Greece.

Dr Ingo Keck, TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, Germany.

Misinformation at CHI 2021

Thursday 13 May 2021 | KMi News

Part of the 2021 ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the hands-on workshop Opinions, Intentions, Freedom of Expression,… , And Other Human Aspects Of Misinformation Online was held on 7th of May. It gathered multidisciplinary researchers from across the world (i.e. Canada, the US, Belgium, Germany, Brazil, Austria, Italy, and the UK), including a representative of WHO, a key organisation in the fight against the current infodemic.

Misinformation is a wicked problem. Therefore, different perspectives related to its detection and spread were discussed, including human aspects such as beliefs and the role of emotions in human reasoning, elements of trust, fact-checking, accountability, and social media platforms regulation as technical issues related to data harmonisation. A total of 9 research statements were accepted (http://events.kmi.open.ac.uk/misinformation/#programme).

The presentations and discussions were split into three clusters: Community and Values; 2. Policies and Regulations; and 3. Tools and Technical Solutions. In an engaging atmosphere, the discussions led to new insights on creating more ethical and impacting technical solutions.

Co-organised by KMi researchers Lara Piccolo and Tracie Farrell, the event was organised in partnership with Diotima Bertel (SYNYO GmbH) and Pinelopi Troullinou (Trilateral Research), integrating the EU projects Co-Infom, HERoS, CIMPLE and EUNOMIA.

Related Links:

Opinions, Intentions, Freedom of Expression,… , And Other Human Aspects Of Misinformation Online

Three KMi Researchers Ranked in the Top 25 Most Influential International Scholars

Tuesday 27 Apr 2021 | KMi News

Prof. Harith Alani, Prof. Enrico Motta, and Dr. Francesco Osborne are among the top 25 most influential scholars in Knowledge Engineering, according to the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Annual List. This is an international ranking produced by AMiner, a popular academic search system, to celebrate the 2000 most significant contributors to the field of Artificial Intelligence.

The AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Annual List was generated by analysing the performance of 133 million experts in the last ten years and it is recognised by world-renowned universities and organisations, including the University of California, Berkeley, Cornell University, Duke University, National University of Singapore, and others. It covers 20 sub-fields of Artificial Intelligence, including Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Robotics, Knowledge Engineering, Speech Recognition, Data Mining, Information Retrieval, Databases, Human-Computer Interaction, and others.

Prof. Alani was selected for his pivotal papers about the application of Sentiment Analysis to Social Media. At the same time, Prof. Motta and Dr. Osborne were chosen for their innovative work on Scholarly Data Analytics. Thanks to these contributions, The Open University ranks fourth overall among organisations in the field of Knowledge Engineering. The list also includes two KMi alumni: Prof. Mathieu D’Aquin and Dr. Hassan Saif.

Related Links:

AI 2000 Most Influential Scholars

KMi at the OERxDomains Conference

Monday 26 Apr 2021 | KMi News

The OERxDomains Conference took place online on April 21-22 as a special edition of the 12th annual conference for Open Education research, practice and policy. The conference was organised by the Association for Learning Technology in partnership with Reclaim Hosting’s Domains Conference, thus incorporating a special strand hosted by the Domains Conference and bringing two communities together. This year’s conference has put the spotlight on both the value and limitations of Open Education in a (post)pandemic world.

KMi was represented by Alexander Mikroyannidis, who served on the conference committee and delivered a hands-on workshop entitled “Decentralising Open Education Using Blockchain Technology”. The workshop explored the different aspects of open education that are affected by decentralisation. Participants acquired a good overview of the range of scenarios for the use of Blockchain technology in open education, as well as an insight into best practices for designing a decentralised ecosystem based on the Blockchain. The outcomes of this workshop will provide useful feedback for the QualiChain pilot led by Alexander.

Watch the recording of this workshop:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewcJCYUWM5g]

KMis First Apprentice Success!

Friday 23 Apr 2021 | KMi News

Congratulations to Kiran Parmar on passing his Level 3 Digital Marketer Apprenticeship. Kiran began his apprenticeship with the OU in September 2019 and due to the pandemic, he has had to work remotely for the majority of the time. The apprenticeship was comprised of on-the-job training in the KMi Admin Team and STEM Comms Team, and formal training provided by Milton Keynes College.

Kiran was assessed on both his college assignments and a portfolio of social media work that he carried out in KMi. This month he completed a synoptic project and was interviewed by an examiner.

He now embarks on 18 months’ work experience to embed his learning by continuing to promote KMi’s activity and achievements using digital and social media.

Kiran said: " I’d like to thank my MK College Tutor, Dawn-Louise Kerr, my KMi colleagues, and my mentors Jane Whild, Katrina Bray and Rachel Coignac-Smith for all their support with my studies and my on-the-job work."

KMi are proud of his achievement, and wish Kiran every success in his career as a digital marketer.

Related Links:

Kiran Parmar on LinkedIn

Anna is President-elect of the SIG on Cognitive Science Research

Thursday 15 Apr 2021 | KMi News

Dr Anna De Liddo (Senior Research Fellow and lead of the IDea research team) has been invited to become President-elect of the SIG (Special Interest Group) on Cognitive Science Research in IS of the Association for Information Systems for 2021-2023.

Anna will join Luca Iandoli (President-in-office and Associate Dean for Global Programs and Research at St. John’s University, New York) and Jia Shen (Incumbent Presiden, Associate Professor and Chair Department of Information Systems at Rider University) in leading the SIG’s activities for the next three years. The Association for Information Systems (AIS) is the premier professional association for individuals and organisations who lead the research, teaching, practice, and study of information systems worldwide.

A SIG is a community that shares an advancement in a specific area of knowledge in IS; they allow members to connect with like-minded individuals to affect or produce solutions within a particular area of expertise. SIGs are dedicated to researching, developing and disseminating knowledge based on vast experiences of particular topics in the management and organisation of IS.

The SIG on Cognitive Research (SIG CORE) is specifically intended to represent and support researchers in information systems who view understanding human cognition as a critical component to the successful design and implementation of information systems. As such, the questions of interest relevant to this SIG group focus on IS problems in terms of knowledge, technology-mediated reasoning, perception, and judgment. Becoming President of the SIG on Cognitive Research means Anna will help the organisation of some of the leading AIS conferences, such as AMCIS 2021 and its subsequent series in 2022 and 2023. In particular, Anna, Luca and Jia will chair a track at AMCIS2022 and organise a workshop on IS Cognitive Research at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), which is the most prestigious gathering of information systems academics and research-oriented practitioners in the world. Joining SIG CORE and becoming an AIS member gives access to such annual conferences and workshops and Affiliated Conferences and other resources, such as libraries, journals, professional training, and community news.

Overall this new role allows Anna to represent and support researchers in information systems who view understanding human cognition as a critical component to the successful design and implementation of information systems.

Flowcite Expands its Knowledge Library with 210 Million Research Papers from CORE

Friday 09 Apr 2021 | KMi News

Flowcite has teamed up with CORE, the world’s largest aggregator of open access research papers. The partnership will provide Flowcite users with free and unlimited access to millions of open access research papers from the CORE database.

CORE is delighted to partner with Flowcite and progress our aligned goals to make open research content available to all. By connecting our innovative solutions we continue to evolve the way research is being completed and increase the discoverability and usage of all research outputs.” Dr Petr Knoth, CORE Founder.

“Expanding our Knowledge Library with CORE we provide our users with an opportunity to find relevant sources for their research in just one click. This integration doesn’t simply improve our in-built Knowledge Library, but makes us closer to our global goal of creating one tool that takes care of everything, where you can read, annotate and cite unlimited papers simultaneously just like when working in a browser.” – says Guillaume Grust, Founder of Flowcite.

Read more about this collaboration on the Jisc Research blog.

Related Links:

Read more.

Successful Conclusion to the MK:5G Project

Tuesday 06 Apr 2021 | KMi News

A final virtual consortium meeting celebrated the successful conclusion of the MK:5G project, a flagship city initiative centred around the deployment of 5G technologies in Milton Keynes. In particular, MK:5G has deployed a dedicated 5G infrastructure for the city and an associated Data Exchange facility. KMi’s contribution to the project centers on the design and implementation of a novel open-source technology, the API Factory, which defines a back-end component for the Data Exchange. The API Factory supports an efficient consumption and delivery of the large-scale IoT data streams made possible by 5G technologies. The API Factory is just one of the components of the MK Data Factory suite of technologies, which forms part of the MK Data Hub. The latter was developed by a joint KMi/BT team within the context of the MK Smart project and has since been used in a variety of contexts, including SME Innovation (CityLABS), Autonomous Robots (SciRoc), and Cultural Heritage Data Infrastructures (SPICE).

The 5G mobile network and data infrastructure, designed exclusively for research and development purposes, currently covers a large part of the Milton Keynes area, including Central Milton Keynes (CMK), MK Stadium, Bletchley & CMK rail stations, the Hospital, Universities, essential junctions on the M1, and a number of rural communities. Testbed applications spanned across three core themes: Mobility, Health & Wellbeing, and Energy, producing extensive datasets available through the Data Exchange. MK:5G was led by Milton Keynes Council and was funded by the South East Midlands Local Enterprise Partnership (SEMLEP). Consortium partners are: BT, CityFibre, TechMahindra, The Open University, Satellite Applications Catapult and the Connected Places Catapult.

A Seed for Tackling Violence Against Women in Sierra Leone

Tuesday 30 Mar 2021 | KMi News

Dr Lara Piccolo has received a seed funding award from the Royal Academy of Engineering to tackle violence against women in Sierra Leone.

Gender-based violence (GBV) is widespread in Sierra Leone, with almost 70% of women reportedly experiencing violence in their lifetime. The adverse health, social, and psychological consequences of GBV have a severe impact on women and girls’ livelihood and on the broader national development agenda towards Sustainable Development Goals.

With Dr Steven Sam from Brunel University, Dr Soraya Mostefaoui from C&C, and Mr Sylvester Macauley from Mamie Foundation in Sierra Leone, Dr Lara Piccolo will contribute to improving collaboration between the health sector, policy, legal systems and support service providers involved in GBV work. The team will contact key stakeholders to gather evidence and socio-technical requirements to propose an effective digital solution for the country’s vocal support and empowerment.

The seed funding is an outcome of the Frontiers Programme, which held an event on 21st March, gathering 60 people worldwide who connected for several days to build ideas to improve lives utilizing smart technology!

Related Links:

Learn more here

Christina Myer’s PhD Success

Tuesday 30 Mar 2021 | KMi News

This week, Christina Myers defended her thesis titled ‘A Framework to Democratise the Design of Educational Games on Social Issues during Game Jams’. Game Jams are multi-day events organised to create computer games, usually attended predominantly by male game developers with game design and development skills.

Christina’s thesis proposes a framework with educational resources, dynamics, and tools to support diverse group participation in Game Jams, including people from different ethnicities, genders, ages, sexual orientations and who do not have any prior experience designing games. It explores Game Jam participation as an opportunity to discuss social issues. Her thesis involved 138 people to co-create stories and tools on ‘everyday sexism’ and engaged and empowered 22 people that created and developed their games on this topic as part of a game jam.

On the day of her PhD viva, the examiners Prof Helen Kennedy, University of Nottingham, and Dr Alexander Mikroyannidis from KMi recognised the relevance of her work and its applicability to the framework to engage young people with social issues.

Dr Lara Piccolo and Dr Trevor Collins are also celebrating the success of this PhD! They have supported Christina in this journey that applied principles of Participatory Design, Educational Game Design, and Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy as part of this multidisciplinary and impactful work!

Related Links:

To celebrate heres a clip about her PhD research, click here

CORE update for October to December 2020

Monday 29 Mar 2021 | KMi News

October to December 2020 CORE broke records, partnered with arXiv.org and continued improving our REF2021 compliance monitoring service. The CORE team had a busy end to 2020!

Our team concentrated on multiple areas, including collaboration with the open access community and new feature development. Find out more details on Jisc Research Blog.

Congratulations, Professor Siddharthan

Thursday 25 Mar 2021 | KMi News

Advaith Siddharthan has been awarded his chair, with the title of Professor of Computer Science and Society.

STEM Executive Dean, Professor Nick Braithwaite said: This is in recognition of his excellent research portfolio and the associated international impact of his work. Advaith has shared his knowledge and enthusiasm to develop socially responsible AI technologies that facilitate meaningful public engagement with science and foster attitudinal and behavioural change, particularly around biodiversity issues.

KMi Director, Professor John Domingue, commented: Advaith has sustained excellence and impact over many years. We will have lots of cake and champagne to celebrate once we’re all back on campus.

Huge congratulations to Advaith Siddharthan on his promotion. To find out more about his projects, visit The Citizen Science and Artificial Intelligence group pages at citsci.kmi.open.ac.uk

Related Links:

To find out more about his projects, visit The Citizen Science and Artificial Intelligence group page

Call Opens for KMi’s Annual Summer Scholarship for people from Black, Asian or Minority backgrounds

Wednesday 24 Mar 2021 | KMi News

KMi are inviting applications for our Summer Scholarship 2021. This is an exciting opportunity for 16 to 20-year-olds from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds to discover what it’s like to be a computer scientist. Successful candidates will receive a grant to carry out a short computer science project in KMi, lasting up to 6 weeks during June-August. The project may be conducted online, at the Open University campus or through a combination of both. While we appreciate applicants with existing computing skills, not all of our scholarship projects will require prior knowledge of programming. We value and promote theoretical diversity in computing.

Among the visitors who come to KMi each summer, there has been an under-representation of visitors from a Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic Background. We aim to ensure consistent representation through this annual scholarship and create greater awareness of computer science research in not-yet-reached communities.

What does a Scholarship from KMi offer?

Taking part in a project will enhance employability, develop computer science skills and/or provide a social benefit. Applications must be in by midnight on 6th April.

An award winner will carry out their project under the mentorship of KMi Academic Researchers and/or PhD Students. These are five listed KMi topics available:

Robot Assistants in the Wild
Identifying bias in mainstream news sources
Modern Day Mind Control.. Can we use sensors to help learn to control the flow of blood to our brains?
Misogynoir: Intersectionality in Online Abuse
Benchmarking environmental sensors

If you are interested in applying, please contact us by 20th April. You will then be able to speak with one of the supervisors, who will give more information and support with developing your project proposal and application.

Related Links:

For more details about the scholarship and how to apply, click here

KMi Celebrates International Women’s Day 2021

Friday 05 Mar 2021 | KMi News

Happy International Women’s Day 2021! This year’s theme is #ChooseToChallenge and we invite you to join in the many celebrations in KMi and around the Open University.

KMi’s IWD celebrations

We have created this special feature page showcasing video messages from KMi Director, Professor John Domingue, and other staff members. They talk about the inspirational women who have impressed or influenced them and they celebrate the diversity in KMi.

At 12.30 pm KMi’s Senior Researcher, Dr Miriam Fernandez, is a panelist at this discussion hosted by the OU Business School, Women in Research: Making a Difference to the Wider World. Chaired, by Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Josie Fraser, other speakers include Dr Jenny Douglas, Senior Lecturer, WELS, Dr Cinza Priola, Senior Lecturer, FBL, and Kate Lister, PFHE, WELS. Register here to watch online.

Other IWD events taking place in the OU are:

1.45 pm International Women’s Day Event organised by Women@OU and supported by EDI. Speakers include Professor Marcia Wilson, Dean of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at the OU, Professor Clem Herman, Director of eSTEeM and Ruth Spellman, OU Council Member. This will include a recording from Baroness Lane-Fox. Register here

2.00 pm Health & Wellbeing of Black Women in the Atlantic Diaspora: Conversations across the Atlantic. This event is hosted by the Black Women’s Health & Wellbeing Research Network. Register here

We invite you to join us to celebrate International Women’s Day 2021 by tweeting a photo of yourself taking the #ChooseToChallenge pose, and tagging @kmiou, @women_OU, @STEM_OU, @OpenUniversity.

Springer Nature and KMi extend their strategic collaboration until March 2022

Tuesday 23 Feb 2021 | KMi News

KMi’s Scholarly Knowledge Modelling team (SKM) and Springer Nature have formally agreed to extend their strategic collaboration agreement until March 2022. The new contract defines the latest chapter in a highly successful strategic partnership, which started back in 2014 and has since gone from strength to strength. During these years the SKM team has established itself has one of the leading international research groups in scholarly analytics, in no small measure thanks to the financial support provided by Springer Nature and the massive added value derived from such a close collaboration with one of the top international academic publishers. In particular, this collaboration has enabled the SKM team to ground their research in concrete business requirements, leading to a number of innovative resources and applications. These include i) the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), the largest taxonomy of Computer Science research areas currently available, which has been formally adopted by Springer Nature; and ii) the Smart Topic Miner (STM), an innovative application, in routine use at Springer Nature, which automatically classifies conference proceedings in Computer Science with the relevant topics in CSO. Other recent results include the Academia/Industry Dynamics Knowledge Graph (AIDA), an innovative resource characterizing 14M publications and 8M patents according to their research topics and industrial sectors and the Artificial Intelligence Knowledge Graph (AI-KG), which describes 850K scholarly entities relevant to AI research, according to 1.2M statements extracted from 333K articles in AI.

The latest chapter of this exciting partnership will focus on developing new solutions able to predict accurately the key trends associated with both the generation and consumption of scholarly publications, a highly challenging research task whose successful solution will enable robust, data-driven decision-making for both editorial and marketing teams at Springer Nature.

Related Links:

Scholarly Knowledge Modelling work in KMi

Alan Fletcher’s BizTech Blog: Digital Disruption for business models

Tuesday 26 Jan 2021 | KMi News

Alan Fletcher, Head of Research and Enterprise Support in STEM and Lab Manager in KMi has written a thought piece for businesses regarding both threats and opportunities that the digital disruption from Covid presents to their business models. The article appears in the January 2021 edition of the Biztech Blog. The Open University is an active member of Biztech, a business technology forum that has been at the forefront of technological innovation and education in the prospering Milton Keynes region for over a decade.

Related Links:

The Blog Article: Digital Disruption and the explosion of change

KMi at Brazil Week

Tuesday 26 Jan 2021 | KMi News

On the 26th of January 2021, King’s College London and The British Council launched the STEM Education Hub targeting research and education in Brazil. The Hub’s mission is to act as a point of co-operation between the UK and Brazil.

As a member of the Hub KMi Researcher, Lara Piccolo, presented her research on technology design to promote social changes both in Brazil and in the UK, illustrating possible collaborations and contrasting both research scenarios. KMi’s Senior Researcher, Trevor Collins, was a guest speaker at the inaugural event, introducing The Open University’s Centre for STEM Pedagogy (eSTEeM) and illustrating practitioner-led scholarship that underpins the OU’s STEM Faculty’s innovations in distance learning.

From UNICAMP in Brazil, Prof Cecília Baranauskas was also a guest speaker introducing some interdisciplinary research projects in the context of e-inclusion and e-citizenship applying participatory and socially responsible approaches to design technology.

The STEM education hub will continuously promote debate around key research areas and teaching questions that require greater development, both in Brazil and the UK, in a way that promotes equality, citizenship, and sustainable development. It will also offer academic support to researchers and establish channels of mobility between and to the benefit of both countries. Certainly, it will be the host and trigger of fruitful international collaborations for KMi and the OU.

Related Links:

CORE PubMed collaborate for further full text dissemination

Tuesday 26 Jan 2021 | KMi News

CORE provides access to freely available full text papers which were previously unavailable in PubMed to enhance the experience of its users. This is delivered via the LinkOut service. Read the CORE blog post to find out more about this integration. Continue reading on the Open Research blog.

Polifonia, An EU Project Launch

Wednesday 13 Jan 2021 | KMi News

The Polifonia project kick off meeting was held today.

The project aims to identify and recreate connections between music, people, places and events from the 17th century to the modern day. Funded by the European Commission under the H2020 Framework Programme, project partners such as, King’s College in London, and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences met virtually, (due to COVID19 restrictions) to introduce their research teams and to set the executive working agenda for the next six months.

Polifonia will help create a vast resource of computational knowledge in the form of a knowledge graph network of interconnected data from all the main musical heritage sources with one single point of access, to uncover these phenomena systematically. Working in close relation with musicologists and historians of music, Polifonia will develop methods and tools to help understand the evolution of European musical heritage in space and time. Themes include the transition of music genres across borders, the experiences of music in childhood, and the tracing of musical ideas through musicians’ encounters in history. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, Polifonia will analyze sounds, texts and musical scores and develop novel approaches to interact with music content for the benefit of scholars, musicians, and citizens.

KMi leads the OU team, which have researchers from the Music Computing Lab and the Music Department. Enrico Daga will carry out the role of Technical Director for the project and lead KMi’s research on knowledge graph construction for Polifonia and the work package of Human Interaction with Music, in collaboration with Paul Mulholland and Simon Holland (Music Computing Lab). The project is coordinated by the University of Bologna and will run until April 2024.

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Related Links:

KMI’s CORE reaches 30 million visits per month

Tuesday 15 Dec 2020 | KMi News

KMI’s CORE has reached a new milestone of 30 million monthly active users. This follows already significant growth of CORE’s user base in 2020, as they only reported achieving 20 million monthly users in June 2020.

Read the detailed blog post here.

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Read the detailed blog post here.

Developing accessible network simulation software for the visually impaired

Friday 11 Dec 2020 | KMi News

The Association for Learning Technology (ALT) blog has initiated a COVID special collection, featuring the latest news about the PT Anywhere network simulator. PT Anywhere, which has been jointly developed by the Open University and Cisco, has recently launched an accessible version for the visually impaired, in the context of the Open Networking Lab Accessibility project.

The Open Networking Lab Accessibility project, funded by the UfI VocTech Trust, allows visually impaired people to acquire basic computer networking skills through the use of accessible network simulation software. In order to achieve this, we have extended the PT Anywhere network simulation tool to offer an accessible interface for visually impaired learners. We have collaborated with instructors from the Cisco Networking Academy, visually impaired users, members of the broader disability community, and accessibility specialists, in order to identify user requirements and test the new software developments.

The accessible version of PT Anywhere can be accessed here, or by visiting the interactive learning activities of our OpenLearn course. Read the ALT blog post here.

Keynote and Special Track at eLmL 2020

Friday 27 Nov 2020 | KMi News

The 12th International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-line Learning (eLmL 2020) took place online on November 21-25, 2020. eLmL is bringing together federated views on mobile learning, hybrid learning and online learning. The conference is dedicated to educators, eLearning experts, and students to exchange their ideas, experiences and lessons learned in different facets of modern learning.

Alexander Mikroyannidis delivered a keynote entitled “Emerging Technologies and Paradigms in Education”. In his talk, Alexander discussed emerging paradigms in education, notably decentralised education, practical education and social education, as well as the technologies driving these paradigms. Alexander’s keynote featured the outcomes and lessons learned from a variety of recent KMi research initiatives, including QualiChain, Open Blockchain, Institute of Coding, Open Networking Lab and more. The slides of the keynote are available here.

Additionally, Alexander organised a QualiChain special tack entitled “Decentralised Qualifications on the Blockchain”. The special track investigates the creation, piloting and evaluation of decentralised solutions for storing, sharing and verifying education and employment qualifications. The submissions received address a wide range of educational and employment use cases and applications of Blockchain technology. The special track proceedings are available here.

Watch the recordings of the special track presentations:

KMi Has Joined The I4OA Stakeholders Group

Tuesday 24 Nov 2020 | KMi News

KMi has joined the I4OA Stakeholders’ Group, adding its support to their Open Abstract Initiative. This action, launched on 24 September, aims to advocate to all scholarly publishers to open the abstracts of their publications, and specifically to distribute them to trusted repositories where they are open and machine-accessible, in order to facilitate large-scale access and promote discovery of critical research.

This is a joint collaboration between scholarly publishers, librarians, researchers, and infrastructure organisations and KMi is very proud to be part of this large group who are promoting Open Abstracts. Indeed, our Scholarly Knowledge Modelling Mining and Sense Making (SKM3) team, relies heavily on abstracts for their analyses and access to such information is important to achieving their results.

Take, for example, the AIDA Dashboard which is one of the latest products developed by the SKM3 team, a tool for exploring and making sense of scientific conferences. This dashboard allows users to assess the research challenges that a conference is actually addressing, examine the trends of its relevant research topics and how its focus changed over time. To enable this functionality, all research papers published and presented to a conference were annotated using the CSO Classifier. This tool takes as input abstracts and titles and through Natural Language Processing and Semantic Web techniques identifies relevant topics drawn from the Computer Science Ontology. Abstracts have played a key role in the development of this innovative application.

Currently, I4OA is supported by more than 60 publishers, including Cambridge University Press, MIT Press and others, which are committed to making their abstracts openly available by depositing them in Crossref. However, many major publishers like Elsevier, the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Springer Nature and others are still hesitant. On the other hand, more than 60 stakeholders, including Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CORE, Center for Open Science, Harvard Library, UK Research and Innovation and many others, have expressed support for this initiative.

KMi recognises there is a need for unrestricted availability of the abstracts of the world’s scholarly publications and is thrilled to support this Open Abstracts Initiative.

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Citizen science data reveals the need for keeping pollinator-friendly plant lists up-to-date

Tuesday 24 Nov 2020 | KMi News

Our latest paper from BeeWatch Planting for Pollinators citizen science data has just been published in Nature Scientific Reports.

Widespread concern over declines in pollinating insects has led to numerous recommendations of which “pollinator-friendly” plants to grow and help turn urban environments into valuable habitat for such important wildlife. We used data gathered through our UK-wide citizen science programme (BeeWatch) to determine food plant use by the nations’ bumblebee species, and show that much of the plant use recorded does not reflect practitioner recommendations. Whilst communicated widely by organisations and readily taken up by gardeners, “pollinator-friendly” lists fail to recognise the stark differences among species and pollinator groups, or adapt to changing phenology or gardening practices. Our paper calls for the provision and use of up-to-date dynamic planting recommendations driven by live (citizen science) data to support pollinator-friendly management of garden spaces, and in the process transformative personal learning journeys through gardening.

The research was partially funded through the ongoing EPSRC Grant "Human-computer collaborative learning in citizen science" (EP/S027513/1). Principal Investigator Advaith Siddharthan said:

"Planting for Pollinators pioneered the use of AI technologies such as Recommender Systems in Citizen Science projects to offer data-driven pollinator-friendly gardening advice, and previously demonstrated its value in bringing about attitudinal change in citizens (Sharma et al. 2019). This paper additionally demonstrates the scientific value of the data collected through citizen science."

To find out more, read the paper below:

Citizen science data reveals the need for keeping garden plant recommendations up-to-date to help pollinators (2020) Helen B Anderson, Annie Robinson, Advaith Siddharthan, Nirwan Sharma, Helen Bostock, Andrew Salisbury, Stuart Roberts and René van der Wal. Scientific Reports volume 10, Article number: 20483
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77537-6

KMi at Open Education Global 2020

Monday 23 Nov 2020 | KMi News

The Open Education Global 2020 conference took place online on November 16-20. The Open Education Global conference is the most internationally diverse conference devoted exclusively to open education, attracting researchers, practitioners, policy makers, educators and students to discuss and explore how open education advances educational practices around the world. This year’s conference was held online, featuring a packed programme across multiple time zones. Presenters from 36 countries delivered 183 sessions, the recordings of which amount to 55 hours of viewing.

Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi and delivered a hands-on workshop entitled “Decentralising Open Education Using Blockchain Technology”. The workshop explored the different aspects of open education that are affected by decentralisation. Participants had the opportunity to try out and evaluate the tools offered by the QualiChain project for the Blockchain-based award and verification of education and employment qualifications. The outcomes of this workshop will provide useful feedback for the QualiChain pilot led by Alexander.

Watch the recording of this workshop:

KMI’s CORE update for July to September 2020

Wednesday 04 Nov 2020 | KMi News

KMI’s CORE team continues to work on improving the CORE. This period was a highly productive period for CORE in terms of growing and developing our products.

Find more in the blog post.

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Find more in the blog post

KMi at the 2020 International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC)

Thursday 29 Oct 2020 | KMi News

Most conferences this year are being held virtually and the 2020 International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), the most prestigious international venue for research on the Semantic Web and Linked Data, is no different. Over the years, KMi has been one of the top contributors to the conference and this tradition continues in 2020, with members of the lab chairing tracks at the conference, presenting a paper in the Resource Track, as well as contributing to the Poster Session. In particular, members of KMi’s Intelligent Systems and Data Science (ISDS) group will present the following paper:

Dessi, D., Osborne, F., Reforgiato Recupero, D., Buscaldi, D., Motta, E., and Sack, H. (2020) AI-KG: An Automatically Generated Knowledge Graph of Artificial Intelligence. In The Semantic Web – ISWC 2020, Springer. The paper introduces the Artificial Intelligence Knowledge Graph (http://w3id.org/aikg), which includes 1.2M statements extracted from 333K research publications in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The graph includes 5 types of entities (tasks, methods, metrics, materials, and others), which are linked by 27 relations. It has been designed to support a variety of intelligent services for analysing and making sense of the research dynamic, providing insights about AI research to both researchers and practitioners, as well as funding bodies and policy makers.

Members of the ISDS group will also present the following contribution to the poster session:

Angioni, S., Salatino, A.A., Osborne, F., Reforgiato Recupero, D. and Motta, E. (2020). The AIDA Dashboard: Analysing Conferences with Semantic Technologies. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2020.

The poster presents the AIDA Dashboard, a tool providing in-depth analytics about scientific conferences, which can be used to explore the evolution of a conference over the years and assess its quality and impact.

Dr. Miriam Fernandez, member of the Social Data Science Group, will present at the Vision Track. Ten speakers have been selected for this innovative track to present their vision for the Semantic Web. The track aims to be challenging, forthright and controversial and it aims to stimulate the community and the conference.

In addition to the above contributions, Prof Harith Alani is co-chairing the ISWC Doctoral Consortium this year. He also chaired the Semantic Web Distinguished Dissertation Award, and will be the General Chair of ISWC in 2021.

KMi’s CORE organises the first 3C Citation Context Classification shared task

Wednesday 28 Oct 2020 | KMi News

The first edition of the shared task organised by the researchers at CORE, Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), The Open University, UK featured the classification of citations for research impact analysis. The new shared task, known as the 3C Citation Context Classification task, organised as part of the 8th International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications (WOSP), 2020 and was hosted on the free data science competitions hosting platform, Kaggle InClass.

Find more following the link.

Related Links:

Find more following the link.

Summer in STEM scholarship provides opportunities to improve representation in Computer Science

Monday 26 Oct 2020 | KMi News

The Black Lives Matter movement has (re)highlighted systemic inequalities within our social structures, including Higher Education (HE), that require immediate attention. Efforts to decolonise research and curricula must be accompanied by real investment in communities that have been historically disadvantaged or excluded from HE or specific domains, like STEM.

To contribute to balance and improved representation in the field of Computer Science, KMi has created a summer scholarship, specifically directed at young, would-be researchers from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds. The purpose of the Summer in STEM scholarship is to provide real work experience and mentorship to young people, which can influence future opportunities.

Our first intern, 16 year-old Azizah Blackwood, is a talented programmer and developer, who plans on working in game design in the future. We had worked with Azizah in the past through our Work Experience programme, in which she helped us develop a voice skill for Alexa. This summer, Azizah was involved in creating our first ever fact-checking chatbot. Under the mentorship of Senior Research Fellow Dr. Lara Piccolo, alongside Dr. Tracie Farrell and programmer Chris Sanders (from our development team), Azizah was able to connect a large database of fact-checking articles with a chatbot interface. The interface assesses Twitter profiles and looks for the amount of misinforming claims they have shared (based on fact-checkers’ assessments). The bot is also set up to provide users with small insights about misinformation. This tool is a real research output, funded in part by the Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF). Azizah will also be co-author on a scientific paper outlining this contribution. At the end of the internship, Azizah told us that she has gained new skills, more confidence and useful contacts for her future in Game Design. She has also already developed a piece of interactive research software that she can put on her CV. If you want to contact Azizah about hiring her, please get in touch with us and we will pass it on. She’s currently looking for a second internship as a requirement for her Game Design programme.

Recent figures from Black British Professionals in STEM (BBSTEM) indicate that only 6.2% of Black students living in the UK are enrolled in STEM subjects (and a large part of that percentage are coming from abroad). In terms of teaching staff, only 0.5% of professors in the UK are Black, a leaky pipeline that follows all the way down to postgraduate and graduate work. Offering personalised, paid, professional internships to young people interested in STEM will improve our ability to meet them, find out more about their specific needs and create appealing opportunities that challenge and excite.

Related Links:

If you want to learn more, join our presentation for Black History Month October 27th at 11am BST.

KMi at Erasmus Days 2020

Friday 23 Oct 2020 | KMi News

October 15, 16 & 17, 2020 marked three days of celebration of the Erasmus+ Programme in Europe and beyond. Erasmus Days are a unique opportunity to organise an event, share Erasmus experiences and spread the word about Erasmus projects. For those that want to study or train abroad, Erasmus Days offer three dedicated days to learn about the Erasmus+ Programme, talk with the programme’s alumni and network via exhibitions, concerts, contests, seminars, partner networking, open days, distribution of Europass Mobility documents, digital events, and more.

In 2020, a total of 5,024 events were organised across Europe during Erasmus Days. The OpenLang Network project participated with several events organised by the project partners, both individually and jointly. On October 16, all project partners organised a webinar to disseminate the project and its outputs. KMi was represented by Alexander Mikroyannidis, who presented the OpenLang Network platform, an open and collaborative online environment for networking between language learners and teachers across Europe.

The OpenLang Network project is building a network among all Erasmus+ KA1 Mobility Participants within an open and highly interactive online environment for supporting more efficiently their efforts to develop their language skills of the target mobility EU languages. Alexander Mikroyannidis is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Open University, in charge of the project’s online platform. This is a key output for the project as a whole, as it offers the technological foundations for the success and sustainability of the project’s language learning network.

Watch the recording of the webinar here:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6UEPHTHchg]

KMis CORE joins stakeholder group of the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA)

Monday 19 Oct 2020 | KMi News

The I4OA was launched this September, calling for an increase in the volume of open abstracts. After having identified that either a large number of the published literature does not have open abstracts, or that available abstracts are currently disseminated via proprietary platforms with reuse restrictions, I4OA calls the publishing community to open up all abstracts of the published literature.

Find more in CORE’s blog.

Related Links:

Find more in CORE’s blog.

arXiv uses KMis CORE Recommender to support article discovery

Friday 16 Oct 2020 | KMi News

arXiv readers now have a faster way to find articles relevant to their interests. From an article abstract page, readers can simply activate the CORE Recommender to find additional open access research on similar topics.

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Read more at the arXiv.org blog.

KMi at ICL2020

Wednesday 07 Oct 2020 | KMi News

The 23rd International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL2020) took place online on September 23-25. This interdisciplinary conference is focused on the exchange of relevant trends and research results, as well as the presentation of practical experiences in Interactive Collaborative Learning and Engineering Pedagogy.

KMi was represented by Audrey Ekuban and Alexander Mikroyannidis. Audrey presented a paper entitled “Using GitLab Interactions To Predict Student Success When Working As Part Of A Team”. The paper explores machine learning algorithms that can be used to predict student results in an assignment of a Software Engineering course, based on weekly cumulative average source code submissions to GitLab. GitLab is a source code version control system, commonly used in Software Engineering courses in Higher Education.

Alexander delivered a hands-on workshop entitled “Decentralising Education Using Blockchain Technology”. The workshop explored the different aspects of education that are affected by decentralisation. Participants had the opportunity to try out and evaluate the tools offered by the QualiChain project for the Blockchain-based award and verification of education and employment qualifications. The outcomes of this workshop will provide useful feedback for the QualiChain pilot led by Alexander.

Alexander also presented a paper entitled “The OpenLang Network Platform: Building a European Community of Language Learners and Teachers”. Τhe paper presents the OpenLang Network platform, an open and collaborative online environment for networking between language learners and teachers across Europe. Alexander is leading the development of this platform, in the context of the Erasmus+ project OpenLang Network.

Agneses presentation at KR 2020 tops the charts

Tuesday 06 Oct 2020 | KMi News

The 17th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2020) was held virtually on September 12-18. This year, a special track was devoted to research contributions at the intersection of Knowledge Representation and Robotics. 25% of the submissions to this special track were accepted as full papers.

Agnese Chiatti, together with supervisors Enrico Motta and Enrico Daga, authored “Towards a Framework for Visual Intelligence in Service Robotics: Epistemic Requirements and Gap Analysis”, which was accepted as a full paper.
Visual Intelligence is a robot’s ability to use its vision system, reasoning components and background knowledge to make sense of their environment. This paper presents a framework of requirements to enhance the level of Visual Intelligence exhibited by service robots. These requirements were gathered by analysing both the limitations of state-of-the-art methods for Image Understanding (in the context of a real-world robotic application, as well as existing cognitive frameworks which formalise human-like Visual Intelligence. Additionally, in the paper, the obtained framework is used to assess the level of coverage of each epistemic requirement provided by state-of-the-art Knowledge Bases.

The presentation was well-received by the audience. Two weeks after the conference, the video recording of the presentation is the most popular among the full paper presentations on the conference’s channel, with 152 views.

Related Links:

Video presentation on YouTube

OU wins two categories in DataIQ 2020 Awards

Wednesday 30 Sep 2020 | KMi News

The Open University (OU) has won the categories for Best use of data by a not-for-profit organisation and the Data for society in the DataIQ Awards 2020.The two OU winners were announced in a vibrant virtual tea-time awards ceremony which honoured and celebrated the outstanding contributions to the data and analytics industry. A third entry was shortlisted in the Most innovative use of AI category.

The awards recognise how the data industry continues to excel by showcasing the best examples across the industry. There were over 200 entries this year, and the organisations who were shortlisted in all categories ranged from small and medium-sized enterprises to multi-nationals.

Data for society: Athena Swan at the Open University

This entry led by Dr Miriam Fernandez, KMi Senior Research Fellow, received the award for its ongoing data-driven initiative to reduce gender inequality through embedded data-driven policies and practices leading to transformation of processes, thinking and culture.

For the OU to obtain and maintain its Athena Swan charter data is collected for all staff and students, sex-disaggregated, and analysed across policies and practices. Quantitative data analyses are complemented with qualitative data analyses including questionnaires, interviews and focus groups, empowering the voices of all members of staff and students across the institution. As a result of these analyses action plans have been designed and implemented at university level, as well as across faculties and departments. As a result, the median pay gap has been reduced to 6.5%, 60.7% of staff members are women, and within Science Technology Engineering and Maths (STEM) 40.3% of academic and research staff and 50% of students are women.

Miriam said: “I’m very proud to be a part of the OU’s Athena Swan movement and must thank the many contributors across the institution for their commitment to reduce gender inequality at the OU”.

Best use of data by a not-for-profit organisation: OUAnalyse

Led by Dr Martin Hlosta, KMi Research Fellow, OUAnalyse is a collaborative project between KMi, the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) and Data and Student Analytics (DSA). The OU’s ‘open entry policy’ means that students can study without any prerequisites, meaning that we have much higher student withdrawal rates. In response, the OUAnalyse project implemented predicting student success in student assignments, through rigorous evaluation with more than 1,770 teachers and 161,000 students in 530 courses, making it most probably the largest implementation of such project globally. Progressing from Technology Readiness Level TRL1 to TRL8, OUAnalyse changed the way teachers monitor students in distance learning and help them towards success. Our deployment of a classroom-based version of OUAnalyse led to retention improvement at a face-2-face university by 30% in 2015-2019. Every week, the OUAnalyse learning analytics tool enables more student to succeed as models to predict which students are at risk of failing their assignments and need additional support. This project team includes Christothea Herodotou, Avinash Boroowa, Vaclav Bayer, Miriam Fernandez, Zdenek Zdrahal, John Domingue.

Commenting on the award, Martin said: “I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the development of OUAnalyse over the years, with special thanks to all the amazing tutors who are using the tool and helping us improve the system.”

Shortlisted in the Most innovative use of AI category: Smart topic miner

Deserving of an honourable mention are KMi’s Smart topic miner team who were shortlisted for this innovative state-of-the-art AI application which automates editorial processes at Springer Nature and improves access to scientific knowledge. Smart topic miner analyses scientific publications in Computer Science and classifies them with very high accuracy in terms of a catalogue of 15,000 research topics. The automation of this complex task has produced both a 75% cost reduction and a dramatic improvement in metadata quality. As a result of the latter, downloads in Computer Science from the Springer Nature portal have increased by almost 10 million units, as search engines can now identify the relevant scientific content with much higher accuracy, thus benefitting readers of scientific literature all over the world. The team were Dr Francesco Osborne, KMi Research Fellow, Dr Angelo Antonio Salatino, Research Associate, and Enrico Motta, Professor of Knowledge Technologies.

Congratulations to the award winners.

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New workflow for adding new data providers and gaining access to the CORE Repository Dashboard

Tuesday 22 Sep 2020 | KMi News

CORE’s mission is to increase the discoverability of open access research and promote as widely as possible the content of our data providers, i.e., repositories, journals, and web resources. We currently collaborate with more than 10,000 data providers from around the world and are continuously looking for new ways to increase this number to offer an as complete as possible coverage of the world’s open access content.

More information about the new workflow for adding new data providers and gaining access to the CORE Repository Dashboard can be found at Jisc Scholarly Communications.

Related Links:

Read more.

Supporting Lifelong Learning with Blockchain Technology

Tuesday 15 Sep 2020 | KMi News

Blockchain technology provides a decentralised peer-to-peer infrastructure, supporting openness, transparency, accountability, identity management and trust. As such, the Blockchain has the potential to revolutionise education in a number of ways. Blockchain technology offers opportunities to thoroughly rethink how we find educational content and training services online, how we register and pay for them, as well as how we get accredited for what we have learned and how this accreditation affects our career trajectory.

Alexander Mikroyannidis, Allan Third and John Domingue have recently published a paper entitled “A case study on the decentralisation of lifelong learning using blockchain technology” in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME). The paper reports outcomes of a pilot on the decentralisation of lifelong learning, conducted in the context of the QualiChain project. In particular, the authors investigate the different scenarios and requirements for making online education and lifelong learning more open and decentralised, while placing lifelong learners in control of their learning process and its associated data. Additionally, the authors discuss various approaches to the Semantic Blockchain and the applications of these approaches on education.

The accepted manuscript is available to download from ORO.

KMi’s Apprentice Featured in MK College Blog

Monday 14 Sep 2020 | KMi News

Last week Milton Keynes College, the education provider of KMi’s two apprentices, featured our Digital Marketing and Social Media Apprentice Kiran Parmar in their blog. Kiran has been with us for a year, alongside a Web Developer Apprentice.

In the blog Kiran talks about why he decided to take an alternative route to studying as an undergraduate which many sixth forms urge students to consider as a next step, the process of discovering apprenticeships as well as his experience of balancing the learning and studying with putting those skills into action. Kiran also touches on the structure and independence that the apprenticeship has brought to his lifestyle.

Thank you Kiran for sharing your experience.

Related Links:

Read The Article

KMi at EKAW 2020 Ethical and Trustworthy Knowledge Engineering

Thursday 10 Sep 2020 | KMi News

The 22nd International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2020) will be held virtually on 16-18 September 2020. EKAW is one of the leading international conferences in the area of knowledge engineering and its applications. This year, it is being organised by the Free University of Bolzen-Bolzano.

This year’s theme was "Ethical and Trustworthy Knowledge Engineering". While recently reported breaches predominantly relate to machine learning systems, ethical breaches can be related more broadly to the wider field of knowledge engineering. Hence, as these technologies become more and more ubiquitous, it is essential to devise methods and techniques to ensure none or minimal harm in knowledge-driven information systems.

KMi is one of the strongest contributors in the history of EKAW, providing more than 30 contributions over the years. This significant role has been maintained also in this edition, where we are contributing 3 out of 19 accepted papers (from a total of 72 submissions).

Alba Morales Tirado, second-year PhD Research Student in KMi, together with supervisors Enrico Daga and Enrico Motta, authored "Effective use of personal health records to support emergency services”, which was accepted as a full paper. In a Smart City context, systems are expected to interconnect and exchange data in order to support the emergency services. In the proposed case study, relevant healthcare data can provide up to date information enabling the recognition of people requiring special assistance during a fire building evacuation. However, access to personal data is restricted by privacy policies. In the paper, the authors propose a methodology to identify and extract useful information from health records to support emergency services with a privacy-aware method. The system uses a knowledge engineering approach and a common-sense knowledge base to identify sensitive data, extract relevant information, and process it to answer task-oriented questions, while avoiding data disclosure.The accepted conference paper presents the first peer-reviewed result of a novel research line aimed at studying the design of Privacy-Aware Intelligent Systems.

Another important contribution comes from the SKM3 team – Angelo Salatino, Francesco Osborne and Enrico Motta presented “ResearchFlow: Understanding the Knowledge Flow between Academia and Industry”. In this paper, they introduce ResearchFlow, an approach that integrates semantic technologies and machine learning to quantifying the diachronic behaviour of research topics across academia and industry. This approach takes advantage of Academia/Industry DynAmics (AIDA), a novel Scientific Knowledge Graph, to characterize each research topic according to the frequency in time of the related i) publications from academia, ii) publications from industry, iii) patents from academia, and iv) patents from industry. This representation is then used for a) producing several analytics regarding the topic evolution and the research flow between academy and industry and b) predicting the impact of research topics on the industrial sector.

Finally, a paper co-authored by Paul Warren and Paul Mulholland reports on a study investigating user difficulties with SPARQL, a commonly used query language for linked data. The paper compares two different language styles, declarative and navigational, as well as a number of SPARQL operators. It was found that the navigational style had advantages when it was used with operators which permitted a succinct expression of the query. The paper makes recommendations, both regarding the use of the language and its further evolution. For example, the paper also considered the difficulties people have with the negation operator and suggests that a more intuitive notation might be helpful

Related Links:

KMi at the ALT Summer Summit 2020

Tuesday 01 Sep 2020 | KMi News

The first virtual Summer Summit of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) took place on August 26-27, 2020. The event was a great success, with over 300 participants joining from 25 countries. The event’s theme was exploring Learning Technology in a time of crisis, care and complexity. Participants explored the themes of crisis, care and complexity together with an international line up of featured speakers, practical sessions and panel discussions on topics ranging from assessment to student well being.

Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi and presented the QualiChain project, as well as the current state and results of the project’s lifelong learning pilot. This pilot aims at providing support to lifelong learners in various stages of their learning journeys and of their career trajectories. Watch the recording of this presentation:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXKLrBPijpU]

1st Scientific Knowledge Graphs Workshop (SKG2020)

Tuesday 01 Sep 2020 | KMi News

The 1st Workshop on Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKG2020) was held virtually on 25th August, when participants were invited to explore innovative solutions and ideas for the production and consumption of Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs).

SKG was a satellite event of the 24th edition of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL2020), which was attended virtually by many practitioners from the field of Digital Libraries, Database, Semantic Web, Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence and others.

This event was organised by two KMi researchers, Angelo Salatino and Francesco Osborne, alongside KMi alumnus, Andrea Mannocci, who is now at the Italian Research Council (CNR) in Pisa, Italy.

At SKG, Francesco took the chance to present a short paper about one of their latest works, developed in collaboration with a former KMi Visiting Student Simone Angioni and Diego Reforgiato Recupero at the University of Cagliari:

Angioni, Simone; Salatino, Angelo; Osborne, Francesco; Reforgiato Recupero, Diego and Motta, Enrico (2020). Integrating Knowledge Graphs for Analysing Academia and Industry Dynamics. In: 1st Workshop on Scientific Knowledge Graphs, 25 Aug 2020, Lyon, France.

In this paper, Francesco presented the Academia/Industry DynAmics (AIDA) Knowledge Graph, which describes 14M publications and 8M patents according to the research topics drawn from the Computer Science Ontology. 4M publications and 5M patents are further characterized according to the type of the author’s affiliations (academy, industry, or collaborative) and 66 industrial sectors (e.g., automotive, financial, energy, electronics) organized in a two-level taxonomy.

SKG2020 was a very successful event, which saw a peak of 64 attendees, highlighting the importance of such an event and how central is this topic among the community of scholars.

Related Links:

For more info about this workshop, click here

CORE update for April to June 2020

Thursday 27 Aug 2020 | KMi News

Despite the global situation caused by the pandemic and the ongoing changes, the second quarter of 2020 has seen significant progress in the operation and development of CORE – new products have been released and the team reached new achievements. Follow the link and be informed about:
1. 20 million monthly CORE users and growth of CORE’s worldwide rank
2. CORE Repository Dashboard and Repository Edition releases
3. CORE helps Lean Library to provide OA research papers
4. CORE Ambassadors’ network and achievements
5. CORE Discovery and repositories
6. CORE team research accomplishments
7. CORE negotiations and partnerships
8. CORE Statistics.

Related Links:

Read more.

8th International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications (WOSP), 2020

Thursday 20 Aug 2020 | KMi News

Due to unprecedented events following the global pandemic situation, this year, the 8th International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications (WOSP), 2020 was fully organised virtually. The entire workshop constituted a single day, with four sessions, featuring keynote talks, with accepted paper presentations and a shared task on citation context classification. More details regarding the programme structure can be found here. The workshop this year was organised by CORE, The Open University, UK, in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Tennessee, US. Find out more here.

Related Links:

Read more.

Best Paper Award for Alessio at Hypertext 2020

Wednesday 29 Jul 2020 | KMi News

Congratulations to Alessio Antonini, who was co-author of the Best Paper at the 31st ACM International Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT’20).

This year’s conference theme was Hypertext for Social Good with a focus on ensuring that technology will have a positive impact on both society and individual users. HT’20 turned some important stones to reunify different hypertext research directions and communities.

Alessio and his co-authors, Francesca Benatti and Sally Blackburn-Daniels, were awarded the Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award for their paper entitled On Links To Be: Exercises in Style #2.This paper is the result of a collaboration between KMi and FASS for the EU JPI READ-IT project. It provides a novel perspective on references, addressing the creation of links at the moment of reading. The traces of these links are what literary scholars call “marginalia”, notes and signs left at margin of books, defining the meaning behind the connections “to be” in future works.

This was one of two papers that Alessio had accepted at HT’20 this year, the other was

Mediation as Calibration: A Framework for Evaluating the Author/Reader Relation

An open-access versions of Alessio’s papers are available below.

Related Links:

n Links To Be: Exercises in Style #2

Mediation as Calibration: A Framework for Evaluating the Author/Reader Relation

Tracie Farrell is a WebSci2020 winner!

Thursday 23 Jul 2020 | KMi News

Tracie Farrell, one of KMi’s Research Associates, won second place for her presentation on exploring emergent language in the manosphere at WebSci2020 this month. This work was based on a large-scale study using word embeddings to help extract and define new words from online communities focusing on men’s issues. The paper is available here: http://oro.open.ac.uk/70529/. Collaborating alongside Miriam Fernandez, a Senior Research Associate at KMi, PHD student Oscar Araque and Harith Alani our Professor of Web Science, this is a continuation of previous work available here http://oro.open.ac.uk/61128/

The 12th International ACM Conference on Web Science in 2020 took place online 6-10 July to aim to understand the Web, its impacts and reflecting on the most pressing questions at the moment, making the topic, Jargon and Word Embeddings to Explore Subculture within the Reddit’s Manosphere, incredibly relevant

The objective was to acknowledge identities, needs, and realities of men that participate in these groups, as a target of sociology and cultural studies. Examining the use of language, in particular, the existence and use of neologisms, slang and jargon capture concepts and expressions that are not in common use and represent the experiences, norms and values of subcommunities.

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Congratulations Anita Khadka on your PhD success!

Thursday 23 Jul 2020 | KMi News

At the end of last week, Anita defended her thesis titled ‘Capturing and exploiting citation knowledge for the recommendation of scientific publications’ which explored various notions of citations for recommending scientific publications; notions such as citation graph, citation intention, citation context, citation section and citation proximity. By exploiting such knowledge, she has proposed various novel recommendation methods and benchmarks.

On the day of her PhD viva, she started with a short presentation showcasing her work to her examiners, Dr Paul Mulholland, and Dr Saul Vargas. Before the questions and discussion started, the examiners were very thoughtful and provided her with a metareview which actually helped her settle down her nerves. She enjoyed the examination process as she felt it was more of a discussion with experts within the domain. The discussion and feedback were for making the thesis better and the whole experience was very pleasant.

Of course, the whole PhD journey and this success would not have possible without the support of her supervisors, Dr Miriam Fernandez, Dr Ivan Cantador and Dr Anna DeLiddo. They provided her guidance, support and exemplary supervision in every possible way. They were always there for her, especially when a paper got rejected, they motivated her to move forward, make the work better and submit in a better venue.

Open Blockchain presented to the W3C Credentials Group

Tuesday 14 Jul 2020 | KMi News

On July 13th 2020, the work of the Open Blockchain group was presented to the W3C Credentials Community Group. John Domingue, Allan Third, Alexander Mikroyannidis, Niaz Chowdhury and Mano Ramachandran joined a conference call between all members of the W3C group and presented their latest work on Verifiable Credentials and Blockchains. In particular, John and Allan presented the Open Blockchain architecture and its applications on the Institute of Coding project. Alexander presented an overview of the QualiChain project, its scope and objectives, as well as the pilot conducted by the Open University on lifelong learning. Niaz and Mano presented a Blockchain-based COVID-19 digital immunity passport. The slides from this presentation are available here.

The mission of the W3C Credentials Community Group is to explore the creation, storage, presentation, verification and user control of credentials. The group focuses on a verifiable credential created by an issuer about a subject (a person, group, or thing) and seeks solutions inclusive of approaches, such as self-sovereign identity, presentation of proofs by the bearer, data minimisation, as well as centralised, federated and decentralised registry and identity systems. The group is drafting and incubating Internet specifications for further standardisation and prototyping and testing reference implementations.

New AI-enhanced learning about pollinators during Bees Needs Week

Monday 13 Jul 2020 | KMi News

As the COVID-19 pandemic puts the focus on literacy and numeracy in home-schooling, KMi researchers have developed technologies to also help families learn about the natural environment.

The Human-Computer Collaborative Learning in Citizen Science (X-Polli:Nation) project, which received £507,000 from the Engineering and Physical Research Council has responded to the pandemic by creating a new collection of interactive learning materials on the Open University’s OpenLearn Create Platform.

The course, A Cross-pollinated resource for pollinator citizen science, is being launched today at the beginning of Bees’ Needs Week (July 13-19 2020), an annual event coordinated by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, working alongside charities, businesses, conservation groups and academic institutions to raise awareness of bees and other pollinators.

Innovative technologies and interactive interfaces

These courses, which are suitable for children aged seven and above and their parents and teachers, are designed around innovative research technologies developed through the project (by Nirwan Sharma, Stefan Rüger and Advaith Siddharthan), which investigates how Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies can work alongside human intelligence in monitoring our natural environment and how people and AI can help each other in science learning.

The materials make it possible to learn to identify and distinguish different species of bumblebee and butterfly using an interactive identification key, seeking suggestions from automated image recognition and receiving formative feedback through automatically generated texts. There are also interfaces to explore which flowers attract which pollinators, and advice on what to plant is delivered through a recommender system.

As the research project develops novel technologies that mediate formal and non-formal science learning, indoor and outdoor learning, and home and school learning, this OpenLearn Create collection provides a fantastic and timely way for families and schools to explore these. We hope that learning about the diversity of pollinating insects can open a door to greater enjoyment of nature and spur societal action to protect it.

The learning materials and the wider project are part of a collaboration in X-Polli:Nation citizen science between The Open University, University of Aberdeen, Imperial College London, Learning through Landscapes, St Alban’s CE Aided Primary School and Museo Di Storia Naturale Della Maremma.

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Lockdown Exam success for KMi Apprentice

Monday 13 Jul 2020 | KMi News

Congratulations to Oliva, KMi’s web development apprentice, who along with her many classmates passed her exam despite being in lockdown!

Started in October Olivia Hagen passed her Software Development Methodologies assessment along with all her classmates at MK College in May. Olivia was tested on all sort of skills such as development methodologies and stages on the software development lifecycle. The exam was 40 questions long and Olivia had an hour to complete it. The assessment was done at home due to the lockdown. In order to complete the exam, Olivia was moderated by an external moderator using Zoom. Olivia said, “it was really challenging but I felt it was beneficial and interesting”. Olivia mentioned that the skills will help her manage and create projects. For the leading two weeks, Olivia spent most of her working time preparing for the exam. This involved doing practice papers and quizzes in order to prepare. Normally 20% of her working week goes towards her off the job study. In order to use the time to do revision, Olivia did multiple 45-minute sessions and timed herself with a stopwatch. Even though this year has come with a few obstacles, Olivia plans to complete her apprenticeship in the normal timeframe. Olivia is currently working on refreshing information to fit in with security purposes. Olivia started her role straight out of 6th Form where she found it challenging to adapt to the working lifecycle but enjoyable.

KMi are incredibly proud of Olivia and her achievements, which pave her way through her career as a Web Developer.

Tool to Support with REF2021 Open Access Compliance has been released

Monday 13 Jul 2020 | KMi News

CORE is happy to announce the release of a new version of the CORE Repository Dashboard. The update will be of particular interest to UK repositories as we are releasing with it a new tool to support REF2021 open access compliance assessment. The tool was developed for repository managers and research administrators to improve the harvesting of their repository outputs and ensure their content is visible to the world. Full details here.

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QualiChain passes first review with flying colours

Monday 22 Jun 2020 | KMi News

The first formal review of the QualiChain project took place on June 18th, 2020. The review was held online and was attended by representatives from all project partners, the Project Officer, two external reviewers, as well as DG CONNECT representatives. The review was a complete success, with the reviewers and the Project Officer commending the work carried out by the project partners. Very interesting discussions were also held regarding the potential synergies of QualiChain with existing and emerging initiatives in the Blockchain sphere, such as the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure.

KMi was represented by Alexander Mikroyannidis, Allan Third and Niaz Chowdhury. Alexander presented the QualiChain pilot on lifelong learning, as well as the dissemination and communication activities of the project. Allan presented the landscape analysis and concept definition of the project. All presentations were very well received and led to useful discussions and suggestions.

QualiChain targets the creation, piloting and evaluation of a decentralised platform for storing, sharing and verifying education and employment qualifications. The project has finalised the requirements of its pilots and is currently working on the development of a platform that addresses these requirements. The project pilots are targeting 4 key areas: (i) lifelong learning; (ii) smart curriculum design; (iii) staffing the public sector; (iv) providing HR consultancy and competency management services.

CORE reaches 20 million monthly users

Thursday 11 Jun 2020 | KMi News

Thousands of data providers from almost 150 countries from all over the world are connected with researchers, students, life long learners and the general public via CORE. This past month CORE’s monthly users reached 20 million – we are really proud of it and grateful to all our content providers. Read more about this here.

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Agnese secures 2nd place at the 2020 OU poster competition

Thursday 11 Jun 2020 | KMi News

Great result of Agnese Chiatti, PhD student in KMi and member of the Intelligent Systems and Data Science group, at the 15th Edition of the Postgraduate Research Student Poster Competition, which was held earlier today at The Open University. Agnese submitted a poster entitled “Robots with Common Sense – Improving Sensemaking in Service Robotics”, which was ranked 2nd out of 39 entries in the Judges’ Choice category. The poster summarises her research on "Robots with Common Sense", which aims to improve the ability of robots to make sense of complex everyday environments.

The award ceremony was hosted by Vice Chancellor of The Open University, Prof Tim Blackman, and by Dr Lindsay O’Dell, Academic Director of the Graduate School. The PGRS competition has grown to become a valued tradition at the OU, providing a forum for PhD students to showcase their research to a broader audience, while also being exposed to the work of colleagues from other Faculties and Departments.

However, this year, the ceremony took place in an unconventional setting: online, through a video conference meeting. Indeed, despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the Department for Academic Professional Development (APD) wanted to ensure that the event would go ahead. As emphasised by the APD organising committee, this effort was possible thanks to our own Chris Valentine, Project Officer at KMi, who single-handedly implemented the official website for this year’s poster competition. Through the website, students could load their posters and multimedia submissions (a short video pitching their research topic), while the other members of the OU could vote for the Community Choice poster and video. A separate jury of members of the OU staff selected three posters as Judges’ Choice. Posters were judged not only based on their balance of text and imagery, but, most importantly, based on how effectively they could convey research topics in a way that was accessible to people outside the field.

A full-size version of the poster can be found here, while more details about the competition can be found here.

PT Anywhere in the UK Government Digital Skills Toolkit

Wednesday 03 Jun 2020 | KMi News

The OpenLearn course Discovering Computer Networks has been included in the UK Government Digital Skills Toolkit for furloughed workers. The Digital Skills Toolkit is a collection of training resources, including courses from Google, FutureLearn and the Open University, aiming to help people acquire digital skills for improving their employability. This online training initiative will be preparing the nation for the post-virus economy, in which digital-related jobs are expected to be more resilient than other occupations.

The OpenLearn course teaches how computer networks operate and allows learners to practice using an inbuilt network simulator to create their own simulated computer networks. The course has been built around the PT Anywhere network simulator, which has been jointly developed by the Open University and Cisco. Alexander Mikroyannidis, who is leading the PT Anywhere initiative, sees this development as “a recognition of the effort we have put as a team in developing a world-class educational tool and high-quality learning materials for anyone to use”.

The Joint Conference on Digital Libraries has accepted two papers of CORE

Wednesday 27 May 2020 | KMi News

Members of the CORE Team have been working on submissions for the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) and today we are extremely happy to inform our readers that our two teams have both received acceptance notices. Doctors Bikash Gyawali, Dr. Nancy Pontika and Dr. Petr Knoth have been working on “Open Access 2007-2017: Country and University Level Perspective” while David Pride and Dr. Petr Knoth worked on another submission entitled, “An Authoritative Approach to Citation Classification”. Follow the link and find out more details about this.

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CORE helps Lean Library to provide its users with freely accessible copies of research papers

Friday 22 May 2020 | KMi News

CORE follows its mission and makes open access more visible and reusable by being an enabling infrastructure. This time CORE joins its forces with Lean Library, whose aim is to provide seamless access to research materials for users. Due to this collaboration with Lean Library, the CORE Discovery service will now be indirectly used by library systems integrating Lean Library, thereby reaching more users. More information about this integration can be found here.

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3C Shared task: A Kaggle Competition for Citation Context Classification

Wednesday 20 May 2020 | KMi News

As part of the International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications, WOSP 2020 (https://wosp.core.ac.uk/jcdl2020/index.html), researchers at CORE are organizing a new shared task: the ‘3C’ Citation Context Classification Task. The aim of this shared task is to classify the citation context in research publications based on their influence and purpose. There will be two subtasks associated with this shared task and these tasks will be hosted on Kaggle as separate competitions. Subtask A (https://www.kaggle.com/c/3c-shared-task-purpose) is a multi-class classification task, where the citations are categorized as six different classes based on the purpose. The second subtask B (https://www.kaggle.com/c/3c-shared-task-influence) is a binary classification task, based on the citation influence.

More information can be found in this blogpost.

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SPICE project is launched

Tuesday 19 May 2020 | KMi News

SPICE is a 3 year EU project developing new technologies and methods that enable groups at risk of exclusion to actively participate in culture through a process we term citizen curation. Our approach to citizen curation supports virtual and physical visitors to the museum to engage in two interrelated processes of interpretation and reflection. Citizens will be supported in developing their own interpretations of museum objects, using techniques such as collecting and storytelling. They will also be supported in reflecting on the varied perspectives revealed in the interpretations of other visitor groups.

Rather than converging on the city of Bologna, the first meeting of the SPICE project consortium was conducted virtually between 6th and 15th May. The meeting brought together representatives from three museums (Design Museum Helsinki, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Fondazione Torino Musei), three SMEs (GVAM Interactive Guides, PadaOne Games, CELI Language Technology) and eight universities (Bologna, Italian National Research Council, Aalto, Aalborg, Open University, Complutense University of Madrid, Turin, Haifa). KMI was represented at the meeting by Paul Mulholland, Enrico Daga and Trevor Collins.

The aim of the meeting was to plan our upcoming activities which will focus on the co-design of the citizen curation methods and supporting technologies through case studies in five countries: Finland, Ireland, Spain, Italy and Israel. In each case study a museum serves as a hub to support citizen curation with specific target groups including older people, asylum seekers, young people living with illness, Deaf people and children from different religious and secular communities.

Research Fellow, Miriam Fernandez Receives Executive Dean Commendation

Tuesday 19 May 2020 | KMi News

KMi Research Fellow, Miriam Fernandez, received a Commendation from the STEM-Executive-Dean, Nick Braithwaite, at the STEM Faculty Assembly today. Miriam was nominated by her KMi Director on behalf of her colleagues. The commendation is recognised with a £250.00 award which can be used towards conference fees and travel/accommodation costs

Miriam has lead a refreshed commitment in KMi since 2017 (where the department successful achieved a bronze Athena SWAN award) to put diversity, equality and engagement in advancing careers transparently, in particular for women at the forefront of our agenda.

The impact Miriam’s actions have made are difficult to quantify, however, there are many examples that highlight her commitment and energy to this cause I would like to share and celebrate, to name a few; Miriam set up and led KMi Athena Swan group and application, she regularly monitors our progress against the action plan. She led the changed on the membership, structure and proves models for the KMi staffing committee and oversees the messaging/communication that is delivered to staff on these matters. Miriam led the organisation of the Athena Swan Groups Unconscious bias training for the Management group in 2018 and the Promotions Workshop in 2019. She has driven the transformation of KMi’s induction process for new academic staff.

Miriam, a Senior Research Fellow and a member of KMi’s Social Data Science group research is at the intersection of Web Science and Semantic Web Communities. She has contributed with more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in various leading conferences and journals. She extensive experience in leading EU and national group grants and has been co program chair at a number of leading conferences in the field.

Miriam is a true asset to KMi and the Open University not only as a senior researcher but as a true advocate and inspiration for equality and change.

Miriam said, “THANK YOU SO MUCH to both for the thought, time and effort of putting this case forward! It means a lot to me, and I am very very grateful for it! I have asked the deanery to transfer the award to the Athena SWAN team, so that anyone in the team – or more than one person in the team- can use it; for example, it could support some staff to attend online events aimed to develop female leaders.”

Track compliance of the REF2021 open access policy with the CORE Repository Dashboard

Tuesday 12 May 2020 | KMi News

At the end of March, CORE presented a webinar (slides and recording) on how UK HEIs can track compliance with the REF2021 open access policy. The webinar was fully booked and attended by 131 repository managers and research administrators from the UK Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR) and the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) groups.

During the webinar the CORE Team presented the CORE Repository Dashboard, a tool specifically designed for research support staff, which contains functionalities that provide useful information about tracking compliance with the REF2021 open access policy.

Some of the topics that were discussed during the webinar are:

Deposit compliance
Deposit time lag
Publication dates
RIOXX metadata

Read the full blog post to learn more, and access the slides and the webinar recording.

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Congratulations to The Core and iTunes U Teams

Tuesday 12 May 2020 | KMi News

Every day, millions of people access free OU content. Congratulations to all members, past and present, of our CORE and iTunes U teams for being recognised as two of the five Open Access sources mentioned on the OU’s Mission Page.

CORE is the world’s largest collection of open access research papers delivered in partnership by the Open University and Jisc. CORE hosts over 19 million Open Access full text papers and allows searching and accessing over 170 million research papers.

KMi were instrumental in launching the ITunes U podcasts, in partnership with the Open University Learning and Teaching Solutions division.

KMi are extremely proud to see these achievements acknowledged; the teams’ hard work over many years has paid off, benefiting our students, and exemplifying the OU’s core values.

Related Links:

http://www.open.ac.uk/about/main/strategy-and-policies/mission

Congratulations Martin Hlosta and Trevor Collins on RET

Friday 01 May 2020 | KMi News

Congratulations to KMi Research Fellow, Martin Hlosta the Early Alerts IndicatorsTeam and tutors for their Excellence in Teaching Award in the ‘enhancing teaching and learning’ category . The award was for OUAnalyse which is now deployed in all undergraduate OU modules to support student success.

Hats off are also due to Trevor Collins and the eSTEeM management team, Diane Butler, Diane Ford and Rachel Redford, who received a commendation in the ‘scholarship research and practice’ category for their fantastic work.

Although we can’t physically congratulate these amazing people, it’s important that we recognise them virtually. So we extend our congratulations to all those mentioned in theOU’s Recognition of Excellence in Teaching awards, and thank everyone working hard during the COVID-19 crisis, making contributions to learning, teaching,student experience, through cutting edge research.

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Recognition of Excellence in Teaching (RET)

QualiChain at the 9th eSTEeM conference

Friday 01 May 2020 | KMi News

The 9th eSTEeM conference took place online on April 29-30, 2020. The conference is organised annually by the Open University, UK. Entitled "Informing Student Success – From Scholarship to Practice", this year’s programme has been a mix of short orals, workshops and poster presentations, showcasing scholarship work conducted by STEM colleagues.

Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi and the QualiChain project and delivered a hands-on workshop entitled "Decentralised Qualifications on the Blockchain". The workshop explored the different ways that employability is affected by decentralisation. More specifically, the ways that education and employment qualifications can be awarded, managed and verified on the Blockchain were outlined, as well as how learners can receive personalised job or course recommendations based on the qualifications they have acquired. Participants have had the opportunity to try out and evaluate the tools offered by the QualiChain project for the award and verification of decentralised qualifications. The outcomes of this workshop will provide useful feedback for the QualiChain pilot conducted by KMi.

Taha Tobaili Achieves Doctoral Success

Thursday 30 Apr 2020 | KMi News

Despite being in COVID-19 lockdown, Taha Tobaili successfully defended his PhD Thesis entitled "Sentiment Analysis for the Latinised Arabic Arabizi". Taha’s supervisors, Dr Miriam Fernandez and Professor Harith Alani expressed their delight at his achievement. The panel was chaired by Professor Marian Petre with Professor Zdenek Zdrahal as internal examiner alongside external examiner Dr Alia Abdelmoty, from the University of Cardiff. Miriam Fernandez was the panel observer. KMi colleagues sent Dr Tobaili their virtual congratulations and look forward to a time when they can celebrate with him in person. Until then we wish him good luck in his future research career.

OUAnalyse awarded Recognition of Excellence in Teaching

Thursday 30 Apr 2020 | KMi News

RET is a scheme at The Open University created to celebrate outstanding contributions to learning, teaching and the student experience in all types of roles across the University – both individual and team roles. More than 470 student submissions were sent this year. OUAnalyse and the Early Alert Indicators project was recognised as winners of the OU Recognition of Excellence in Teaching (RET) in the category Excellence in enhancing teaching and learning.

OUAnalyse is a joint collaborative project between the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) and Data and Student Analytics (DSA). Conceived in 2013, this learning analytics tool uses Machine Learning models to predict every week which students are at risk of failing their assignments and need additional support. OUAnalyse is deployed in all undergraduate OU modules and primarily support tutors in monitoring their students and help them succeed in their studies.

Dr. Martin Hlosta, the leader of the KMi team commented on the success: "We are extremely grateful to be recognised by the OU for enhancing teaching and learning. Moreover, this would not be possible to achieve without our excellent tutors at the OU, their usage of the tool and supporting the students. To celebrate this mutual success of both the team and the tutors, the award will be collected by Anna Gillespie, our tutor champion from WELS faculty. Anna has been using the system from the very beginning and apart from using the tool she helped us with the training of hundreds of other tutors."

Team members: Martin Hlosta, Christotea Herodotou, Avinash Boroowa, Vaclav Bayer, Miriam Fernandez, Zdenek Zdrahal, John Domingue

Two KMi Professors Feature In The Top 25 most Cited Scholars List

Monday 27 Apr 2020 | KMi News

Harith Alani, Professor of Web Science and Enrico Motta Professor of Knowledge Technologies, were ranked 7 and 24 respectively out of-the top 2000 scholars in their AI field. AMiner produces the rankings by drawing on a variety of sources available on the web, including semantic-based profiles, bibliographic data.

We are also proud to say that three KMi alumni, appeared I the list, they were:

Dr Hassan Saif, rated 13 on the list, was awarded a PhD degree at The Open University, and currently working at HSBC as a senior data scientist focusing on Research Analytics and Finance Crime Threat Mitigation.

Prof Yulan He, ranked 15 was a Research Fellow at KMi working on Sentiment analysis and opinion mining. She is now Professor of Computer Science at University of Warwick.

Dr Andriy Nikolov, ranked at number 94 Andriy joined KMi as a PhD student and was awarded his doctorate in 2010. He is now a Knowledge Graph Engineer at AstraZeneca.

The AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Annual List presents the world’s top-cited research scholars from the fields of artificial intelligence. The list is produced by the AMiner project led by Dr Jie Tang at Tsinghua University and aims to provide comprehensive search and mining services for AI researcher social networks. Their website states:

‘Currently, the academic network includes more than 6,000 conferences, 3,200,000 publications, 700,000 researcher profiles. The system attracts users from more than 200 countries and receives >200,000 access logs per day. The top five countries where users come from are United States, China, Germany, India, and United Kingdom.’

Congratulations Harith, Enrico and Hassan, Yulan and Andriy, you are ‘ones to watch’ and you have set the bar high for you colleagues over the next decade!

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AI 2000 Most Influential Scholars

KMi Professors in the Top 25 on Most influential Scholar List

Friday 24 Apr 2020 | KMi News

KMi Professors in the Top 25 on Most influential Scholar List

Two KMi Professors feature among the top 25 most cited scholars inthe Knowledge Engineering field, according to the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Annual List for 2020.

Harith Alani, Professor of Web Science and Enrico Motta Professor of Knowledge Technologies, were ranked 7 and 24 respectively out ofthe top 2000 scholars in their AI field. AMiner produces the rankingsby drawing on a variety of sources available on the web, including semantic-based profiles, bibliographic data.

KMi is also proud to say that it’s alumni, Dr Andriy Nikolov, isranked at number 94 in the same Knowledge Engineering category. Andriy joined KMi as a PhD student and was awarded his doctorate in 2010. He is now a Knowledge Graph Engineer at AstraZeneca.

The AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Annual List presents the world’s top-cited research scholars from the fields of artificial intelligence. The list is produced by the AMiner project led by Dr Jie Tang at Tsinghua University and aims to provide comprehensive search and mining services for AI researcher social networks. Their website states:

‘Currently, the academic network includes more than 6,000 conferences, 3,200,000 publications, 700,000 researcher profiles. The system attracts users from more than 200 countries and receives >200,000 access logs per day. The top five countries where users come from are United States, China, Germany, India, and United Kingdom.’

Congratulations Harith, Enrico and Andriy, you are ‘ones to watch’ and you have set the bar high for you colleagues over the next decade!

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AI 2000 Most Influential Scholars

KMi researchers develop worlds first COVID-19 digital immunity passport

Friday 24 Apr 2020 | KMi News

KMi researchers have created the world’s first digital application to certify COVID-19 immunity test results.

The Open Blockchain Team, led by Professor John Domingue, have developed a prototype mobile phone app that enables instant verification of tamper-proof coronavirus test results and vaccination certificates.

Speaking on the new mobile phone app Professor John Domingue, Director of the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute, said:

“Like many researchers, the OU’s blockchain team have been highly motivated to contribute to resolving this global pandemic. We’ve been looking at how our existing technology could be repurposed to aid immunity certification.

“Our app, building on several years of research into decentralised certification, is readily scalable, applicable generically, and ‘waiting in the wings’ for immunity testing to be in full effect.”

Read the full story by Bridgette Honegan on OU News. Shorlty after publishing the story, it was topping the Google search for digital immunity passport or COVID-19 digital immunity.

For more on the COVID-19 digital immunity certification read the submitted OU paper at blockchain.open.ac.uk/#covid-19

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CORE update for January to March 2020

Friday 24 Apr 2020 | KMi News

CORE is extremely happy to keep its reader up to date and here is its quarterly report for January to March 2020 period. Read CORE Blog Post which includes:

CORE is ready to release a premium version of the Repository Dashboard
CORE’s products are used by Open Access Helper
CORE is continuously expanding its ambassadors’ network
CORE step by step guides
CORE as an enabling infrastructure
CORE Statistics

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OU Receives Grant to Combat False COVID-19 Information

Friday 03 Apr 2020 | KMi News

KMi’s Harith Alani, Professor of Web Science and leader of the Social Data Science group, has received a grant of €393,000 from a European Union (EU) emergency fund to track the spread of misinformation about coronavirus (COVID-19) on social media platforms.

Harith and his team will track the extent of misinformation about COVID-19 in social media content so that it can be brought to the attention of policymakers and be used to alert social media users of the extent to which they are spreading false information.

The team have begun work on the three-year project where they will use automated algorithms to trawl COVID-19 content on social media platforms, such as Twitter and Reddit, and check it against registered fact checkers. Read More in OU News.

The project has generated a lot of media interest including from The Express and BBC.

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OU News

QualiChain publishes special track proceedings

Tuesday 31 Mar 2020 | KMi News

Alexander Mikroyannidis has co-edited the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-line Learning (eLmL 2020). The eLmL 2020 proceedings include the papers of the QualiChain Special Track on “Decentralised Qualifications on the Blockchain”. Project partners have contributed 6 papers that describe the context and goals of the QualiChain pilots, the key research questions driving the evaluation of the pilots, as well as the overall framework of the project.

The QualiChain research and innovation project focuses on the assessment of the technical, political, socio- economic, legal and cultural impact of decentralisation solutions on education. QualiChain is targeting four key areas for exploring the impact of decentralisation: (i) lifelong learning; (ii) smart curriculum design; (iii) staffing the public sector; (iv) providing HR consultancy and competency management services.

The papers published in the proceedings of the QualiChain Special Track are the following:

Exploring Blockchain for Public Sector Recruitment
Konstantinos Siassiakos, Foteini Bompoti, Thanos Papaioannou, Kalliopi Stagka, Panagiotis Zarafidis, and Anna Pavli
keywords: Blockchain, Public sector recruitment, Qualification, Verification, Evaluation

Blockchain Applications in Education: A Case Study in Lifelong Learning
Alexander Mikroyannidis
keywords: lifelong learning; blockchain; decentralisation; smart badge; personalised recommendation

Using Blockchain, Semantics and Data Analytics to Optimise Qualification Certification, Recruitment and Competency Management: a Landscape Review
Christos Kontzinos, Ourania Markaki, Panagiotis Kokkinakos, Vagelis Karakolis, Stavros Skalidakis, and John Psarras
keywords: blockchain; semantics; data analytics; state-of-the-art; qualification certification; human resources management.

Decentralised Qualifications’ Verification and Management for Learner Empowerment, Education Reengineering and Public Sector Transformation: The QualiChain project
Christos Kontzinos, Ourania Markaki, Panagiotis Kokkinakos, Vagelis Karakolis, Stavros Skalidakis, and John Psarras
keywords: higher education; public sector; certification; human resource management; blockchain.

Towards A Blockchain-based Decentralised Educational Landscape
Niaz Chowdhury, Manoharan Ramachandran, Allan Third, Alexander Mikroyannidis, Michelle Bachler, and John Domingue
keywords: blockchain; decentralisation; verification; education

Digital Transformation of Education Credential Processes and Life Cycles – A Structured Overview on Main Challenges and Research Questions
Ingo R. Keck, Maria-Esther Vidal, and Lambert Heller
keywords: Credentials;Education credentials;Digitisation;Challenges in digitisation

KMi service makes open access more visible and reusable by being an enabling infrastructure

Friday 20 Mar 2020 | KMi News

CORE is a global aggregator of open access research content, one of the Jisc’s Open Access services and UK’s National Aggregator. Through its services, CORE delivers a number of key measurable benefits to its stakeholders, such as institutions, repositories, and researchers. Moreover, CORE’s value is not only proved by its services, but by helping others with the delivery of specific use cases. Read more about how CORE acts as an enabling infrastructure, that allows for text mining, business intelligence, compliance monitoring and research analytics.

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CORE welcomes a leading figure in the quest for Open Access to scientific knowledge

Tuesday 10 Mar 2020 | KMi News

Last Tuesday, March 3, we were privileged at CORE to welcome a leading figure in the quest for Open Access to scientific knowledge. Carl Malamud and Petr Knoth had a very productive discussion of their work, common goals and shared their experience. What is more, Carl Malamud has given a talk at KMi on text and data mining in scientific journals. For more information about his talk, read here.

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A blockchain badge pilot for the IoC Conference

Wednesday 26 Feb 2020 | KMi News

KMi conducted a successful pilot of the IoC blockchain-verified badges this week at the second Institute of Coding (IoC) Conference. Conference attendees were given delegate badges with blockchain technology to log their activities over the course of the two-day event as part of the OU pilot.

During the conference, delegates took part in a series of activities, such as visiting the OU booth, following the IoC on social media and attending the keynote presentation, to gain ‘credit’ in the form of a badge. To collect a badge on completion of each activity, attendees swiped their delegate pass at the relevant station, a digital box which changes colour to reflect the individual has completed the activity.

Professor John Domingue, the OU’s IoC project lead, commented: “The blockchain-verified badges are an important element of the IoC toolbox and will aid the transformation of computing education. They are a form of micro accreditation which allows IoC partners to give credit for learning wherever and whenever it occurs. We have already issued badges across a range of IoC learning events as well as providing a fine-grained accreditation map for our new IoC Computing Accreditation Standard.”

Alicia McEwan, Marketing and Communications for the IOC added: “Our conference has to focus on how a new emphasis on life-long learning can make a positive change in the UK.”

Professor John Domingue, commented: “The next phase of our work will involve experiments with mobile interfaces and data privacy. For example, a student wearing an activity tracker who visits the library will create a ‘data footprint’. The data generated by the tracker could be incorporated into the student’s personal learning record, as evidence of their learning experience.”

The OU team plan to use the Solid data privacy ecosystem – developed by Sir Tim Berners Lee – to maintain student confidentiality. Using a Solid personal record learning store, students will own their data and control what data, if any, they share with institutions and employers. Depending on the success of these experiments, the first Solid e-portfolio could be available to learners by 2021.

If you’d like to know more about the IoC blockchain-verified badges, please visit our website.

Related Links:

IoC Badges

CORE raises repository data quality by consolidating information from external datasets

Tuesday 25 Feb 2020 | KMi News

Read about our work on going beyond mirroring content from our data providers to improve data quality. In our latest blog post, we present how we link CORE data to complementary scholarly sources and databases including Crossref, MAG, and ORCID.

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Read more.

Congratulations Dr Prashant Khare!

Tuesday 11 Feb 2020 | KMi News

KMi gathered yesterday to celebrate Prashant Khare’s successful defence of his PhD thesis, Identifying and Processing Crisis Information from Social Media.

The exam panel was successfully convened, despite severe weather from Storm Ciara which caused disruption to the examiners’ travel plans. Ironically, Prashant’s work is focused on processing crisis information, which is highly topical given the increase in all kinds of natural and man-made crises.

The viva went on for nearly two hours, during which time the examiners posed various questions to Prashant, which he answered eloquently and gave a strong defence to his work and thesis. Prashant’s work has been published at top conferences in the domain, as well as at the high impact IEEE Intelligent Systems journal.

Parshant was supervised internally by Prof Harith Alani, Dr Gregoire Burel. The exam panel was chaired by Dr Allan Third (OU), and consisted of Dr Danica Vukadinovic Greetham (OU) and Professor Pete Burnpa from Cardiff University.

We wish Dr Khare every success for the future in his academic career.

Are you an iOS user? Access scientific articles in your device without hitting a paywall

Tuesday 11 Feb 2020 | KMi News

Claus Wolf, with CORE’s support, has developed the OA Helper – a brand new application, which enables iOS users to search for scientific articles in their devices without hitting a paywall. Fascinated by Open Access and Open Source, Claus Wolf implemented CORE Discovery and CORE Recommender into this application. Claus Wolf says: “Open Access provides a level playing field on which innovation can be built and also serves as a field for learning. Creating a tool that would support Open Access for macOS & iOS users thus seemed like a worthwhile endeavour and it turned out to be a great learning opportunity for him.” To install this application on your device, just visit the Apple Store site.

Related Links:

Read more.

Del4All Kicks off

Thursday 06 Feb 2020 | KMi News

KMi researcher Allan Third, and KMi Director John Domingue attended the DEL4ALL Project Kick Off Meeting in Luxembourg on 21-22 January 2020.

Digital Enhanced Learning for All (DEL4ALL) is a new EU H2020-funded Coordination and Support Action. The project aims to promote a forward-looking perspective, for more personalised learning solutions for everyone, while demonstrating the adoption of digital technologies, such as blockchain, AI and new media, which are links with KMi projects in practice, making us a core component.

DEL4ALL will engage experts from a multidisciplinary perspective to understand all the legal, organisational and technological challenges to be overcome, especially those related to scaling-up such solutions. The analysis will form a basis to provide guidelines on future research directions, as well as policy recommendations enabling an effective transition from Horizon 2020 to Horizon Europe.

The OU is a partner in this Consortium which is led by Swiss company, Martel, and includes the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany and the Commonwealth Centre for Connected Learning in Malta.

The Open University will coordinate the scientific and technical activities and manage the ethical aspects of the project.

Related Links:

Del4All Website

Smart India: A Data Science Research Collaboration with Amity University

Monday 03 Feb 2020 | KMi News

Last week saw four KMi researchers travel to Noida, near Delhi, for a week-long meeting with the senior team of Amity University. Amity University has around 175,00 students across 22 campuses in India and 13 more globally including in London, Dubai, New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, South Africa and China. This meeting followed a Memorandum of Understanding signed between the OU and Amity in Dubai in September, for research collaboration in three areas: Data Science, Education and Space. KMi’s Director Prof. John Domingue leads on the Data Science collaboration.

Within the collaboration in December a one-day online research workshop was held between KMi and Amity data science researchers to explore areas of common interest. At the end of that meeting it was agreed that KMi would collaborate in the areas of Data Analytics for Education and Health as well as Smart Cities. In Noida these three areas were represented by Dr. Martin Hlosta (Education), Dr. Allan Third (Health) and Dr. Enrico Daga (Smart Cities). Prof. John Domingue served as overall coordinator leading the collaboration with his Amity counterpart Dr. Selvamurthy President of the Amity Science, Technology and Innovation Foundation.

The overall trip was very intense and a fabulous success. The meeting coincided with CONFLUENCE 2020 an annual IT conference organised by Amity University and all four KMi researchers gave a conference keynote as well as leading specific specialist OU/Amity research meetings. John gave an overview talk of KMi’s data science research in the Amity Boardroom at dedicated OU/Amity collaboration meeting chaired by Shri. Ajit K. Chauhan, Chairman, Amity Online, Amity Skills and Vocational Training and Deputy President. Martin led a meeting with Dr. Jeevanandam (Director of the Amity Ed Tech Company), Dr. Sushil Chandra (Amity Curriculum and Academics) to investigate how OU Analyse might be rolled out to all 175,000 Amity university students globally. We also discussed in the same meeting how KMi’s blockchain based micro accreditation framework could be applied across Amity universities.

Allan gave a keynote on Data Science for Health to members of a specially invited panel whose members included Dr. Harpreet Singh, Scientist and Head of the Division of Informatics Systems and Research Management ICMR-AIIMS Computational Genomics Centre Data Management Laboratory, Indian Council of Medical Research, Prashant Mishra MD and the India and South Asia representative for the British Medical Journal and Amity’s Dean of the Medical School.

Enrico explored potential collaborations in the area of smart cities with Prof. Devendra Pratap Singh (Director of the Amity School of Architecture and Planning), Prof. Anupam Saxena (Director of the School of Real Estate and Environment), and Dr Sarika Jain (Amity Institute of Information Technology). Topics included green buildings, construction waste management, buildings accessibility, and environmental quality assessment. The common perspective is the development of large-scale data capturing methods to support governance and influence policy-makers.

John and Martin also gave invited talks to 50 selected sixth-form Amity International School pupils under the direction of Mrs. Mohina Dar, Director (Academic Projects) Amity International and Global Schools.

The main meetings were held on Amity’s Noida campus which has 37,000 students. The KMi team also travelled to Amity’s University in Haryana which has 5,000 students to have meetings with their Vice Chancellor, Deputy Vice Chancellor, Head of Collaborations and their Dean of Science and Technology. The team presented an overview of KMi data science research to the university’s executive team and local faculty members and students.

The week-long meeting concluded with the signing of a document outlining how we will continue to work together in the short, medium and long term. In the short term KMi will look to host Amity research students and faculty and supervise PhD scholars remotely. All four KMi researchers hosted local Masters and PhD student round table discussions to facilitate matchmaking between specific KMi research areas and research student interests. After running a pilot we will explore licensing options for the deployment of OU Analyse at Amity. Our overall research collaboration will be under the umbrella of ‘Smart India’: applying a Smart City research lens at national scale and investigating how we can move towards a Knowledge Graph for India supporting enhanced health outcomes and educational opportunities.

The input from the whole KMi team was highly appreciated by our Amity hosts who showered us with gifts to show their appreciation. One of these ‘gifts’ was an honorary Professorship for John Domingue. John also had a conversation with Amity’s Founder President and Chairman of Amity Group of Institutions and Industries Dr. Ashok K. Chauhan about the, in his view, very positive impact of the visit to his institution. If our collaboration continues along the trajectory of this meeting then our research and societal impacts in India will be highly significant.

KMi News Image 5 — John presenting KMi to senior researchers and the executive of Amity University at Haryana

KMi News Image 6 — John presenting the Institute of Coding in the Amity Boardroom

KMi News Image 7 — John and Martin on the Amity Noida Campus

KMi News Image 8 — John lighting a lamp onstage to open the CONFLUENCE conference

KMi News Image 9 — Allan and John visiting the Taj Mahal

KMi News Image 10 — KMi Team interacting with 50 selected Amity 6th form pupils

Open Networking Lab Accessibility – The Challenge

Thursday 30 Jan 2020 | KMi News

In the UK, there are over 2 million people with sight loss, with 360,000 registered as blind or partially sighted. Approximately 25% of those with partial sight loss are employed, but this decreases to 10% for those who are blind. There is therefore a pressing need to enable blind and visually impaired people to gain better access to the job market. Evidence has shown that people who are visually impaired can seek employment if the professional tools they use have appropriate accessibility. These adaptations help visually impaired individuals to access the same vocational learning and employability opportunities as the general population.

Computer networking is a promising area for employment for visually impaired people because command line software (using text only) is widely used professionally for computer networking and is already accessible through assistive technology such as screen readers. The Open Networking Lab Accessibility project will allow visually impaired to acquire basic computer networking skills through the use of accessible network simulation software. In order to achieve this, we will build upon and extend the PT Anywhere network simulation tool to offer an accessible interface for conducting network simulations. We will collaborate with blind and visually impaired users, members of the broader disability community, and accessibility specialists to identify user requirements and test the new developments.

This project is carried out by the Open University Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and is funded by the Ufi VocTech Trust.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moh-vhzs4U8]

Related Links:

Open Networking Lab Accessibility

Kicking off the Decentralised Web

Friday 17 Jan 2020 | KMi News

KMi researchers are among the leaders of a new group of academics, aDecentWeb, which aims to create a web where individuals and organisations remain in control.

John Domingue and Allan Third co-chaired the group’s first Decent(ralised) Web Symposium held in Vienna on 17th January 2020. The event was restricted to 200 attendees drawn from a range of research interests including decentralised infrastructures, multi-agent systems, collective intelligence, blockchains and the web, and cyber physical social systems.

KMi’s Anna De Liddo was a keynote speaker who presented her research on the technical factors influencing the design and uptake-of Collective Intelligence infrastructure.

Also giving a keynote was Ruben Verborgh of Ghent University. Ruben is part of the team working with Tim Berners Lee on Solid a decentralised data store. We are collaborating with the team in the Institute of Coding (IoC) on turning Solid stores in lifelong learning records.

Other invited talks were from Luc Desrosiers from IBM, Hugh Dickinson of The Open University, Julian Padget from University of Bath, Markus Sabadello CEO of Danube Tech, and Sarah Spiekermann of Vienna University.

The focus of Symposium was on decentralising infrastructures to allow users to feel empowered to manage their own digital assets. The event included quick flash talks and a poster session.

The group’s next event will be a Workshop at the Web Conference 2020 on 20-24 April in Tapai, Taiwan, where KMi’s Allan Third is on the Programme Committee.

Related Links:

ADecentralised Web Symposiuim

One to Watch! KMi Director’s TEDx Talk

Wednesday 18 Dec 2019 | KMi News

KMi Director, John Domingue’s, TEDx Talk ‘A Blockchain-based decentralised university‘ is available on TEDx Talks on YouTube. John was one of 24 selected speakers for the very first TEDxOpenUniversity event which was held on 8 November 2019 in Milton Keynes. The theme of the event was ‘Imagine What’s Next’ and it attracted over 22,000 viewers either online or in the auditorium, while the TEDx YouTube channel has over 22 million subscribers.

John’s presentation was a part of the section of the event entitled ‘#1 The Future is Digital ‘ which also featured talks by the OU’s Chancellor Martha-Lane Fox, STEM Executive Dean, Nick Braithwaite, Dr. Adrian Mallory and Dr.Helen Lockett.

In his TEDx Talk, John contends that with blockchain technology we can create a radically new type of university: a DAO University. DAO is a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation which operates with no central control and no humans in the loop and are based on Smart Contracts: pieces of computer code on a blockchain which can represent and enact financial and legal contracts.

In a DAO University value and reputation associated with teaching and learning would be accounted for through a blockchain with no central control. Instead the whole learning community would agree how the educational elements, for example, learning materials, teaching resources and teaching delivery are shared and recompensed.

John predicts that a DAO University is a next step evolution in higher education.

Viewers are invited to leave comments on YouTube page or Tweet to @johndmk and @KMiOU.

Related Links:

A Blockchain-based decentralised university John Domingue TEDxOpenUniversity

KMi hosts the latest OpenLang Network meeting

Tuesday 10 Dec 2019 | KMi News

The latest meeting of the Erasmus+ project OpenLang Network took place in KMi on December 5-6. Representatives from all project partners spent two days discussing the latest project developments and planning their next activities. The OpenLang Network project is building a network among all Erasmus+ KA1 Mobility Participants within an open and highly interactive online environment for supporting more efficiently their effort to develop their language skills of the target mobility EU languages. Additionally, the project will support their cultural understanding and integration in the host EU country, as well as their success in their specific subject field of study and/or work.

Alexander Mikroyannidis hosted the meeting in KMi as the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Open University. Alexander is in charge of the project’s online platform that will be supporting networking and language learning via Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This is a key output for the project as a whole, as it will offer the technological foundations for the success and sustainability of the project’s language learning network.

CORE welcomes Plan S

Monday 09 Dec 2019 | KMi News

CORE supports Plans S in granting open access to scholarly outputs (such as publications) to anyone without any barriers and restrictions, including to most forms of use and re-use by humans and machines. PlanS is an initiative supported by the European Commission and various national public funding bodies (“cOAlitionS") who, from 2020, will require that all articles by their grantees must be published immediately OA. Plan S is developed by Science Europe – the European association representing the interests of major public research performing and research funding organisations. Read more about this at the CORE Blog.

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Read more.

The Open Education Global 2019 conference: Open Education for an Open Future

Wednesday 04 Dec 2019 | KMi News

The Open Education Global Conference (OE Global 2019) took place in Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy on November 26-28. The OE Global conference is the most internationally diverse conference devoted exclusively to open education, attracting researchers, practitioners, policy makers, educators and students from more than 35 countries to discuss and explore how Open Education advances educational practices around the world.

Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi and delivered a hands-on workshop entitled “Decentralising education using blockchain technology”. The session was highly interactive, with participants discussing a variety of scenarios that decentralise education and place the lifelong learner in control of the learning process and its associated data via the use of Blockchain technology. The outcomes of this workshop will feed into the requirements of the QualiChain pilot conducted by the Open University.

Co-Inform presented at the Paris Peace Forum

Friday 29 Nov 2019 | KMi News

On November 11-13, the Co-Inform project team attended the Paris Peace Forum event, which aims to place global governance at the top of the international agenda. The Call for Projects received more than 700 project submissions from 115 countries. The Co-inform project was showcased in the New Technology category. The event was attended by 7000 people, including 33 heads of state and government.

Prof Harith Alani from KMi presented the project and gave some examples of how misinformation can have a real impact on society.

Throughout the event, Co-Inform stand was visited by the President of Latvia, Mr. Egils Levits and the Prime Minister of Malta, Mr. Joseph Muscat. Mr. Henri Verdier, the French Ambassador for Digital Affairs, also expressed great interest in the project and visited the stand with a delegation of ambassadors for digital affairs from 10 different EU countries. Furthermore, the project team received representatives from high-level international organisations, such as the EU Commission, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Related Links:

Co-Inform

KMi at the Ufi VocTech Showcase 2019

Friday 22 Nov 2019 | KMi News

The annual Ufi VocTech Showcase took place on November 21, 2019 in IET London. The event showcased a wide variety of projects funded by the Ufi VocTech Trust. Attendees had the opportunity to learn about the latest innovative vocational learning solutions and approaches helping to upskill adults across the UK.

Alexander Mikroyannidis (KMi) and Andrew Smith (Computing & Communications) represented the Open Networking Lab and the Open Networking Lab Accessibility project with a demo booth. Andrew and Alexander demonstrated to attendees the educational capabilities of the PT Anywhere network simulation tool, as well as the newly launched OpenLearn course. Useful feedback was collected, which will be put to use for the further development of the network simulator tool and learning materials.

KMi, the first 25 years

Monday 18 Nov 2019 | KMi News

At the 25th Anniversary KMi Festival we invited staff from across the OU campus to come and find out how our latest knowledge and media technologies are impacting education, science, and cities.

The Festival attendees included Lady Kitty Chisholm, one of the three founders of KMi, the STEM Executive Dean, Nick Braithwaite, and the new CFO Paul Traynor. Visitors had in-depth conversations with the research teams and tried out some hands-on exhibits. Among the fun demonstrations were the Knowledge Makers’ Memory Game, and the Citizens Science Team’s Biodiversity Quiz, which invited visitors to test their powers of observation by comparing photographs of bees and butterflies which have been uploaded by the general public with the species catalogue, to identify the correct variety of species. There was also a demonstration of the Open Field Lab kit which is used to broadcast live student fieldcasts through the OU’s Stadium Live system.

A visitor tries the Knowledge Makers' Memory Game

Other stands were showing:

Our Social Media Analytics work on online misogyny was recently featured in WIRED
Our learning analytics platform (OU Analyse) which has been shortlisted for a Times Higher Education Award. The OU Analyse Team are OU REsearch Excellence 2019 winners.
Our scholarly data platform which CORE now attracts more web traffic than the OU or FutureLearn websites. The CORE team are aslo OU Research Excellence Awards 2019 winners.
Our collaboration with Springer Nature on scholarly analytics has produced a new standard classification scheme for Computer Science as well as a solution for automatic metadata generation, which is now in routine use at Springer Nature.
Our blockchain based accreditation work underpins the £20M funded Institute of Coding which was highlighted at the OU’s TEDx event.
Our award-winning MK Data Hub which was recently applied to power the world’s first Smart City Robot competition in Central Milton Keynes.

A picture of Hans the Robot in action

Back in 1994, the KMi founders had a vision of what the future of knowledge and media would be like and KMi was created to implement such a vision. During this 25 years KMi has established itself as a world-class research centre and the KMiFest was a great way to come together to celebrate the impact that KMi’s intensive research has delivered.

GATEKEEPER Kick-off Meeting

Wednesday 13 Nov 2019 | KMi News

The GATEKEEPER project official starts in Madrid (23-25 Oct. 2019) with a pack-full kick-off meeting (KOM). With the size of a small conference, the KOM guided the forty-three partners in building a shared vision for GK. During the three days, the consortium worked on sharing their experiences on advanced health & care solutions and integrating the different perspectives of clinicians, carers, engineers, computer scientists and business.

Related Links:

GATEKEEPER website

KMi at ISWC 2019

Thursday 07 Nov 2019 | KMi News

Every year the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the main destination for many researchers in the Semantic Web community. The 18th edition of the ISWC was held last week in Auckland, New Zealand, and hosted around 500 researchers coming from all around the world. ISWC is of high importance to KMi since it relates to much of the core research and projects in the lab. Many researchers and academics in KMi have been on the organisation committees of ISWC in various years, and their work contributed strongly and regularly to the programme of the conference.

KMi members, Harith Alani, Allan Third, Francesco Osborne, and Martino Mensio took part in the conference at Auckland this year, where they presented papers, posters, and demos, and were involved in various other activities, such as tutorials, journal editorial meetings, and PhD mentoring.

In the pre-conference sessions, Allan Third ran a well-attended all-day tutorial on Blockchains and the Semantic Web with collaborators from Southampton and Zurich. He also presented “LinkChains: Trusted Personal Linked Data”, about our Linked Data verification platform and the MerQL model for proving data integrity at the individual triple level, at the Blockchain-enabled Semantic Web workshop.

In the In-Use track, Francesco Osborne presented the paper “Improving Editorial Workflow and Metadata Quality at Springer Nature”, about our long-standing collaboration with the world’s largest academic book publisher. This paper was also nominated for best In-Use paper.

In the Demo track, Martino Mensio and Harith Alani presented “MisinfoMe: Who’s Interacting with Misinformation?” which was developed in the Co-Inform project, to track people’s interactions with misinformation on Twitter. In the same track, Francesco Osborne presented “Smart Topics Miner 2: Improving Proceedings Retrievability at Springer Nature”, about the system developed for automatically annotating research publications at Springer Nature. In the Poster track, Francesco Osborne and Allan Third also presented “Integrating Knowledge Graphs for Comparing the Scientific Output of Academia and Industry”, regarding a new knowledge base for exploring the industrial contributions to research and “Parsing Natural Language Sentences into Robot Actions” which described a Natural Language Processing engine that allows the NAO humanoid robot to execute natural language actions spoken by the user.

Overall, the Scholarly Knowledge Mining Team was nominated for four awards: best In-Use paper, best student In-Use paper, best Poster, and best Demo.

The next edition of ISWC will be held in Athens, Greece. Harith Alani will be on the organisation committee of ISWC 2020, co-chairing the Doctoral Consortium track. We all look forward to meeting again with this large and highly active community next year.

The Open Networking Lab launches free online course

Tuesday 05 Nov 2019 | KMi News

The Open Networking Lab project has launched a free online course entitled “Discovering computer networks: hands on in the Open Networking Lab”, where learners can explore how computer networks operate, discover how data is sent around the internet, as well as put their understanding into practice using the PT Anywhere network simulator to create their own simulated computer networks.

The course uses a new teaching approach based on:

short screencasts
hands-on computer networking activities
quizzes and other self-assessment activities

These elements are tightly integrated to provide an active, iterative learning experience aimed specifically at young people, but suitable for everyone. Upon completion of the course, learners will earn a free statement of participation issued by The Open University.

The course has been the product of collaboration between the Open University’s Computing & Communications department and KMi, with funding from the Ufi Charitable Trust and support from the Cisco Networking Academy. The KMi team, led by Alexander Mikroyannidis, has contributed the PT Anywhere network simulator, which allows learners to practice what they have learned and experiment with their own network simulations. PT Anywhere has received funding from the European Commission and the Ufi Charitable Trust in order to extend its educational capabilities and, most recently, to provide an accessible interface for visually impaired learners.

Related Links:

Discovering computer networks: hands on in the Open Networking Lab

KMi and QualiChain at the EADTU 2019 conference

Friday 25 Oct 2019 | KMi News

The Online, Open and Flexible Higher Education Conference (OOFHEC2019) took place on October 16-18 in Madrid, Spain. This is the flagship annual event of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU), Europe’s leading institutional association in online, open and flexible higher education. This year’s event was hosted by the National Distance Education University (UNED) and was focused on trends and high impact factors in the global and European higher education. Highlights of the conference included, among others, a keynote by Stefaan Hermans (Director of Policy Strategy and Evaluation at the European Commission), a keynote by Liz Marr (Pro-Vice-Chancellor at The Open University, UK), as well as a presentation of the recent European MOOC Consortium initiative towards a common accreditation framework for lifelong learning.

Alexander Mikroyannidis (The Open University, UK) represented KMi and the QualiChain project and delivered an interactive workshop, entitled “Decentralising online education using blockchain technology”. The session was very well attended with participants contributing scenarios that place the lifelong learner at the very centre of the learning process and its associated data via the use of Blockchain technology. The outcomes of this workshop will feed into the requirements of the QualiChain pilot conducted by the Open University.

CORE team wins at the Research Excellence Awards 2019

Thursday 24 Oct 2019 | KMi News

CORE was presented with the Outstanding Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity Award at The Open University’s Research Excellence Awards Ceremony 2019 which took place at the MK Stadium on October 23rd.

Over 150 Researchers, academics and support staff attended with Professor Kevin Hetheringthon, Pro Vice Chancellor for Research, Enterprise and Scholarship hosting. The new Vice Chancellor of the Open University, Professor Tim Blackman also attended and welcomed the guests at the beginning of proceedings. The awards were presented by Professor Monica Grady and we were extremely lucky to also be joined by Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell who presented the Open University’s 50th Anniversary Prize for Research.

Representing CORE were Dr. Petr Knoth, Matteo Cancellieri, Lucas Anastasiou, Bikash Gyawali, David Pride and Alan Fletcher. Balviar Notay of Jisc, a key partner of The Open University in delivering CORE also joined the awards ceremony.

Dr. Petr Knoth commented: "I am delighted to win this award and would like to thank everyone who contributed to the development of CORE since its start in 2010, including our key partner Jisc as well as other funders, our users and commercial customers and our fantastic and talented current and former staff. It has been a great pleasure for me to be able to lead this fantastic team that is so passionate about the mission of opening up research knowledge to all, including not just researchers, funders and librarians, but also the millions of our users from within the general public who can discover and access the results of research they have contributed to by paying their taxes. It has been a privilege for me to be able to run this project from within the Open University which fully embraces the mission of openness, lifelong education and knowledge sharing. I hope the work of my team, a service that has become an essential part of the open access infrastructure, will contribute to making the Open University a centre of excellence for Open Research in the future."

Blockchains and Understanding the Post-truth Society

Wednesday 23 Oct 2019 | KMi News

Early October saw the KMi Director participate in two panels in a Conference on Understanding the Post-truth Society held in Valletta, Malta. The aim of the event was to bring together technology experts, social scientists and journalists to discuss how recent challenges and issues associated with fake news, mass datafication, mass surveillance, censorship and the death of trust.

Our input to the event was to highlight how blockchains can be used to implement self-sovereignty – a self-created and self-owned digital identity – and as a ‘global source of truth’.

The event contained many prestigious and interesting speakers. For example, the event was opened by the Maltese Minister for Education and Employment Evarist Bartolo and one of the following speakers was Hossein Derakhshan. Hossein became famous for bringing blogging to Iran and in 2008 was sentenced to 20 years by the Iranian government for his work (he was released after six years).

Recent local events also highlighted the importance of free speech. In October 2017 the Maltese journalist Caruana Galizia was assassinated in a car bomb attack by her home for her role in the release of the Panama papers and one of the conference panellists Herman Grech – the Editor in Chief of the Maltese times – is currently under 24/7 police protection because of his knowledge of the murder.

The unanimous view of all attendees is that the issues highlighted are not going to disappear anytime soon and will only be resolved if the wide variety of stakeholders continue to remain in dialogue. The event leaders are currently discussing how best to continue the work.

Related Links:

Post-truth Conference website

Maintaining Trust and Privacy of Personal Data with Blockchains

Wednesday 23 Oct 2019 | KMi News

Following scandals in the media such as with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook there has been widespread concern around the abuse of personal online data. These include from Sir Tim Berners Lee who in a Variety article called the over centralisation of data on the Web ‘anti human’.

At the annual EU Big Data Value Forum, held in Helsinki, KMi’s Director highlighted how a combination of blockchains and personal data stores, such as Solid, could help maintain personal data privacy without loss of trust.

This is the main EU Commission event for Big Data and as such attracted over 500 delegates including leading European researchers and representative of big industry. The event was opened by Jari Partanen the Finnish State Secretary at the Ministry Economic Affairs and Employment and other speakers included Roberto Viola Director General of DG Connect and the European Commission, Risto Siilasmaa, the Chairman of the Nokia Corporation, Norbert Gaus, Executive Vice President of Siemens and Timo Elliott a Vice-President and Global Innovation Evangelist at SAP.

Related Links:

European Big Data Value Forum

First International Competition on Robots in Smart Cities held in Central Milton Keynes

Tuesday 24 Sep 2019 | KMi News

Last week saw robotics teams from several European countries converge to Central Milton Keynes to take part in the First ERL Smart CIty RObotic Challenge (the SciRoc challenge). The event, which was organised by KMi’s ISDS team, was held at centre:mk from 18 to 21 September. The aim of SciRoc, an EU-funded project comprising 10 partners from 6 EU countries, is to bring robotics competitions in the context of smart cities. Given this goal, it was a natural choice to hold the first of these international competitions in Milton Keynes, an innovative city at the leading edge of smart city developments. The selection of KMi as the host organization was also a natural one, recognizing the level of excellence in the lab, which includes world-class expertise in both smart cities and robotics.

This was the first time that an international robotics competition of this kind was held in a public space and the event proved to be extremely successful, attracting a large audience as well as radio and television crews. About 500K people visit centre:mk on average every week and indeed the goal of the SciRoc Challenge was not only to stage an elite international robotics competition, but also to provide an important public engagement opportunity, allowing members of the public, including many children, to get very close to robots performing everyday tasks, such as serving in a coffee shop, taking an elevator, opening a door, and others.

In addition to the core organization team, comprising Enrico Motta, Gianluca Bardaro, Ian Pulford, Agnese Chiatti, Enrico Daga and Jason Carvalho, many other KMi-ers were involved in the event, as assistant referees or volunteers.

A big thank you and congratulations to all of them for making SciRoc such as successful event!

QualiChain meets in Madrid

Monday 23 Sep 2019 | KMi News

The consortium of the QualiChain project has met in Madrid, Spain on September 19-20, 2019. Representatives from all project partners spent two days discussing the latest project developments and planning their next activities. The QualiChain project targets the creation, piloting and evaluation of a decentralised platform for storing, sharing and verifying education and employment qualifications. The project focuses on the assessment of the potential of blockchain technology for disrupting the domain of public education, as well as its interfaces with private education, the labour market, public sector administrative procedures and the wider socio-economic developments.

KMi was represented in the meeting by John Domingue, Allan Third, Alexander Mikroyannidis and Niaz Chowdhury. The KMi team is building upon its expertise from the Open Blockchain initiative to conduct a landscape analysis, implement Blockchain technology for storing and sharing education credentials and qualifications, integrate Semantic Blockchains in Ethereum, as well as conduct a pilot on lifelong learning. KMi is also in charge of shaping the overall dissemination strategy of the project.

In the first 6 months of the project, the consortium has defined the pilots of the project, which have been documented in deliverables D2.2 and D7.1. Project partners are currently working on the implementation architecture of the project, which is documented in deliverable D5.1. Based on this architecture, the first prototypes will be developed for testing within the pilots of the project. The latest QualiChain deliverables can be accessed and downloaded here.

CORE makes it to the top 5,000 websites globally by user engagement

Monday 23 Sep 2019 | KMi News

CORE has just made it to the top 5,000 websites globally accroding to Alexa Global Rank, which is calculated from a combination of daily visitors and page views on a website over a 3 month period. As of today, CORE ranks at 4,924, climbing 871 places over the last 90 days. The improvement is impressive considerring that academic websites typically experience a seasonal slowdown during the summer break. As a result, the rank is likely to improve even further.

For instance, these are the ranks of the Open University (10,605), British Library (17,925), Directory of Open Access journals (24,255) and OpenAIRE (508,394). These are very strong data, showing the amazing value for money of CORE to the society.

Blockchains at the Pan Commonwealth Forum

Thursday 19 Sep 2019 | KMi News

The Pan Commonwealth Forum (PCF), held at Murrayfield Stadium the home of Scottish rugby, brought together over 500 attendees from 61 commonwealth countries including many ministers and university vice chancellors to discuss the future of learning. The overall aim of this year’s event was to discuss, debate and showcase how innovations are improving the quality of education and creating new spaces for lifelong learning. This was broken down into sub-themes covering inclusion, equity, employability and technology. Education is a special concern for the Commonwealth, which has third of the World’s population, as over 60% of its citizens are under the age of 30.

The OU has had a special relationship with the event of the years and this year saw both parties celebrating birthdays: 50 for the OU and 30 for PCF. Sir John Daniel a former OU Vice Chancellor and Commonwealth Forum Chair helped open proceedings with our current Vice Chancellor, Mary Kellet, serving as Conference Chair. The OU Pro Chancellor, Malcolm Sweeting also spoke on a panel on the future of learning.

Prominent Keynotes included Lord Puttnam, a former OU Chancellor, who spoke on the role of innovation in higher education, Sarah Brown, founder and president of the children’s charity Theirworld, the Executive Chair of the Global Business Coalition for Education, co-founder of A World at School and wife of former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who spoke on the desperate educational need for the 260 million children globally who are not at school and for refugees who on average spend 17 years in refugee camps.

The UK Minister for Schools, Nick Gibb, chaired a closed meeting attended by the OU’s Pro Chancellor and Vice Chancellor and the Scottish Minister for Education, Richard Lochhead gave an after dinner speech.

The President of the Seychelles spoke of the need for transformative education to address the many challenges associated with small countries. The top picture shows the President of the Seychelles, the Executive Dean of the OU’s Faculty of Business and Law and KMi’s Director posing after having a conversation.

KMi’s Director, John Domingue, chaired a panel on How Blockchains are Transforming Higher Education which attracted a full house in the plenary conference room. This panel covered how the OU is leading the way in applying the technology in adult learning and how it is being deployed nationally in a number of countries.

Mary Kellett closed the conference restating the OU’s aims for open education and committing the OU to expanding our large international education arguments (TESS and TESS-India) to begin to address the educational needs of the 260 million children who currently miss out.

Related Links:

Pan Commonwealth Forum

Fifth STI International Summit held in Crete

Thursday 19 Sep 2019 | KMi News

The Fifth Summit for the STI International Summit, a bi-annual event, was held in Crete this week. Chaired by KMi’s Director John Domingue, the event brought together leading researchers from across the globe (including Stanford and the University of Southern California in the US and Wonkwang University in Korea) to discuss the research challenges associated with Knowledge Graphs.

The key themes at this year’s event included the relationship between Knowledge Graphs and new machine learning approaches and architectures, for example, deep learning and specialist machine learning hardware, how Knowledge Graphs can enhance the explainability of AI systems through ‘human semantics’ and how decentralized platforms such as Sir Tim Berners Lee’s Solid and blockchains could empower knowledge control for individuals and small organisations.

A ‘Chania’ statement is currently being prepared to be signed by all participants as a prelude to a joint white paper.

Related Links:

STI International Summit page

eLmL 2020 Special Track: Decentralised Qualifications on the Blockchain

Monday 16 Sep 2019 | KMi News

Alexander Mikroyannidis and the QualiChain project are organising a special track at the 12th International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-line Learning (eLmL 2020), which will be held on March 22-26, 2020 in Valencia, Spain. The special track is entitled Decentralised Qualifications on the Blockchain and it will investigate the creation, piloting and evaluation of decentralised solutions for storing, sharing and verifying education and employment qualifications and will focus on the assessment of the potential of blockchain technology, algorithmic techniques and computational intelligence for disrupting the domain of public education, as well as its interfaces with private education, the labour market, public sector administrative procedures and the wider socio-economic developments.

Important dates
Submission: February 6th, 2020
Notification: February 20th, 2020
Registration: February 29th, 2020
Camera ready: February 29th, 2020

More details and submission guidelines can be found here.

The CSO Classifier nominated for the Best Paper Award

Monday 16 Sep 2019 | KMi News

Last week, Angelo was in Oslo for the 23rd edition of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL2019). Every year, this conference attracts many researchers from all over the world, working in the fields of digital libraries, information retrieval, text analysis, web archives, and many others.

Angelo attended the conference to present his recent results on the CSO Classifier, an unsupervised approach for automatically classifying research papers according to the Computer Science Ontology. This work has been acclaimed by many attendees who showed interest, and engaged in offline discussions to understand further details about the project.

The paper was also nominated for the Best Paper Award. At the SKM3 team, we are extremely proud of this achievement as it shows how important is our research for the relevant communities of scholars.

More info and links:

Conference website: http://www.tpdl.eu/tpdl2019/

CSO Classifier paper: http://oro.open.ac.uk/62026/, https://infernusweb.altervista.org/wp/the-cso-classifier-ontology-driven-detection-of-research-topics-in-scholarly-articles/

Computer Science Ontology Portal: http://cso.kmi.open.ac.uk

SKM3 team: http://skm.kmi.open.ac.uk

KMi and QualiChain at ALTC 2019

Thursday 12 Sep 2019 | KMi News

Alexander Mikroyannidis joined the Association for Learning Technology Conference (ALTC) last week and delivered a QualiChain workshop. ALTC 2019 took place on 3-5 September 2019 in Edinburgh, UK with a packed programme and over 450 participants from across the globe. ALTC is an annual event aiming to confront and challenge established assumptions, approaches and accepted truths in relation to key dimensions of digital education, and advance our practice and thinking through critical dialogue and reflection, closer scrutiny of evidence and theory, and a stronger commitment to values including creativity, community, social good, openness and porosity, and more democratic access to knowledge and learning.

Alexander delivered an interactive workshop entitled "Blockchain technology for the lifelong learner". The session was well attended with participants contributing scenarios that place the lifelong learner at the very centre of the learning process and its associated data via the use of Blockchain technology. The ways that ePortfolios, accreditation, tutoring, as well as other aspects of teaching and learning can evolve within a learner-centred ecosystem based on the Blockchain were also discussed. The outcomes of this workshop will feed into the requirements of the QualiChain pilot conducted by the Open University. Alexander’s slides are available here.

OUAnalyse shortlisted for the THE 2019 Awards!

Wednesday 11 Sep 2019 | KMi News

OU Analyse has been shortlisted for the Times Higher Awards (THE 2019 Awards) in the category Technological or Digital Innovation of the Year!

Conceived in 2013 by Prof. Zdenek Zdrahal, OUAnalyse is a joint collaborative project between the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) and Data and Student Analytics (DSA).

The resulting product of this fruitful collaborative research and development effort is a learning analytics tool, currently available to all undergraduate modules at the OU. Based on trained Machine Learning models, this tool automatically identifies students at risk of failure within the institution. Not only the research behind this tool demonstrates its association with enhanced student performance, but an earlier deployment of this tool at the Czech Technical University has demonstrated its profound impact in terms of increasing retention. The number of failing students in this institution has dropped down by 49% since the 2015/16 academic year, generating an economic saving of more than 1M pounds. The results of OUAnalyse are currently being extended at two other UK universities as part of the the Institute of Coding.

The winners of the awards will be announced on the ceremony on Thursday 28 November at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, London. It is expected the attendance of 1000 guests, including politicians, senior sector figures, and academic and professional university staff from all corners of the UK.

Wish us luck!

Team members: Zdenek Zdrahal, Martin Hlosta, Jakub Kocvara, Christotea Herodotou, Avinash Boroowa, Vaclav Bayer, Miriam Fernandez, Michal Huptych, Jakub Kuzilek, John Domingue, Bart Rienties, Kevin Mayles

Twitter (#THEAwards)

KMi becomes a partner in new EU-funded project on Open Science and cumulative advantage: ON-MERRIT

Tuesday 10 Sep 2019 | KMi News

Success in research and innovation should primarily build and depend on clarity of thought, innovation of ideas, and integrity of processes, rather than on external factors like prior reputation or levels of resources.

Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation aim to bring equity and inclusivity to research. Yet could policy interventions in these directions actually worsen existing inequalities?

ON-MERRIT studies „Matthew effects“ of cumulative advantage in Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation across research, industry and policy-making, through a mix of sociological, bibliometric and computational approaches.

Where we discover such effects at play, we will make policy-recommendations to mitigate or negate these effects.

Dr. Petr Knoth explains: “ON-MERRIT will help us to better understand the flaws of the axiomatically established indicator-based incentives system that is currently deeply driving academic practice. This understanding will enable us to apply data-driven approaches to seek new counter-measures that reward based on merit and incentivise good research practices, such as reproducibility, transparent research workflows, and open research data and software sharing. The project will build on the expertise acquired by the Big Scientific Data and Text Analytics (BSDTAG) group in the area of open science and big data analytics which has been developed through a series of KMi projects supporting the CORE (core.ac.uk) service over the last 8 years.”

ON-MERRIT will be launched in October 2019 and runs until March 2022, with total funding of 1 million Euros from the EC’s Horizon 2020 programme.

Partner Consortium

KNOW-CENTER GMBH – Research Center For Data-Driven Business & Big Data Analytics, Graz (AT)
TU Graz – Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science, Graz (AT)
THE OPEN UNIVERSITY – Knowledge Media Institute (UK)
UNIVERSIDADE DO MINHO – Minho (PT)
GEORG-AUGUST-UNIVERSITÄT GÖTTINGEN – Göttingen State and University Library (DE)

Related Links:

Original Press Release

KMI’s CORE highly visible at Open Repositories 2019 conference

Friday 19 Jul 2019 | KMi News

CORE participated at the Open Repositories conference (10 – 13 June 2019), which took place in Hamburg, Germany. This year’s conference theme was “All the user needs”, where CORE received much attention and participated actively with 5 presentations:

Assessing compliance with the UK REF2021 Open Access Policy
Comparing the performance of OAI-PMH with ResourceSync
CORE Analytics Dashboard
Analysing the performance of open access papers discovery tools
The future of scholarly communications professionals

Related Links:

CORE’s conference presentations

KMi member wins ISWS Summer School 2019 Award

Tuesday 16 Jul 2019 | KMi News

The 2nd edition of the International Semantic Web Research Summer School (ISWS) was organised by STLab-ISTC National Research Council at the University Residential Centre of Bertinoro between 30th June and 6th July 2019. Following the success of last year, the Summer School was held once again in Bertinoro, a small village on a scenic hill with a wonderful panoramic view. The school focused on diverse range of research areas including FAIR Knowledge Graphs, Machine Learning, Linked Data, Ontology Engineering and Design Patterns, Frame Semantics, Crowdsourcing, Data Mining, Querying and Reasoning, Knowledge Graph Learning and Production, Natural Language Processing, Empirical analyses on the Semantic Web, a Distributed and Decentralised Semantic Web, and Blockchain technology.

This year, the school had outstanding keynotes from Frank van Harmelen from the Free University of Amsterdam and Chris Welty and Lora Aroyo from Google. Frank was behind many of the major foundational elements of the Semantic Web stack, Lora led a variety of large EU projects in the cultural heritage domain and Chris was a member of the original IBM Watson team.

KMi once again had exceptional representation, including John Domingue who was invited as a tutorial speaker and as a tutor at the summer school. Alba Morales (1st year PhD student) participated in the summer school as registered participant.

John Domingue presenting his tutorial on a Distributed Decentralised FAIR Knowledge Graphs

In his tutorial John provided an overview of Distributed Decentralised FAIR Knowledge Graphs. The talk highlighted how decentralised technologies such as Blockchains and the Solid platform, from Sir Tim Berners Lee, can lead to a future where data is owned, controlled and managed in a more equitable fashion. John also presented the notions of FAIR ‘TRADE’ (TRustable, Autonomous, DistributEd) framework for assessing decentralised data solutions, the framework can support the preservation and evolution of FAIR knowledge graphs in a trusted decentralised manner.

This year, the school was attended by 10 tutors and 62 students (selected from 101 applications) from around the world. At the beginning of the week, the students were divided into 10 Research Task Forces. Each Research Task Force consisted of 6 – 7 students and were led by a tutor.

A common research problem was assigned to all research task forces – Knowledge Graph evolution and preservation – that is to carry out a research investigation into the evolution and preservation of Knowledge Graphs. After a week of a super-intensive learning and work, incorporating lectures and keynotes, each group was required to deliver a research report, 10-minute presentation of their work and a novel video.

KMi member Alba Morales participated during the School’s first day in the School Poster Competition where she presented the initial results of her PhD research in a poster entitled: “Towards privacy-aware intelligent systems for emergency response”. Alba’s research goal is to analyse the privacy issues that Information Systems face when exchanging data with public services and informing the knowledge requirements for a solution that only allows valuable and minimally sensitive information to be exchanged. Alba won the first prize for the best Newcomer Poster, also contributed towards the success of her group ‘Klingon’. Overall her group was very successful: they received awards in two categories – 3rd Best Research Report and Best Video. Within their project, the Klingon group proposed a four-step human-in-the-loop framework to handle implicit bias in knowledge graphs – the framework was based on the concept of capturing provenance data around who agrees and disagrees on elicited statements.

Alba (first from left) and other members of team Klingon collecting their awards.

Yet again the ISWS Summer School has proven to be a success and yet again KMi has participated fully with our PhD students winning prizes confirming our leadership position in the Semantic Web/Linked Data/Knowledge Graphs community. We are already looking forward to year to see if we will make it three in a row.

WIRED Magazine Interviews KMI researchers

Thursday 11 Jul 2019 | KMi News

This week, WIRED Magazine released an article covering KMI’s ongoing work about networked misogyny and misogynistic language online. WIRED reporters interviewed KMi researchers in response to a paper delivered at the WebSci19 conference (Sunday June 30th – Wednesday July 3rd, Boston, USA). Authors Tracie Farrell, Miriam Fernandez and Harith Alani, along with associated researcher Jakub Novotny, presented their paper “Exploring Misogyny Across the Manosphere in Reddit”.

The paper describes exploratory research, using feminist, sociological models of misogyny to create 9 lexicons of hate that refer to different types of misogynistic speech. These lexicons were used to identify the type and amount of misogynistic language found within 6 million posts, from 300K conversations crated between 2011 and December 2018, covering the full live of 7 different subreddits. The authors found that the use of misogynistic language and group membership are both increasing across the more “extreme” subreddits. In addition, they discovered that the type of misogynistic language is changing, with more hostility towards women and more focus on men as the victims of feminist ideology. The authors plan to take this work forward, focusing on networked misogyny and the potential for radicalisation online. The research was conducted as part of an existing EU funded project; Trivalent, which aims to better understand the root causes of the phenomenon of violent radicalisation.

The Wired article highlights the challenge of quantifying hate speech and exploring hate speech computationally, and promotes our work as an example of how we can evidence certain complex phenomena, and supporting other qualitative studies with data at scale.

Related Links:

Link to the Wired Article

SciRoc Show at MK Futures 2050

Tuesday 09 Jul 2019 | KMi News

This past week (Thursday July 4 – Sunday July 7) has seen the SciRoc team (specifically, Matthew Studley and Mark Wilson from UWE and Enrico Motta, Ian Pulford, Gianluca Bardaro and Agnese Chiatti from KMi) camping in Middleton Hall (Central Milton Keynes), as part of the MK Futures 2050 event. The SciRoc stand was conceived for showcasing different robotics technology and advertising the forthcoming ERL Smart CIty RObotic Challenge, which will be held in Milton Keynes on 16-21 September, 2019.

The MK Futures 2050 Exhibition received great interest, attracting over 125,000 visitors just over the weekend, from the general public to the experts who, together with the MK Council, are involved in designing the future of the city of Milton Keynes over the coming decades. Located “in the heart of the borough”, the exhibition was intended to give everyone the opportunity to come and see the future plans for Milton Keynes.
Various types of robots were showcased at the SciRoc booth, including a merry band of TurtleBots, drones and PAL Robotic’s TIAGo robot. In particular, the Tiago was a hit with the schoolchildren who visited the booth and enjoy interacting with it. A BBC Look East crew also turned up and filmed the Tiago robot – see the clip at https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0006jzh/look-east-west-evening-news-04072019 (while it lasts….).

The exhibition also comprised a programme of lectures for the general public, one of which, about the future of robotics technology, was presented by Dr Matthew Studley, the SciRoc Project Coordinator. The lecture was followed by a lively Q&A session with members of the public, who asked the SciRoc team about the wider socio-technological issues associated with the current and future developments in robotics and, more in general, in AI.

KMi PhD student organises two Game Jams

Wednesday 26 Jun 2019 | KMi News

Christina Myers’ PhD, supervised by Lara Piccolo and Trevor Collins, explores how to democratise educational game design in order to enable diverse teams to design games in an egalitarian and well-informed way. To evaluate some of the tools that Christina has developed, she organised two weekend-long game design events, also known as ‘Game Jams’, where participants learnt how to create educational games collaboratively. The educational games were aimed at raising awareness of gender inequalities. The Game Jams were structured with activities and resources, co-designed with hundreds of people to support inclusivity, that triggered reflection, conversation and mutual learning about gender, education and game design.

On two rainy Saturday mornings the participants; including particularly women, people of color, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ+ community; showed up at a recently opened gaming space called ‘Platform’ in London for the Game Jam. Most of them had never designed games before and were incredibly motivated to create games that represent them and their views on gender inequalities. Above all, they were eager to learn how to create educational games to create social change.

The participants were guided by mentors Victor Cardozo, Anaïs Chetrit, Charlotte Chenu and Hanna Hallard who supported the groups to accomplish each of the activities. At the end of the event, the large majority of the participants said they felt capable and motivated to design more educational games in the future and they created awesome games in two days. One example of the games created illustrates the everyday life of a woman, where players experience issues related to the gender gap, sexist language and beauty expectations. Another game is about gender-based toys where players come to understand how difficult it is to choose toys without being influenced by societal stereotypes.

Christina is part of the Athena SWAN committee of KMi, led by Miriam Fernandez, and presented this initiative as a way to ensure more diversity in the gaming sector. All of the game jamers received a certificate of participation signed by one of the advocates for the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, Dr. Alaa Murabit. Scholas Occurrentes, the Pope’s initiative on education, has also agreed to publish the games created on their online platform, which is accessed by more than 446,000 schools. Christina’s work is being recognised as an initiative to create social change by diversifying the gaming sector and by using gaming as a tool to raise awareness of social issues.

The OpenLang Network meets in Cyprus

Monday 24 Jun 2019 | KMi News

Last week saw the second plenary face-to-face meeting of the Erasmus+ project OpenLang Network, which took place in Limassol, Cyprus. Representatives from all project partners spent two days discussing the latest project developments and planning their next activities. The OpenLang Network project is building a network among all Erasmus+ KA1 Mobility Participants within an open and highly interactive online environment for supporting more efficiently their effort to develop their language skills of the target mobility EU languages. Additionally, the project will support their cultural understanding and integration in the host EU country, as well as their success in their specific subject field of study and/or work.

Alexander Mikroyannidis joined the meeting as the Open University’s PI (Principal Investigator). Alexander is in charge of the project’s online platform that will be supporting networking and language learning via Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This is a key output for the project as a whole, as it will offer the technological foundations for the success and sustainability of the project’s language learning network.

The project’s next plenary face-to-face meeting will be hosted by KMi on December 5-6 in Milton Keynes, UK.

KMi’s CORE to be used in the Research Excellence Framework – REF2021 audit

Monday 17 Jun 2019 | KMi News

CORE a global aggregator of open access content and UK’s national aggregator will be assisting the UK Research and Innovation’s audit for the REF2021 by supplying the deposit date information for all UK REF outputs.

Compliance with the REF2021 Open Access Policy is established when an author deposits the post-print or Author’s Accepted Manuscript in a repository, institutional or subject, within 90 days from its acceptance. The REF audit committee will consult CORE for discovering the deposit date and decide whether an output is compliant with the policy or not.

The Research England’s REF Audit Guidance specifically states that:

“40. We will undertake verification of the dates that outputs became publicly available, particularly where they were published early in the REF period or are marked as ‘pending’ publication (for example, by obtaining a letter from the publisher). This will include checking the publication year against the Crossref4 database and against Jisc CORE”

….

“46. We will assess each HEIs’ overall compliance with the REF 2021 open access policy by: … iv. Using Jisc CORE, comparing the datePublished and depositedDate and identifying where the number of days between the two dates is greater than 92.”

….

“49. Where there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate a robust and well-managed process for open access, we will identify a set of outputs from each submission made by the HEI, and request further information to verify whether they are compliant with the policy, or whether an exception applies. Outputs may be selected randomly, or based on information in unpaywall.org or Jisc CORE, or a combination of the two. We will select outputs that have been returned as compliant with the policy, and/or outputs that have been returned with exceptions.”

For more information visit the “Audit Guidance” here.

Related Links:

Audit Guidance

KMi and QualiChain at ESWC and JTELSS 2019

Friday 14 Jun 2019 | KMi News

Last week, KMi members were in two flagship events, spreading the word about the QualiChain project. The Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2019) took place on June 2-6 in Portoroz, Slovenia. QualiChain was represented by John Domingue and Allan Third from KMi, as well as Damien Graux from Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany. QualiChain was presented prominently at the opening and closing ceremonies as a conference sponsor and had a banner and exhibition space, where the project was discussed with attendees during the coffee breaks. Allan also presented QualiChain at the Project Networking Session, where common interests were identified with other ongoing projects on decentralisation and personal data usage.

The 15th EATEL Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning (JTELSS 2019) took place on June 1-8 in Bari, Italy. Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi and QualiChain and delivered a workshop entitled “How the Blockchain can shape the future of education”. During this hands-on workshop, participants explored the different scenarios that place the learner at the very centre of the learning process and its associated data via the use of Blockchain technology. The ways that ePortfolios, accreditation, tutoring, as well as other aspects of teaching and learning can evolve within a learner-centred ecosystem based on the Blockchain were also discussed. The outcomes of this workshop will feed into the requirements of the QualiChain pilot conducted by KMi.

Co-Inform passes its first review with flying colours

Tuesday 11 Jun 2019 | KMi News

The Co-Inform consortium came back triumphant from Cyprus where the project’s first review took place on June 7th in the beautiful historical public library building of Limassol.

Project officer and assigned monitors expressed their surprise of how much was achieved by Co-Inform in its first 12 months of life. These achievements included the organisation of three community and stakeholder engagement workshops, in Austria, Sweden, and Greece, to gather requirements and to produce social as well as technical recommendations for tackling misinformation that the project is take on. The KMi team presented their work on the detection of claims to be fact-checked, on the development of a tool for raising awareness on interaction of a given Twitter account with misinformation, and on a research of the influence of social values on misinformation sharing online.

Co-Inform is a €4 million European H2020 project that is investigating socio-technical solution to misinformation, for citizens, journalists, and policymakers. Co-Inform is co-ordinated by the University of Stockholm, and involves the Open University, Cyprus University of Technology, University of Koblenz, FactCheck Northern Ireland, Expert System Iberia, International Hellenic University, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and Scytl.

Related Links:

Co-Inform

KMi Researchers Win Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award at JCDL2019

Wednesday 05 Jun 2019 | KMi News

KMi researchers Dasha Herrmannova, Nancy Pontika and Petr Knoth win Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2019) for their paper titled: “Do Authors Deposit on Time? Tracking Open Access Policy Compliance”. JCDL 2019 is an A* conference (highest rank) and the world’s highest ranking venue for digital libraries research, within the top 4% of all computer science conferences according to the Computing Research & Education Conference Portal. JCDL has taken place this year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States.

The paper, which uses data from CORE (core.ac.uk) to quantify the growing traction of open access has received media attention even prior to the presentation at JCDL 2019 and was featured in an article in Physics Today. Dasha Herrmannova says: “I am utterly astonished and still can’t get over the fact that we won the best paper award last night at this amazing conference.” Petr Knoth says: “It has been a pleasure to work with this amazing team. We went through many revisions on this paper as the work turned out to be more complicated than we originally anticipated, but it paid off.”

What is even more impressive is that this is the second Best Paper Award in a 12-month period at key digital libraries conferences for the Big Scientific Data and Text Analytics Group (BSDTAG). David Pride and Petr Knoth won the Best Paper Award at the best European DL conference – TPDL in Porto, Portugal in September 2018 for their paper: “Peer review and citation data in predicting university rankings, a large-scale analysis”.

Related Links:

ANGELO succeeds his viva

Tuesday 04 Jun 2019 | KMi News

Congratulations to Angelo Salatino for succeeding in his viva!

Last Friday, Angelo Salatino successfully defended his PhD thesis on Early Detection of Research Trends. The thesis is a body of research work over the last three years leading to a successful system that identifies the emergence of new research topics up to two years before they emerge (i.e., at their embryonic stage). The work in the thesis would allow relevant stakeholders (e.g., companies, funding bodies, academic editors, and researchers) to quickly react to developments in the research landscape. Indeed, this research has been sponsored by Springer Nature.

The more general research question that drove Angelo’s thesis was on whether, and how, it is possible to detect the emergence of new research topics in their embryonic stage before it is consistently recognised by a research community.

The thesis answers this question by developing Augur, a framework for identifying the appearance of new topics at an embryonic stage. Specifically, Augur analyses networks of research topics, detects areas exhibiting a significant increase in the pace of collaboration, and produces clusters of topics correlated with the future emergence of new research areas. For instance, if available, before 2001, Augur would have allowed us to observe that previously less connected topics (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, World Wide Web and Knowledge-Based Systems) were increasingly collaborating with each other.

Angelo was supervised by Prof Enrico Motta and Dr Francesco Osborne. The exam panel was chaired by Dr Pallavi Anand from the Open University, and consisted of Prof Kalina Bontcheva from the University of Sheffield, and Prof Alun Preece from Cardiff University.

About his viva, Angelo says: “I am very grateful to the whole panel, they made me feel comfortable during the viva. Also, the examiners gave me interesting feedback. It was an interesting discussion indeed.”

We congratulate him once again for this success and we wish him all the best in his career.

References

Angelo A. Salatino, Francesco Osborne, and Enrico Motta. “AUGUR: Forecasting the Emergence of New Research Topics.” In JCDL ’18: The 18th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, June 3-7, 2018, Fort Worth, TX, USA
Angelo A. Salatino, Francesco Osborne, and Enrico Motta. “How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas.” PeerJ Computer Science 3 (2017): e119.
Angelo A. Salatino, and Enrico Motta. “Detection of Embryonic Research Topics by Analysing Semantic Topic Networks.” International Workshop on Semantic, Analytics, Visualization. Springer, Cham, 2016.
Angelo A. Salatino. “Early Detection and Forecasting of Research Trends.” ISWC-DC 2015, The ISWC 2015 Doctoral Consortium (2015): 49.

KMi’s CORE partners with Turnitin, a global leader in plagiarism detection software

Monday 03 Jun 2019 | KMi News

CORE, the world’s largest aggregator of open access scientific content and Turnitin, a global leader in plagiarism detection software, have entered into a collaboration. Using CORE’s FastSync service, Turnitin’s proprietary web crawler will search through CORE’s vast global database of open access content and metadata—135 million metadata records from over 3,700 data providers and counting—to check for text similarity.

“As the scholarly publishing industry evolves, Turnitin’s services must similarly adapt,” said Valerie Schreiner, Turnitin SVP Business and Corporate Development. “This partnership with CORE ensures that our database remains at the forefront of publishing trends and can continue to best serve the needs of our customers and partners.”

Access the Press Release here.

Related Links:

Press Release

Blockchain Travels

Friday 17 May 2019 | KMi News

The last few weeks has seen the KMi Director travel to give Keynotes, participate in panels and project meetings all related to KMi’s blockchain work. At the end of April there the Blockchain Expo took place at the Olympia Grand in London with over 8,000. John Domingue gave a Keynote on applying blockchains to lifelong learning. The event covered a wide range of areas with other presentations from a range of corporations including the Bank of England, DELL, Deloitte, EDF, KPMG, Legal and General, Lloyds Register, Maersk, NHS, Pfizer, Sainsbury’s and TNT also blockchain companies Consensys and Hyperledger.

Early May saw John give an invited talk to representatives of the Government of Flanders in Ghent on the Future of Educational Technology followed by a meeting in Lisbon for the EU funded project QualiChain where blockchain and Linked Data technologies are being combined as the basis for a European platform for digitally signed credentials.

In the middle of May John participated in a panel entitled Structuring Knowledge and Decisions – Is the Truth Out There? at the British Council hosted Going Global event held in Berlin which had over 1,000 attendees comprised of university senior management globally. His presentation, titled, Decentralising Truth at Universities covered blockchains, nano-publications, a global research engine and uber-universities.

Finally this week, as part of the Institute of Coding, has seen the KMi blockchain team host a visit from IBM to discuss collaboration on micro-accreditation and blockchains. The main outcome will be a co-development project combining the our blockchain infrastructure, customised decentralised data stores adapted from Sir Tim Berners Lee’s Solid platform and IBM’s self-sovereign and verifiable claims platform Hyperledger Indy based on the Sovrin framework.

A combination of general interest in blockchain technologies and a surge in local funding has seen KMi’s blockchain work grow rapidly in the last few months. In the next months the group will be supporting a range of summer schools locally, online and in Italy as well as releasing a new version of our blockchain badges plug-in for the OU’s Virtual Learning Environment.

Related Links:

Solid website

QualiChain meets in Lisbon

Wednesday 15 May 2019 | KMi News

The consortium of the QualiChain project has met in Lisbon, Portugal on May 9-10. This has been the first plenary face-to-face meeting of the project, after its kick-off meeting in January 2019. Representatives from all project partners spent two days discussing the latest project developments and planning their next activities. The next plenary face-to-face meeting will be held on September 19-20 in Madrid, Spain.

QualiChain targets the creation, piloting and evaluation of a decentralised platform for storing, sharing and verifying education and employment qualifications. The project focuses on the assessment of the potential of blockchain technology for disrupting the domain of public education, as well as its interfaces with private education, the labour market, public sector administrative procedures and the wider socio-economic developments.

KMi was represented in the meeting by John Domingue, Allan Third and Alexander Mikroyannidis. The KMi team is building upon its expertise from the Open Blockchain initiative to conduct a landscape analysis, implement Blockchain technology for storing and sharing education credentials and qualifications, integrate Semantic Blockchains in Ethereum, as well as conduct a pilot on lifelong learning. KMi is also in charge of shaping the overall dissemination strategy of the project.

KMi’s FOSTER eLearning platform mentioned in a Nature article about Open Science

Tuesday 14 May 2019 | KMi News

A Nature article titled “Data sharing and how it can benefit your scientific career”, which discusses the importance of opening up research data and how data sharing could benefit researchers, mentions the FOSTER Open Science eLearning Portal, developed in KMI.

The EU funded “Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research” (FOSTER) and its continuation project “Fostering the practical implementation of Open Science in Horizon 2020 and beyond” (FOSTER Plus) have established the FOSTER eLearning portal, which has been implemented in KMI. FOSTER offers more than 1,300 training resources, 45 courses (offered either self-paced or moderated) and five learning paths leading to specialisations in Open Science.

KMI’s Big Scientific Data and Text Analytics Group (BSDTAG) has participated in the two FOSTER projects. KMi fully developed and hosts the training technology and has also contributed to the creation of the training content and courses.

Related Links:

FOSTER portal

Nikos Story: Developing KMi PhD Research into a Commercial Product

Wednesday 24 Apr 2019 | KMi News

Nikolaos (“Nikos”) Nanas completed his PhD in Artificial Intelligence (AI) at KMi in 2004. His research focused on Adaptive Information Filtering and its application to content personalisation. Inspired by the biological immune system, he developed an AI model (that he called “Nootropia") capable of learning and continuously adapting to an individual’s multiple and evolving interests. In 2006, he returned to Greece, taking up a research position at the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) at Volos while also teaching Artificial Intelligence and Web Technologies at the University of Thessaly.

In 2011, Nikos became an entrepreneur and co-founded NOOWIT, a startup dedicated to the creation of intelligent online magazines able to adapt to the interests of each individual user. Utilizing Nootropia as NOOWIT’s AI core, Nikos and his colleagues devised a unique layout engine, able to adapt each page of the magazine to the personal interests of the individual reader.

In 2017, Nikolaos and his team were acquired by Atypon to apply their technologies and insights to the domain of academic publishing. Two years later they released a new product in private beta, SCITRUS. SCITRUS is a personalised publication aggregator that aims to help researchers and practitioners stay on top of developments in their fields of interest. SCITRUS aggregates all relevant publications and news and filters them according to the researcher’s specific interests to produce a personalised feed of academic content. Initial user studies have produced positive feedback and confirmed the value of this approach to content personalization.

From the initial creation of Nootropia, to the entrepreneurial leadership of NOOWIT, to the product development of SCITRUS, Nikos’ trajectory describes a great success story and a nice example of how leading-edge PhD research eventually gets deployed in commercial products.

If you are interested in trying SCITRUS, use the invitation link below to get access to the private beta.

https://www.scitrus.com/splash/?invitationToken=9568fde0-2617-11e9-aacc-ad37fd3cdebc

Excellence has been reached .. COMRADES great finale

Tuesday 23 Apr 2019 | KMi News

COMRADES project witnessed its final review at the European Commission in Brussels recently, bringing to an end the work of the project which started in January 2016. COMRADES is a €2 million European H2020 project, co-ordinated by Prof Harith Alani from KMi, and involves the University of Sheffield (UK), Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), Ushahidi network (Kenya), and Gov2U (Belgium).

COMRADES (Collective Platform for Community Resilience and Social Innovation during Crises) aims to empower communities with intelligent socio-technical solutions to help them reconnect, respond to, and recover from crisis situations. The project’s core innovations are built around the collection and processing of information related to crisis events, to raise people’s awareness through social-enabled platforms.

In the final review report, the project officer and reviewers acknowledged and praised the exceptional quality of the work and achievements of the project over its lifetime of three years. They wrote that “Excellency has been reached” and that “the project has largely overpassed the expected impact and exploitation plan”. In an acknowledgement of the role of Prof Harith Alani as the project Co-ordinator, the reviewers stated that the project’s success “would not have been possible without efficient and effective management during the 36 months of the project.”

Over the past three years, COMRADES produced several technologies, such as:

Ushahidi COMRADES platform: allows the gathering of information, incidents, and reports from people directly or via Twitter. The primary source code for the functionality of the platform is available on Github. Also available is the source code that fetches data from the services developed for COMRADES, such as YODIE, CREES, and EMINA.
CREES (Crisis Event Extraction Service): an advanced Artificial Intelligent method that identifies crisis events in social media streams. CREES is available as an integrated component in the COMRADES platform, but also as an API and as a Google Sheet plugin. CREES was designed and developed by Gregoire Burel; a Research Associate in KMi.
EMINA: and informativeness classifier for social media posts, to filter the deluge of data on social media and to selects which messages are more informative and which are more actionable.
YODIE: an antity finder for social media posts. The tool automatically identifies uncommon entities in given posts, to help digital responders and others to very quickly learn about the locations, organisations, and other entities mentioned in the post.
VERACITY: a veracity classifier for social media messages, which automatically calculate the probable veracity level of a given message.

The reviewers stated that “the use of these tools would most probably reduce the loss of life as well as environmental, material and economic losses.” In particular, they praised the use of the COMRADES technologies to monitor Kenya’s General Elections, and said that that “was a good opportunity to test the COMRADES platform because it was a good chance to see how the platform and all the tools included here work in a real-time situation.” In May 2018, COMRADES was featured at the European Commission portal as a success story.

COMRADES produced over 30 peer reviewed publications, targeting multiple fields and disciplines, such as Humanitarian Technology, Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Crisis Management. It has also produced 27 deliverables.

Several KMi researchers contributed to the work and success of COMRADES, including Lara Piccolo, Gregoire Burel, Miriam Fernandez, and Prashant Khare.

Related Links:

KMi researchers’ study quantifying the growing traction of Open Access featured in Physics Today

Thursday 18 Apr 2019 | KMi News

A study by Drahomira Herrmannova, Nancy Pontika, and Petr Knoth of KMI has been featured in Physics Today, the flagship publication of the American Institute of Physics (AIP). The study evaluated the time it took for academics to deposit some 800,000 papers in repositories in relation to when these papers got published. The bibliometric data for the study came from KMI’s CORE.

As the Physics Today article noted, the study found that while the time to deposit has been decreasing globally, the change has been particularly pronounced in the UK. In fact, since 2016, UK-based scientists have been posting their papers online more quickly than those in the other four nations with the highest number of papers in the dataset: the US, the Netherlands, Italy, and Switzerland. The REF 2021 Open Access Policy, which requires depositing papers within three months of their acceptance date, may have accelerated this trend in the UK.

According to the authors, the key message of the paper is that this observation supports the argument for the inclusion of a strictly time-limited deposit requirement in OA policies. The study has also found significant differences between deposit practices at different universities, suggesting that institutions play an important role in supporting Open Access.

The study will be presented at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Urbana-Champaign, IL, in June. The code and the dataset used in the study are available online.

Related Links:

Why does fact checking matter? @ImagineBelfast

Monday 15 Apr 2019 | KMi News

KMi was invited to present the Co-Infom project at the event "Why does fact checking matter?" which was organised by FactCheckNI as part of the Imagine! Festival in Belfast. The event focused on the importance of fact checking from the perspectives of fact checkers, data scientists, journalists, and academics.

The panellists in the event were Allan Leonard (Editor, FactCheckNI), Harith Alani (Professor of Web Sciences, Open University), Linda Keys (Data Scientist, NISRA), and Kathleen Carragher (former Head of Content, BBC NI).

Harith Alani, the Co-Inform PI from KMi, described how Co-Infom is addressing the gap between the work produced by the fact checking organisations, and the social media platforms where misinformation is circulating. He showed real examples of how misinforming articles, and their corresponding fact-check articles, are shared on Twitter, to highlight their different patterns and to demonstrate the need for socio-technical interventions.

Harith also demonstrated the Co-Inform MisinfoMe tool produced by the Co-Inform KMi team (developed by Martino Mensio), to help people raise their awareness of how they, their friends, and others, have been interacting with misinformation on social media, and how they compare to the average user.

An edited video of the event is available, which was created by Alan Meban (Chair, FactCheckNI Advisory Group).

Related Links:

CORE releases a new front-end

Tuesday 09 Apr 2019 | KMi News

We are very excited to announce that CORE has released a new front-end marking the end of Phase 1 of front-end improvements, which will continue with 2 more phases. The key highlights of the new UI are:

A more modern yet functional look and feel.
Support for mobile devices.
A new and better presentation of CORE’s mission and services.
Cross-browser support covering over 95% of CORE’s users.
Accessibility improvements.
Removal of single point of failure dependencies, taking full advantage of CORE’s high availability infrastructure.

But what is an end to one thing is a start to another. The objectives of Phase 2 are now:

Taking CORE’s search experience to a new level.
New functionalities for the online CORE Reader
Improvement to some existing static pages

Special thanks here to the everyone involved in this release: Viktor Yakubiv, Tom Davey, Matteo Cancellieri, Balviar Notay, Samuel Pearce, Sergei Misak, Svetlana Rumyanceva, Nancy Pontika and Petr Knoth.

Related Links:

CORE – The worlds largest collection of open access research papers

KMI Director awarded Fellowship of the British Blockchain Association

Friday 15 Mar 2019 | KMi News

Earlier this week the KMi Director, John Domingue, was awarded a Fellowship of the British Blockchain Association.

As stated on the British Blockchain Association website an award of the Fellowship is “recognition of exceptional achievement and contribution to Blockchain research and allied disciplines”. Additionally, recognition through a Fellowship demonstrates a “commitment to excellence, leadership, advancing standards and best practice, as evidenced by a track record of outstanding contribution to the discipline of Blockchain or other Distributed Ledger Technologies”.

Amongst the eligibility criteria for being elected Fellow were the following:

Proven track record of excellence, leadership, advancing standards and best practice, evidenced by an outstanding contribution to the society
Set up and established a service, product or an institution that has made an outstanding contribution in the field of Blockchain
A recognised and respected thought leader and influencer in the field of Blockchain
Internationally renowned educator, author, scholar or mentor in the domain of blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies
Provide evidence of a sustained and effective record of impact at a strategic level in relation to supporting blockchain research (Evidence Based Blockchain), as part of a wider commitment to Scholars in Blockchain.

The award, which recognises the hard work of the whole KMi blockchain team, was presented at the annual British Blockchain Association conference which was held at the ExCel in London.

Related Links:

Fellowship description at the British Blockchain Association

Gatekeeper Project will help support Healthy Ageing in MK

Thursday 14 Mar 2019 | KMi News

KMi are part of a 40 partner EU project that has just be given the go ahead as part of the EU Horizon2020 research funding programme. The main objective of the Project is to create a GATEKEEPER that connects healthcare providers, businesses, entrepreneurs, elderly citizens and the communities they live in, in order to originate an open, trust-based arena for matching ideas, technologies, user needs and processes, aimed at ensuring healthier independent lives for the ageing populations. The KMi Team, led by Professor Enrico Motta, will investigate the role of robots in the developing landscape of healthcare support. Specifically, the team will test the feasibility and appropriateness of in-home robots and community robots that can provide citizens with healthcare support and information and well as a direct link to healthcare professionals. The team will build test scenarios in Milton Keynes that provide valuable insight into the role of robots. This project is part of the broader KMi research programme in Robots and Smart Cities, which is described at https://isds.kmi.open.ac.uk/smart-cities-and-robotics/.

Human-computer collaborative learning in citizen science

Friday 08 Mar 2019 | KMi News

We are delighted to announce new research funding from the EPSRC to explore the potential for collaborative learning between humans and AI within the framework of environmental citizen science. A new collaboration between KMi (Siddharthan and Rüger) and STEM Deanery / EEES (Ansine), in partnership with Imperial College London, University of Aberdeen, Learning Through Landscapes and St Alban’s Primary School, Havant, has been awarded just under £500,000 under the EPSRC’s call for Digital Economy Investigator-led Research Projects.

Our research is on developing a new citizen science paradigm that facilitates science practice and learning through collaboration between citizens and Artificial Intelligence. For naturalists, the honing of identification skills is a key motivator of the recording activity. The introduction of technology (e.g. image recognition for species identification) risks de-skilling citizens by replacing human intelligence with machine intelligence. We will instead design systems that provide opportunities for learning for both citizens and machines, and co-create technology to ensure that it responds to citizen motivations. Over the next three years, we will study this learning interplay with respect to collaborative species identification, and will also explore technologies that foster wider science learning, environmental consciousness and data literacy through better communication of complex citizen science data.

Our proposed work programme seeks to bring about quantifiable benefits to (a) science, e.g., through the production of new knowledge and through monitoring key scientific processes at challenging temporal-spatial scales; (b) diverse stakeholders including the citizens themselves, e.g., through meaningful science learning in formal and informal education contexts; and (c) wider society, e.g., through better societal understanding of current sustainability issues, leading to individual and societal action in support of the environment.

KMi at first Japanese Government Run Blockchain Hackathon

Monday 04 Mar 2019 | KMi News

KMi was invited to give a presentation and run a workshop at the first Japanese Government run blockchain hackathon which happened in February in Tokyo.

It was sponsored by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and tickets where by application only and limited due to the venue size. There were about 98 participants in the event and 22 teams entered the Hackathon competition.

It ran over two weekends and was extremely well organised and managed by Recruit. The, first Saturday had the main presentations as well as workshops on Ethereum Solidity programming and Hyperledger Fabric.

(Youngrok Kim, Senior Vice President from Recruit Strategic Partners, presenting the Hackathon schedule – kind permission given to use this photo – Copyright the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University)

There were 12 external speakers presenting at the Hackathon. Eight where Japanese and four where from outside Japan. Of those from outside Japan, three attended in person and one presented remotely. There was myself from KMi talking about our Open Blockchain experiments in Education.

(Michelle Bachler presenting OpenBlockchain research – copyright The Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University)

It was a novel experience working with a translator as I presented, and took some of the focus off me, which was wonderful!

Professor Soulla Louca from the University of Nicosia gave a presentation about ‘Digital Certificates for Academic and professional history’. The university of Nicosia were the first University to offer a Cryptocurrency course and later the first to offer a Digital Currency Degree. They were also the first to write academic certificates to the Blockchain back in 2014, using Bitcoin and Merkle tree root hashes for issuing batches of certificates in a cost efficient but verifiable way. More information about their blockchain based certificate system can be found on their GitHub page.

(Professor Soulla Louca from the University of Nicosia – kind permission given to use this photo – copyright The Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University

Denise Parfenov from Data Management Hub and Open Knowledge Ireland gave an interesting presentation about ‘Data, Policies and Algorithms’. The Data Management Hub (DaMaHub) believe distributed web technologies are well suited ‘to meeting the challenges of creating a network infrastructure which natively supports research data which is findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable’ (FAIR). You can find out more about their aims and vision from their website and their GitHub page.

Denis ParParfenov from Data Management Hub presenting
(Denis Parfenov from Data Management Hub – kind permission given to use this photo – copyright The Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University)

There was also a remote presentation on the second Saturday from Dr Sönke Bartling, Founder of Blockchain for Science, who talked about ‘Blockchain and Cryptoeconomy for Science’.

There where also eight Japanese speaking presentations over the course of the Hackathon. One was from the OpenID Foundation, Japan and one from the NEM Foundation. NEM, I discovered, is a popular blockchain service provider in Japan and was used by several of the Hackathon teams for their competition entries.
There was also what looked like a very interesting presentation from the BlockBase CEO, Taiju Sanagi about Blockchain based Identity systems and ERC725. Taiju Sanagi is also a member of the ERC-725 Alliance. It did make me wish I could speak Japanese, which happened a lot of the time I was at the event.

(Sanagi Taiju, CEO BlockBase Inc.- kind permission given to use this photo – copyright The Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University)

Open Blockchain workshop badge image On the second Saturday, I gave a second presentation and a follow-on workshop on putting certificates on the Blockchain, This was a more technical talk and gave an overview of the landscape of certificates on the blockchain and our research in it. It then gave the attendees a chance to get hands-on and try creating some badges and putting them on our blockchain in various ways, for themselves. We created three separate Open Badges for them to earn while completing the workshop tasks.

About 20 people attended, which I thought was quite good considering most were manically hacking away downstairs working on the final coding of their entries for the competition, which were being judged the following day.

(Some of the Hackathon teams working away – copyright The Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University)

The workshop seemed to go down well though. Several people came to talk to me about it. I just want to thank Kevin Quick and Jon Linney for all their help preparing the workshop website.

The final day of the Hackathon saw the Judging. Somehow during the morning, the teams where whittled down from 22 to 12. The final 12 teams then presented their projects in the afternoon for Judging. There was a panel of 12 Judges with members from tech, industry and education. The jury President was Masanori Kusunoki the CTO of Japan Digital Design.

LONGHASH logo Unfortunately, taking photos of the presentations was not permitted, and they were all given in Japanese. However, luckily for Denis and I, Chris DAI, the CEO of LONGHASH Japan, who were one of the organizers for the event, was able to sit with us through some of the presentations and give us an idea of what was going on. Otherwise we would have been totally lost. Thank you, Chris, for the translation and for your company providing cool LONGHASH stickers, one of which is now on my laptop!

After the presentations came the awards. There were official awards in various categories as well as some separate unofficial prizes from individual judges. BlockBase, who I mentioned before, entered one of the teams called DigiD. They worked in collaboration with Digital Hollywood University for the Hackathon and created a system that collectively manages a portfolio of degrees and enrolments. They won 3 awards / judges prizes in the end, including the Industrial Technology and Environment Bureau Award.

DigiD Winning team
(DigiD Team – Copyright Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan – press release)

You can see more details about the winners on the official Ministry press release page. After the Awards were given out there was a small post Hackathon Pizza party.

After party
(General shot of the party. Copyright, The Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University)

Most of the developers had worked through the night finishing their entries and where tired by this stage. So, it was a subdued gathering, with a bit of networking. I did exchange a lot of business cards and very much enjoyed not shaking hands with anyone, but just bowing slightly and smiling widely.

Because I was there for a week, I got a chance, in between preparing for the workshop, to see some of Tokyo.

(The East Gardens of the Imperial Palace, Tokyo. Copyright Michelle Bachler)

I visited many of the gardens in Tokyo, over the week. Navigating around on the train system was really easy. Transport was always on time and everywhere was so clean. There were also hardly any cars in the city, so somehow it was quieter than I would have expected a capital city to be.

Like the locals, I became a little obsessed with taking pictures of the early cherry blossom that had just started to come out on a few trees in the parks. You could tell from the number of trees in bud that in a few weeks it would be a breath-taking spectacle.

Cherry Blossom in Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden
(Cherry blossom, Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, Tokyo. Copyright Michelle Bachler)

I became more confident with the transport as the week progressed, so on the Friday I thought I would take a longer train ride out of the city and I visited the coastal town of Kamakura. It had been the political centre of medieval Japan and it has dozens of Buddist Zen temples and Shinto shrines.

Unfortunately, the day I picked for my trip out of the city, there was quite heavy snow all morning and into the afternoon. Luckily, I had packed my duvet coat, so it was fine. I also found the snow falling at the temples beautiful to watch. It made the whole experience more magical and slightly surreal.

I managed to fit in 5 temples on my day out and have tea in tea houses at two of them. I took loads of pictures and here are just a few of my favourites to get a flavour:

Green Tea, at Jomyoji Zen Temple tea house
(Tea at Jomyoji Zen Temple tea house, watching the snow falling. Copyright Michelle Bachler)

Green Tea at Jomyoji Zen Temple tea house
(Tea at Hokokuji Temple tea house, contemplating the bamboo forest. Copyright Michelle Bachler)

(Heavy snow at Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gū Shinto Shrine. Copyright Michelle Bachler)

(Great Buddha at Kōtoku-in Buddist Temple. Copyright Michelle Bachler)

(Hasendera Buddist Temple. Copyright Michelle Bachler)

All, in all, it was a fabulous week and left me feeling like I had hardly scratched the surface of this magical country. I will be back!

SlideWiki concludes with a rich legacy

Thursday 28 Feb 2019 | KMi News

The SlideWiki project has been formally concluded with its final review, which was held on February 27 in Hannover, Germany. The project has developed an open-source platform for collaborative authoring of educational content, where the effort of the creation, translation and evolution of highly-structured remixable content can be widely shared and crowdsourced. Similarly to Wikipedia for encyclopaedic content, SlideWiki allows to collaboratively create comprehensive learning materials (curricula, slide presentations, self-assessment tests, illustrations etc.) in a crowdsourcing manner.

KMi has played a key role in the project, leading two work packages. Allan Third has led WP5, which concerned the integration of the SlideWiki platform with major educational platforms, including Learning Managements Systems such as Moodle. Alexander Mikroyannidis has been in charge of WP9, coordinating the piloting and evaluation of the SlideWiki platform within the open education community. Both work packages have been instrumental in the success of the project and have contributed to its rich legacy.

Red kites writing their own blogs – Find out how!

Wednesday 27 Feb 2019 | KMi News

Our latest Blogging birds paper has just been published in the Communications of the ACM. Blogging birds is a novel artificial intelligence program that generates creative texts to communicate telemetric data derived from satellite tags fitted to red kites — a medium-size bird of prey — as part of a species reintroduction program in the U.K. We address the challenge of communicating telemetric sensor data in real time by enriching it with meteorological and cartographic data, codifying ecological knowledge to allow creative interpretation of the behaviour of individual birds in respect to such enriched data, and dynamically generating informative and engaging data-driven blogs aimed at the general public. To find out more, read the paper below or watch the video above…

Blogging Birds: Telling Informative Stories About the Lives of Birds from Telemetric Data (2018).
Advaith Siddharthan, Kapila Ponnamperuma, Chris Mellish, Chen Zeng, Daniel Heptinstall, Annie Robinson, Stuart Benn, and Rene van Der Wal.
Communications of the ACM, 62 (3) 68-77.

CORE hits 10 million monthly active users mark making CORE a top 6k website globally by usage

Friday 22 Feb 2019 | KMi News

CORE usage has increased dramatically in 2018 and has hit the 10 million monthly active users mark in January 2019 (10.41 million users). This is a 571% increase of users compared to January 2018.

As of January 2019, CORE was the 5,448th most used website globally according to an independent Alexa Rank. This rank is calculated from a combination of daily visitors and page views on a website over a 3 month period.

To put this into perspective, at the time of writing this document, the rank indicates that CORE has significantly more users than Futurelearn (rank 6,083), The Open University (rank 8,849), British Library (rank 12,702), Jisc (rank 75,663) and many other significant organisations.

Related Links:

Alexa Global Rank for CORE

A successful conclusion for HUB4NGI

Wednesday 20 Feb 2019 | KMi News

Last week saw the final review of the HUB4NGI project in Brussels. Starting in January 2017, HUB4NGI was the first Coordination and Support Action dedicated to transforming the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative into an increasingly dynamic, collaborative, vibrant and participatory Research and Innovation Ecosystem. HUB4NGI has offered a collaborative platform capable of effectively supporting and coordinating activities across the whole NGI context by combining knowledge, tools and processes to reach and engaging top-notch Internet researchers and innovators.

The final review of the project was a success, with the reviewers and the project officer praising the overall efforts and various outcomes of the project. KMi was represented by Alexander Mikroyannidis, who presented the work associated with dissemination and community building. KMi has played a key role in the project, leading the work package for dissemination and community building and in charge of developing the NGI map, an open online repository of NGI actors and initiatives.

PT Anywhere and the Open Networking Lab make news

Friday 15 Feb 2019 | KMi News

The latest OU STEM newsletter features the collaboration of the Open Networking Lab with the Watford college. The Open Networking Lab makes available introductory practical computer networking skills training, in order to service the needs of vocational learners (Further Education and Apprenticeship levels), educators, and industry. PT Anywhere is the underlying technology the project uses to teach networking concepts. The KMi team consisting of Alexander Mikroyannidis, Chris Sanders and Allan Third are in charge of developing this technology in collaboration with the Cisco Networking Academy, which has over 1 million students worldwide.

A core feature of the project is collaboration with schools, colleges and UTCs (University Technology Colleges) who all work in the post sixteen sector. The project has been working with post sixteen BTEC students at the Watford UTC and testing the content as well as using it to underpin the teaching of the BTEC national qualification. Apart from online badges, students also received statements of participation as part of their study and progression portfolio. The project will continue working with colleges and will deliver a Badged Open Course available to the public via the OpenLearn platform.

Jakub Wins the Rubik Cube Challenge

Tuesday 12 Feb 2019 | KMi News

The Open University social media team organised a light-hearted Rubik’s Cube solving competition for the occasion of Brainteaser month in January.

The competitors were Jakub Kocvara from the Knowledge Media Institute, representing computer science field and Dr. Robert Brignall, Senior Lecturer and the Director of Research in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, representing mathematicians everywhere.

Jakub won the competition, and together with Robert they narrated a short instructional video, giving pointers for solving the Rubik Cube challenge. You can watch these videos on Twitter under "Related Links":

Related Links:

https://twitter.com/OpenUniversity/status/1083302618275950592

QualiChain kicks-off!

Tuesday 29 Jan 2019 | KMi News

The new H2020 project QualiChain has had its kick-off meeting on January 22-23, hosted by the coordinator partner NTUA in Athens, Greece. QualiChain targets the creation, piloting and evaluation of a decentralised platform for storing, sharing and verifying education and employment qualifications. The project focuses on the assessment of the potential of blockchain technology for disrupting the domain of public education, as well as its interfaces with private education, the labour market, public sector administrative procedures and the wider socio-economic developments.

KMi was represented in the meeting by John Domingue, Allan Third and Alexander Mikroyannidis. The KMi team will play a key role in the project, leading a core work package and several tasks. The KMi team will build upon its expertise from the Open Blockchain initiative to conduct a Landscape Analysis, implement Blockchain technology for storing and sharing education credentials and qualifications, integrate Semantic Blockchains in Ethereum, as well as conduct a pilot for verifying academic qualifications across institutions. KMi is also in charge of shaping the overall dissemination strategy of the project.

We expect many great things from this project, so stay tuned!

Related Links:

A new doctor in the house!

Tuesday 22 Jan 2019 | KMi News

Congratulations on Trung Huynh’s viva success!

Last Friday, Trung Huynh successfully defended his PhD thesis Text Classification With Deep Neural Networks. The thesis is a body of research work over the last six years culminating in a successful system that identifies documents pertaining to Adverse Drug Reactions in corpora as diverse as tweets and MEDLINE case reports. The work in the thesis has the potential to considerably widen the the net of post-market drug safety monitoring with obvious health benefits for everyone.

The more general research question that drove Trung’s thesis was how to learn better language representations efficiently from unlabelled corpora.

The thesis ultimately answers this question by utilising deep neural networks for various unsupervised learning tasks. Trung studied for a PhD part-time while he was employed full-time, most recently as a software engineer at Google, London, from 2015.

Trung was examined by Prof Udo Kruschwitz, University of Essex, and Dr Advaith Siddharthan, OU, and supervised by Prof Stefan Rueger and Dr Alistair Willis, OU, and Prof Yulan He, University of Warwick.

Related Links:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/yulan_he/

The Open University and Springer Nature launch the Computer Science Ontology

Thursday 10 Jan 2019 | KMi News

Springer Nature and the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) of The Open University are partnering to provide a comprehensive Computer Science Ontology (CSO) to a broad range of communities engaged with scholarly data. CSO can be accessed free of charge through the CSO Portal, a web application that enables users to download, explore, and provide feedback on the ontology.

Ontologies of research areas are important tools for characterizing, exploring, and analyzing the research landscape. The current version of CSO contains information about 14,000 research topics and was automatically generated by means of the specialized data mining technologies developed by the SKM3 team at the Knowledge Media Institute. It covers hierarchical relationship between topics, whether a topic contributes to another one, and whether two topics are equivalent. About 60% of its topics are linked to equivalent concepts in DBpedia.

This resource presents several advantages over alternative taxonomies: it is produced entirely automatically and therefore can be regularly updated with little effort; it is generated from a very large corpus of publications in computer science; and it provides a fine-grained characterization of this field of study. Indeed, this CSO is about an order of magnitude larger than other current characterizations of this field.

The CSO currently supports a variety of tools and research prototypes for classifying and recommending research publications, making sense of research dynamics, modelling the evolution of research communities, and forecasting research trends.

Aliaksandr Birukou, Executive Editor Computer Science at Springer Nature, said: "It is great to see this joint project live and publicly available to everybody. Consistent content classification as a key challenge is addressed by machine-driven and repeatable ontology generation, and embedded in our metadata workflows. The use of CSO within Springer Nature has helped us to improve the discovery of relevant content. However, its potential is well beyond the current use cases, as it could be successfully applied, for example, in finding reviewers, transferring submissions between journals and conferences, and many more situations.”

Enrico Motta, Professor of Knowledge Technologies at KMi said: “We are delighted to partner with Springer Nature and make CSO freely available to the wider community. Our collaboration has been very successful and provided us with a number of concrete R&D challenges, which have both stimulated new fundamental research in scholarly analytics and also led to the development and deployment of new concrete solutions to support editorial processes at Springer Nature. This public release of CSO is a key milestone in this successful partnership and I very much look forward both to continuing our collaboration with Springer Nature and also opening up new initiatives with other interested parties who wish to work with us in progressing the R&D agenda in scholarly analytics.”

RefResh workshop at EuroCSS symposium

Monday 07 Jan 2019 | KMi News

The 2nd European Computational Social Science symposium held in Cologne, Germany hosted the 1st workshop on Reframing Research (RefResh) organised by the KMiers Dr. Mannocci and Dr. Osborne and Dr. Manghi from ISTI, CNR, Italy.

The main objective of RefResh was to bring together researchers from both quantitative and qualitative studies, practitioners and policy-makers working in the field of academic research, scholarly communication and knowledge production in order to reframe research in relation to the underlying socioeconomic and geopolitical canvas and foster an analysis of research as complex system that influences and is influenced by society, economics, culture, and politics.

The workshop was a success; 23 registered participants from all over the world attended the full day event consisting of 1 keynote, 9 talks, 1 poster talk and a roundtable at the end. Participation was high and interesting discussions stemmed from each presentation.

Contextually, Dr. Mannocci presented a poster titled “Geographic trends in academic conferences: closed clubs or open houses?” that gained interest during the main symposium poster session and was awarded an honourable mention by the public.

KMi at SlideWiki info day in Greece

Monday 17 Dec 2018 | KMi News

The SlideWiki project delivered an info day about “Open and Collaborative Tools and Open Courses”, which took place on December 15th in Athens, Greece. The info day was organised by the National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government (EKDDA) and the Greek Ministry of Education. The event was attended by more than 100 trainers from higher, secondary and primary education, in addition to EKDDA’s trainers and other public officers. Attendees came from different organisations, several administrative levels and from various regions of Greece.

KMi was represented by Alexander Mikroyannidis, who delivered a talk about the lessons learned from using SlideWiki in different open education case studies. In particular, Alexander presented the pilots of the SlideWiki platform that have been conducted by the Open University, as well as by external partners subcontracted by the Open University. Alexander showcased the methodology, results and lessons learned from these pilots, focusing on the challenges faced by the open education community and how the SlideWiki platform addresses these challenges.

COMRADES at ICT2018

Monday 17 Dec 2018 | KMi News

COMRADES team organised a 3 day exhibition at ICT 2018 in Vienna, to showcase the various technologies developed in H2020 COMRADES project. More than 5000 people attended the event this year, so the COMRADES booth was super busy! Visitors to the booth were able to see and use a crisis mapping platform that was powered with AI technologies to automatically filter, categorise, and verify crisis information shared on Twitter.

Prof Alani also presented COMRADES at a session organised by Nesta on "Tech for everyone, by everyone: citizen-centred digital innovation for good". The presentation showed the innovation of COMRADES which brought the latest AI techniques to the field of crisis information processing and management.

Related Links:

Dr Greetham goes to Westminster

Wednesday 12 Dec 2018 | KMi News

Danica Greetham, KMI’s Senior Research Fellow went to the House of Lords on the 11th December 2018 on the invitation of Environmental Defense Fund Europe, to participate at the roundtable on the electrification of transport and the electricity sector. The meeting was chaired by Baroness Worthington and attended by representatives of several of the big 6 energy distribution network operator, new suppliers Ecotricity, Octopus Energy, Nissan, Tesla, Energy Saving Trust, Centrica, Element Energy, e-Mobility, UK Car Park Management among others.

The aim was to identify any barriers to a much faster uptake of electric vehicles that can be tackled by the Government, and inform policies, as well as to recommend areas for prioritised investment. It was noted that while in the UK currently demand for electric vehicles is greater than supply, current tax on electric vehicles as company cars and lack of aggresive investment strategy for batteries means that the most of motor industry uses this demand to sell more petrol and diesel cars. One way to counter that would be to mandate that a certain percentage of total sales for any manufacturer has to be electric.

Several recommendations for future policies were given: related to reinforcement network needs, one of a particular interest for KMi is that the managed charging should be opt-out (instead of opt-in) allowing for smart algorithms to be used to reduce peak loads. A tax credit on energy bundles (an electric vehicle with renewables, time of use tariffs and vehicle to grid technology) for small and medium enterprises was proposed by Dr Greetham as an incentive that would help accelerate the uptake of EVs. This meeting just confirmed that the need for smart algorithms for efficient energy management is growing and this is an area to watch.

KMi support Universities in Wales for Vietnam Collaboration

Thursday 06 Dec 2018 | KMi News

KMi’s Alan Fletcher was asked by Universities in Wales to provide a presentation and workshop for a delegation of Vietnamese Universities visiting The University of South Wales in Cardiff this week. The delegation had asked to learn more about the development of the smart city movement in the UK and in particular the work done by the OU in Milton Keynes and Cardiff.

Universities Wales runs the Global Wales project, a partnership between Universities Wales, Welsh Government, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) and British Council Wales. Since its inception, Global Wales has successfully facilitated the collaboration of partner organisations to support the international higher education agenda in Wales. Vietnam has been a priority country for Global Wales since the outset.

On 29 October 2018 the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training and the Welsh Cabinet Secretary for Education signed a Letter of Intent for educational cooperation between both countries. The focus will be on increasing staff and student mobility between Vietnam and Wales, collaborating on mutually beneficial research, and policy dialogue and the exchange of best practice. An agreement was also signed with the FCO in Vietnam to bring up to 10 Vietnamese Chevening scholars to Wales per year.

KMi and SlideWiki at ICERI 2018

Wednesday 21 Nov 2018 | KMi News

The 11th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI) took place on November 12-14 in the beautiful city of Seville in Spain. This year, more than 700 participants from 75 different countries attended the conference. This was a unique occasion to meet new and old colleagues and share experiences on the conference motto: Meeting the challenges of 21st century learning.

Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi and the SlideWiki project by presenting a paper about the lessons learned from the use of the SlideWiki platform in different learning contexts. The SlideWiki platform is fostering open education by supporting the collaborative authoring, sharing, reusing and remixing of open educational content online. This paper presents the lessons learned from piloting the SlideWiki platform in different learning contexts and scenarios. The paper was co-authored by the partners subcontracted by the Open University to conduct pilots within their respective organisations, as part of the community outreach initiative of the SlideWiki project. This initiative has offered opportunities to extend the user base of the SlideWiki platform and gather valuable feedback from different communities of learners and educators about their open education needs.

The pre-print of the paper is available here.

SlideWiki final plenary meeting and final platform release

Friday 09 Nov 2018 | KMi News

The final plenary meeting of the SlideWiki project took place on November 7-8 in Amsterdam, hosted by project partner Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The meeting saw the conclusion of the project’s activities, the preparations for the project’s final review, as well as the final release of the project’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) platform. The SlideWiki platform is fostering open education by supporting the collaborative authoring, sharing, reusing and remixing of OCW. Its final release brings several new features and improvements to the platform, especially impacting its usability and accessibility.

Allan Third and Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi in the plenary meeting as leaders of two work packages (WP5 and WP9 respectively). WP5 concerns the integration of the SlideWiki platform with major educational platforms, including Learning Managements Systems such as Moodle. WP9 coordinates the piloting and evaluation of the SlideWiki platform within the open education community. Both work packages have been concluded successfully and will be reporting their latest activities in deliverables due at the end of the project.

Paul attended the Gartner Symposium/IPxpo 2018 in Orlando, Florida

Thursday 08 Nov 2018 | KMi News

KMi’s Senior Technology Officer Paul Alexander recently attended the Gartner Symposium/IPxpo 2018 in Orlando, Florida during the period of 14-18 October 2018. The conference is held annually and allows thousands of CIOs and senior IT executives to come together to explore and discuss strategic trends and technologies that are shaping the future of IT and business. These included data & analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, culture, customer experience, cybersecurity and many more.

While in Orlando, Paul was also invited to sit as a member of a Client Advisory Board for Park Place Technologies who have been a strategic supplier to KMi for many years. The aim of the advisory board is to understand and inform on trends and future technologies and how the industry will shape in the years to come. As part of the Client Advisory Board, Paul led an IoT (Internet of Things) discussion and presented some use cases where KMi has combined its research of Blockchain and IoT technologies.

In addition to the above, multiple networking opportunities arose, as well as the opportunity to attend some key sessions at the Gartner Symposium and bring back plenty of new ideas and innovations for Paul’s teams in KMi to digest.

The OpenLang Network has kicked off!

Friday 02 Nov 2018 | KMi News

The kick-off meeting of the new Erasmus+ project OpenLang Network took place on October 29-30 in the beautiful city of Thessaloniki. The project is led by the University of Macedonia (Greece) and the project consortium consists of The Open University (UK), Cyprus University of Technology (Cyprus), and Pixel (Italy). The project will build a network among all Erasmus+ KA1 Mobility Participants within an open and highly interactive online environment for supporting more efficiently their effort to develop their language skills of the target mobility EU languages. Additionally, it will support their cultural understanding and integration in the host EU country, as well as their success in their specific subject field of study and/or work.

Alexander Mikroyannidis is the Open University’s PI in this project and joined the kick-off meeting in order to present the work to be undertaken by the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi). More specifically, the KMi team will be building on its extensive Technology-Enhanced Learning expertise for developing the online platform that will be supporting networking and language learning via Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This is a key output for the project as a whole, as it will offer the technological foundations for the success and sustainability of the project’s language learning network.

KMi at ISWC2018

Monday 22 Oct 2018 | KMi News

Every year the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the main destination for many researchers in the Semantic Web community. The 17th edition of the conference was held last week at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Monterey, California, and it hosted around 500 researchers coming from all around the world.

Many KMiers including John Domingue, Harith Alani, Miriam Fernandez, Francesco Osborne, Andrea Mannocci, Angelo Salatino, Prashant Khare, Thiviyan Thanapalasingam, and Zeeshan Jan took part in the conference this year.

Harith co-authored a research track and a workshop paper. Also, Harith chaired the Entitiy Recognition and Linking session that saw some really interesting works in the research and resource track of the conference. Miriam presented a paper “Contextual Semantics for Radicalisation Detection on Twitter” at the Semantic Web for Social Good workshop. Miriam was also involved in the Ada Lovelace Day Celebration, in which saw more than 135 attendees. This event is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). In particular, it aims to increase the profile of women in STEM and, in doing so, create new role models who will encourage more girls into STEM careers and support women already working in STEM. In her role as panelist, Miriam was discussing Athena Swan, the initiative she is currently leading within the KMi.

Miriam gave a brief talk about her involvement in the Athena Swan work at KMi

In the Research track, Francesco and Prashant presented their respective works. Francesco presented “Pragmatic Ontology Evolution: Reconciling User Requirements and Application Performance”. While, Prashant presented “Cross-Lingual Classification of Crisis Data”. In the Resource track, Angelo presented “The Computer Science Ontology: A Large-Scale Taxonomy of Research Areas”. In the In-Use track, Thiviyan presented “Ontology-Based Recommendation of Editorial Products”. Zeeshan presented his work “Recognition and Reward System for Peer-Reviewers” at the Doctoral Consortium. All of these works were well received by the community and there was a generous follow up by the interested researchers on many of the papers presented by the KMiers.

Beside presenting their work, KMi members participated in other conference activities. Andrea, an exceptional electric guitarist and member of the Knowledge Media Instruments, took part in the legendary Jam session. Prior to the conference, Thiviyan completed the 98-mile ISWC bike ride challenge, which started from Santa Teresa County Park, San Jose, and finished at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Monterey.

The performance at the Jam session was very eventful

The conference dinner was organised at the well-known Monterey Bay Aquarium. The attendees had a good time enjoying the amazing sights of the sea-life. The dinner was followed by music and dance.

The next edition of ISWC will be held in the beautiful Auckland (NZ). We all look forward to meeting again this large community next year.

KMi hosts first misinformation workshop for the OU

Monday 15 Oct 2018 | KMi News

On October 4th, 2018 KMi hosted the first Misinformation Workshop for OU researchers working on the topic of mis/dis/information, education and information literacy. As part of our participation in Co-Inform, a European-funded project to create misinformation resilient societies (https://coinform.eu/ ), we hope to draw from interdisciplinary research conducted at our own institution to help understand how we define mis/dis/information, how we identify the major challenges associated with it and what we are doing about it in our respective fields of research.

16 academics from Psychology, the Business School, the Library, the Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership, Linguistics, Computing and KMi took part in the full-day workshop. The morning was spent reviewing research from the perspectives of understanding behaviour, improving information literacy, reviewing technological contributions, and engaging with the wider social implications. A reflection session in the afternoon explored the participants’ collective ideas about future technological solutions, the role of education and training, and our expectations around social impact. We will continue our work, exploring joint spaces for collaboration and exchanging knowledge within this group.

We welcome any other contributors who are working on the topic of misinformation at the OU. Please contact Harith Alani for more information at h.alani@open.ac.uk. You can also follow the Co-Inform project on Twitter: @Co_Inform

KMi Blockchain research showcased at the IEEE FIE 2018

Thursday 11 Oct 2018 | KMi News

The 48th IEEE Frontiers in Education (FIE) conference took place on October 3-6 in San Jose, California, USA. FIE is a major international conference sponsored by the IEEE Education Society and the IEEE Computer Society. It is an ideal forum for sharing ideas, learning about the latest developments and interacting with colleagues in the fields of engineering and computing education. FIE 2018 has continued a long tradition of disseminating results and educational innovations in engineering and computing education. The theme for 2018 has been Fostering Innovation Through Diversity. In addition to the traditional FIE topics, submissions targeted the thematic tracks of: diversity/equity/inclusion in engineering/computing, encouraging and teaching innovation, innovation in software engineering education, upward mobility, and more.

Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi and presented 2 research papers. The first one showcases KMi’s latest Blockchain work and specifically its applications on Smart Blockchain Badges. The paper investigates how Smart Blockchain Badges can support learners that want to advance their careers in data science, by offering them personalised recommendations based on their learning achievements. This work aims at enhancing data science accreditation by introducing a robust system based on the Blockchain technology.

The second paper describes the work conducted so far in the context of the Open Networking Lab, a joint project between KMi and the OU’s Computing department. The Open Networking Lab is supporting hands-on vocational learning in computer networking, through the provision of the PT Anywhere network simulator integrated into learning resources and activities. These learning resources are currently being evaluated by students and lecturers from a cluster of Further Education colleges in the UK and will subsequently be made available to learners worldwide via free and open courseware.

Both papers are available in ORO (see links below).

Related Links:

CORE partners with Naver, South Korea’s No 1 search engine

Tuesday 09 Oct 2018 | KMi News

CORE, the world’s largest aggregator of open access scientific content, and Naver, South Korea’s number one search solution, have entered into a collaboration that will see CORE’s content being made available to 42 millions Naver users. As part of the collaboration, Naver ingests data collected by CORE to enrich its Naver Academic search system with millions of open access papers. The aim of both services is to provide free access to scientific publications and make the experience seamless.

Related Links:

Read more on the Jisc website

Knowledge Makers v5.0 Raspberry Research Special Edition.

Wednesday 03 Oct 2018 | KMi News

The Knowledge Makers recently took over the Berrill Theatre and Mezzanine for their fifth, and rather special event. Over 100 attendees from across all faculties took part on the day and joining them were two guests from The Raspberry Pi Foundation; Philip Colligan, CEO and Dr. Sue Sentance, Chief Learning Officer.

The event kicked off with a ‘Raspberry Research’ showcase where OU researchers displayed their current research or teaching projects that are using Raspberry Pi. Eleven teams showed off incredible variety of use-cases for the single board computer. KMi demonstrated a strong presence with their OpenBlockchain and GreenData project teams, ably represented by Michelle Bachler and Chris Valentine, attracting a good deal of attention from the attendees. The KMi SciRoc team brought along some of their recent developments in working towards bringing robots to smart cities. Other researchers from across the OU were also in attendance, notably from the OpenSTEM labs who showed off their incredible Mars Rover, the MAZIZONE team who brought a range of interactive and engaging displays. Teams from STEM also took part with projects from healthcare (STRETCH) to networking, with the ‘Network in a Box’ being used to teach networking concepts via the OU Cisco Academy

Following the showcase, Dr. Petr Knoth opened the keynote session with the results of a new investigation showing how Raspberry Pi is being used in research globally. The data that informed this research was drawn from the full-text articles held in the Core dataset. Excitingly, Core recently became the world’s largest legal repository of full-text scientific articles.

An engaging keynote by Philip Colligan about The Raspberry Pi and the foundation rounded the day off after which he was presented with a framed ‘Raspberry Research word cloud’ built using data from the Core research project.

Overall, the event was a huge success. New partnerships and friendships were formed and a great time was had by all.

The Knowledge Makers will be back in December for ‘A Very Maker Christmas’ which will be taking place in the Library at Walton Hall (date tbc)

Visit http://knowledgemakers.kmi.open.ac.uk to see details of this and all the other Knowledge Makers events and workshops.

KMi help launch the IWA report for Cardiff Capital Region

Wednesday 26 Sep 2018 | KMi News

The Institute of Welsh Affairs is the leading think tank for the development and delivery of public initiatives that have real impact in Wales. IWA director, Auriol Miller, invited KMi’s Alan Fletcher to be part of the IWA Advisory Group that has just published “Our Smart Region”, a report on the Cardiff Capital Region City Deal.
The report explores how the Cardiff Capital Region City Deal could use smart technology to improve the lives of the people who live and work in the region – and at the same time strengthen the region’s economy.
Working with domain experts from Arup, BT, Cardiff University, Centrica, Microsoft, Next Generation Data, Valleys Taskforce, Wales Cooperative Centre and Y Lab, KMi’s experience of MK:Smart, CityLABS and the UK APPG on Smart Cities was appreciated as providing real world evidence backed by academic research.
At the official launch of “Our Smart Region” Alan provides the keynote address on Smart Thinking for a Smart Region. The event, on the 27th Sept at the University of South Wales brings together local and national government, industry stakeholders and leading academics to consider the report’s 6 recommendations.
The Open University in Wales are delighted to be supporting the IWA in the activity with continued support to further investigate the delivery of learning and skills platforms specifically designed to meet the region’s needs.

KMi Director gives Royal Institution Lecture

Wednesday 26 Sep 2018 | KMi News

Monday say KMi’s Director give a talk entitled “Blockchains: Hope or Hype?” at the Royal Institution sponsored by the French Embassy. The Royal Institution is an independent charity, founded in 1799, dedicated to connecting people with the world of science. The lecture was conducted in the famous Royal Institution theatre where some of the most famous scientists and research communicators in history have given lectures, including Michael Faraday (who discovered the principles underlying electromagnetic induction), Humphry Davy (who discovered a number of elements including potassium, sodium and calcium in 1807-1808), Carl Sagan, David Attenborough, George Porter and Richard Dawkins.

The presentation covered the impact of blockchain technology and a number of novel applications including KMi’s work on its use in higher educational settings and the link to decentralizing personal data. The lecture was co-presented with Sajida Zouarhi who is an architect at the prominent blockchain company Consensys.

Related Links:

The OU’s blockchain page

Event main page

KMi and SlideWiki at the ALT 2018 conference

Wednesday 19 Sep 2018 | KMi News

The 25th annual conference of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) took place on 11-13 September in Manchester, UK. The conference brings together different critical perspectives in Learning Technology from across the community in order to examine the challenges ahead and question the shape of things to come. The event was very well attended, featuring lively discussions and interactive sessions.

Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi and the SlideWiki project and delivered a hands-on workshop about the redesigned SlideWiki platform for collaborative authoring of educational content. Participants had the opportunity to try the SlideWiki platform in order to perform a range of tasks related to Open Educational Resources (OERs), including finding OERs, reusing existing OERs, as well as authoring new OERs in collaboration with other participants. Participants were able to offer their feedback via a plenary discussion and complete a questionnaire evaluating SlideWiki in terms of its usefulness and usability.

The SlideWiki project is currently organising a competition and invites participants to create and import high-quality educational content in the SlideWiki platform. This educational content will have the form of slide presentations and will be directly related to secondary education, vocational and professional training, higher education and/or community-driven open-education with contributions from academics, teachers and learners with disabilities. Participants should create reusable, repurposable, and multilingual material in a crowdsourcing way. More information about this competition can be found here.

CORE mentioned in a Nature article on AI technology for scientific literature

Tuesday 18 Sep 2018 | KMi News

CORE has received a mention in a Nature article titled: “How AI technology can tame the scientific literature.” The article discusses how Artificial Intelligence (AI) assists researchers, and in general those who are in need of scientific information, with discovering new knowledge from the vast amounts of available scientific literature.

It is estimated that up to two research papers are being published within one minute, making it difficult for everyone to retrieve, read and digest all this content. As a result, new services that use machine learning, natural language processing, and algorithms are emerging.

CORE has been mentioned in this context due to its collaboration just with Iris.ai, a literature-exploration tool powered by artificial intelligence, that is fully reliant on data supplied by CORE through its API. CORE provides a number of data services and is capable of offering enterprise machine access to a large corpus of research papers using a newly developed service called CORE FastSync.

Related Links:

How AI technology can tame the scientific literature

KMi researchers, David Pride and Petr Knoth, receive best paper award at TPDL2018

Wednesday 12 Sep 2018 | KMi News

The best paper award at the 22nd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2018) went to the paper authored by David Pride and Petr Knoth titled “Peer review and citation data in predicting university rankings, a large-scale analysis.” The paper conducted the largest analysis of REF2014 data so far (data of 145 thousand submitted papers, 7 million citations across all 36 REF Units of Assessment/disciplines), looking at the link between peer review, conducted by REF nominated panels, and bibliometric indicators. The study found surprisingly high correlations of the REF results at an institutional level (Grade Points Average – GPA) with simple bibliometric indicators.

This indicates that 2014 REF results could have been predicted using automated techniques to a high degree of accuracy for about a third of the disciplines, those with high average citations per paper. If such approach was adopted for just those disciplines, this could result in savings to UK universities and Research England of about £50 million every time a national exercise is run and even more if more disciplines adopted a similar approach. Since the preprint of this study was made available, a number of researchers have made contact with us and confirmed that they have since obtained similar results. This information is now being discussed with Jisc, who finance the project, to advise Research England on the next steps.

TPDL 2018 is the highest regarded conference in the area of digital libraries in Europe and 2nd worldwide. TPDL 2018 took place in Porto, Portugal.

Pride, D. and Knoth, P. (2018) Peer review and citation data in predicting university rankings, a large-scale analysis, Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) 2018, Porto, Portugal Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.08529

KMi Appears In Vuforia Newsletter

Thursday 23 Aug 2018 | KMi News

The human biology Augmented Reality (AR) application developed by Paul Hogan in KMi that is used by students studying the Open University SK299 module and is a collaboration between KMi and STEM partners has been featured in the August edition of the Vuroria Newsletter and links readers to the video available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChHVnB-2olk

Vuforia is the AR tool of choice used thus far by KMi due to its flexibility, ease of use and cost effectiveness.

https://www.vuforia.com/

The SK299 Human Biology was released on both Android and iOS at the beginning of 2018

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.ac.open.sk299

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/sk299-human-biology/id1343163047?mt=8

Webinar on SlideWiki’s Open Education Trials and the Semantic Blockchain

Wednesday 15 Aug 2018 | KMi News

On August 14th, the SlideWiki project organised a webinar, which was delivered by Alexandra Garatzogianni (L3S Research Center, LUH), Alexander Mikroyannidis (The Open University, UK) and Allan Third (The Open University, UK).

In the first part of this webinar, Alexandra presented the H2020 SlideWiki project and its OpenCourseWare (OCW) competition. Alexander then presented SlideWiki’s open education trials, which are investigating the potential of the SlideWiki platform for supporting the full lifecycle of Open Educational Resources (OERs). Allan elaborated on the SlideWiki’s Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard, which allows educators to embed SlideWiki directly into their courses. In the second part of the webinar, Alexander showcased Blockchain applications in open education and Allan analysed the importance of the Semantic Blockchain.

You can access the webinar presentations here.

Congratulations Dr Farrell!

Monday 06 Aug 2018 | KMi News

Tracie Farrell successfully passed her PhD viva on Friday August 3rd. Her PhD thesis investigates the affordances of learning analytics for mediating learning. Tracie has conducted a series of in-depth interviews and focus groups with Open University students and educators. Her findings suggest that domain-related epistemological assumptions and previous experience influence how and why an individual could make use of learning analytics insights. Her findings also indicate that learning analytics has the strongest mediatory effect for learners when the technology is capable of exposing them to other learners’ strategies, or when it assists them personally, and continually in goal orientation adoption. The implications of this study are important for higher education institutions looking to implement large-scale learning analytics initiatives, in particular, those with a diverse student body.

Tracie has been supervised by Alexander Mikroyannidis and Harith Alani. The exam panel consisted of Trevor Collins (panel chair), Allison Littlejohn (internal examiner) and Denis Gillet (external examiner). Both examiners praised Tracie’s work and pointed out its importance for informing the teaching and learning practices of the Open University.

Tracie is continuing her research work in KMi, currently working on Harith’s project Co-inform. We wish her all the best in her career!

QualiChain H2020 project funded

Friday 20 Jul 2018 | KMi News

QualiChain – Decentralised Qualification Verification and Management for Learner Empowerment, Education Reengineering and Public Sector Transformation

The QualiChain project, involving KMi’s Blockchain, Knowledge and Learning group, has been successfully funded under the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme. QualiChain targets the creation, piloting and evaluation of a decentralised platform for storing, sharing and verifying education and employment qualifications and focuses on the assessment of the potential of blockchain technology, algorithmic techniques and computational intelligence for disrupting the domain of public education and the wider socio-economic domains depending on it. The proposed solution will be piloted through four representative scenarios, including: (i) cross-university degree equivalence verification; (ii) smart curriculum design; (iii) staffing the public sector; (iv) providing HR consultancy and competency management services.

The OU will lead Workpackage 1: Landscape Analysis and QualiChain Concept and Potential Definition, as well as tasks on the use of blockchain technology for educational credentials, platform design and architecture, the pilot for academic degree verification, and dissemination and communication planning. This will build on and complement our OpenBlockchain work and developments from SlideWiki, Up2U and the Institute of Coding, and serve as an application scenario for the LinkChain semantic blockchain technology for decentralised self-sovereign Linked Data.

The project will run for 3 years, and is coordinated by the National Technical University of Athens. Alongside KMi and NTUA, the partners are ATOS Spain, the Fraunhofer Institute and the Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology University Library from Germany, the Supreme Council for Civil Personnel Selection in Greece, and KnowledgeBiz Consulting, the Institute of Systems and Computer Engineering – Research and Development, the Agency for Administrative Modernisation and the National Institute of Public Administration, all in Portugal.

Related Links:

KMi Blockchain research presented in EdMedia 2018

Friday 13 Jul 2018 | KMi News

Alexander Mikroyannidis presented the latest KMi work on educational applications of the Blockchain at the World Conference on Educational Media and Technology (EdMedia). The event was held in Amsterdam on June 25-29. Alexander presented a paper outlining a learner-centred approach for lifelong learning powered by the Blockchain. The paper explores the different aspects of lifelong learning and describes an ecosystem that places the learner at the centre of the learning process and its associated data. More specifically, the paper outlines the ways that ePortfolios, accreditation and tutoring can evolve with the use of the Blockchain and discusses the various benefits that this evolution bears for lifelong learners. Alexander’s presentation was very well attended and received by conference participants.

Alexander also demonstrated the SlideWiki platform during a dedicated session. The SlideWiki platform employs crowdsourcing methods in order to support the authoring, sharing, reusing and remixing of open courseware. The SlideWiki project is introducing the SlideWiki platform to different communities of educators and learners by performing a wide range of trials covering different levels of education (i.e. from secondary to higher education) and different types of learning (i.e. formal learning, informal learning, vocational learning).

EdMedia is an international conference organised by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). This annual conference has been held since 1987 and spans all disciplines and levels of education attracting researchers and practitioners in the field from more than 70 countries. It offers a forum for the discussion and exchange of research, development, and applications on all topics related to Innovation and Education.

KMi and SlideWiki at EDULEARN18

Friday 13 Jul 2018 | KMi News

The 10th anniversary of the annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (EDULEARN) took place on July 2-4 in the beautiful island of Mallorca. EDULEARN is one of the largest international education conferences for lecturers, researchers, technologists and professionals from the educational sector. After 10 years, it has become a reference event, where more than 800 experts from 80 countries got together to present their research and share their knowledge on teaching and learning methodologies and educational innovations.

Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi and the SlideWiki project by presenting a paper on an open education case study conducted with the use of the SlideWiki platform. With the SlideWiki platform, the effort of producing and reusing highly-structured remixable educational content can be crowdsourced and therefore widely shared. SlideWiki employs crowdsourcing methods in order to support the open education community in authoring, sharing, reusing and remixing open courseware. Alexander’s paper presents a case study of this platform carried out in the context of open education and informal learning and reports on the feedback received thus far from members of the open education community.

KMi members win ISWS Summer School 2018 Awards!

Thursday 12 Jul 2018 | KMi News

The 1st edition of the newly branded International Semantic Web Research Summer School (ISWS) was organised by STLab-ISTC National Research Council and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology at the University Residential Centre of Bertinoro between 1st and 7th July 2018. The Centre was located in Bertinoro, a small village on a scenic hill with a wonderful panoramic view. The school focused on diverse range of research areas including embeddings for knowledge graphs, natural language processing, ontology design patterns and Blockchain technology. The school saw an active participation by several members of KMi, including Prof. Enrico Motta was invited as the first keynote speaker at the summer school and Prof. John Domingue who attended the school as a tutor. Thiviyan Thanapalasingam (Research Assistant) and Prashant Khare (3rd year PhD student) participated in the summer school as registered students.

Enrico Motta showcases the Computer Science Ontology Portal.

In his keynote speech, Enrico provided an overview of his research on scholarly data and smart city projects. The talk highlighted the research and the commercial outcomes of work undertaken by his research group. Enrico also gave motivational tips and advice to students who are pursuing a PhD in Semantic Web. John delivered two talks, a tutorial and an ‘In-Depth Pill’ session, that provided a very detailed vision of the significance and the potential impact of blockchain technologies for a decentralised Semantic Web. The talk elaborated on how various industries ranging from finance to academia could leverage Blockchain technologies to address and tackle wide range of issues.

John Domingue presenting his tutorial on a Decentralised Semantic Web

The format of the school was oriented towards advancing student’s research abilities and was meant to provide the experience of working under tight deadlines to stimulate the life of a researcher. This year, the school was attended by 9 tutors and 60 students (selected from 113 applications) from around the world. At the beginning of the week, the students were divided into 9 Research Task Forces. Each Research Task Force consisted of 6 – 7 students and were led by a tutor.

A common research problem was assigned to all research task forces – Linked Data Validity – that is to support the assessment of the validity of a Linked Data statement. By the end of the week, each group was required to deliver a research report and a 10-minute presentation of their work. Each research task force, under the supervision of their mentor, conceived a solution to the research problem with a different perspective. The ideas spanned across relevancy in the data based on a domain to leveraging blockchain technologies on linked data.

Thiviyan delivering the first part of the presentation for Hufflepuff.

KMi members contributed towards the success of two groups fetching three awards in total. Team ‘Hufflepuff’, which Thiviyan was a part of and John mentored, won the best prize awards in two categories – Best Research Report and Best Presentation. As part of their work, Huffpuff proposed a model for validating Linked Data on the Blockchain network and the team also presented potential use cases, such as career and relationship validation, where the model could be useful. Team ‘Hobbits’, which Prashant was a part of, won the 3rd prize in the Best Presentation category. Team Hobbits proposed an approach to determine the validity of linked data based on the contextual and spatial relevancy within a domain.

Prashant (first from right) and other members of the Hobbits collecting their award.

John participating in a game of slide karaoke.

The week, however, was not just about research methodologies and tight deadlines. The school organised social events, such as games, dinners and a trip around the historical city of Rimini. The students also realised their creativity skills by creating 1-minute videos which captured the funny side of being at a summer school. Overall, the students had an intense, engaging, learning, and fun filled stay of 6 days at the summer school. The school saw a great synergy generated from a blend of experience of the tutors and enthusiasm of the students.

Ettore Rizza, an Italian PhD student from Belgium, said that he “learned a lot here, and not just about technology.”

Tatiana Makhalova, a Russian student studying in France said: “It was a great experience that enhanced a wide range of skills: from hot-topic knowledge to team-working skills. Any research is not just about publishing results, it is the whole way from the idea to the completed project. I got an excellent insight on how to walk this path. Interesting and various lectures, outstanding tutors, talented participants — they make a summer school a starting point for new researches and leave with participants much more than good memories”.

OUAnalyse at London Festival of Learning

Wednesday 04 Jul 2018 | KMi News

This year, three important conferences related to educational technology were co-organised within one week in London as part of the London Festival of Learning. These conferences included Learning@Scale, International Conference on Learning Sciences and Artificial Intelligence in Education. This provided us with a unique opportunity to meet researchers across similar but slightly different fields.

OUAnalyse was represented by a poster focused on extending the study material recommender system by investigating the influence of demographic factors on the recommendations (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-93846-2_27). Martin Hlosta and Jakub Kocvara presented the poster on the Thursday afternoon session and received a positive feedback from both academic and industrial participants.

Moreover, Quan Nguyen from IET presented the paper from LAK 2018 Linking students’ timing of engagement to learning design and academic performance, a joint work of IET and KMi. This presentation was part of the session dedicated to best papers from the 7 educational related conferences.

We hope to see everyone next year in Chicago!

Intelligent Leadership – APPG on Smart Cities

Wednesday 27 Jun 2018 | KMi News

The UK Government All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Smart Cities last night published its initial report on how government strategy can unlock the potential of smart cities in the UK.

KMi’s Alan Fletcher has been a member of the APPG for a number of years and was engaged in the process of creating the report with other members through a series of round table discussions, chaired by the APPG lead, Iain Stewart MP.

The report, launched at the House of Commons, recognizes the complexity of the smart city landscape and the need for contextual awareness in all cities. It draws upon the experience gained through projects such as MK:Smart in Milton Keynes, cityVerve in Manchester, Bristol is Open and others across the UK and Europe. Combined with specialist knowledge from industry in tech, accounting, local government, construction planning and academia, the APPG report makes some key recommendations for realizing the potential of smart cities:

Ministerial Responsibility to deliver interoperability; a central source of information and knowledge; governance to create standards in procurement that allow for agility; enhanced digital capacity with strong local leadership; ROI models that recognize interoperability; the facilitation of smart exports.

These recommendations are all explored in more detail in the report, which is available from the APPG

Related Links:

Intelligent Leadership: How government strategy can unlock the potential of smart cities in the UK

Digital DNA – KMi working with Smart Cities in Ireland

Wednesday 27 Jun 2018 | KMi News

KMi joined colleagues from STEM and the OU in Ireland to present keynote and workshop presentations at Ireland’s premier digital conference.
Over two days in June, Digital DNA brought together 3,000 delegates from across a wide range of industries.
KMi Business Development Manager, Alan Fletcher was on stage with Jamie Cudden from Smart Dublin and Deborah Colville from Belfast City Council to explore the importance of SMEs in the growing digital economy, particularly in the innovation needed to deliver resilient and sustainable smart cities.
KMi have been working with Dublin and Belfast for some years in developing Smart City Thinking and applied practice.The group considered the challenges faced by SMEs in engaging with local and national authorities and the support needed to help innovation flourish. The experience of MK:Smart and CityLABS in Milton Keynes was used to evidence the possibilities that emerge from supported SME engagement. CityLABS currently supports over 50 SMEs in innovation.Smart Docklands in Dublin is an exemplar of development and growth in a post-industrial economy that has focused on delivering a connected district in a complex city. Smart Docklands has attracted global tech giants to set up large offices and is working with local SMEs to ensure they can engage in the opportunities that are emerging as the development continues.
Belfast has similar capability in Smart City development and is working hard to deliver infrastructure and service interoperability as the city adapts to change. The inclusion of SMEs in the innovation needed to bring about change is a key point of their smart city thinking.
The panel concluded that whilst each city exists in its own context, the common understanding of the challenge of innovation and the inclusion of agile and challenging SMEs is something that all three will continue to develop with the help of the Open University.

Institute of Coding Launches from the House of Lords

Friday 22 Jun 2018 | KMi News

A pleasant and warm evening saw the Institute of Coding (IoC) from the House of Lords. The event, hosted by Baroness McGregor-Smith CBE, was attended by over 200 supporters from the senior management of major technology companies such as Amazon, ARM, BT, Cisco, IBM, Oracle, Raspberry Pi, Telefonica, a wide range of companies including Barclays, Channel 4, Deloitte, Goldman Sachs, Jaguar Land Rover, JP Morgan, John Lewis, Morgan Stanley, PwC, Santander, Tata, and governmental departments and organisations such as DVLA, HMRC, the Greater London Authority and the Office for Students.

The evening began with speeches from Baroness Ruby McGregor-Smith CBE (Peer and Chair of the Women’s Business Council), Jacqueline De Rojas CBE (Co-Chair of the IoC, President at techUK, Chair of Digital Leaders, and a member of the Digital Economy Council), Professor Bernie Morley (Deputy Vice Chancellor and Provost of Bath University) and Dr Rachid Hourizi (IoC Project Lead).

After the 200 plus guests mingled discussing the hot issues associated with the teaching computing in the 21st century. The OU plays a leading role in the IoC leading the first Theme on University Learners and bringing to bear its extensive expertise in innovation teaching approaches, including learning analytics and blockchains and widening participation. Arosha Bandara (Head of the School of Computing and Communications), John Domingue (KMi’s Director) and Josie Fraser (Executive Dean for the STEM Faculty) attended on behalf of the OU.

This of course is just the beginning and we fully expect the IoC to impact on how topics such as Data Science, Cyber Security and Artificial Intelligence are taught in the future across the whole of the UK.

Related Links:

OU Institute of Coding Website

OU Blockchain website

Great success for the SKM3 team at ISWC

Wednesday 20 Jun 2018 | KMi News

The SKM3 team, the KMi research group on scholarly analytics, will present three full papers at the 2018 International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), the premiere international venue for the Semantic Web and Linked Data communities, which will be held in October in Monterey, California. The SKM3 team succeeded in having a paper accepted in each of the main tracks of the conference: Research Track, Resources Track, and In-Use Track.

The paper in the highly selective Research Track is entitled Pragmatic Ontology Evolution (POE) and presents an innovative approach to producing evolved versions of scholarly ontologies that is able to consider pragmatic business requirements within a formal ontology evolution framework. POE was applied to a real-world test case provided by our commercial partner, the Springer Nature taxonomy for editorial classification, yielding excellent results.

The paper in the Resources Track introduces the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a large- scale, automatically generated ontology of research areas, which includes about 25K concepts. CSO powers several tools adopted by the editorial team at Springer Nature and has been used to support a variety of applications for classifying research publications, modelling the evolution of research communities, and predicting research trends. The SKM3 team recently developed the CSO Portal, a web application that enables users to download, explore, and provide granular feedback on CSO.

Finally, we will present in the In-Use Track a paper describing the Smart Book Recommender (SBR), an ontology-based recommender system developed in collaboration with Springer Nature, which supports their Computer Science editorial team in selecting the products to market at specific venues. SBR recommends books, journals, and conference proceedings relevant to a conference by taking advantage of a semantically enhanced representation of about 27K editorial products.

ISWC is a very selective conference and it is rather rare for a single research group to cover all three main tracks, hence we are extremely pleased with the result, which evidences the quality and impact of our work.

The papers that we will present at ISWC are the following:

Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2018) Pragmatic Ontology Evolution: Reconciling User Requirements and Application Performance, International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Monterey, CA (USA).
Salatino, A.A., Thanapalasingam, T., Mannocci, A., Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2018) The Computer Science Ontology: A Large-Scale Taxonomy of Research Areas, International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Monterey, CA (USA).
Thanapalasingam, T., Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2018) Ontology-Based Recommendation of Editorial Products, International Semantic Web Conference 2018, Monterey, CA (USA).

Chinese@OU Mobile New Release

Tuesday 12 Jun 2018 | KMi News

Mobile Applications Developer Paul Hogan in KMI has updated Chinese@OU, a mobile application to accompany The Open University course: L197: Beginners’ Chinese, with the next block of 5 lessons. The app now includes a total of 11 out of 36 planned lessons.

The application is being developed in collaboration with Dr Qian Kan at The School of Languages and Applied Linguistics to provide both Open University students and any beginner learners of Chinese up to GCSE level with a feature rich learning experience.

The application is available on Android and iOS and incorporates activities to cover writing, reading, listening, character reordering, character identification and word search puzzles.

KMi@WebScience2018

Tuesday 05 Jun 2018 | KMi News

This year was a very special edition of the WebScience 2018 conference. Not only because it was the 10th anniversary of the event, but because Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and recipient of the 2016 ACM A. M. Turing Award (also known as the Nobel Price for informatics) delivered his award lecture at the conference on Tuesday 29th of May. This lecture was open to the public, and several renown Computer Scientist across the world, including our own Professor Enrico Motta, were invited by Elsevier to participate at the event.

Not only KMi researchers were invited to attend such a unique event, but also to deliver the only other invited keynote at the conference. Professor John Domingue spoke about The Future of Semantics on the Web. He provided a fantastic overview of Semantic Web history, highlighted the importance of common sense knowledge, discussed the problems with data and technology (data poor, fair principles, verifiable claims) and stressed the need of semantics to adapting to ever changing context.

Big Congratulations are also in order to Miriam Fernandez, Moizzah Asif and Harith Alani for bringing to KMi the WebScience2018 best paper (joint) award. The paper "Understanding the Roots of Radicalisation on Twitter" aims to bridge the gap between the Social Science and Computer Science research fields by translating current theories of radicalisation into computational models that enable the analysis of radicalisations at scale .

In summary, a very exciting conference with a key participation from KMi researchers!

Related Links:

Knowledge Makers’ 3D Printing Workshop success

Friday 01 Jun 2018 | KMi News

On the 30th May, the Knowledge Makers organised the first 3D printing workshop to take place at KMi. 23 people from all OU faculties attended and got hands on with an introduction to the software tools used to design 3D objects and also got to see some ‘live’ printing and a range of finished examples.

The attendees were given a brief overview of OpenSCAD, an open-source 3D design tool, and were then tasked with designing an object of their choice in just 90 minutes. The results were truly amazing, clearly demonstrating what happens when you combine engaged and enthusiastic participants with powerful tools. Some wonderful designs were realised, including chairs, dice, wheels, ladders (albeit very small ones) – and even Tower Bridge! Outstanding design of the day however went to team ‘Piggy Bank’ who worked flawlessly together, each member producing one section of the final model. See the photos below for the impressive end results.

The session gave the opportunity to bring people together from across the OU and introduce them to a new skillset. Additionally, attendees were introduced to some of the amazing facilities available on campus including the FabLab and Rapid Prototyping Lab. There is a wealth of talented people and fantastic resources here at the OU, we firmly believe events like this one can help to bring the two together.

About the Knowledge Makers

We are a growing group of enthusiastic makers, hackers and tinkerers who hold bi-monthly meetups at the Walton Hall Campus. We actively encourage makers and crafters of ALL varieties to get involved. It does not matter what your making passion happens to be, we believe sharing your passion is what makes a difference.

Related Links:

Two Blockchain Keynotes in Two Weeks

Sunday 27 May 2018 | KMi News

KMi Director, Prof. John Domingue, was invited to give two keynote talks during May 2018 featuring the blockchain research that he is leading at the Open University.

The first talk, “Experiments with Blockchains. The Open University and the emergence of new higher education models” was given at second Conference by the Commonwealth Centre for Connected Learning (3CL,2018). This was held in Malta during 17-18 May 2018, and the conference theme this year was ‘Blockchain, Credentials & Connected Learning’. The 3CL Conference brought together practitioners, academics, consultants and industry specialists for engagement with thought leaders on the blockchain and connected learning.

His talk directly followed the conference opening was which given by the Maltese Minister for Education and Employment Evarist Bartolo and covered some of the work which the KMi blockchain team have been carrying out in the least year including how blockchains can be used for peer accreditation, proactive job and course searching and disintermediating universities.

The event attracted educational and blockchain enthusiasts from a wider variety of places many of whom are actively investigating this new technology in a wide variety of scenarios. For example, Marloes Pomp serves as the Programme Officer for blockchain projects within the Dutch Government and responsible for the international strategy of the Dutch Blockchain Coalition. She described how blockchains are being trailed in self driving vehicles. Alex Grech outlined how Malta are developing blockchain educational pilots at national scale. Finally, Natalie Smolenski described how the work at the MIT Media Lab spinout, Learning Machine, is using blockchain accreditation to support self-sovereign identity: giving learners complete control over their learning related digital presence.

Following his talk John has been invited to give a talk to the EU Commission on how the OU’s work could support a new EU framework for digitally signed qualifications.

The second, “Using Blockchains to Open Higher Education” took place on 27th May at the Lile2018 Conference: Learning & Education with Web Data, in Amsterdam. LILE2018 provides an interdisciplinary forum to discuss approaches making use of Web Data for teaching, learning and education. The conference is co-located with WebSci’18, the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science, 27-30 May. At that event, Sir Tim Berners gave the Turing Lecture which was broadcast live on FaceBook Live.

John’s talk entitled “Using Blockchains to Open Higher Education” illustrated how he believes blockchains are a technology which can open up higher education and empower learners and teachers. He highlighted how we have been using blockchains to manage micro-accreditation and to outline initiatives at the Open University to setup national and international blockchain networks and how blockchains could herald the emergence of Uber-style universities.

The LILE2018 papers are published online as part of the WebSci18 Companion Proceedings.

Related Links:

LILE Workshop Website

KMi rocks at the CryptoParty

Wednesday 23 May 2018 | KMi News

KMi researchers Pinelopi Troullinou and Allan Third were among the presenters at the first ever Milton Keynes CryptoParty, held on 10th May.

CryptoParty is a grassroots global movement which hosts free workshops to introduce practical internet security to the general public. The Milton Keynes’ public were invited bring along a smartphone or laptop (or both!) and learn the basics from the experts and other participants, listen to enlightening talks, participate in workshops, make friends and teach others.

The event was co-organised by the GirlsCode MK, The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park and The Open University’s STEM Faculty (KMi and the School of Computing and Communications). It was hosted by MK Gallery and was completely free to attend. Party music was provided by DJ Bod. BBC Look East came along to film and event and featured interviews with the speakers and attendees in their local news bulletins

Lead organiser, Eva Dovc said “Feedback from the audience was very positive – great talks, great workshops. I was really pleased that people stayed on after the talks for the workshops; they were interested and taking notes – it was really fantastic to see!”

The program, which was well received, included:

Talks

– WannaCry ransomware attack
Mike Richards explained the damage caused by the WannaCry ransomware cyber attack, which had serious implications last year for the NHS and businesses around the world.

– Cambridge Analytica & Co: What is seductive surveillance
@pinelopi_tr explains why users provide ever more data on online platforms and what are the risks. She also discusses the data scientists’ responsibilities in light of Cambridge Analytica scandal.

– What are blockchains and how do they work?
@thirda explains the paradox of blockchains providing secure and trustworthy ledgers despite the fact that they’re fully open with no access control or centralized management.

– Web encryption: Ever wondered what the green padlock on a website really means?
@robinjpickering explains SSL certificates; how sites get them, and the ways they have been abused by everyone from dodgy websites through paranoid employers even rogue states. He will tell us what all this means in practice for protecting ourselves online today.

Workshops

– Social media and the right to privacy
@neilnjae talks about privacy settings on mobile devices and across social media accounts

– Staying safe online
@amel_bennaceur teaches about benefits and configuration of password managers and two-factor authentication

– How to spot fake news?
@teraknor explains how the concept of fake news is not new and has been with us for a long time. Using the ‘source’ + ‘sense’ + ‘substance’ triage method he will teach us how to discern whether something is (or is not) fake news.

Planning is already underway for the second event in the Autumn. Watch this space!

Related Links:

MK CryptoParty in the News

KMi @The Web Conference 2018

Tuesday 22 May 2018 | KMi News

KMi once again had a strong presence at The Web Conference, which this year was held in Lyon, France from 23-27 April, and was attended by over 2300 delegates. More than 7500 tweets were posted about the event, with 17000 retweets, reaching around 8.6 million twitter users.

On the Program Committee were KMi’s Harith Alani, Emanuele Bastianelli, Gregoire Burel, Enrico Daga, Andrea Mannocci, Francesco Osborne, Angela Salatino, Miriam Fernandez, and Ilaria Tiddi.

Prof Harith Alani was Co-Chair of the Web Content Analysis, Semantics, and Knowledge track, which received nearly 300 submissions, thus making it by far the largest track in the entire conference.

KMi members co-organised three Workshops, a Tutorial and a stand at the Jobs Fair. Our #RCBlackMirror2018 Workshop was featured on the morning paper blog which gives a short summary every weekday of an important, influential, topical or otherwise interesting paper in the field of computer science.

Details of our Workshops & Tutorial are here:

#RCBlackMirror2018: Re-Coding Black Mirror
Organizers: Pinelopi Troullinou, Mathieu D’Aquin and Ilaria

Workshop on “Semantics, Analytics and Visualisation: Enhancing Scholarly Dissemination” (SAVE-SD 2018)
Organizers: Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran, Francesco Osborne, Silvio Peroni and Sahar Vahdati

3rd Workshop on Linked Data & Distributed Ledgers (LD-DL)
Organizers: Luis-Daniel Ibanez, John Domingue and Pascal Molli

Tutorial: Social Media Analysis for Situation Awareness during Crises
Organizers : Gregoire Burel, Mayank Kejriwal and Prashant Khare

Additionally, three papers were presented at the conference:

Mannocci, A., Osborne, F. and Motta, E. (2018) Geographical trends in research: a preliminary analysis on authors’ affiliations, Workshop: SAVE-SD at The Web Conference, Lyon

Jan, Z., Third, A., Ibanez, L., Bachler, M., Simperl, E. and Domingue, J. (2018) ScienceMiles: Digital Currency for Researchers, Workshop: 3rd International Workshop on Linked Data and Distributed Ledgers at The Web Conference, Lyon, France, International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.

Fernandez, Miriam and Alani, Harith (2018). Online Misinformation: Challenges and Future Directions. In: WWW ’18 Companion: The 2018 Web Conference Companion, ACM, New York.

The official conf stats were:
* 2 300+ participants
* 1 461 abstracts; 4 852 authors from 62 countries
* 1 172 submissions; 3 649 authors from 60 countries
* 4 602 reviews by 1 232 PC members
* 170 papers selected, acceptance rate of 15%

* 1 584 Twitter followers
* 7 500+ tweets on "TheWebConf"
* 8 600 000+ twitter users reached
* 16 900+ retweets of tweets with TheWebConf
* 91.6% of neutral or positive tweets
* 400+ press mentions
* 10 000+ video views

The next Web Conference will be held in San Francisco, May 13-17, 2019.

Athena Swan Award Success!

Tuesday 08 May 2018 | KMi News

The Knowledge Media Institute is delighted to be among the successful applicants announced by The Equality Challenge Unit for the November 2017 award round. Our Athena SWAN Bronze Award will be presented at an awards ceremony to be held at Swansea University on 16 July 2018.

Dr Miriam Fernandez, who led KMi’s submission said “This is fantastic news. I’d like to thank each and every member of KMi for making us an institution who cares and fights for diversity and equality. Special thanks go to our Athena Swan team for all their amazing efforts so far on the proposal and on all the activities that have been happening in the lab to achieve our goals.”

KMi Director, John Domingue added ”Congratulations to Miriam and her entire team on this achievement! Since it was founded KMi has embraced diversity through bringing researchers to work with us from across the globe. All the lab members are behind the Athena Swan initiative 100%, and look forward to consolidating and building on this Bronze Award going forward.”

KMi’s submission is will be published here on in due course.

Related Links:

Athena Swan Results

The Open Education Global Conference 2018: Transforming Education Through Open Approaches

Friday 27 Apr 2018 | KMi News

The Open Education Global Conference (OE Global) is where the global open education community meets to discuss how opening education helps us achieve universal access, equity, innovation and opportunity in education. The OE Global conference is the most internationally diverse conference devoted exclusively to open education, attracting researchers, practitioners, policy makers, educators and students from more than 35 countries to discuss and explore how Open Education advances educational practices around the world.

OE Global 2018 has taken place from 24-26 April 2018 in Delft, the Netherlands, hosted by the Open Education Consortium and Delft University of Technology. The theme of OE Global 2018 was Transforming Education through Open Approaches.

Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi and the SlideWiki project and delivered a hands-on workshop dedicated to raising awareness about the SlideWiki platform and collecting feedback from members of the open education community. Participants had the opportunity to try the SlideWiki platform in order to perform a range of tasks related to Open Educational Resources (OERs), including finding OERs, reusing existing OERs, as well as authoring new OERs in collaboration with other participants. Participants were able to offer their feedback via a plenary discussion and complete a questionnaire evaluating SlideWiki in terms of its usefulness and usability.

The SlideWiki project is currently organising an OpenCourseWare (OCW) Competition and invites participants to create and import high-quality educational content in the SlideWiki platform. This educational content will have the form of slide presentations and will be directly related to secondary education, vocational and professional training, higher education and/or community-driven open-education with contributions from academics, teachers and learners with disabilities. Participants should create reusable, repurposable, and multilingual material in a crowdsourcing way. More information about this competition can be found here.

KMi @ the first edition of AAAI/ACM conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.

Tuesday 10 Apr 2018 | KMi News

In the light of the societal and ethical risks emerging from the technological developments in Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things, AAAI and ACM joined their forces to launch a new conference series exploring ‘AI, Ethics, and Society’. The first edition of this conference was co-located with AAAI-18 on February 2-3, 2018 in New Orleans, USA.

The organizers received an impressive number of high-quality submissions revealing the community’s interest to discuss data ethics in an interdisciplinary context. KMier Pinelopi Troullinou and ex-KMier Mathieu d’Aquin participated to the conference presenting a methodological tool to integrate ethical and societal considerations in AI and data science research process. The paper entitled “Towards an ‘Ethics in Design’ methodology for AI research projects” was accepted for inclusion in the conference proceedings and as an oral and poster presentation. This was a great success for the authors, not only due to the low acceptance rates, but mainly because this paper was the outcome of a great collaboration between two arguably distinct academic spheres; computer and critical social science. This collaboration also shows the commitment of KMi to play a key role in the ethical debate emerging from the wide use of AI technologies.

It was a long way to New Orleans and an intense two days conference but totally worthy discussing about algorithmic bias, accountability of autonomous entities, philosophical grounding of AI decision and other pressing issues with such a great and diverse bunch of academics and industry players.

#AIES, #AIES2018

Related Links:

http://www.aies-conference.com/

KMi at the European Robotics Forum

Wednesday 14 Mar 2018 | KMi News

Ilaria Tiddi and Emanuele Bastianelli were among 800 top European experts who attended the European Robotics Forum (ERF2018) in Tampere, Finland on 13-15th March 2018. Under the theme "Robots and Us", ERF2018 covered current societal and technical themes related to the field of robotics. Interesting subjects being featured include human-robot-collaboration and how robotics can improve industrial productivity and service sector operations. Attendees were comprised of researchers, engineers, managers, and a growing number of entrepreneurs, business people, and public funding officers from all over Europe who discussed the technology push and market pull and how innovation in robotics can be accelerated.

Ilaria, Emanuele and Prof. Enrico Motta are also participating in a new project, SciRoc, which is funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 SPARC initiative, and builds on KMi’s smart-city projects, MKSmart and CityLabs, which involve collaborations with Milton Keynes Council, European Regional Development Fund, Department for Communities and Local Government and local SMEs.

SciRoc is a collaborative project which will run novel, robotic tournaments, under the badge of the European Robotics League. The tournaments will invite teams to compete in three vibrant fields of robotics: industrial, service and emergency robotics. Biennial major tournaments will be held in Smart Cities, where robots from all three categories will come together to interact with the smart infrastructure in familiar urban settings.

These competitions aim at replicating consistent benchmarking results more than stating a winner of a single event, and have been designed to target three clear objectives: the European societal challenge of aging population, the strengthening of the European robotics industry and to push the state of the art in autonomous systems for emergency response.

In addition, robot competitions meet educational needs and can serve as an excellent platform for developing the skills of future engineers and scientists, raising student awareness and understanding of applied research and development in robotics.

SciRoc is led by

University of the West of England, Bristol.

with the following members

Hochschule Bonn-Rhein- Sieg (Germany)
Fundacion Andaluza para el Desarrollo Espacial (Spain), the
NATO Science and Technology Organisation (Belgium),
Eurobotics AISBL (Belgium),
Associacao Do Instituto Superior Tecnico Para a Investigacao e Desenvolvimento (Portugal),
The Open University (UK)
Politecnico de Milano (Italy),
Universita Degli Studi di Roma la Sapienza (Italy)
Universitat Politecnica de Cataluya (Spain)
Further reading:

https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/discover-new-h2020-robotics-projects-contributing-sparc-strategy

https://www.eu-robotics.net/robotics_league/about/the-european-robotics-league/index.html

www.robotics-league.eu

http://www.eu-robotics.net/sparc

Best paper at the LAK-18 conference

Monday 12 Mar 2018 | KMi News

The paper entitled " Linking students’ timing of engagement to learning design and academic performance" authored by Quan Nguyen (IET), Michal Huptych (KMi) and Bart Rienties (IET) has been awarded the best full paper at the Learning Analytics and Knowledge 2018 (LAK-18), held in Sydney, Australia.

LAK is the most prestigious conference on Learning Analytics held annually.

Michal Huptych’s contribution is a part of the research and development of the Personalised Study Recommender to be integrated with the OU Analyse predictive modelling system.

KMi is hiring! join our Institute of Coding Team

Thursday 01 Mar 2018 | KMi News

KMi are currently looking to fill a number of posts to work in the Open University’s Institute of Coding team, comprising academics and technology specialists in learning analytics and distributed ledger technologies. These are:

Why join KMi? Take a look at KMi Careers. We promote diversity in employment and welcome applications from all sections of the community.

The Institute of Coding

The Open University (OU) is a major partner in the UK’s Institute of Codin g (IoC), a new, exciting, national initiative, led by the University of Bath, supported by theme leaders Aston University, Coventry University, the Open University and Queen Mary University of London. The Institute brings together a range of universities, industry, training providers and professional bodies to address the UK’s digital skills gaps.

The Institute’s vision is to enhance the education and employability of every IoC learner, and ensure that employers and individuals across the UK can access the skills they need to compete in the global digital economy. This unique and innovative collaboration has been made possible with £20m from the Higher Education Funding Council for England and match funding from universities and industry partners.

The Institute of Coding will develop and deliver innovative, industry-focused higher education across the UK. It will develop accredited degree schemes and short courses aimed at professionals in a wide range of sectors, as well as working to widen the participation of women, returners to work and hard to reach groups.

KMi in the IoC

KMi’s Professor John Domingue Leads the IoC’s first theme on University Learning, which aims to influence computer science teaching in universities nationally. An important part of KMi’s work in this theme will be collaboration with the OU’s School of Computing & Communication, a number of IoC partners and industry representing employers and educators to:

create an IoC Industrial Accreditation standard that will connect students and employers in new ways, using blockchain based micro accreditation (including badges) and learner records.
mainstream data analytics within IoC partners to enhance teaching and improve educational outcomes.

Celebrations for Enrico Daga’s viva success!

Tuesday 27 Feb 2018 | KMi News

Staff joined Enrico Daga, Senior Project Officer in KMi’s Data Science Group, to celebrate the successful defence of his PhD Thesis: "Knowledge Components and Methods for Policy Propagation in Data Flows”.

The Thesis examines data-oriented systems and applications which are at the centre of current developments of the World Wide Web (WWW). On the Web of Data (WoD), information sources can be accessed and processed for many purposes. Users need to be aware of any licences or terms of use, which are associated with the data sources they want to use. Conversely, publishers need support in assigning the appropriate policies alongside the data they distribute. It tackles the problem of policy propagation in data flows – an expression that refers to the way data is consumed, manipulated and produced within processes.

It poses the question of what kind of components are required, and how they can be acquired, managed, and deployed, to support users on deciding what policies propagate to the output of a data-intensive system from the ones associated with its input. The problem has been studied in three scenarios: applications of the Semantic Web, workflow reuse in Open Science, and the exploitation of urban data in City Data Hubs.

Enrico’s examiners were Dr Trevor Collins, Prof. Oscar Corcho of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Prof David Robertson of University of Edinburgh and his supervisors were Prof Mathieu d’Aquin and Dr Miriam Fernandez.

For more information about Enrico’s projects and publications, visit his profile page.

Augmented Reality App for Students Studying SK299

Wednesday 07 Feb 2018 | KMi News

The SK299 Human biology app is the second Augmented Reality (AR) application developed by Paul Hogan in KMi that is used by students studying an Open University module and is a collaboration between KMi and STEM partners.

It is a unique application designed to support and enhance the learning of the structure and function of the heart as part of the Open University module, SK299, or as a stand-alone app. The app consists of an anatomically accurate heart which can be viewed in three dimensions, in cross section and also as a ‘zoomed in’ virtual exploration.

The app has a range of functions to help develop the learning and understanding of how the heart beats and the cardiac cycle. By selecting ‘Show pins’ all the major anatomical structures of the human heart are identified and selecting a pin provides the name and description. There is the option to show the blood flow through the heart. All the options are available as a stationary or beating heart, the rate of which can be fully adjusted aiding the understanding of the mechanical events of the heart beat.

The app will help students at all educational levels to develop and extend their knowledge and understanding of the heart beat.

The application is available on Android, iOS (both from 15th February), Windows and MacOS. Note that AR is not present on the desktop versions.

Chinese@OU Mobile And Desktop Apps

Tuesday 06 Feb 2018 | KMi News

Mobile Applications Developer Paul Hogan in KMI is currently developing Chinese@OU, a mobile and desktop application to accompany The Open University course: L197: Beginners’ Chinese.

The application is being developed in collaboration with Dr Qian Kan at The School of Languages and Applied Linguistics to provide both Open University students and any beginner learners of Chinese up to GCSE level with a feature rich learning experience.

The application will be available on Android, iOS, Windows and Mac OSx in the near future and provides 36 lessons incorporating activities to cover writing, reading, listening, character reordering, character identification and word search puzzles as well as an additional ‘Survival Chinese’ section.

Open Call: Collaborative OpenCourseWare Authoring Using SlideWiki

Monday 05 Feb 2018 | KMi News

Within the SlideWiki project we have launched an open call, looking for external partners that will produce educational content in the SlideWiki platform and will evaluate the platform with learners. Each external partner will receive funding in the region of £25-50k.

The selected candidates will receive funding, guidance, technical support and mentoring from the SlideWiki Consortium members for the implementation of the large scale trials. The expected outcome is that feedback will be collected and educational material will be created and published on SlideWiki, maximising thus its learning impact. The topics of the trials can cover a wide range of items, such as search, evaluation, creation of user/deck groups, user profiling and interactive learning analytics.

With the open-source SlideWiki platform, the effort of the creation, translation and evolution of highly-structured remixable OpenCourseWare (OCW) can be widely shared (i.e. crowdsourced). Similarly to Wikipedia for encyclopaedic content, SlideWiki allows to collaboratively create comprehensive OCW (curricula, slide presentations, self-assessment tests, illustrations etc.) online in a crowdsourcing manner. The SlideWiki platform has won the OpenCourseWare Consortium’s Excellence Award and is used by hundreds of educators and thousands of learners. Several hundred comprehensive course materials are available on SlideWiki in dozens of languages.

More info: https://slidewiki.eu/2018/01/24/more-info-about-the-tender-test-the-slidewiki-platform-and-receive-funding/

OU Go version 2.0

Wednesday 31 Jan 2018 | KMi News

Due to the underlying mapping API OU Go currently uses being discontinued from 1st February 2018 an urgent update was required.

Mobile Applications Developer Paul Hogan in KMI has taken the opportunity to add some new features to the 3D campus map app:

Social media sharing
Off and on campus map use
Custom route navigation when using off campus
A new single generic character

The new version is currenlty available on the Android Play Store and will be available soon on Apple’s App Store.

The home of OU Go http://arvr.kmi.open.ac.uk/ougo/app/ will be updated shortly to reflect the update.

OU to play lead role in new Institute of Coding

Thursday 25 Jan 2018 | KMi News

The Open University (OU) has been announced as a major partner in the UK’s Institute of Coding.

Led by the University of Bath, the world-leading consortium has been established to strengthen the UK’s position globally in computing and IT, address the UK digital skills gap and create opportunities for more computer science graduates. Funding is comprised of £20 million from HEFCE and a further £20 million in matched funding.

KMi’s Professor John Domingue, is Project lead at The Open University. Together with School of Computing and Communications in the OU STEM faculty, John will lead the first theme on university learning, to influence computer science teaching in universities nationally. John said:

“We are extremely excited to be playing a leading role within the Institute of Coding as there is a fabulous fit between our values and expertise and the goals of this enterprise. As the leaders of Theme 1 University Learners we will use our extensive know-how in delivering high quality learning at scale to address the current skills gaps in new and emerging areas such as Data Science and Cyber Security.

We will also lead on educational innovations based around our cutting-edge work in learning analytics and the application of blockchains to higher education teaching.

We are all eager to apply our know-how of working at national scale and to deploy our innovative technology for the benefit of learners and industry associated with the digital arena and believe that Institute of Coding will prove to be transformative for this important UK sector.”

This is great news and essential to tackle the skills shortage in coding. By 2022, we need half a million skilled computer scientist – three times more than were generated in the last 10 years!

@NGI4eu @edsa_project @IoCoding

#blockchain #oudigitalinnovation #DataScience #LearningAnalytics

#openinnovation #employability #NGI4EU

Related Links:

One of our papers was one of the top 5 most viewed in its areas

Saturday 13 Jan 2018 | KMi News

Great news for some KMiers! A paper authored by Angelo A. Salatino, Francesco Osborne and Enrico Motta, published last June to PeerJ Computer Science journal, was one of the top 5 most viewed in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Digital Libraries.

The paper entitled "How are topics born? Understanding the research dynamics preceding the emergence of new areas" is a pivotal part of Angelo’s doctoral work, providing evidence that the emergence of a new topic is anticipated by a significant increase in the pace of collaboration between relevant research areas, which can be seen as the ‘ancestors’ of the new topic. Taking advantage of these results, Angelo is currently developing a framework for the early detection of new research topics.

To know more about this study, please visit https://peerj.com/articles/cs-119/

Drahomira Herrmannova successfully passes her PhD viva

Tuesday 02 Jan 2018 | KMi News

A KMi research student Drahomira Herrmannova (Dasha) has successfully defended her PhD thesis titled: "Mining Scholarly Publications for Research Evaluation." While current research metrics evaluate the excellence of a publication based on the number of interactions in the scholarly network, such as the number of times it has been cited (Bibliometrics) or downloaded (Altmerics), this thesis explores the use of publications’ full texts in research evaluation. The thesis first investigates what research quality is and then defines a new class of research evalution metrics called Semantometrics and its first metric called contribution. It then demonstrates, on a newly created True Impact Dataset, that the contribution metric can be more effective in identifying key research than existing research evaluation metrics.

Dasha’s examiners were Prof Enrico Motta and Dr Iana Atanassova of University of Franche-Comté. Dasha’s supervisors were Dr Petr Knoth and Prof Zdenek Zdrahal. Dasha will continue her research in this area at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States. All the best Dasha!

CORE, a KMi service, partners with ProQuest

Monday 18 Dec 2017 | KMi News

The CORE service is working in partnership with ProQuest to deliver more content within their library discovery services (Ex Libris Primo and Ex Libris Summon). What does this mean for the end user? This means that search results will bring back more relevant content from OA repositories worldwide in addition to the existing library collection records. The user will not have to go to a separate search interface to run the same search query. Read more…

KMi at OEB Global 2017 – Shaping the future of learning

Thursday 14 Dec 2017 | KMi News

Alexander Mikroyannidis was in Berlin last week to present the SlideWiki project at the OEB Global 2017 conference. OEB (Online Educa Berlin) Global brings participants to the forefront of learning and technology developments, gives new insights on opportunities and challenges that are changing the world of learning, and shows the latest best practices from leading organisations. More than 2,000 particpants attended the event, comprising a diverse audience of policy makers, higher education leaders, chief learning officers, technology & learning experts, learning and development professionals, change managers, ICT administrators, online learning curriculum designers and more.

Alexander delivered a hands-on workshop in this event as part of the SlideWiki project’s initiative in developing a collaborative open courseware authoring platform and collecting feedback from the online education community. This workshop offered the opportunity to participants to get acquainted with the newly launched SlideWiki platform and its functionalities for collaborative authoring of open courseware, crowdsourced translation of educational content, as well as social networking. The workshop was well attended and offered opportunities for discussions not only about the SlideWiki platform, but also about the future of open educational resources and open education.

Related Links:

OEB Global 2017

KMi at K-Cap2017

Tuesday 05 Dec 2017 | KMi News

KMi continued its long association with the KAW/K-CAP series of workshops and conferences this week with a strong presence at the 9th International Conference on Knowledge Capture(K-CAP2017) held in Austin, Texas, USA the first week of December. The K-CAP conferences aim at attracting researchers from diverse areas of Artificial Intelligence, including knowledge representation, knowledge acquisition, intelligent user interfaces, problem-solving and reasoning, planning, agents, text extraction, and machine learning, information enrichment and visualisatiAon, as well as researchers interested in cyber-infrastructures to foster the publication, retrieval, reuse, and integration of data.

In addition to Ilaria Tiddi serving as this year’s Publicity Chair, KMi had three papers accepted for the main conference track:

• Forecasting the Spreading of Technologies in Research Communities, Francesco Osborne, Andrea Mannocci, Enrico Motta
• Propagating Data Policies: a User Study, Enrico Daga, Mathieu D’Aquin, Enrico Motta

and

• An ontology-based approach to improve the accessibility of ROS-based robotic systems, Ilaria Tiddi, Emanuele Bastianelli, Gianluca Bardaro, Mathieu d’Aquin, Enrico Motta

which was concurring for K-CAP2017’s best paper award.

Additionally, Francesco served as panel member in "The future of scientific knowledge capture" at the International Workshop on Capturing Scientific Knowledge while KMiers Harith Alani, Miriiam Fernandez, Andrea Mannocci helped in the paper reviewing process as PC members.

Finally, our congratulations to Ilaria on her 4-year appointment to the K-CAP steering committee.

Related Links:

K-Cap2017

Data and Computing Skills for Digital Science and Society

Thursday 30 Nov 2017 | KMi News

The European Big Data Value Forum 2017 took place on November 21-23 in Versailles, Paris. This event has served as a platform, as well as a business and technology oriented showcase and exhibition space for the Big Data Value ‘Public Private Partnership’ established by the European Commission and the European data stakeholders, represented by the Big Data Value Association.

Among the most well-attended sessions of this event was the session dedicated to Data and Computing Skills for Digital Science and Society. Alexander Mikroyannidis represented the EDSA project by participating on the panel of this session and contributing the research outcomes and best practices from EDSA.

The session was successful in opening an actionable debate about the emergence of core digital competences for Science, Business and the Society. Experts and representatives from the Big Data and HPC Communities as well as from eScience started a multilateral dialogue in order to identify common baseline for a cooperative work.

Related Links:

The European Big Data Value Forum 2017

The EDSA project

Driverless/Autonomous vehicles in MK – come and tell us what you think on the 13th December

Wednesday 29 Nov 2017 | KMi News

UK Autodrive is a project in which The Open University are a partner. One of the things we are doing is supporting the work stream understanding public attitudes towards driverless/autonomous vehicles, in advance of the deployment of the MK Pods in 2018.

A key activity in the work stream is the running of workshops that explore attitudes and perceptions towards driverless/autonomous vehicles

The Open University are hosting the MK workshop on the 13th December and would like to invite you to participate.

Participants have the chance to win the use of an electric vehicle for a week, courtesy of the MK EV Experience.

The workshop will run from 6-8pm in KMi, 4th Floor, Berrill Building. It is facilitated by the UK Autodrive team. Places are limited to 24, so please book your place asap by completing the following form.

UK Autodrive Workshop

KMi PhD student kicks off new Jisc blog on Open Metrics

Tuesday 28 Nov 2017 | KMi News

A new blog launched yesterday by Jisc focuses on their Open Metrics project which aims to support the development of new research metrics. Following the publication of The Metric Tide report in 2015 there is increasing awareness within the sector of a need for new research evaluation metrics that move beyond the limitations of traditional citation-based metrics.

The launch included a piece that introduces David Pride, a PhD. research student at KMi. David’s current research looks at the large scale evaluation of research articles using the publications’ full-text.

You can read the post here: https://openmetrics.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2017/11/citations-created-equal/

And the Open Metrics blog can be read here: https://openmetrics.jiscinvolve.org/wp/about/

KMi researcher visits Ethiopia and participates in an Open Science training session

Tuesday 14 Nov 2017 | KMi News

EIFL’s invitation to KMi’s CORE project to take part in a workshop for researchers from developing countries pays dividends for participants and for CORE.

In June 2017, EIFL invited the global open access full text aggregator CORE to take part in an Open Science train-the-trainer course for universities and research institutions in EIFL partner countries.

Read more on EIFL’s post and check CORE’s blog to watch the videos of the workshop participants talking about CORE.

Related Links:

OU case study featured in EU Policy Report: Blockchain in Education

Tuesday 14 Nov 2017 | KMi News

An interview with KMi Director John Domingue about KMi’s blockchain research at Open University is one of four use case studies featured in a new EU Policy Report: Blockchain in Education. The Report exemplifies where the Blockchain is being deployed with an education context, and its potential for disruption in the education sector. Other case studies are from University of Nicosia, MIT and various educational institutions in Malta.

This European Commission Joint Research Centre report presents the findings of a research study into understanding what can facilitate both the process of issuing and recognising credentials in an increasingly digitised world. It is primarily for policy makers, education institutions, educational researchers, teachers and learners, and anyone from a non-technical audience who is interested in understanding blockchain and its potential in education. It explains how this technology may both disrupt institutional norms and empower learners and proposes eight scenarios for the application of the Blockchain in an education context, based on the current state of technology development and deployment.

Professor Domingue, in his interview (page 64-67), describes KMi’s holistic blockchain strategy which encourages researchers to explore the full potential of the technology, rather than focusing on one particular aspect. He talks about KMi’s research both within the Open University and global collaboration networks to conduct experiments with data, and the challenges and opportunities that these will pose for educational institutions in the medium term.

“Professor Domingue believes that administrative and student-facing processes within universities are ripe for radical change because of the fundamental need for the disintermediation of roles that currently sit within the institution and add little value to the end user – the student. Some components of these process (such as certification) need to be placed within the custodianship of students and not just the institution.”

Finally, he highlights the potential benefits for the sector from Blockchain Analytics:

“Imagine a scenario where every learning activity is registered on the Blockchain, including informal learning – together with informal feedback. All assignment test scores will be mapped on learning environments across Europe. Europe-wide analytics could then be developed from the ground up. The best lecturers in Europe by subject could be easily identified. Learning would become that much more interactive – and reputations built on more tangible matrices”.

The Report itself concludes that “even from these early pilots it is pertinent to conclude that blockchain could probably disrupt the market in student information systems and loosen the control current players have over this market.”

It recommends:

creating and promoting a label for ‘open’ educational records
that policymakers consider investigating and supporting the application of blockchain technology to specific educational use cases by organising and supporting innovation pipelines to lead to their implementation
that Europe urgently supports standardisation activities in this area
that an expert consultative committee be formed to keep policymakers abreast of developments and their implications on policy
outreach to the networks to help them understand the benefits of blockchain technology, and the incorporation of the principles behind the technology into digital competence education for learners.

Related Links:

KMi at ISWC 2017

Friday 03 Nov 2017 | KMi News

It was the turn of Vienna, Austria to host the International Semantic Web Conference, and once again KMi’s participation at the event was very strong. Miriam Fernandez co-chaired the Research Track, while Harith Alani, Enrico Motta, Alessandro Adamou, Francesco Osborne and Ilaria Tiddi sat on various program committees.

KMi members organised two Workshops this year, namely Alessandro Adamou and Enrico Daga’s WHiSe: Humanities in the Semantic Web and Pinelopi Troullinou and Ilaria Tiddi’s BlkMirror: Re-coding Black Mirror #RCBlackMirror. In addition, KMiers presented three workshop papers:

John Domingue and Allan Third presented “LinkChains: Exploring the Space of Decentralised Trustworthy Linked Data” at DeSemWeb: Decentralizing the Semantic Web Workshop #DeSemWeb2017.
Andrea Mannocci, Angelo Antonio Salatino, Francesco Osborne and Enrico Motta presented “2100 AI: Reflections on the mechanisation of scientific discovery”, at the BlkMirror workshop.
Enrico Daga and Paul Mulholland co-presented "Characterizing the Landscape of Musical Data on the Web: State of the Art and Challenges" at the WHiSe workshop.

Two papers were also presented in the highly selective research and industry tracks, on

"Semantic Wide and Deep Learning for Detecting Crisis-Information Categories on Social Media", by Gregoire Burel, Hassan Saif, and Harith Alani, and
"Supporting Springer Nature Editors by means of Semantic Technologies", by Francesco Osborne, Angelo Antonio Salatino, Aliaksandr Birukou, Thiviyan Thanapalasingam, and Enrico Motta.

Within the demo and poster tracks the following contributions were given:

Shuangyan Liu, Carlo Allocca, Mathieu D’Aquin and Enrico Motta demonstrated "A Platform for Triple Accuracy Measuring and Evidence Triples Discovering”.
Francesco Osborne, Thiviyan Thanapalasingam, Angelo Antonio Salatino, Aliaksandr Birukou and Enrico Motta demonstrated “Smart Book Recommender: A Semantic Recommendation Engine for Editorial Products”.
Francesco Osborne, Andrea Mannocci and Enrico Motta presented “Forecasting Technology Migrations by means of the Technology-Topic Framework”.
The highlight of the week was Ilaria Tiddi winning the SWSA Distinguished Dissertation prize – “Explaining Data Patterns using Knowledge from the Web of Data”. The prize is awarded every year to the best Doctoral Thesis in the field. This was the second year in a row that a KMi graduate has scooped this highly prestigious award.

To top all this, we participated in the first ISWC Job Fair where our members were on hand to talk to the ISCW community about the exciting academic and developer vacancies that are currently available at KMi.

Last but not least, The Knowledge Media Instruments band took part in the legendary ISWC Jam Session promoting the cultural environment of KMi.

Other important contributions were provided by Miriam Fernandez and Harith Alani, who were part of the tutor group invited to attend the mentoring lunch for PhD students, postdocs and junior faculty members; Miriam also attended editorial board meetings for the Journal of Web Semantics and Enrico Motta, who took part in the annual meeting of the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA), the body that oversees the ISWC series of conferences.

Related Links:

ISWC 2017

CORE listed as a top tool and resource to make Science Open and Collaborative

Wednesday 01 Nov 2017 | KMi News

Laworm, an aggregator of scientific online tools addressed mainly to scientists, has listed CORE as a top tool and resource, which helps science to become open and collaborative.

Related Links:

Tools and Resources to make Science Open and Collaborative

CORE organised and presented two workshops for the OpenMinTeD project

Tuesday 31 Oct 2017 | KMi News

During 25 – 27 October OpenMinTeD participated in the FORCE2017 Research Communication and e-Scholarship conference that brings together a diverse group of people interested in changing the way in which scholarly and scientific information is communicated and shared.

On Friday October 27th the OpenMinTeD partners held two workshops, one on “How to improve interoperability across publisher platforms to support text and data mining” and another one on “Enhancing the real impact of scholarly publications through text and data mining”.

At the first workshop the Open University partners from the CORE project presented on the work they have done on the Publisher Connector. This involved surveying the publishers on their machine accessibility interfaces of accessing Open Access content, the creation of the Publisher Connector, a tool that harvests Open Access content from publisher systems and exposes them via the ResourceSync protocol, and the technical expertise directory, where documentation is provided on how harvesting from publisher platforms can be achieved.

Related Links:

Original blog post

CORE’s Open Access Week 2017

Tuesday 31 Oct 2017 | KMi News

1. DOES YOUR ORGANIZATION HAVE AN OPEN ACCESS STRATEGY? AND HOW ARE YOU IMPLEMENTING IT?

CORE is an Open University (OU) project and is jointly funded by the OU and Jisc. CORE is a global full text aggregator of Open Access content harvesting repositories, institutional and disciplinary, and Open Access and Hybrid Journals.

Today, the CORE team at the OU runs the CORE service, which is the world’s largest aggregator of open access research publications, from repositories and journals systems at a full text level.

Currently CORE harvests more than 3700 repositories, 6000 journals and has 80 million metadata records and almost 8.5 million full text. Our mission is to aggregate all Open Access research outputs and make them available to the public. We support the citizens’ right to have access to information and we have established a wide set of services for that purpose. All our services are free of cost to the end user and enable them to gain access to Open Access content both in a human and machine readable form and develop their own applications using our content. Read more

Related Links:

Original blog post

KMi deploys OU’s first Hyperconvergence solution

Monday 23 Oct 2017 | KMi News

After many months of infrastructure re-architecting, KMi Systems have deployed the University’s first hyperconverged platform for its VMware vSphere estate.

Hyperconvergence is a type of infrastructure system with a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources and other technologies from scratch in a commodity hardware box supported by a single vendor.

Maxta, the vendor of KMi’s new hyperconverged layer within its virtualised estate, takes a different stance on hypervisor storage management when compared to traditional Storage Area Network (SAN) / Direct Attached Storage (DAS) solutions. These require expensive disk arrays or ‘Just a bunch of disks’ (JBODs) with their disks configured with a mixture of different ‘Random Array of Inexpensive Disks’ (RAID) sets and incurs a high amount of administration as a result. RAID sets have often restricted us from providing small increments to storage capacity owing to the nature of the technology, therefore making storage expansion a costly exercise. However, KMi’s new hyperconverged layer in its virtual estate has changed this.

Maxta maps raw disk to the hypervisor, aggregating it into a large pool. Redundancy is then leveraged via data replication to multiple nodes, akin to Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). This approach allows for cheaper storage increments, whilst still affording us cross-datacentre redundancy.

Unlike our previous SAN and current DAS solution, we are also reaping the rewards of data compression on the backend disk, therefore allowing us to fit more data into our pool of aggregated storage.

A further benefit from the Maxta technology is its proprietary snapshotting. This is particularly useful for KMi&#39s Data Science / Big Data research allowing snapshots with zero interruption to the running services. Traditionally, snapshotting technology built into virtualisation solutions institutes a minor interruption to service when creating a snapshot this has a negative impact on running big data tools. The Maxta solution and its new approach mitigates this issue.

This emerging technology is cutting edge, and will eventually be used as a staple requirement for virtualisation in enterprise datacenters across the world. KMi’s early adoption of this is befitting of the department’s ethos, and further supplements our researchers and developers server environment, whilst also leading the way for the University in this field.

For more information about Maxta and the features it affords KMi, see their website for more details at www.maxta.com

KMi at the JTEL Summer School 2017

Monday 16 Oct 2017 | KMi News

The 13th Joint European Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning took place last week in the beautiful city of Aveiro in Portugal. This is an annual event, gathering PhD students from universities across Europe and providing them with opportunities to develop research skills, increase their knowledge base, collaborate with others in their own and complementary research areas, engage in debate, have access to experts in the field, and discuss their own work. This year, KMi was represented in this event by Alexander Mikroyannidis and Tracie Farrell Frey, both of whom delivered hands-on workshop sessions.

Alexander’s workshop introduced participants to the SlideWiki platform and its functionalities for collaborative authoring of Open Educational Resources (OERs). Participants were also introduced to the latest technological developments behind SlideWiki, regarding its integration with different educational platforms. Additionally, participants have had the opportunity to try the SlideWiki platform and perform a range of OER-related tasks, including finding OERs, reusing existing OERs, as well as authoring new OERs in collaboration with other participants. Participants were able to offer their feedback via discussions and complete a questionnaire evaluating SlideWiki in terms of its usefulness and usability.

Tracie’s workshop was about hands-on collaborative and social learning in Technology-Enhanced Learning. Participants were given the opportunity to try out two pieces of innovative software, both of which leverage digitalisation to add value to already validated, social pedagogical concepts. "Noracle", for example, was originally a face-to-face method for representing different perspectives through question-based dialogue (in which only questions are used as speech acts). The digital tool, a distributed Noracle, makes it possible to explore and map community ignorance through question-based dialogue, asynchronously and without a formal infrastructure. The tool uses a peer-to-peer architecture to safe-guard the community’s outputs and reduce the costs involved with centralisation. The second tool, the SOIL project, transfers the concept of creating flashcards to a digital space, to support Social MicroLearning. Participants tested the early stage software and provided valuable feedback for future development.

Related Links:

Successful trial of tutorial attendance mobile app

Monday 09 Oct 2017 | KMi News

Students studying U116 Environment: journeys through a changing world were the first to trial a new app being developed by Paul Hogan in KMi.

OU Check In allows students to log in with their University credentials and displays a QR Code that tutors using the same app can scan to record their attendance. The one time log in app displays the student’s QR Code each time the app is opened and all the student needs to do is to present their phone to the tutor to be scanned.

Student Demi Abrahams (pictured) can be seen presenting her QR Code for scanning at the U116 tutorial held on 7th October. When asked about the app Demi replied "I think the app is fab!".

Associate Lecturer Roger Bradley (pictured) has been working closely with Paul to ensure the app provides both tutors and students with an easier more efficient method of attendance recording. Roger is the first tutor to use the app in a tutorial.

Once all students have been scanned the tutor can then transfer the data to the university for later analysis.

It is hoped the app will be taken up by tutors and students alike.

Demi Abrahams presenting her QR Code for scanning Associate Lecturer Roger Bradley advising tutor on app development

Special Issue: Motivating and Supporting Self-Regulated Learning

Friday 06 Oct 2017 | KMi News

Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) is a term that can be used to describe an individual’s ability to develop a skill set allowing him/her to learn in a number of different ways. According to the well-established literature in this field, SRL is an active and constructive process where learners set themselves goals that enable them to monitor, regulate and control their cognition, motivation and ensuing behaviour within the contextual features of their environment. Thus, SRL can be perceived to be, in rather more simplistic terms, as learning how to learn.

Since the 1980s, a number of researchers have proposed a variety of theoretical frameworks and models that outline SRL in terms of learning targets, guidance and potential planning mechanisms. More recently, the emergence of Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) environments, such as Personal Learning Environments (PLEs), offers opportunities to enhance the necessary SRL skills, especially metacognitive abilities. Additionally, the deployment of Learning Analytics tools in a variety of TEL environments can potentially motivate and support SRL via awareness and reflection upon an individual’s learning process. Open Educational Resources and the advancing Open Education movement also offer greater control to learners over acquiring the most suitable resources for their learning needs and goals.

This Special Issue will address the latest developments in the field of SRL, both from a technological as well as pedagogical perspective. Contributions are expected to address how SRL can be motivated and supported with the use technologies, such as TEL environments, PLEs and Learning Analytics, which are grounded on different pedagogical approaches. Experiences and best practices from the fields of formal, informal, non-formal education, as well as workplace learning, are particularly welcome.

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 April 2018
Guest Editor: Dr. Alexander Mikroyannidis
Submission guidelines: http://mdpi.com/si/11575

Related Links:

Special Issue: Motivating and Supporting Self-Regulated Learning

KMi’s Stefan Rueger presents Dr Ian Witten for honorary doctorate

Tuesday 03 Oct 2017 | KMi News

Prof Stefan Rueger of KMi presented Dr Ian Witten of Waikato University to Executive Dean Mary Kellett at Friday’s Degree Ceremony. Ian received a honorary doctorate "Doctor of the University" from the OU for services to the educationally underprivileged.

Ian Witten is a Computer Scientist who has contributed to the research in his discipline in different areas: throughout his career he researched compression algorithms, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning and Digital Libraries. It is a hallmark of his lab that their research is almost always accompanied by software implementations and textbooks to reach a much wider audience than the immediate research community: For example, the textbook ‘Managing Gigabytes’ has accompanied his open source text search engine MG. A highly acclaimed data mining book (translated into many languages, including Korean) has accompanied their open-source Weka toolkit, which has been adopted by data mining researchers all over the world.

However, Ian Witten’s main influence beyond academia is via his outstanding service to the educationally underprivileged through the Greenstone Digital Library Suite http://www.greenstone.org/ that was developed under his direction. Greenstone is an open source platform for publishing books and documents on the intranet or through CD-ROMS on a local unconnected machine. This has enabled thousands of communities, non-government organisations etc. to distribute complex and rich material on a very wide range of low-cost hardware. Greenstone has become a high-profile digital library system that is widely used in less-developed countries, effectively becoming the standard for distributing digital libraries. Co-sponsored by UNESCO, Greenstone has user interfaces in 50+ languages, full documentation in 5 languages, and a large and avid user community providing support.

KMi has a special relationship with both the Greenstone digital library and the team which developed it: David Bainbridge, who succeeded Ian Witten as director of the project, is an affiliate of KMi, and has been a visitor to KMi in the past, collaborating with Stefan Rueger on retrieval methods for multimedia that have found its way into the Greenstone Digital Library. Stefan and other team members in KMi visited the Greenstone team on numerous occasions over last decade each time researching and co-developing new modules and new document access mechanisms. This collaboration was partially funded by two EPSRC grants and by grants held at the University of Waikato.

ICL2017: Teaching and Learning in a Digital World

Monday 02 Oct 2017 | KMi News

The 20th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL 2017) took place last week in Budapest, Hungary. This interdisciplinary conference focuses on the exchange of relevant trends and research results, as well as the presentation of practical experiences in the fields of Interactive Collaborative Learning and Engineering Pedagogy.

KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis was there to deliver a workshop related to the SlideWiki project, as well as present the latest research outputs of the EDSA project. Alexander’s SlideWiki workshop is part of the project’s initiative in developing a collaborative open courseware authoring platform and collecting feedback from the online education community. This hands-on workshop offered the opportunity to participants to get acquainted with the newly launched SlideWiki platform and its functionalities for collaborative authoring of open courseware, crowdsourced translation of educational content, as well as social networking.

Alexander’s EDSA paper presents the project’s initiative for bridging the data science skills gap across Europe and training a new generation of world-leading data scientists. The EDSA project has established a rigorous process and a set of best practices for the production and delivery of curricula for data science. Additionally, the project’s efforts are dedicated to linking the demand for data science skills with the supply of learning resources that offer these skills. In order to achieve this, EDSA is offering interactive tools for finding learning resources and building personalised learning pathways towards acquiring the skills that are currently in demand.

Related Links:

The SlideWiki project

The EDSA project

MK:Smart helps ignite the 2017 Digital Thailand Big Bang

Friday 29 Sep 2017 | KMi News

KMi’s Alan Fletcher gave one of two key presentations hosted by the UK Foreign Office and British Embassy in Thailand for the 2017 Digital Thailand Big Bang Conference. Opened by General Prayut Chan-o-cha, the Thai

Prime Minister, Digital Thailand Big Bang 2017 is a national digital and technology exhibition that aimed to transform ideas and connect people to Digital Thailand.

Alan was invited by the Embassy to showcase the smart city transformation of Milton Keynes and the focus of data at the heart of the city that was delivered by MK:Smart.

In a series of meetings in the days after the conference Alan and the Embassy team met with some key players in the Digital Thailand initiative. H.E. Dr. Pichet Durongkaveroj, Minister of Digital Economy and Society, was pleased to meet and continue discussions with KMi, after his visit to MK earlier in the year. The Minister is keen to see universities from the UK having an input to the Digital Thailand initiative and keen to see Thai developments learn from MK.

A group of senior Mangers from PTT invited Alan to present MK:Smart in more detail at their Bangkok HQ and engaged in some detailed discussion about their activities in the Thai Eastern Economic Corridor, the smart city and university development covering over 13,000 km2 and expected to see over $43bn of global investment. KMi is set to continue these discussion on a number of focal points that will seek to engage the KMi team in the EEC project.

In talks with the director of the Thailand National Innovation Agency the team compared SME support activity between the KMi CityLabs project and the work of the NIA, with a view to identifying opportunities for collaboration.

MK:Smart in China

Wednesday 20 Sep 2017 | KMi News

Geoff Snelson, director of strategy and futures of Milton Keynes council presented the MK:Smart vision to the TM Forum 3rd Smart City in Focus Forum in Yinchuan, China. The MK delegation included leader of the council, Peter Marland and Alan Fletcher from KMi who were invited to the Forum to contribute to the wider debate and to showcase the work of MK to a global audience. The event included an invited focused workshop that considered the current state and goals of the global smart city movement. Geoff and Alan were invited to participate in the workshop and bring the experience of MK to the group.
Councilor Marland attended a civic leaders reception and dinner aimed at building a closer relationship with Yinchuan, a city with many similarities to MK.

As a member of TM Forum, KMi contribute to the Smart City initiatives of TMF and were pleased to have been part of the team whose work in smart city modeling was showcased at the event by Carl Piva, head of smart cities for TM Forum. Milton Keynes is a signatory to the Smart City Manifesto of TM Forum and will continue to engage with and contribute to the global debate.

Special Issue: Awareness and Reflection in Technology Enhanced Learning

Friday 15 Sep 2017 | KMi News

The latest issue of the International Journal of Technology-Enhanced Learning (IJTEL) is a special issue on Awareness and Reflection in Technology Enhanced Learning. This special issue has been edited by KMi’s Alexander Mikroyannidis together with external collaborators Milos Kravcik (DFKI Germany), Viktoria Pammer (Graz University of Technology, Austria), Michael Prilla (Clausthal University of Technology, Germany) and Thomas Daniel Ullmann (The Open University, UK). This is related to the ARTEL (Awareness and Reflection in Technology-Enhanced Learning) workshop series, which started in 2011. This series of workshops has mostly taken place at the European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL), which is one of the most prominent venues in its field.

This special issue features a set of high quality papers, addressing different aspects of awareness and reflection. In particular, 21 submissions were thoroughly reviewed and 8 of them were accepted for publishing. The accepted papers can be divided into several categories. The first three papers present a theoretical overview of the field – starting with a general overview and then focusing on blended and workplace learning respectively. The next two articles introduce methodological approaches, namely annotations in online course and digital storytelling. The last three contributions describe implementations of different systems – personalised dashboards, ambient visualisations and remote labs.

Related Links:

Special Issue: Awareness and Reflection in Technology Enhanced Learning

Augmented Reality App for Students Studying E117

Thursday 27 Jul 2017 | KMi News

Paul Hogan in KMi has finalised the Augmented Reality (AR) application that he has developed in collaboration with partners in Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELs) that will be made available to students studying E117 Introduction to Sport and Fitness starting in October 2017.

The initial application was developed to provide students with a more emersive study expeience via the use of AR. However it has since evolved to provide both AR and non AR for the mobile platforms Android and iOS as well as a non AR version for both Windows and Mac OSX.

KMi’s Allan Third and Chris Sanders have expanded upon technology used in the CARRE project that allows students to use the activity fitness tracker supplied in their module material to record and share their activity data with other students studying E117.

WELs partners, Caroline Heaney, Jessica Pinchbeck and Ben Langdown worked along side Paul providing the educational content and direction of how they wanted the app to become what it is, a multi platform emersive study experience that should appeal to the E117 students.

The mobile versions will be released on the Google Play and Apple App stores while the desktop versions will be released via the students module web page.

KMi wins prestigious SWSA Distinguished Dissertation Award for the 2nd year running

Wednesday 26 Jul 2017 | KMi News

Dr Ilaria Tiddi has just won the 2017 SWSA Distinguished Dissertation Award for her Dissertation ‘Explaining the Data Patterns with Knowledge from the Web of Data’.

This is the second year in a row that a KMi PhD student has won this prestigious award with Dr Hassan Saif picking up the award last year.

Ilaria describes her work at the intersection of knowledge discovery and semantic web research, using the Web of Data to generate explanations for patterns found in data through data mining techniques. In her thesis Ilaria investigated the hypothesis that the interpretation of data behaving in a similarly way (“patterns”) could be facilitated and automatized using the Web of (Linked) Data thanks to the shared and cross-domain knowledge in it. To demonstrate this, Ilaria developed Dedalo, a framework that automatically provides explanations to patterns of data using the background knowledge extracted from the Web of Data. She studied the elements required for a piece of information to be considered an explanation, identified the best strategies to automatically find the right piece of information in the Web of Data, and designed a process exploiting Machine Learning techniques (such as Inductive Logic Programming, Neural networks and Genetic Programming) able to produce explanations to a given pattern using the background knowledge autonomously collected from the Web of Data. The final evaluation of Dedalo involved users within an empirical study based on a real-world scenario, the interpretation of trends of Google searches. She demonstrated that the explanation process is complex when not being familiar with the domain of usage, but also that this can be considerably simplified when using the Web of Data as a source of background knowledge

Congratulation Ilaria! KMi is so proud of your achievement.

KMi have become regulars at ESWC

Tuesday 25 Jul 2017 | KMi News

Several members of KMi contributed to the 14th Extended Semantic Web Conference, which took place recently in Portoroz, Slovenia.

In the research track, there were papers from Dr. Hassan Saif and Paul Warren, on "A Semantic Graph-based Approach for Radicalisation Detection on Social Media" and "Improving the Comprehensibility of Description Logics – Applying insights from theories of reasoning and language”. Dr Saif’s paper focuses the use of semantics together with machine learning approaches for detecting radicalised users on social media. Dr Saif also presented a paper entitled “On Semantics and Deep Learning for Event Detection in Crisis Situations” at the 2nd Semantic Deep Learning workshop (SemDeep), where he introduced a novel approach of enriching deep neural networking with word semantics for detecting crisis-related events on social media.

Prof. John Domingue took part in a panel entitled "The Future of Proceedings Publication: the Perspective of the Semantic Web Community” which stimulated a lot of active discussions about the community’s ability and desire to ‘eat its own dogfood’ and use Web-based and Web-focused tools and standards to promote publication in a linked semantic fashion, and how best to work with publishers to ensure this.

The programme also featured two workshops organised by KMiers (or former KMiers): the steering committee of the 1st International Workshop on Application of Semantic Web technologies in Robotics (AnSWeR) included Dr. Emanuele Bastianelli, Dr. Ilaria Tiddi and Dr. Mathieu d’Aquin, while the 2nd International Workshop on Linked Data and Distributed Ledgers (LD-DL) included Prof. John Domingue.

The AnSWeR workshop was the first attempt to bring together people from Semantic Web and the Robotics area. A considerable amount of people attended the workshop, that featured lively interactions and discussions. Many of the points raised during the presentations and the final discussion have been put down in a shared document, which was editable by everyone in the audience, and will serve as starting point for the future editions of the AnSWeR workshop.

Dr. Allan Third presented a paper at LD-DL, "Towards the temporal streaming of graph data on distributed ledgers" featuring the work of the Blockchain group with the GreenData project and the data collection work organised in the KMi-featured MK2MG project. The paper describes the use of blockchains to provide a “certification” of streaming datasets which guarantees that they haven’t been corrupted or tampered with after initial storage, allowing trustworthy data querying in cases where there is a lack of trust due to, e.g., economic or political pressures

Related Links:

https://2017.eswc-conferences.org/

KMi supports Fight Against Hate Campaign in Milton Keynes

Thursday 20 Jul 2017 | KMi News

On Wednesday, July 19th, the Open University Library welcomed students from five local schools to celebrate their participation in a poster competition about fighting hate crime and hate incidents in Milton Keynes. The competition was launched by the Citizens:MK Fight Against Hate Campaign, to raise awareness and encourage young people to participate in building a more equitable society. The entries were scored by an independent panel of judges, awarding three lucky pupils the top prizes.

KMi had the honour of sharing our commitment to diversity and tolerance by sponsoring the 3rd place prize. The award was presented by Dr. Miriam Fernandez, who spoke briefly to about the contribution of computer science to fighting hate, especially online. Milton Keynes is a diverse area with a growing population and a younger age profile than other areas in the country. More than 25% of the population belong to minority ethnic groups. KMi is also a diverse research lab, with more than 15 countries represented among our staff, and several of our research efforts intersect with issues related to intolerance, extremism and access to information. We congratulate all of the participants and their teachers.

WOSP2017 – Touchdown Toronto

Wednesday 19 Jul 2017 | KMi News

Since 2012, members of KMi’s CORE team, headed by Petr Knoth, have orchestrated the WOSP (Workshop On mining Scientific Publications) held each year as a part of JCDL (Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.

Previously held in locations as diverse as London and Indianapolis, this year the 6th annual international WOSP workshop took place at the University of Toronto. Over 100 academics joined us to hear presentations from 14 authors on a wide range of topics, from using machine learning to detect academic plagiarism, to using text and data-mining to interrogate a bilingual scientific repository. Our very own Petr Knoth presented new research on Recommender Systems, you can see the slides from this presentation HERE. We also had several demonstrations; Victor Botev gave us a really nice overview of their ‘Iris.ai – the Science Assistant’ project whilst Ron Daniel from Elsevier presented the ‘Content Analytics Toolbench (CAT)’

Jevin West - Keynote Jevin West Waleed Ammar

We had fantastic keynote speeches, from Jevin West (Assistant Professor at the Information School at the University of Washington and co-director of the DataLab ) who introduced us to VizioMetrix, a platform that extracts visual information from the scientific literature. Our second keynote was Waleed Ammar, research team lead at Semantic Scholar, who spoke about their latest work around citation extraction and recommender systems. Researchers can check out their Cite-o-Matic recommender HERE.

Many thanks to all our speakers, authors and attendees, hopefully we’ll see many of you next year for WOSP 2018!

Related Links:

Full workshop details here

KMi Develops OU Photobooth Mobile Application

Tuesday 18 Jul 2017 | KMi News

Paul Hogan in KMi has developed an Android and iOS application on behalf of Learning Innovation that will allow students to share fun photos edited with OU themed emojis on social media.

Although intended for students the app is free and so anyone will be able to use the app and promote The Open University.

Learning Innovation Senior Product Development Manager Elizabeth Ellis who champions OU Photobooth says:

‘Our students form very deep connections with each other on soclal media – they use it for support, to celebrate their successes, and to vent their frustrations. I’ve often seen students joking that they would love an OU emoji to express a specific emotion. Hopefully they’ll enjoy using these light-hearted stickers to share their stories.’

The application that will be available in early August allows the user to snap photos or use existing ones from their gallery and add fun emojis and text and then share via social media, text and email.

Related Links:

Learning Innovations using OU Photobooth

Congratulations to Dr Paul Warren

Friday 14 Jul 2017 | KMi News

Paul Warren successfully defended his thesis on 13th July 2017. The title of Paul’s thesis was "Human Reasoning and Description Logics: Applying Psychological Theory to Understand and Improve the Usability of Description Logics". The examiners were Dr. Gem Stapleton (University of Brighton) and Prof. Marian Petre (Computing and Communications).

A key contribution of the thesis was the way in which psychological theories were applied, over a series of empirical studies, in order to identify the difficulties people have with Description Logics and propose ways of alleviating them. Paul undertook his PhD studies on a part time basis and published findings from the thesis in the EKAW, SEMANTICS and ESWC conferences.

Congratulations!

CORE participates in new EU funded project on Responsible Research and Innovation – FIT4RRI

Tuesday 11 Jul 2017 | KMi News

FIT4RRI is precisely intended to contribute to bridging the gap between RRI and Open Science and promoting viable strategies to render institutional changes in RFPOs (Research Funding and Performing Organizations)

FIT4RRI moves from the assumption that there is a serious gap between the potential role RRI and OS (open science) could play in helping RFPOs (Research Funding and Performing Organizations) to manage the rapid transformation processes affecting science (especially the science-in-society aspects) and the actual impact RRI and OS are having on RFPOs, research sectors and national research systems.

The project will act on 2 key factors:

Enhancing competencies and skills related to RRI and OS through an improvement of the RRI and OS training offer
Institutionally embedding RRI/OS practices and approaches by promoting the diffusion of more advanced governance settings

‘Through FIT4RRI we want to engage hard scientists into responsibility matters and promote RRI and OS as drivers for institutional change in research funding and performing organizations. We look at science as a tool to create bridges towards society’

Andrea Riccio, Project Coordinator UNIROMA1

CORE has two contributions in this project; it will create the platform to host the RRI resources, training tools and events and will also run an RRI experiment with a focus on the Text and Data Mining.

The FIT4RRI project was granted within the Horizon 2020 Program of the European Union after a competitive one stage selection process. The project started with a kick-off meeting in Rome at the Sapienza University on the 12th & 13th of June 2017 and will be funded for three years.

The FIT4RRI partners in the wonderful cloister of San Pietro in Vincoli

Related Links:

http://fit4rri.eu/

COMRADES sails through its mid-term review

Monday 10 Jul 2017 | KMi News

The COMRADES (www.comrades-project.eu/) consortium came back triumphant from Brussels where the project’s mid-term review was held at the European Commission on July 5th. Project officer and reviewers were highly impressed by the exceptional quality of the work and achievements of the project partners over the first half of the project.

In these 18 months, the consortium developed several advanced methods for crisis information processing, including a semantic deep-learning approach that beats the state of the art in automatically grouping social media posts with respect to the type of crisis-related information they contain, and a novel entity extraction tool that identifies and disambiguates unknown place names from social media content. They also praised the extensive community engagement activities carried out by the project, which involved hundreds of stakeholders from several countries around the world, including Nepal and China.

Reviewers also had the chance to use the first prototype of the COMRADES platform, which offers the functionalities of the Ushahidi (www.ushahidi.com/) crisis-mapping tool, with added A.I. services for powerful processing of disaster information.

COMRADES is a €2 million European H2020 project, co-ordinated by Prof Harith Alani from the Open University, and involves the University of Sheffield (UK), Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), iHub (Kenya), and Gov2U (Belgium).

Best Paper at NLDB 2017

Saturday 01 Jul 2017 | KMi News

A paper coauthored by new KMi member, Advaith Siddharthan, ex-KMi member Chenghua Lin and their PhD student Mohamad Barawi was awarded the best paper award at the 22nd International Conference on Natural Language & Information Systems – NLDB 2017 (17% acceptance rate for full papers). The extended version of the paper below will be published in the Data & Knowledge Engineering Journal (Springer) later this year.

Automatically Labelling Sentiment-bearing Topics with Descriptive Sentence Labels. Mohamad Hardyman Barawi, Chenghua Lin, and Advaith Siddharthan

Learn About Fair 2017, but with a difference!

Thursday 29 Jun 2017 | KMi News

The Learn about Fair 2017 (LAF 2017) came back this year at the OU yesterday bringing something new to the table focusing around the theme of ‘Personalised Open Learning’. KMi participated as an exhibitor showing neat projects for future innovation in teaching and learning; AR/VR developments, Green Data & OU Analyse.

Paul Hogan, in the continuum of last year presentation of Augmented Reality (AR) applications, presented the Introduction to Sport and Fitness and Human Biology Apps developed in partnership with Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELs) and STEM colleagues respectively.

The Apps provide a direct and dynamic way for students to learn how human digestion/muscular systems and our heart work bringing to life body systems. The students can navigate through the Apps developing their knowledge by exploring the different body components.

The app includes two AR models (one for Level 1 E117 Sport and Fitness module and one for SK299 Human Biology) and a website. The website allows students to access and share data supporting their course materials in order to record their own daily learning steps and at the same time, compare them with other students developing critical and scientific thinking.

The students can access them not only via phone or tablet camera but also through PC based desktop version or non-AR mode on mobile devices as well.

Following the success of OU Go 3D campus Guide last year, in July Paul Hogan with KMi will be launching the OU Photobooth App, which will be available for students and general public respectively. The App has been developed in collaboration with Liz Ellis from Learning Teaching Innovation (LTI), project manager of OU PhotoBooth.

The app is being developed to allow students to edit their photos and text with OU styled emojis, ‘OUmojis’ and then share on various social media platforms as well as text and email. Look out for new OU photobooth snaps coming soon!

Leaving the augmented reality and virtual world, Chris Valentine captured the attention on the stand on how detect, store and share power generation and the use of data directly from solar PV, wind and solar/geo thermal installations.

The GreenData project collects data every 10minutes using low-cost devices which are quick and easy to set up. The volume of data is expanding all the time as the network of volunteers who have installed these devices in their homes increase, these are mostly in the UK, however, two based in Greece and Austria.

The data captures instantaneously live information allowing students at any level of education to easily access and use in a different way as an incredible open source data.

Today the GreenData project is only being used by course tutors (associate lecturers) in their own teaching of the course.The next goal is to make the data extrapolation and interpretation as an official part of the OU course modules! Challenge accepted!

Students are constantly experiencing hard times during their studies especially in their first year. What can go wrong during my studies? Am I at the right speed? Did I choose the right course for my career or is the module too advanced?

OUAnalyse is a project piloting machine-learning based methods for early identification of students at risk of failing Open University modules. Thanks to a collection of Demographic and Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) data, OUAnalyse creates predictive models in order to detect who is at risk. After detection, the process follows next a justification to show the reason why the model predicted the possible risk of failure. Supplied with this information, the student would be supported by the tutors by intervention and advised on how to improve their performance in the course.

To support the tutor’s decision on how to help the students, Zdenek Zdrahal and Martin Hlosta presented the newly developed personalised study recommender at LAF 2017. Each week, it combines the current importance of the material with the effort student have made so far. Based on this data, the model shows which study materials which are most appropriate to use with respect to each assignment.

The recommender will be piloted in selected courses starting in the autumn semester.

KMi PhD Student success in winning HEIF funding

Thursday 01 Jun 2017 | KMi News

The Augmented Reality in Activism (ARIA) Project launched this week at KMi with the aim of improving inclusive participation in social protest and campaigning. ARIA will utilise Augmented Reality (AR) and Web technologies to enable people to remotely engage in social activism. AR allows digital and physical world to coexist in the same space. With the help of mobile devices and head-mounted displays, any user is able to visualize digital objects placed in the physical space, providing an extra layer of information and interaction with the real world. In the ARIA project, AR enables those who support a given cause, but who are not able to visit a physical protest or event, to be "digitally" present and engage with the rest of the participants. Through a web interface, activists will be able to place a digital avatar at the location of the event, along with a short statement expressing their views. Those who are physically present at the event will be able to download an AR application that will show them the people remotely supporting the cause: Looking through their smartphone or other device’s camera they will see in the space around them the avatars of those the remote supporters.

Initial testing will be conducted with an online campaigning organisation in Poland and a local charity in Milton Keynes. Organisational leaders hope that this tool can help reach out to activists with typically low participation, such as individuals with mental health issues (such as anxiety or depression), activists with mobility issues and those who are threatened by any kind of violence.

Over the next three months, the ARIA team (Beppe Scavo, Alberto Ardito, Tracie Farrell Frey and senior staff member Anna De Liddo) will develop a multiple campaign website creator and manager that will utilise a submission service to allow potential users to launch a new campaign and attract supporters. Organisations and potential participants will also have access to a campaign geovisualiser to provide an overview of digital participation in the campaign. The first steps of ARIA will be funded through Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF), after a successful bid by PhD student Tracie Farrell Frey.

Sentiment Analysis for Arabizi: A Multilingual Jargon on Social Media

Monday 29 May 2017 | KMi News

After spending almost 2 years at the lab, I am finally pleased to share my research with my friends. Last Thursday, 25th of May, I presented my work in NLP titled "Sentiment Analysis for Arabizi: A Multilingual Jargon". Arabizi is a transcription of the naturally-dialectal Arabic language in Latinscript, quiet common in mobile texting and social media. Similar to the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Al-Fus·ha, it is rich in morphology. Unlike MSA, there is no standard orthography to transcribe a spoken language, it is often code-switched with English or French, found within multi-lingual streams of social data, and it is under-resourced lacking the classical NLP tools such as lexicons, stemmers, parsers, and labelled datasets. I talked about a pilot case study that we conducted last year to analyse the usage of Arabizi in Twitter data, and then moved on to address the challenges to process and extract sentiment from Arabizi. I presented some preliminary results and my current and future line of research. I thank Rania Islambouli, Omar Farhat, and Omar Osman for their contributions in annotating a Lebanese dialect Arabizi dataset that is going to be prepared and released publicly soon on project-rbz.com. You can watch the talk (20 min) via the link below.

Related Links:

Link to talk

Project RBZ

Personalised learning – paving the way forward

Friday 19 May 2017 | KMi News

The latest CALRG event on Personalised Learning took place on May 18th. The event was organised by the Open University’s Computers and Learning Research Group (CALRG) and brought together researchers that have been working on personalised learning in order to share the outcomes of their work and move forward to shape the university’s strategy in this area.

Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi and presented some of the work conducted in the context of recent EU-funded research projects. In particular, Alexander presented the outcomes of four years of educational research in the project called ROLE (Responsive Online Learning Environments). ROLE technology is centered around the concept of self-regulated learning that creates responsible learners, who are capable of critical thinking and able to plan their own learning processes. The methodology and outcomes of the project have been published in an open access book available by Springer.

Additionally, Alexander talked about how the outcomes of the ROLE project have informed and shaped the approaches adopted by follow-up KMi research projects, including the weSPOT project on personalised inquiry-based learning, FORGE on remote labs and online experimentation, as well as KMi’s ongoing work on Blockchain technologies for higher education.

The event was broadcasted live and the recording is available here.

Related Links:

More details about the event

PT Anywhere presented at the IEEE EDUCON 2017

Wednesday 03 May 2017 | KMi News

The IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) 2017 has been the eighth in a series of conferences that rotate among central locations in IEEE Region 8 (Europe, Middle East and North Africa). EDUCON is the flagship conference of the IEEE Education Society. This year’s EDUCON took place on April 25-28 in the city of Athens, Greece.

Alexander Mikroyannidis attended the conference and presented a paper on PT Anywhere. PT Anywhere offers a network simulation environment via a web interface that can be accessed from any web browser or as a widget inside an interactive eBook. PT Anywhere is based on the Packet Tracer network simulator for Windows and Linux developed by the Cisco Networking Academy. PT Anywhere has been jointly developed by the Open University and Cisco and has been funded by the FORGE project, as part of its initiative in driving and promoting the concept of experimentally driven research in education by using experiments as an interactive learning and training channel for both students and professionals.

The FORGE project was completed in September 2016 and was rated "Excellent" by the European Commission. The Open University team continues to maintain PT Anywhere and is actively seeking new funding opportunities in order to further develop and improve PT Anywhere.

Related Links:

PT Anywhere

1st Workshop on Linked Data and Distributed Ledgers @ WWW

Tuesday 18 Apr 2017 | KMi News

The first workshop on Linked Data and Distributed Ledgers which was recently held at the World Wide Web (WWW) conference in Perth, Australia attracted a lively audience who came to discuss the relationship two fields. Linked Data research has a long pedigree at WWW whereas Distributed Ledgers (which include blockchains the technological underpinning of crypto-currencies such as BitCoin) are very new.

The day was structured around two keynotes, three presentations based on refereed submissions and a Round Table discussion. After an opening from one of the workshop’s organisers, KMi’s Director John Domingue, Peter Evans-Greenwood first gave an overview of how Distributed Ledgers could initiate a golden era of community-driven collaboration over market driven enterprises.

The second Keynote came from Manu Sporny who outlined how Linked Data could contribute to Distributed Ledgers and vice versa. Two key messages emerged from his talk. Firstly, Distributed Ledgers can be used to digitally sign Linked Data graph fragments enabling authentication with respect to, for example, a Linked Data application or validation from an authority. Work needs to be carried out however, on how distributed identities, a core component of Distributed Ledgers, can be handled within the Linked Data technology stack.

In between the two keynotes a series of refereed presentations were given. Victoria Lemieux outlined how Distributed Ledgers could support Archival Bonds – the property linking an archival record to its surrounding context. For example, that a set of documents represent land ownership or birth records.

The presentation “Linked Data Indexing of Distributed Ledgers” outlined a joint paper from Allan Third and John Domingue of KMi on how meaningful and domain specific blockchain indexes could be built. This work uses the BLONDiE blockchain ontology which emerged from a collaboration between KMi and the Fraunhofer Institute.

The round table discussions were lively and it was agreed that the work would continue within the existing W3C Blockchain Community Group. The newly formed W3C Working Group on Verifiable Claims will also provide a forum to expose the work. The overlap between Linked Data and Distributed Ledgers is a very exciting area with a lot of potential. A second workshop will soon follow at the ESWC Conference in Portoroz, Slovena where again KMi will play a leading role. Watch this space!

Related Links:

The OU’s blockchain home page

5 contributions from KMi presented LAK 2017

Tuesday 18 Apr 2017 | KMi News

As every year, KMi presented the current results at the top-level Learning Analytics conference, Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK17). This year, the conference was held in Vancouver, Canada (13-17 March) and co-organised with ex-KMier Marek Hatala. Even though the acceptance rate was quite low, KMi was proud to have 5 papers accepted: 1 full paper, 3 short papers and 1 poster in the research sections and one also in the practitioners track.

On the first day of the conference, Martin Hlosta presented the novel model that is used at The Open University for identifying at-risk students, when no historical data are available for learning the model. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3027449

Michal Huptych showed an early version of our study materials recommender, which is based on analysing the information about successful students in the previous presentation of the same course. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3027426

The joint paper between KMi, IET and LTS, introduced by Thea Herodotou, showed the teachers perspective of learning analytics at large scale. This research is based on the results and interviews with tutors from the previous year. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3027397

Moreover, in the practitioner track, organised together with the poster section, we shared our results in scaling up the OUAnalyse from various perspectives: both with the focus on including as many courses and as many users at OU.

Tracie Farrell Frey, one KMi’s PhD students, participated in the poster section with her contribution about Seeking Relevance: Affordances of Learning Analytics for Self-Regulated Learning.

Still fresh from the conference, the OU Analyse team hope to come back to present their new results next year down under in Sydney, https://latte-analytics.sydney.edu.au/index.php/lak18-sydney-australia/

OER17 – The Politics of Open

Friday 07 Apr 2017 | KMi News

The Open Educational Resources conference (OER17) took place on April 5th and 6th in London. In two days fully packed with paper presentations and interactive sessions, OER17 has presented an opportunity for open practitioners, activists, educators and policy makers to come together as a community to reflect on ‘The Politics of Open’ and discuss the following questions:

What are our current key challenges and strengths – locally, nationally, and internationally?
What are our priorities – in terms of political governance, organisational and personal politics?
What are the changes that we want to effect together?

Alexander Mikroyannidis represented KMi and delivered a hands-on workshop together with Abi James (University of Southampton). The workshop was focused on the SlideWiki platform for collaborative authoring of open courseware. Similarly to the workshop delivered at the Open Education Global conference, this session offered the opportunity to participants to get acquainted with the redesigned SlideWiki platform and its functionalities for collaborative authoring of open courseware, crowdsourced translation of educational content, as well as social networking. Valuable discussions were conducted with participants and feedback was collected regarding the redesigned content editing interface of the platform, its capabilities for reusing various sources of external media, as well as the import and export capabilities of educational content offered by the platform.

Related Links:

The SlideWiki project

An inspiring conference for the majority of science educators

Thursday 16 Mar 2017 | KMi News

The ENGAGE project conference, at the Open University on March 11th, was a unique event designed to launch a community of innovative science teachers. Funded by the European Commission (EC), this event brought together more than 80 Science teachers from right across England, as well as Russia and Brazil.

The conference themes were chosen by the teachers themselves, who presented their innovative classroom practice on curriculum, assessment and teaching methods. “Overall the event was excellent, inspiring and very informative. I enjoyed presenting. I would be happy to present again next year. I enjoyed networking with colleagues from around the country.” Rowan Mangier, Science Teacher. “Teachers were so very grateful to have the opportunity to discuss ideas and strategies with other teachers and hear solutions to the problems they are encountering” Jude Sanders, facilitator.

Ale Okada the legacy and technical coordinator of ENGAGE, opened the conference with the key outcomes of this European project: an open science education portal, including OER and MOOC in 10 languages for equipping students to make decisions using science; a relevant framework to foster 10 inquiry skills for Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI); and an international community of science teachers with 18,043 members interested in topical science. She highlighted that RRI is one of the key areas created by the EC for promoting science with and for society. "This is exactly our aim: to empower students supported by teachers to take an active role and voice their informed views and concerns on socio-scientific issues that are relevant for their lives and society.”

The keynotes Tony Sherborne, scientific leader of ENGAGE and Stella Paes, Head of science at AQA presented important questions and reflections on Science Education: "How can the Science Education curriculum be reshaped so that it’s more fit for purpose?" and "How can an approach focussed on examination success still lead to an enlightened science education?"

The workshops on 5 year plan and assessment including ENGAGE resources -were also considered very thougthful for several teachers who mentioned that there was a sense of relief that they could finally see ‘proof’ that their hunch that there was just not enough teaching time was a valid criticism to take to senior leadership . There was too much content to teach across the 5 years so teachers should focus on teaching the core well rather than covering everything badly.

“ENGAGE project is very relevant to attract teachers and students across the world. Its content and strategies are very relevant for secondary schools and it should be also extended to primary education” Marianne Cuttler – the head of Association for Science Education in the UK. “It was very useful to talk to teachers in the UK to know how they used ENGAGE. Our students in Bahia were really engaged with topical socio-scientific dilemmas including innovative resources to develop scientific argumentation”. Ana Karine Rocha, Sonia Pinto and Silvar Ribeiro – Teachers from Salvador Brazil.

“I came away from the conference very proud of the work we have done over the years! It was great to meet so many teachers who like what we do and want more.” Gemma Young ENGAGE resources developer and KMi research visitor.

Indeed, it is really significant for us to see the impact of ENGAGE in the UK and across the world.

Related Links:

CARRE rated ‘Excellent’ in final review

Thursday 16 Mar 2017 | KMi News

The CARRE project received its final written review this week, and was rated "Excellent" by the Project Officer and the review panel. The final review meeting took place in December and was attended by representatives of all CARRE partners.

CARRE was a 3-year FP7 project, working on a personalised risk prediction and planning tool for patients with, or at risk of, chronic cardiac and renal conditions and associated comorbidities. Patients using low-cost monitoring devices, such as activity trackers and body analysis scales, can see visualisations of their health risks, based directly on their personal data connected with an up-to-date semantic repository of clinical knowledge extracted from the medical literature. KMi contributed to the project by developing ontologies for both personal sensor data and clinical risk modelling, and developing and maintaing the two semantic repositories at the heart of the project; a private repository for patient-specific sensor and health record data and a public repository containing knowledge of clinical risks. The risk factor repository in particular was identified by the reviewers as a significant contribution of the project to the state of the art.

We are seeking to continue the work of CARRE and make use of the technologies we developed in future projects, both internal to the OU and externally funded.

Related Links:

CARRE

Up2U kicks off in Amsterdam

Thursday 16 Mar 2017 | KMi News

On Febuary 27th, the Up2University project held its face-to-face kick-off meeting in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, hosted by the project coordinator Géant. KMi and the Open University were represented by Allan Third.

Up2U is a Horizon 2020 project seeking to bridge the gap between secondary and higher education by developing innovative and flexible tools for learning which can be accessed by students using their own devices while remaining integrated with their formal schoolwork. The focus is on the development of flexible learning paths taking advantage of the wealth of Open Educational Resources which are now available.

The Open University’s role in Up2U sits at the intersection of the technical work packages, bearing responsibilitly for developing the integrated application toolbox which will serve as the student- and teacher-facing frontend for the project, bringing together the cloud infrastructure and pedagogical resources and gathering data for Learning Analytics.

Related Links:

Up2U

First European Ethereum Development Conference

Wednesday 15 Mar 2017 | KMi News

Last month John Domingue and I attended the first European Ethereum Development conference. Over 400 developers and researchers gathered in Paris at the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris on 17-18 February 2017, to hear about the latest developments in Ethereum technology and research including proof of stake, Scalabilit and Privacy as well as to see demonstrations of Ethereum-based applications.

The event was hosted by LinkTime, a startup that develops Ethereum applications and was supported by the Ethereum Foundation, ADETIF, Asseth- a French Ethereum non-profit and La ChainTech (a French Blockchain non-profit).

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereums creator, gave an introductory talk on Cryptoeconomics which was followed by an in depth talk from Vlad Zamfir about Casper, Ethereum’s new proof of stake consensus system which they hope may be ready as soon as the end of this year. The benefit for proof of stake over proof of work is associated with the reduced need to use excessive computational resources and therefore electricity to sustain consensus and security.

For me personally there were several talks that were especially exciting to hear as they advanced the progression of the Ethereum blockchain towards an infrastructure that is accessible by the general public.

Firstly, I was interested to hear about the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) that is currently in testing on the Ethereum testnet but is due to go live soon which "offers a secure and decentralised way to address resources both on and off the blockchain using simple, human-readable names." This registry will be vital if the average person is to interact with Ethereum based web applications and personal and contract blockchain addresses in the same way that DNS systems today allow users to type in human readable strings as web addresses rather than long numbers.

Secondly, there was encouraging update from Status a project that is developing a Mobile Ethereum operating system which will provide, as they put it, "a browser, messenger and gateway to a decentralised world". The Status mobile app will allow users send, receive and store Ether, browse decentralised apps and discover nearby Status users to exchange goods and services.

Thirdly there was a presentation from Mihai Alisie the founder of AKASHA who demoed their new social networking platform based on Ethereum and IPFS which publicly launching in January this year. We were so impressed with his presentaion that we are considering the possibilities of using the AKASHA social networking platform to create an educational platform where educators can easilyd host learning materials and build learning pathways and The OU blockchain team will be exploring this further in the coming months.

Lastly, I would just like to mention a presentation relevant for KMi semantics and data analytics researchers – EthOn: Introducing Semantic Ethereum which outlined a multi-purpose Ethereum ontology. We will be looking at this ontology closely for our work on semantically indexing the Ethereum blockchain led by Allan Third.

Related Links:

You Tube recordings of presentations from EdCon

KMi at the Open Education Global conference

Tuesday 14 Mar 2017 | KMi News

The Open Education Global conference took place last week in the beautiful city of Cape Town. KMi was represented by Alexander Mikroyannidis, who presented a paper on the European Data Science Academy (EDSA) project and delivered a workshop related to the SlideWiki project.

Alexander’s paper on the EDSA project describes the project’s approach in using open courseware in order to bridge the Data Science skills gap across Europe. The European Data Science Academy is looking to bridge the data science skills gap by developing multimodal open courseware tailored to the real needs of data practitioners. The EDSA courseware is implemented as a combination of living learning materials and activities (eBook, online courses, webinars, face-to-face training), produced via a rigorous process and validated by the data science community through continuous feedback.

Alexander’s workshop on the SlideWiki project is part of the project’s initiative in developing a collaborative open courseware authoring platform and collecting feedback from the Open Education community. This hands-on workshop offered the opportunity to participants to get acquainted with the redesigned SlideWiki platform and its functionalities for collaborative authoring of open courseware, crowdsourced translation of educational content, as well as social networking.

This year’s Open Education Global conference marks the 10-year anniversary of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. 2017 also marks several important milestones in Open Education, including the 15-year anniversary of the term Open Educational Resources (OER) and the 5 year anniversary of the Paris OER Declaration. The Open Education Global conference has offered the opportunity to celebrate and reflect on these and other achievements, reconnect with colleagues and friends, and learn about new ideas and initiatives.

Related Links:

The EDSA project

The SlideWiki project

OU receives new grant to make education more inclusive

Thursday 09 Mar 2017 | KMi News

The Open University (OU) is leading a £480,050 project funded by the Higher Education Funding Council in England, to address barriers to student success.

In collaboration with the University of Leeds and Plymouth University, Dr Trevor Collins, Research Fellow in the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute, is initiating the ‘Embedding and sustaining inclusive STEM practices’ project. This two-year collaboration aims to share and promote inclusive educational practices in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) disciplines across UK universities.

The project, which began on 1 March 2017 and will run to 28 February 2019, will focus on disability as a key factor affecting the outcomes of STEM students across Higher Education (HE), particularly in relation to academic performance and professional employment.

The proportion of OU students with disabilities has increased year-on-year since 2011, reaching 16% by May 2016 (14% in STEM). STEM is consistent with the rest of the OU and HE sector in seeing a rise in the proportion of students declaring mental health disabilities (22% of STEM declarations) and specific learning difficulties (16% of STEM declarations). This presents a significant proportion of OU students for whom access to learning resources and social inclusion within group learning activities is critical for their success.

Building on both previous collaborations and expertise unique to each institution, the cross-institutional team will capture, evaluate, apply and disseminate inclusive educational practices. Specifically, the project will focus on enabling Higher Education institutions to:

Embed inclusive educational resources and design practices.
Sustain inclusive module and curriculum delivery practices.
Develop inclusive career pathways for students and graduates.

This project unifies the institutional priorities of the partners, notably: the OU’s mission to be ‘open to people, places, methods and ideas’ and its values of inclusivity, innovation and responsiveness; the University of Leeds’ remit to provide ‘fair and equal treatment, active engagement with a variety of learning opportunities, and recognition and celebration of diversity’; and Plymouth University’s objective to ‘advance knowledge and transform lives through education and research’.

Using the successful and innovative developments in fieldwork, lab work and online learning that already exist at each institution, the project will work in partnership with staff and students to further embed the values and practices of inclusive education. Key outcomes will include case studies on STEM-specific pedagogies that evidence the impact of inclusive design, and cross-institutional recommendations and principles developed in consultation with the wider HE sector and professional associations.

Related Links:

COMRADES goes to Nepal

Tuesday 28 Feb 2017 | KMi News

COMRADES project, along with the Nepalese Centre for Integrated Emergency Management (CIEM), organised a very successful workshop in Kathmandu, attended by local community leaders, NGOs, government officials, and even the Prime Minister of Nepal, Mr Pushpa Kamal Dahal.
The workshop was on ‘‘Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation for Making Crises Resilient Community", and was aimed at connecting with stakeholder communities, to better understand their socio-technical requirements for disaster communication and management tools and processes.

Kenny Meesters from the University of Agder, who led the COMRADES workshop, says that "Our task is to capture and build on the best practices in the communities rather than deliver a technological platform with no connection to their own practices". Focus groups and interviews were orgnised with over 150 people in Kathmandu and in remote areas of Nepal.

The event was well covered by the media in Nepal, constituting an excellent dissemination activity for the project, and a unique opportunity to ensure that the technologies developed in COMRADES fit the needs of the local end-user communities.

COMRADES is a €2 million European H2020 project, co-ordinated by Prof Harith Alani from the Open University, and involves the University of Sheffield, University of Agder (Norway), iHub (Kenya), and Gov2U (Belgium).

Related Links:

BigDat2017

Tuesday 21 Feb 2017 | KMi News

Angelo, one of our postgraduate students, was recently in Bari (Italy) to attend the 3rd International Winter School on Big Data—BigDat2017. The winter school was organised by the University of Bari (IT) and Universitat Rovira i Virgili (ES).

Big Data has recently gained a lot of interest in research and many believe that it will still play its leading role for many years. Nowadays, we live in a world in which all information seems to be available, we are surrounded by data-driven applications (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, just to name a few), which gather data and try to provide tailor-made solutions for their users. To this end, having such event like BigDat2017 with its clear mission—introduce and update new researchers into this fast advancing research area—is really important.

Throughout the week, BigDat2017 offered 22 classes covering a wide variety aspects and applications centred around the Big Data such as modelling, management, verification, security, sentiment analysis, recommended systems, signal processing and so forth. Among the lecturers there were several authorities in their respective fields. Here are just few names:

Jeffrey Ullman, from Stanford University, author of many books such as Principles of Compiler Design also known for his MOOC on Mining of Massive Datasets on Coursera
Sander Klous, from the University of Amsterdam, Nobel Prize in 2013 for his research on the Higgs Boson and author of We Are Big Data
Bernhard Pfahringer, from the Waikato University (NZ) and maily known to be one of the founder of Weka
George Giannakis, from the University of Minnesota,
Lyle Ungar, from the University of Philadelphia
Diego Calvanese, from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Geoffrey Fox, from the Indiana University

and many others. Each professor delivered a 6 hours course.

With the combination of both the relevance of the subject and the quality of the speakers, the school reached an audience of more than 350 participants including graduate students, postgraduates, postdocs and companies.

Among the already over-busy schedule, every morning before the classes there were seminars. Different researchers showed both the role of the University of Bari and the National Interuniversity Consortium for Informatics (CINI) in the context of Big Data. Damiani from the University of Milan showed the European Project Toreador H2020, which is an architectural framework for Big Data analytics. It contains a set of components that can be combined to create a model for data analysis. Lastly, Quercia from the Bell Labs (Cambridge, UK), talked about the research he conducted in the recent past years. In his talk he spread the idea of “Shortest paths to happiness”, in which thanks to a collaborative game. In this game users define their feeling on pictures of streets, then his approach is able to provide shortest paths based on people taste and that can make your journey more pleasant.

In addition, some professors held a panel discussing about current challenges and opportunities that Big Data offers. Although it lasted just about one hour, many students had the chance to grasp panellists’ experience. Many questions were related to some daily basis issues: incompleteness, noise, outliers, dimension, streaming and so on.

The winter school accomplished its mission. All the professors did a wonderful job in delivering their courses. Many students had the chance to acquire new perspectives on Big Data and prepare themselves for the next few years coming.

Link to the winter school website: http://grammars.grlmc.com/BigDat2017/

Photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/148172210@N04/sets/72157680220420205/

ENGAGE wins the 2017 OER & Project Awards for Open Education Excellence!

Monday 20 Feb 2017 | KMi News

ENGAGE is a winner of the 2017 OER & Project Awards for Open Education Excellence, which was announced by the global network of Open Education (OEC). Fourteen partners and more than 15.000 open educators in 80 countries members of ENGAGE are celebrating this award now, whose the ceremony will be presented at the upcoming OEC Global Conference in Cape Town, South Africa, March 08-10, 2017.

Dr. Okada highlights that the award was made in recognition of a new approach to Open Science Education which promotes Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). The term RRI created by the European Commission refers to the participatory process that aligns scientific innovations to societal needs and expectations. She has just announced to the ENGAGE team that “We are officially leading creative innovations for Science Education to empower teachers through OER and MOOC for equipping next generation for RRI by connecting non-formal resources (topical science-in-the-news) and informal learning (science networks) with formal education (science curriculum)”.

The ENGAGE project funded by the European Commission links available knowledge outside the classroom such as science media that have impact on citizens’ lives to create controversial socio-scientific dilemmas, which hook learners’ curiosity and “need to know” in the school. Students think, talk and develop informed based views using science connected to their life interacting also with scientists. Through OER and guidelines, teachers support them with 10 inquiry skills for RRI, which are grouped in four areas: enquire, analyse, solve and communicate. This framework was adopted by the UK national exam board AQA for assessment.

ENGAGE presents a new way of thinking and substantially improved the discoverability, presentation, usability, accessibility and availability of openness in science education for RRI. It offers contemporary learning materials for students, guidelines for teaching and open online courses in the OpenEdx MOOC platform for all educators – all under creative commons license in 10 languages.

A key challenge in Science Education, which ENGAGE was designed to tackle “for promoting critical scientific literacy, and for learning about science, scientists, scientific inquiry and scientific argumentation, is the need to furnish students with the knowledge, skills and attitudes to address socio-scientific and environmental issues in a critical way and to reach informed decisions on a range of science-related and technology-related issues that impact them, their immediate family and friends, the surrounding local, national and global community, and the planet as a whole.” Hodson

ENGAGE researchers are taking into account possible gender and geographical differences in Europe, including also the analysis of projects developed by socio-economically disadvantaged groups in remote areas of Brazil and Africa. Various studies in Brazil, Lithuania, Spain and Romania use LiteMap tool for collaborative argumentative visualisation developed in KMi. New interdisciplinary research about children’s health and wellbeing in the UK and Brazil are currently in development based on ENGAGE materials related to ZIKA virus, Vitamin D, Sugary Drinks, e-Cigarettes and Text neck (smartphones).

The ENGAGE team led by Dr. Sherborne elaborated more than 30 OER based on contemporary science linked to various topics: Earth, Ecosystem, Electromagnetism, Energy, Forces, Genes, Matter, Organisms, Reactions and Waves. Dr. Okada coordinated MOOC on pedagogical tools and inquiry skills for RRI for pre-service and in-service teachers delivered by 11 partners and co-authored a course book, various research papers and policy reports. Currently, ENGAGE portal has more than 3,500 comments; 130,000 downloads and 675,000 views.

ENGAGE Team, well done !

Related Links:

2017 OER & Project Awards for Open Education Excellence

CORE listed Number 1 in the list of top 21 free online journal and research databases

Friday 17 Feb 2017 | KMi News

An online editing and proofreading company, Scribendi, has recently put together a list of top 21 freely available online databases. It is a pleasure to see CORE listed as Number 1 resource in this list. CORE has been included in this list thanks to its large volume of open access and free of cost content, offering 66 million of bibliographic metadata records and 5 million of full-text research outputs. Our content originates from open access journals and repositories, both institutional and disciplinary, and can be accessed via our search engine. In addition, we also offer an API and Datasets for programmable access to this content, enabling the development of new artificial intelligence-based applications for scientists and for carrying out text and data mining of scientific literature.

Related Links:

The Top 21 Free Online Journal and Research Databases

Where are they now? The Our Story App

Wednesday 15 Feb 2017 | KMi News

KMi has a long track record of co-designing innovative demonstrators and it’s always rewarding when we hear back from our collaborators about how our prototypes have evolved and continue to influence practice.

In a recent article on the whitefox blog, Natalia Kucirkova, a Senior Research Fellow at University College London, talks about the challenges of designing the Our Story app for iPad, the original version of which was the outcome of one such KMi collaboration in 2011. Natalia says she is particularly grateful to KMi’s Paul Hogan for his contribution to creating the app.

The latest version of the app, which enables young children to create and read digital picture books on handheld devices, was redeveloped by a commercial developer in 2015 and is available on the ITunes store.

KMi at the latest Show and TEL

Friday 10 Feb 2017 | KMi News

The Open Technology Enhanced Learning (openTEL) is a priority research area, bringing together researchers from across the Open University. The group runs regular Show and TEL events to share expertise among its members. The latest such event took place on February 9th.

Alexander Mikroyannidis from the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) joined the event and presented some of the latest KMi TEL projects focusing on rich interactive learning resources. In particular, he presented the FORGE project on remote labs and online experimentation, the EDSA project that bridges the data science skills gap across Europe, and the SlideWiki project that offers solutions for collaborative open courseware authoring.

The event was broadcasted live and the recording is available here.

CORE now offers 5 millions of open access full-text research papers

Friday 03 Feb 2017 | KMi News

CORE, a harvesting service that aggregates open access content from open access journals and repositories from all over the world, currently provides 5 millions of open access full-text papers.

“In the last year, we have managed to scale up our harvesting process. This enabled us to significantly increase the amount of open access content we can offer to our users. With more and more open access content being made available by data providers, thanks to recent open access policies, CORE now also captures and provides access to a higher percentage of global research literature ”, says CORE’s founder, Dr Petr Knoth.

With 66 million metadata records and 5 million full-text, from 102 countries, in 52 different languages, CORE becomes now the world’s largest full-text open access aggregator. CORE embraces the vibrant collections of both institutional and disciplinary repositories, while its large volume of scholarly outputs ranges from scientific research papers, to grey literature and from Master’s to Doctoral thesis. In addition, it is a metasearch for the all the open access peer-reviewed scientific journal articles published in open access journals.

CORE’s open access collection can be accessed from our search engine (https://core.ac.uk). For those interested in using our data for other purposes, such as building services or applying text and data mining practices, we offer all the data for free via an API and a Dataset.

Related Links:

CORE

Health and Wellbeing Priority Research Area Website Launched

Tuesday 24 Jan 2017 | KMi News

KMi’s development team recently helped to launch the Open University’s new website for the Health & Wellbeing Priority Research Area. This priority research area brings together the impressive expertise of Open University researchers with their extensive network of local, national and international partners and collaborators across government, industry, policy, practice and the wider academic field.

Research in health and wellbeing is strategically important within all of the University’s Faculties, cutting across various disciplines including healthcare management, ageing studies, reproductive and sexual rights, assistive technologies, patient data management, mental health and biological health sciences. The scope of University expertise ranges from the science underpinning health and disease through to the medical humanities.

The Open University is committed to working towards social justice specialising in participative and inclusive research methods with marginalised and vulnerable communities. In the latest UK research assessment exercise (Research Excellence Framework, 2014), nearly three quarters (72%) of the OU’s research was assessed as world-leading or internationally excellent.

Headline: Health & Wellbeing Priority Research Area Website Launched

Related Links:

Health & Wellbeing Website

OU Go 3D Campus Guide To Be Released on App Stores

Tuesday 17 Jan 2017 | KMi News

Developed by Paul Hogan in KMI, OU Go was originally designed to help staff find their way around campus. The app has been updated and now includes a new user interface, location information for buildings, events, car and cycle parking and the outdoor artwork exhibits.

KMI and Estates are keen that this app be made available to visitors to the University so it has been decided to publish to both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store in the coming weeks, for now staff can obtain the app from the link below.

Staff and visitors alike should find OU Go a useful tool in locating locations on campus that were previously a challenge.

To install the app on your phone or tablet please visit http://appstore.open.ac.uk/ougo using your device and follow the on-screen instructions.

KMi Researchers participated in a case study for an ADBU’s Text and Data Mining in Research Report

Wednesday 11 Jan 2017 | KMi News

The past month the French Association of Directors and Officers of University Libraries and Documentation (ADBU) released a report entitled “Text and Data Mining in Higher Education and Public Research”, which mainly explores the UK and French copyright exceptions for text and data mining (TDM). In more detail, the report lists the benefits of text and data mining in scientific research, defines the primary threats in the adoption and practice of TDM, i.e. legal and technical, presents the need for the development of a technical infrastructure, and demonstrates the motivation barriers and the necessary developments in the field.

In an effort to understand the level of the TDM adoption and the lack of thereof, the report presents various case studies, one of which is the CORE project. CORE, an aggregation service currently holding around 4.5 million of full-text and 66 million metadata records, has been providing infrastructure for TDM via its main services, namely the CORE API and the CORE Datasets. As the report puts it: “Text-mining at scale cannot take place without infrastructure. Investment is needed in the technologies used to aggregate, normalise, interrogate and preserve TDM materials”. CORE’s services offer open access content and are provided to everyone free of cost. In addition, CORE is participating at the EU-funded project OpenMinTeD, which aims to create a TDM infrastructure, focusing on legal, technical, policy and interoperability issues, while its role is to act as an open access scientific content provider.

Additional to the technical challenges, there are also legal requirements that are creating obstacles and limit the incentives to TDM. Even though there have been amendments both in the UK and the French copyright law, there are still gray areas that prohibit the application of TDM practices among researchers. Furthermore, the legal framework is not harmonised in all countries, while in some of them it does not even exist. The report states that “changes to copyright law must be accompanied by improvements in access, infrastructure, skills and incentives for TDM”. In that context, and while CORE is already technically participating in the promotion of TDM, it welcomes all efforts for the advancement of TDM and is open to provide assistantship with the development of new and improvement of existing policies based on its own TDM experience.

Related Links:

Access the full report

Best Demo Award at EKAW!

Thursday 05 Jan 2017 | KMi News

It should come as no surprise that KMi’ers once again gain recognition for their outstanding work. Ilaria Tiddi, Emanuele Bastianelli, Enrico Daga and Mathieu d’Aquin won the Best Demo Award for their paper ‘DKA-robo: dynamically updating time-invalid knowledge bases using robots’ at EKAW (The 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management), which took place in Bologna, Italy between 19 – 23 November 2016.

The paper focuses on Information gathered from the real world and how it can tend to vary in time. The temperature of a room, the number of people in a bar or even the strength of a wi-fi signal are affected by a large number of factors. Indeed, managing the dynamic information of knowledge bases constitutes a key issue in many real-world scenarios, because constantly reevaluating data requires efforts in terms of knowledge acquisition and representation. Ilaria, Emanuele, Enrico and Mathieu developed a system where a mobile agent is used to update those statements of a knowledge base that has lost validity in time. They chose to use Semantic Web technologies to represent and manage the time-validity of information, combined with an agent acting as a mobile sensor, which updates the outdated statements in the knowledge base, therefore always guaranteeing time-valid results against user queries. This demo, that we called DKA-robo (Dynamic Knowledge Acquisition with a Robot), presented the implementation of our approach based on the simulated working environment of their research lab. Conference attendees were shown how a robot can be instructed to move and sense information, and how the evaluated plan is executed to preserve the time-validity of the knowledge base.

OU Go 3D Campus Guide

Wednesday 14 Dec 2016 | KMi News

OU Go has been developed by Paul Hogan in KMi to assist staff members to locate the various campus buildings and outdoor artwork on the go via their Android or iOS device. The app is designed in the Pokemon Go theme which adds some fun whilst seeking a building location and updates the users location in real time to make it easy to find the desired destination.

Along with providing users with a selection of character (avatar) choices the app displays campus in 3D allowing the user to select the building they seek which is then clearly displayed by a rotating OU shield. By switching on outdoor artwork and parking the map will display icons that are interactive to touch and display details about the selected artwork or parking area. The parking capacity and space type data is currently being updated.

To install the app on your phone or tablet please visit http://appstore.open.ac.uk/ougo using your device and follow the on-screen instructions.

Merry Christmas From KMi

Monday 12 Dec 2016 | KMi News

During 2016 the Knowledge Media Institute has been involved in developing and presenting variations of how Augmented Reality can be used in the education sector. The KMi Noel mobile application is a festive fun app developed by KMi for Open University staff.

The app uses Augmented Reality to display a winter wonderland with animated elves, Santa and snowmen…watch as the snowmen dance to a crazy Christmas beat!

To install the app on your phone or tablet please visit http://appstore.open.ac.uk/kmi-noel using your device and follow the on-screen instructions.

Related Links:

Home of KMI Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

KMi blockchain technology featured in Times Higher Education

Wednesday 30 Nov 2016 | KMi News

The Times Higher Education has published an article by Martin Hall, former vice-chancellor of the University of Salford, which considers how Web 3.0 could revolutionise the way higher education is delivered.

In the article, our Director, John Domingue, explains to Martin why KMi’s “student first” vision for blockchain-enabled provision is good news for those needing access to higher education from middle and low income families in developing economies.

KMi’s blockchain prototype for assembling micro-credentials – or “badges” – has the potential to enhance the learner experience, storing all learning outcomes in an expanding eportfolio for all students.

“We envision a world in which the awarding and validation of qualifications no longer occur exclusively under the management of an education institution or an employer and individual students, teachers, and peers take more ownership of the learning experience and its outcomes without compromising on safety, security, and accessibility" – John Domingue.

Related Links:

THE story

FORGE – Officially Excellent!

Tuesday 29 Nov 2016 | KMi News

The FORGE project has been rated "Excellent" by the Project Officer and the review panel during the final project review, yesterday in Brussels. The review was attended by representatives from all project partners, plus external partners that have joined the project through its Open Call series.

FORGE has been a 3-year FP7 project, led by John Domingue from the Open University. The project has promoted online learning using Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) facilities and has developed a number of sustainable educational artefacts, including a variety of FIRE courses and widgets, an interactive eBook, and many more. The project has extended its outreach beyond the project consortium and the European borders by attracting several external partners that have deployed the FORGE educational artefacts in their teaching practices and have also contributed their own courses and widgets to the FORGE community.

The FORGE work will continue through several new projects, including UP2U, HUB4FIRE, as well as the Open Blockchain initiative.

Related Links:

The FORGE website

Zdenek’s 25 years in KMi!

Thursday 24 Nov 2016 | KMi News

On Thursday November 17th at the Town Meeting, the whole of KMi celebrated Zdenek’s 25 years’ working at the Open University, within KMi. Petr Knoth led a tribute from Zdenek’s team, after which we commemorated the occasion with epicurean style, including a personalised giant cookie and an edible pie-chart made by the Analyse team!

We reflected that Zdenek has done some great work at the Open University and 25 years marks an incredible achievement. Throughout his time here, Zdenek has contributed to the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Case Based Reasoning, Design, Knowledge Sharing, Machine Learning and Predictive Modelling. KMi is sure that Zdenek will continue doing great work (hopefully for another 25 years) at the Open University!

Responsible Research and Innovation in Action

Wednesday 23 Nov 2016 | KMi News

The conference “Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) IN ACTION” organised by RRI Tools project supported by the European Commission was held in Brussels on the 21st – 22nd of November 2016. This event brought together 200 experts in the field to discuss open science and innovation system that tackle the societal challenges of our world.

RRI IN ACTION engaged a full range of R&I stakeholders: researchers and research organisations, policy makers at global, European, national and regional level, business and industry representatives, science education members, and civil society organisations.

During this event, various relevant questions were discussed: What are the key impacts of RRI projects for academia, business and society? What have RRI projects achieved so far? Is our research work addressing social-scientific issues that are significant for society? What are the consequences of projectification? How are we equipping the next generation for RRI? How are the RRI best practices influencing policy? What are the international perspectives on responsibility and innovation? What is next? What is beyond the H2020?

Ale Okada, technical coordinator of the European project ENGAGE, invited as a speaker, presented various outcomes of the project and its impact in EDUCATION. ENGAGE developed a wide community of more than 12,000 teachers in 80 countries, 30 Open Educational resources on topical science and 3 Massive Open Online Courses translated in 10 languages, a significant RRI curriculum that connects science with societal issues, needs and concerns, 10 inquiry skills for equipping youth for RRI linked to AQA national exam board, 6 pedagogical tools for educators to embed RRI in the classroom, and various best practices at local, national and transnational level. During the conference, Okada also discussed with the participants the outcomes of the research on the mapping technology “LiteMap“ for RRI, which has been used by the ENGAGE community (researchers, teachers and students) during two years in Europe and Brazil.

More than 45 projects were presented on various key issues: public engagement with science, gender equality, open access, ethics and research integrity, and science education. The event was a fantastic opportunity to envision collaboratively the next steps of Responsible Research and Innovation in Education including in terms of impact, policy and funding opportunities. The event ended with a nice proverb “If you want to go fast – go alone, if you want to go far – go together"

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Presented to LUANAR Delegates

Tuesday 22 Nov 2016 | KMi News

Today Paul Hogan presented his work on Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality to visiting delegates from the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources in Malawi.

Dr Joshua Valeta – Open and Distance Learning Coordinator and Dr Tasokwa Vida Musa Kakota – Senior Lecturer in Mathematics and Head of Basic Sciences Department were visiting the University primarily to see how The Open University delivers open and distance learning.

A visit to KMI gave the opportunity to demonstrate how this technology is being used from initial concepts to the current development of the SK299 Human Biology mobile and web app due to be released to students in October 2017.

Both Dr Valeta and Dr Kakota could see the potential use of this technology and showed interest in the tools used to develop it.

Dr Valeta using VR Headset Dr Kakota using VR Headset

Related Links:

SlideWiki meets in Genoa

Monday 21 Nov 2016 | KMi News

The third plenary meeting of the SlideWiki project took place on November 17th-18th in Genoa, Italy. The meeting was hosted by CNR- IEIIT/School of Robotics. Alexander Mikroyannidis and Allan Third represented the KMi team and joined more than 30 representatives from 17 partner organisations.

SlideWiki is aiming at increasing the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of education in Europe via widely available, accessible, multilingual, timely, engaging and high-quality educational material (i.e. OpenCourseWare). In this large-scale trial project, we are further maturing the SlideWiki technology platform (available at SlideWiki.org), integrating it with state-of-the-art educational platforms and performing large-scale trials in secondary education, vocational and professional training, higher education, as well as community-driven open-education.

The new SlideWiki platform has just been released bringing enhcncements both in the back-end and front-end of the platform. The project is now focusing on the preparation and launch of the trials of the SlideWiki platform targeting a wide range of pedagogical contexts. KMi is leading the trials with informal learners using OpenLearn and iTunes.

Related Links:

The SlideWiki project

Buy Bitcoins Now!

Sunday 13 Nov 2016 | KMi News

“Buy Bitcoins Now!” was one of the main messages from Chandler Guo – who owns one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mines – in the recent Internet of Value workshop held at Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge. The event focused on how blockchains can be used to support the transfer of non-financial value. In his talk Chandler articulated how future citizenship would depend on the ownership of crypto currency funds and how the value of Bitcoin is related to its use in online gambling in China and the fact that it operates as a Distributed Autonomous Organisation (DAO) with no leader.

Other talks at the event covered a wide variety of topics. Maryam Taghiyeva from the Centre for Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance outlined how the Seratio Blockchain can support the transfer of non-financial value using a special representation and consensus mechanism. One application area for this work is the development of a currency for Muslim financial transactions ensuring that the relevant rules for financial processes are followed.

Ashish Gadnis, Chair of Financial Inclusion at the Wall Street Blockchain Alliance and CEO of BanQu talked about BanQu’s blockchain based identity platform that enables a secure and immutable solution redefining financial inclusion by enabling economic opportunities for people living in extreme poverty. He reported on case studies of how citizens living in poverty and refugees were able to access credit and insurance for the first time through blockchain representations of assets such as land and income.

John Domingue discussed KMi’s work on using blockchains for badging, ePortfolios and crowdsourced accreditation in an adult learning context. The presentation was very well received with future collaborations with the Centre for Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance and currently being explored.

The general consensus at the end of the event was that although we are at the beginning there exist a wealth of opportunities in the intersection between non-financial value and blockchain technology.

Related Links:

Digital Humanities in Practice: AR and VR in Humanities Teaching

Wednesday 09 Nov 2016 | KMi News

Today Paul Hogan presented the first seminar in the Digital Humanities in Practice 2016/17 seminar series.

Covering all his work to date in the field of Augmented Reality and Virtual Realty the presentation was a practical demonstration of each application detailing the ideas behind its development and possible uses where it could be applied.

The seminar demonstrated conceptual applications as well as the SK299 Human Biology application which he continues to develop and is evolving into a feature rich experience to enhance student learning.

There was also demonstrations on the use of 360º cameras for use in Virtual Reality applications as well as on a number of affordable VR headsets that make use of mobile phones rather than the more expensive tethered versions that although give outstanding performance and experience are, for most students, out of reach.

Attendees were also given the opportunity to experience the human heart Virtual Reality and 4000 years of human history applications.

Related Links:

Beyond Learning Analytics

Saturday 05 Nov 2016 | KMi News

Data is now seen in many sectors as a platform for the provision of operational services. For example, only recently Admiral announced that they would price car insurance based on Facebook post data. Within UK Higher Education sector through learning analytics – the application of data analytics to student data – is beginning to have an impact and is attracting widespread interest across the HE sector. What next for HE and data technologies? Earlier this week KMi co-chaired with Jisc a workshop containing many of the research leaders and practitioners in HE interested in this question.

Following from a basic principle of Open Data that linking datasets together increases value the main focus for the event was how higher and further education institutions can collaborate with data. The day began with an overview of the issues, challenges and opportunities of a collaboratively formed ‘Education Dataspace’ from John Domingue followed by Phil Richards, Jisc’s Chief Innovation Officer, outlining work on a shared data and analytics architecture. This was followed by a number of short presentations from attendees on a variety of data and HE topics. Mark Stubbs, from Manchester Metropolitan University, revealed how his university has radically transformed their student data infrastructure by connecting disparate databases through a common naming scheme and data quality and data cleaning processes.

After lunch three groups focused on: current and future datasets in use; the technical infrastructure required to support data sharing including shared vocabularies and standards; and cultural inhibitors. The day finished with a number of agreed actions all related to enhancing the sharing of HE data across the sector.

There was consensus that this workshop represents the beginning of a journey and regular follow-on events are being planned. The event was co-Chaired by John Domingue with presentations from Zdenek Zdrahal and Mathieu d’Aquin.

Related Links:

Guardian story on Admiral using facebook posts to price car insurace

ePIC 2016

Thursday 03 Nov 2016 | KMi News

the 14th conference on ePortfolios, Open Badges, Personal Ledgers, Identities, Trust, Blockchains…

Bologna 26-27-28 October 2016

Bologna is home to the oldest university in the world, founded in 1088, so it was a fitting place for the Open Badge and ePortfolio communities to come together and discuss the future of Open Badges and “to think deeply about technology – not just its surface and trends but its newest ideas and applications – and technology to be the key to open up educational and social innovation: open it up to new viewpoints and new paths.” (http://www.epforum.eu/)

The conference was held at the Palazzo Gnudi whose building has its origins in the first half of 1500. The room the conference was held in was the beautiful Galleria degli Stucchi, decorated in 1789 by Giacomo Rossi with high-relief panels and niches with pairs of figures inspired by Greek classicism. It was a breathtaking setting and somehow lent additional gravitas to the proceedings.

The Open University was there to talk about how we see the future of Open Badges integrating with Blockchain technology. John Domingue gave a well-received presentation on “Open Blockchain: Experiments In Using Blockchains to Support Adult Education”. We also had a constructive workshop brainstorming how blockchains might be used for badges and ePortfolio data.

Later during a pleasant walk through the cobbled streets of Bologna we had productive discussions with Phil Long, the Chief Innovation Officer at the University of Texas in Austin who is experimenting with bockchains along similar lines to KMi. He went on to give an inspiring presentation of the work they have been doing setting up multiple blockchains within various departments at his university onto which they have then been putting their open badges.

Of the many other thought provoking talks given, one notable speaker was David Leaser from IBM presenting on ‘How Open Badges deepen professional engagement’. IBM are currently offering 8 badges to their employees for gaining credentials from the IBM Business Unit. Many of these badges are also open to anyone to earn through the IBM Professional Certification Program.

Leila Topic from LRNG gave an interesting talk about their work on the ‘Cities of Learning’ project. This project works in partnership with “schools, businesses, cities, and community institutions such as libraries and museums, nationwide and around the globe, to create a 21st century learning experience for learners everywhere” (LRNG website). LRNG works with young people and tries to connect their passions to their learning, leveraging mobile technology to engage and support the development of real-world and employable skills.

One of the outcomes of the ePIC conference was the Bologna Open Recognition Declaration (BORD). This declaration is “a call for a universal open architecture for the recognition of lifelong and lifewide learning achievements”. Participants were asked to support the declaration and where issued an open badge for showing their support. Here is my Open Badge for supporting BORD:

It was an enjoyable and stimulating event where the overall consensus was that a combination of blockchains, ePortfolios and badges have the potential to radically transform education for student and societal benefit.

KMi at ISWC 2016

Tuesday 01 Nov 2016 | KMi News

The 15th International Semantic Web Conference took place recently in Kobe, Japan, and the KMi contingent had a very strong showing at the conference.

Ilaria Tiddi and Allan Third presented papers in the highly selective research track, on "Learning to Assess Linked Data Relationships Using Genetic Programming", and "Integrating medical scientific knowledge with the semantically Quantified Self", respectively.

The application track was also well covered by KMi-ers, with Gregoire Burel ("EnergyUse – a Collaborative Semantic Platform for Monitoring and Discussing Energy Consumption"), and Francesco Osborne ("Automatic Classification of Springer Nature Proceedings with Smart Topic Miner"), both presenting in this track.

However, the highlight was probably Hassan Saif winning the highly prestigious SWSA Distinguished Dissertation prize, awarded every year to the best Doctoral Thesis in the field. As the winner of this prize, Hassan gave an invited talk about his doctoral thesis, "Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Microblogs".

Hassan also presented an expert highlights paper in the workshop on Linked Data for Information Extraction, "A Linked Open Data Approach for Sentiment Lexicon Adaptation" and contributed to the Posters & Demos session, with a poster entitled "On the Role of Semantics for Detecting pro-ISIS Stances on Social Media". There were also two demos presented by KMi-ers – Gregoire Burel, "Monitoring, Discussing and Publishing Energy Consumption Data using EnergyUse", and Francesco Osborne, "Smart Topic Miner@Supporting Springer Nature Editors with Semantic Web Technologies". See more at: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/news/article/18881#sthash.vt0Cetws.dpuf

Miriam Fernandez chaired the lightning talks session, during which Ilaria presented on "Semantic Web and Robotics: can we work together?".

Other important contributions were provided by Miriam and Enrico Motta, who were part of the tutor group invited to attend the mentoring lunch for PhD students, postdocs and junior faculty members, and Harith Alani, who attended editorial board meetings for the Semantic Web Journal and the Journal of Web Semantics – the latter of which was also attended by Miriam.

Next year’s ISWC will be held in Vienna, Austria, and our very own Miriam Fernandez will be one of the research track chairs!

KMi’s Blockchain Group visits JISC

Tuesday 01 Nov 2016 | KMi News

All members of KMi’s blockchain group visited Jisc’s London offices yesterday for a workshop on the use of blockchain technology in higher education, specifically in tracking a student’s learning history. After a presentation by department director John Domingue, demonstrations of some of our research ‘Ðapps‘ were given by Michelle Bachler (reputation), Kevin Quick (course registration) and Chris Valentine (ePortfolio). Later, Keerthi Thomas and Allan Third joined breakout sessions discussing particular areas of interest including proof of identity, badges, authentication and micro-accreditation.

Jisc have recently set up a server as part of a new Ethereum blockchain that will shortly expand to include a number of other leading UK universities.

Related Links:

A successful first year review for EDSA!

Thursday 20 Oct 2016 | KMi News

EDSA had a very successful first review last week in Luxembourg.

Professor John Domingue and Keyur Dave represented the KMi team at the review and were also responsible for the overall project presentation as KMi is the project coordinator.

A panel of two international experts, chaired by EC project officer Carola Carstens, assessed the project with the first year project outcomes being accepted.

EDSA is a three year long project funded by the European Commission under The EU Horizon 2020 Framework for Research and Innovation with a budget of almost €3 million. The overall objective of EDSA will establish a virtuous learning production cycle whereby we: a) analyse the required sector specific skillsets for data analysts across the main industrial sectors in Europe; b) develop modular and adaptable data science curricula to meet these needs; and c) deliver training supported by multiplatform and multilingual learning resources based on our curricula. The curricula and learning resources will be continuously evaluated by pedagogical and data science experts during both development and deployment.

The reviewers were very impressed with what has been achieved with the project so far, and were excited by the potential value of the EDSA for designing a curricula for data science training and data science education across the European Union.

Augmented Reality Presented at Show and TEL

Thursday 20 Oct 2016 | KMi News

Today KMi’s Paul Hogan gave a presentation on the augmented reality application he is developing for the October 2017 presentation of SK299 Human Biology.

The app uses augmented reality to display a 3D model of a human heart in the users view that they can interact with.

His presentation demonstrated the app in use along with some of the included features such as bluetooth connectivity that allows the student to connect their own heart rate monitor to the app to control the beat rate of the 3D model.

The Show and TEL event is a platform for researchers and like minded people within the OU to get together to discuss and focus on research in TEL.

Yinchuan, Smart city, Wonderful Life

Wednesday 12 Oct 2016 | KMi News

Yinchuan is one of the world’s leading smart cities. This growing, modern city has much in common with Milton Keynes. Host to the TMForumInFocus international conference with over 1000 delegates from over 66 countries, Yinchuan already boasts a range of smart city initiatives that include air quality, traffic and healthcare.

KMi’s Alan Fletcher addressed this global audience in September to introduce them to the MK Data Hub as part of the MK:Smart project and the concepts of innovation through data creation.

Joining speakers from as far apart as Toronto, Delhi, Brisbane, Buenos Aires and of course China, MK:Smart is contributing to this truly international conversation on the nature and future of smart cities. TMForum in partnership with ZTE brought together this group of C level representatives to explore current thinking and developments in the smart city arena.

Yinchuan has been working hard to deliver innovation in big data management for the city and has instituted a comprehensive review of process and systems and reduced city bearacracy.

Yinchuan is seeking to solve its “city Diseases”, those of traffic, air quality, drinking water, waste management and smart health. In one community there are examples of sensor data being delivered to citizens in a mobile app to provide them with dynamic environmental information. Yinchuan is pioneering work in smart manufacturing, emergency response and smart hospital. Its emergency response centre now uses drones to provide live data updates and guide response vehicles to the scene of the emergency.

MK:Smart project, (lead by the OU) will provide insight into the use of data curation in a data innovation system – The MK Data Hub.

Related Links:

http://inform.tmforum.org/smart-cities/2016/09/smart-city-wonderful-life-inspiration-yinchuan-china/

First Public Attitude Survey Launched

Tuesday 11 Oct 2016 | KMi News

Members of the public are being asked what they think of self-driving vehicles as part of a series of surveys being conducted on behalf of the UK Autodrive programme.

The surveys have been designed by experts from Cambridge University, and are intended to track any changes in public attitude towards autonomous vehicles during the remaining two years of the UK Autodrive project.

As well as assessing people’s attitudes towards self-driving vehicles, the survey will also ask what they think of their current travel experiences, as well as examine their travel preferences.

“UK Autodrive is primarily about trialling connected and autonomous vehicles in Milton Keynes and Coventry, but it’s also about seeing what the public think of this new technology,” said Dr Kai Ruggeri, Director of the Cambridge University Policy Research Group. “There has been lots of talk about the potential benefits of self-driving vehicles, but also plenty of concerns expressed – so these surveys will help us measure public sentiment, and how it’s changing.”

The confidential survey comprises 48 questions and takes roughly 12 minutes to complete. Anyone wishing to take part in the survey can do so by clicking on this link.

The first survey will be active for a month, up until 7 November, with further surveys due to take place at regular intervals throughout the programme. The online surveys will also be complemented by a number of qualitative workshops to be held in various UK cities over the next two years.

Blockchains: visions from Shanghai

Monday 03 Oct 2016 | KMi News

The recently held International Blockchain week in Shanghai was jointly hosted by the Ethereum Foundation and Wanxiang Blockchain Labs. The event consisted of a unique three-segment format. The first three days saw the Ethereum DevCon2 where major developers of the Ethereum community showcased the most up-to-date research and development work. This was followed by a Demo day for startups and investors. The week ended with two days of the second Global Blockchain Summit where the fintech and business community gathered to gain knowledge and insight on Bitcoin and Ethereum technology.

DevCon2 saw over 900 Ethereum developers and enthusiasts gather together at the glamorous Hyatt hotel. The major sponsor for the DevCon was again Microsoft. “We’re thrilled to support the Ethereum Foundation’s Devcon2” said Marley Gray, Director of Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Business Development at Microsoft. “The Ethereum blockchain is powerful, and we’re looking forward to continuing the collaborative relationship with the Ethereum community, together bringing the best of blockchain technology to our cloud platform, Microsoft Azure.” Their presentation on day 3 of the DevCon saw Microsoft announce their new Enterprise Consortium Blockchain Ecosystem using a name that we all know very well: ‘Bletchley’. It is designed to make it easy to create an Ethereum based private blockchain in only 5 minutes using 8 simple parameters.

Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, presented a new version of the project’s ‘mauve paper‘ in a talk called "Mauve Revolution". He discussed how they are addressing four major issues with the Ethereum platform; privacy, scalability, cost and latency. He focused on scaling features in development, including sharding and proof-of-stake. One of the biggest banks in the world, Santander, announced their plans to allow its customers to turn bank account funds into the Ethereum cryptocurrency ‘ether’. This will start a new stage in digital currencies and begin a move towards mainstream use. For the past nine months Santander have been working with Roman Mandeleil, founder of Ether.camp, building a one-click option for Santander users to create an Ethereum wallet account. Users will then be able to easily move money from their Santander bank account in and out of Ether token. The project is now in the testing stage. (http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/devcon2-santander-ethercamp-building-bridges-between-bank-accounts-ethereum-1582242)

Other notable talks included one by IPFS, a decentralized file transfer systems used by numerous Ethereum projects to give their blockchain dapps memory by allowing distributed data storage. They announced that their project, filecoin (a currency to allow payment for file storage), will now be based on Ethereum. Also the uPort project by Consensys showed their “universal identity platform” which allows for “secure key management for everyday users” as well as a “persistent identifier”.

“The biggest competition of its kind, Demo Day, hosted by ChainB during the International Blockchain Week, featured 17 ethereum based projects, out of 31, with the overall winner Uport, an Ethereum based blockchain identity project.” (image and quote from https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/ethereum-based-identity-project-uport-wins-the-blockchain-competition/)

During the 2 days of the Global Blockchain Summit discussion focused on addressing the current and future business use cases of the blockchain technology. It looked at the economic and social impacts the technology might have as well as how it might be utilized and deployed for trade and industry. IBM and China UnionPay E-payment Research Institute “previewed the demo of a collaborative project on loyalty bonus points exchange among multiple banks using blockchain technology. With a few simple and quick steps, consumers will be able to exchange bonus points from among any of the banks they do business with to select the rewards they want.” (https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/50613.wss)

All-in-all it was an intense week immersed in the cutting edge research, development and thinking of the Ethereum and Blockchain communities, punctuated with the breath-taking evening skyline of Shanghai and long late-night talks with interesting people. One such person was the entrepreneur and creator of Foundups, Michael Trout, with whom KMi hopes to have a close collaboration. Mike’s vision is that “Unlike startups that put profits first over our planet’s limited resources, Foundups powered by the ethereum blockchain put solutions that help our planet first and then ask, "Can we monetize it?" Foundups are launched locally by individuals or via our global network of Foundups Houses, anyone can launch and run, that brings together a hacker houses / permaculture homesteads / FabLabs under a single roof.”

The overwhelming feelings you come away with after a week such as this are that the future is exciting and the future is blockchains.

Related Links:

The OU Blockchain Website

KMi Showcased at the OU’s STEM Faculty Official Launch

Thursday 29 Sep 2016 | KMi News

Yesterday saw the official launch of the OU’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) Faculty which KMi joined from 1 August. KMi had a stand at the showcase as part of a celebration of some of the researching and teaching that is undertaken by the faculty.

KMi’s stand included some of our projects focussed around the theme ‘Future Technologies for Learning’:

OU Analyse – identifying students that are at risk of failure;

Blockchain – early experiments in placing Open Learn badges onto a blockchain

Stadium Live – embedding interactivity within live webcasts in modules

An Augmented Reality application designed to support students studying human biology here at the OU.

The KMi led project MK:Smart also had its own stand which highlighted a taster of the project and was shared with KMi’ers and other colleagues in STEM.

The event was very busy and both the MK:Smart and KMi stands sparked a lot of interest, including from both our VC and Executive Dean.

Learning Analytics for Awareness and Reflection: Highlights of the 6th ARTEL Workshop

Tuesday 20 Sep 2016 | KMi News

The 6th Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Technology Enhanced Learning (ARTEL) took place on September 13th in Lyon, France, in the context of the 11th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL). The workshop was chaired by Alexander Mikroyannidis (The Open University), Michael Prilla (University of Bochum) and Milos Kravcik (RWTH Aachen University). The theme of this year’s ARTEL was:

“Learning Analytics for Awareness and Reflection: How can Learning Analytics methodologies and tools support awareness and reflection in different learning contexts?”

The workshop was attended by about 30 participants throughout the day, who actively contributed to discussions on the papers presented. The workshop programme featured 10 paper presentations, consisting of papers submitted to the workshop, as well as papers submitted to the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL) for a special issue edited by the ARTEL organisers. The presented papers covered a wide range of topics related to awareness and reflection in learning:

Learning Analytics, Visualisations and Dashboards for Awareness and Reflection
Collaborative/Social Reflection
Reflection in the Workplace
Literature Reviews
Theoretical Contributions to Awareness and Reflection

Among the key take-away messages emerging from the paper presentations and the subsequent discussions, was the importance of data collection and dashboards for awareness and reflection, as well as the definition of the tasks and metrics that need to be considered for effective awareness and reflection. Participants debated that Learning Analytics, visualisations and dashboards can be useful but at the same time can add considerable cognitive load to learners and educators. It was suggested that personalisation and adaptation of awareness and reflection tools could address this load, although personalising one’s tools can add even more load as one is required to reflect on their reflection. Finally, it was agreed among participants that theoretical grounding is key for the design and development of awareness and reflection tools. Additionally, the evaluation results of such tools should offer feedback to the theoretical frameworks upon which the tools have been based.

The ARTEL papers will be published as open access in the CEUR workshop proceedings. The IJTEL papers will be published in the forthcoming special issue on Awareness and Reflection in TEL.

Related Links:

The 6th Workshop on Awareness and Reflection in Technology Enhanced Learning (ARTEL)

The Rise of Data Science – 6th ESWC Summer School held last week in Dubrovnik

Thursday 15 Sep 2016 | KMi News

The ESWC Summer School, this year moved venues and was held for the first time in beautiful Dubrovnik, Croatia last week (between 5-10th September). The year the students enjoyed the change of focus to look at ‘the rise of the data scientist’ which featured a mixture of fantastic invited talks and tutorial taught by specialist from Southampton, JSI and KMi including Carlos Pedrinaci and Allan Third. The week also included a poster session and group mini-projects all designed to prepare our next generation of young researchers in the field.

KMi’s Director, John Domingue, and one of the Directors of the Summer School, each day introduced one of invited speaker which included Marko Tadic, Stefan Decker, Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Rayid Ghani who all gave fantastic and inspiring talks.

The week was enjoyed by all and was a shame it had to end!

Related Links:

http://videolectures.net/eswc2016_summer_school/

ACL 2016: The 54th Annual Meeting

Monday 15 Aug 2016 | KMi News

The Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the largest Natural Language Processing (NLP) annual meeting among other NLP conferences such as EACL, EMNLP, and NAACL. The main conference took place in the heart of Germany, Berlin, at the Humboldt University between the 8th and the 10th of August. Other in-conjunction events, 8 tutorials and 15 NLP workshops, took place on the 7th, 11th and 12th of August as well.

The event was massive with over 1,000 participants from academia and industry coming from all parts of the world. Major conference tracks include all the new on machine learning for NLP, machine translation, parsing, sentiment analysis, word embedding and meaning, generation, summarization, phonology and morphology.

I presented my first paper in the student research workshop titled "Arabizi Identification from Twitter Data" which is part of my PhD line of research. I am looking into Arabizi, a language popular on social media in the Arab region, where users express their natural dialectal Arabic mother tongue in text without following any unified orthography. As a first step we created an approach to identify this language from within multilingual streams of textual data. Next, we will try to apply lexicon-based method to extract sentiment from Arabizi. Apart from being very dialectal and lacking a unified orthography, Arabizi is often discarded by the Arabic NLP due to the lack of resources to process the data such as lexicons, parsers, and stemmers. I was delighted to meet and receive good inputs from students and professors who were interested in our work especially the ones who specialize in Arabic NLP, in other words people who I knew only by their names.

Getting involved in the ACL community has a unique taste, the taste of languages, the stem of motivation for my research discipline; you don’t get to discuss morphology, inflection, diacritization, phonology, transcription, and pronunciation for several languages everyday with a group of inter-cultural NLP intellects over dinner or on a boat in Berlin!

The ACL organization has done a great job in making this event happen. I am enthused to present a paper from my research in the main ACL conference next year!

Related Links:

ACL 2016 Webpage

ACL 2016: The 54th Annual Meeting

Monday 15 Aug 2016 | KMi News

The Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the largest Natural Language Processing (NLP) annual meeting among other NLP conferences such as EACL, EMNLP, and NAACL. The main conference took place in the heart of Germany, Berlin, at the Humboldt University between the 8th and the 10th of August. Other in-conjunction events, 8 tutorials and 15 NLP workshops, took place on the 7th, 11th and 12th of August as well.

The event was massive with over 1,000 participants from academia and industry coming from all parts of the world. Major conference tracks include all the new on machine learning for NLP, machine translation, parsing, sentiment analysis, word embedding and meaning, generation, summarization, phonology and morphology.

I presented my first paper in the student research workshop titled "Arabizi Identification from Twitter Data" which is part of my PhD line of research. I am looking into Arabizi, a language popular on social media in the Arab region, where users express their natural dialectal Arabic mother tongue in text without following any unified orthography. As a first step we created an approach to identify this language from within multilingual streams of textual data. Next, we will try to apply lexicon-based method to extract sentiment from Arabizi. Apart from being very dialectal and lacking a unified orthography, Arabizi is often discarded by the Arabic NLP due to the lack of resources to process the data such as lexicons, parsers, and stemmers. I was delighted to meet and receive good inputs from students and professors who were interested in our work especially the ones who specialize in Arabic NLP, in other words people who I knew only by their names.

Getting involved in the ACL community has a unique taste, the taste of languages, the stem of motivation for my research discipline; you don’t get to discuss morphology, inflection, diacritization, phonology, transcription, and pronunciation for several languages everyday with a group of inter-cultural NLP intellects over dinner or on a boat in Berlin!

The ACL organization has done a great job in making this event happen. I am enthused to present a paper from my research in the main ACL conference next year!

Related Links:

ACL 2016 Webpage

Alessandro Adamou to serve as UK ambassador for the European Linked Data Contest

Tuesday 09 Aug 2016 | KMi News

KMi researcher Alessandro Adamou has been appointed as representative for the United Kingdom in the upcoming European Linked Data Contest.

The ELDC is a fringe event of the SEMANTiCS 2016 international conference on semantic systems, to be held in Leipzig during September 12-15, 2016. After the success of last year’s edition, this initiative once more seeks to gather the top European talents of Linked Data and Semantic Web, by having them present their innovative projects, products and industry implementations involving linked data. This year’s edition will award the two categories of Linked Open Data and Linked Enterprise Data, with a cash prize of €1,500 to the winner in each category.

Much in the vein of the inspiring Eurovision Song Contest, there will be one finalist from each country to compete in the pan-European contest. The finalist for the UK will be chosen by Alessandro upon consultation with his internal team, then the ELDC jury will vote on the two winning projects to be announced on September 13.

In the words of the contest organisers, the ELDC envisages to build a directory of the best European projects in the domain of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, which ensures excellent visibility even to those projects that were not to win or make it to the finals.

The contest is still accepting submissions for the whole month of August.

Related Links:

Book reaches top charts: Responsive Open Learning Environments

Monday 25 Jul 2016 | KMi News

A book co-edited by Alexander Mikroyannidis has reached the top Springer download charts. Since its online publication on November 2014, there has been a total of 28,033 chapter downloads of the book on SpringerLink. This means that the book has been one of the top 25% most downloaded eBooks in the relevant Springer eBook Collection in 2015.

The book is entitled “Responsive Open Learning Environments” and presents the outcomes of 4 years of educational research in the EU-supported project called ROLE (Responsive Online Learning Environments). Authors of this book are researchers, developers and educators who have worked in the ROLE project and belong to the ROLE partner consortium consisting of 16 internationally renowned research institutions, including those from 6 EU countries and China. Chapters include numerous practical tutorials to guide the reader in creating innovative and useful learning widgets and present the best practices for the development of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). Additionally, each chapter has been commented by experts outside of the ROLE consortium, who have offered their perspectives on PLEs.

The book is available online as Open Access via SpringerLink.

Related Links:

Download the book

Dr Hassan Saif Receives the 2016 SWSA Distinguished Dissertation Award

Tuesday 19 Jul 2016 | KMi News

Dr Hassan Saif has recently received the 2016 SWSA Distinguished Dissertation Award for his Thesis: “Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Microblogs”. The award will be presented during the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), which will be held in Kobe, Japan on October 17-21 2016.

The competition this year was very tough with twice the number of submitted applications as last year. Selection of the dissertation was based on the on the originality, significance, and impact of the work on the semantic web research field.

Hassan’s thesis focuses on concept-level sentiment analysis, where he researched several innovative methods of extracting and using the semantics of words along with Natural Language Processing techniques to enhance sentiment analysis performance on social media. Findings of Hassan’s thesis show the significance of using semantic web technology for sentiment analysis in comparison with the statistical state-of-the-art methods.

A significant part of Hassan’s thesis has been previously published at multiple top-tier semantic web journals and conferences. His paper, entitled “Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Twitter”, was one of the first work to introduce the use of semantics for sentiment analysis, and has had strong impact on the research advancement in this field, e.g., the paper has been cited more than 170 times according to Google Scholar.

Hassan has received multiple best paper awards and award nominations which indicates of the positive reception of this body of work by the semantic web community and beyond.

“The Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) is a non-profit organisation incorporated in Karlsruhe, Germany for the purpose of promoting and exchanging scholarly work in Semantic Web and related fields throughout the world. The association’s activities are selfless; its main objectives do not concern any own economic interests.”

Human Biology Sample Augmented Reality App Released

Monday 18 Jul 2016 | KMi News

Paul Hogan in KMI is developing an augmented reality app for colleagues in the STEM faculty that explores the potential of Augmented Reality (AR) to support students studying human biology. The app allows the user to view and interact with an anatomically correct 3D model of a human heart.

To share this work with OU staff so that they can see and try for themselves this technology in action he has developed a sample version of the app. This version although not including all the features of the main app to be used in SK299 gives a user a good taste of how the app can be used for student learning.

Paul will be in the Hub today between 12:30pm and 2:00pm handing out beer mats that have been produced by LiKE that are used to trigger the augmentation from mobile devices for this sample app.

If you do not manage to get to the Hub don’t worry as you can get a copy of the app and the trigger image here: Human Heart

This app works on both Android and iOS but the main app will also run on desktop and browser.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIVlGQt5xA4]

Last FORGE plenary in Athens

Wednesday 13 Jul 2016 | KMi News

The last plenary meeting of the FORGE project took place on July 11-12th in Athens, Greece. In a beautiful location by the sea, the FORGE partners met in order to wrap up the project and prepare for its final review. The main topics of discussion and planning had to do with the sustainability of the project’s outputs beyond its end.

FORGE has been a 3-year FP7 project, led by John Domingue from the Open University. The project has performed pioneering research in online experimentation and remote laboratories and has developed a number of sustainable results and educational artefacts, including the FORGE iBook, a variety of courses and widgets, instructional videos, and many more. All this has been made possible by the excellent collaboration between the FORGE partners, who have formed an energetic and pro-active team.

Related Links:

The FORGE project