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Frank van Harmelen

Frank van Harmelen

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Frank van Harmelen has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh University, and has been professor of AI at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam since 2001, where he leads the research group on Knowledge Representation. He was one of the designers of the knowledge representation language OWL, which is now in use by companies such as Google, the BBC, New York Times, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, Elsevier and Springer Nature among others. He co-edited the standard reference work in his field (The Handbook of Knowledge Representation), and received the Semantic Web 10-year impact award for his work on the Sesame RDF triple store. He is a Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence, member of the the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences (KNAW), of The Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHWM) and of the Academia Europaea, and is adjunct professor at Wuhan University and Wuhan University of Science and Technology in China.

Systems that learn and reason

After the amazing breakthroughs of machine learning (deep learning or otherwise) in the past decade, the shortcomings of machine learning are also becoming increasingly clear: unexplainable results, data hunger and limited generalisability are all becoming bottle necks. In this talk we will look at how the combination with symbolic AI (in the form of very large knowledge graphs) can give us a way forward, towards machine learning systems that can explain their results, that need less data, and that generalise better outside their training set.