Daniel HernándezIt is time to make a short summary of the 2024. To start, today I updated the background of our very simple https://degu.cl website with a beautiful drawing by Sonia @Ayenkantun of a degu over a rock, which I copy here.
We took the 2024 annual picture of our research team at Analytic Computing, directed by Steffen Staab. Most of the researchers and a rooster appear in this picture. We have a very enjoyable and diverse group of people. This was also the first year of KI Institute at the University of Stuttgart (@Uni_Stuttgart) which was launched in November 2023 (Cc: @royaheeee, @yiyiyiyi).
We also took an annual group picture of the young researchers at the IntCDC research group. This picture includes most PhD students and some postdocs.
This was the first year of the Circular Factory project, whose goal is to replace the traditional linear economic approach of "take-make-use-dispose" by a circular economy. My role there is to contribute to the modeling of the circular factory knowledge. Open knowledge is a key aspect of circular economies. This picture is from our first summer school.
The first students I supervised this year graduated: Gabriel Glaser (Bachelor student, co-supervised with Jiaxin Pan) and Xinyi Pan (Master student). Supervising students is sometimes challenging, but one of the most rewarding tasks in the academy.
This year, I co-authored two papers at the Web Conference 2024. In the first, "From Shapes to Shapes: Inferring SHACL Shapes for Results of SPARQL CONSTRUCT Queries," we expressed queries using a Description Logic theory. This paper is part of Philipp Seifer's PhD thesis and leads to another paper that Philipp presented at the DL 2024 workshop, "Inferring SHACL Constraints for Results of Composable Graph Queries (Extended Abstract)."
One of the things that I liked about this paper on SHACL was the application of the proof theoretic definition of relational databases by Raymond Reiter in several of the papers he published in the 1960s and 1970s. His definitions of the open/closed world assumptions, domain closure, and the unique name assumption were a good inspiration for my research since I was a PhD student. I really enjoyed his clear writing style.
The second paper at the Web Conference, was "NPCS: Native Provenance Computation for SPARQL," which is part of Zubaria Asma PhD thesis. This paper had a long story. Zubaria visited us at Aalborg in 2022, when I was already living in Stuttgart. So, I traveled to Aalborg to meet her. We worked for a week on her idea, which improves the method proposed in "Computing How-Provenance for SPARQL Queries via Query Rewriting" in 2021.
Since 2022, Zubaria Asma, Luis Galarraga, Katja Hose (@katjahose), Giorgos Flouris and I have collaborated to make this Web Conference paper. We participated at the COST Action DKG workshop in Malaga and continued with another paper we will submit in 2025.
I also coorganized two events in 2024. First, the second edition of the Knowledge Graphs For Sustainability workshop (@kg4s), which was collocated with the Extended Semantic Web Conference #ESWC (@eswc_conf). In the picture are some of the workshop participants, including two PhDs who I advise, Diellza Elshani (@diellza) and Nadeen Fathallah (@nadeenfathallah), who presented papers in the workshop and in the conference. Start preparing your paper for the third workshop edition in Portoroz!
The second event was the International Semantic Web Conference. It was an honor to coorganize this conference, which is my favorite one. I met many friends I haven't seen for a long time. I also presented a paper, "eSPARQL: Representing and Reconciling Agnostic and Atheistic Beliefs in RDF-star Knowledge Graphs," about writing epistemic queries to integrate different beliefs.
Daniel Hernández (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image I returned from #ISWC (The International #SemanticWeb Conference), where I presented the paper "eSPARQL: Representing and Reconciling Agnostic and Atheistic Beliefs in RDF-star Knowledge Graphs." What is the paper about? The Semantic Web contains multiple statements, and people have different beliefs. Instead of finding a single true, we should learn how to live with this pluralism. Hence, we proposed an extension to #SPARQL to write epistemic queries for this pluralism.
This year, I also co-authored "Generating SROI⁻ Ontologies via Knowledge Graph Query Embedding Learning," which was presented at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence by Yunjie He, a PhD student of our research team that I am also advising. I wrote about this paper before.
Daniel Hernández (@[email protected])
Attached: 2 images ECAI 2024 is over. Here two pictures: Yunjie He (@[email protected]) presenting our paper, and with me and the ECAI 2024 logo behind.
This positive research summary may sound like an easy path, but I am hiding the non-happy part. Most of these published papers were rejected at least once before their acceptance, and I am not even describing the papers that were rejected this year.
Last but not least, my parents and my sister visited at in Stuttgart during a month in the 2024's summer. This was one of the happiest aspects of the year.
I summarized the positive things of 2024. I did not include the difficulties and the sad events. With Sonia, we plan to stay in Stuttgart for another year. 2025 seems promising for us on the personal level, but not much on the global scale. The world is warming, far-right extremism and racism are gaining power, the genocide in Gaza does not seem to stop, several wars will continue in 2025, and more people will die trying to migrate.
Ayenkantun@daniel Cada vez que pienso en el mundo, viene a mi mente un viejo tango que mi padre escuchaba, se llama Cambalache, es un verdadero himno a la realidad cotidiana,y totalmente vigente 🥺
@daniel Tener a la suegra, el suegro y la cuñada fue una toda una experiencia galáctica para mi 😅