QUARTZ Workshop 4 and Training TS5-6

QUARTZ Workshop 4 and Training TS5-6

The workshop W4 was one full-day workshop and was held on February 12, 2020. The goal of the workshop was to give the ESRs opportunities for networking with each other and the senior researchers, for presenting themselves and their research progress to the other colleagues, and for sharing their knowledge within the network, in particulare in an industrial environment.

The following describes the programme of the event that took place 12 February 2020:

  • Afternoon Workshop W4 (BCS London, 25 Copthall Avenue London, EC2R 7BP, UK)
    • 14:00-15:00 Discussion of outreach and dissemination activities
    • 15:00-17:30 ESR progress presentations
  • Evening Training Activities T5-6 (Signal AI, 145 City Road, London, EC1V 1AZ, UK)
    • 18:00 – 19:00 Registration and Networking Reception
    • 19:00 - 19:45 "Applied Research in Signal AI: Sentiment Analysis for PR monitoring" Raymond Ng/Signal AI
    • 19:45 - 20:30: "Quantum Mechanics meets Information Search and Retrieval", Intro by Ingo Frommholz, Haiming Liu and lightning talks by ESRs
    • 20:30 – 21:00 Networking Reception

About Workshop 4

The workshop W4 was a half-day workshop and was held in the afternoon of Wednesday, February 12, 2020.  The goal of the workshop was to give the ESRs opportunities for presenting their research progress with the scientific board and for sharing their knowledge within the network. W4 was organized by Ingo Frommholz and Haiming Liu of the University of Bedfordshire.

The workshop consisted of eleven ESR’s research progress presentations; the ESRs had twenty minutes to discuss their research, either in person or via a video link, which was followed by a ten minutes discussion, question and answering session for each ESR. The list of workshop speakers is reported below; the presentations are attached in Appendix B.

ESR-1 Li Qiuchi University of Padua (Online)
ESR-2 Wang Benyou University of Padua (Online)
ESR-3 Jaiswal Amit Kumar University of Bedfordshire (In person)
ESR-5 Younes Yousef Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg (Online)
ESR-6 Uprety Sagar The Open University (In person)
ESR-7 Gkoumas Dimitris The Open University (Online)
ESR-8 Lima Lucas University of Copenhagen (In person)
ESR-9 Wang Dongsheng University of Copenhagen (In person)
ESR-10 Lebedev Aleksandr Linnæus University (Online)
ESR-11 Tiwari Prayag University of Padua (In person)
ESR-12 Geriente Suzette Vrije Universiteit Brussel (The supervisor - Diederik Aerts presented the work on Suzette’s behalf)
ESR-13 Beltran Lester Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Online)

Some ESRs were not able to attend the event in person and attended online, due to visa issues and concerns regarding the Coronavirus epidemic, which led the consortium to leave the attendance decision up to the ESRs. A video link was provided so that all ESRs, with the exception of Suzette Geriente, were able to attend at least remotely.

The attendance record is as follows:

  • Attended in person: Amit Kumar Jaiswal, Lucas Lima, Dongsheng Wang, Prayag Tiwari, Sagar Uprety, Ingo Frommholz, Haiming Liu and Emanuele Di Buccio
  • Attended online: Qiuchi Li, Benyou Wang, Dimitris Gkoumas, Lester Beltran, Aleksandr Lebedev, Yousef Younes, Ingo Schmitt and Diederik Aerts
  • Apologies: Suzette Geriente, Andrei Khrennikov, Christina Lioma, Dawei Song and Massimo Melucci

TS5-6 Training Sessions

The training sessions were held at Signal AI in London. Training activities covered discussions around employability and knowledge transfer. Signal AI, one of our partners and award-winning UK SME, was established in the context of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with a UK university and is hence a highly relevant example for students to learn how research can be turned into a product of commercial value as well as to discuss employability.

The evening session was held in the context of the London Text Analytics Meetup and was organized by the University of Bedfordshire (Ingo Frommholz and Haiming Liu) and Signal AI (Dr. Dyaa Albakour). It was attended by 50 industry practitioners and academics, working in Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing, who provided feedback and contributed to a discussion about knowledge transfer and employability with the ESRs.

ESRs had the opportunity to pitch their work to the audience in 90 second lightning talks; this format was agreed with the host (Dr. Dyaa Albakour) as a training event to be able to pitch the ESRs respective projects, including their relevance and commercial and academic impact, to a non-expert audience coming from industry and academia alike.

A further talk by Raymond Ng from Signal AI covered knowledge transfer aspects with Signal’s sentiment analysis tools and their own history and involvement in recruitment and knowledge transfer as a prime example. The subsequent discussion covered employability aspects whereby many industry practitioners in the audience contributed to the discussion with their own experience and expectations.

Social Event

The evening event was conducted in the context of the London Text Analytics Meetup (see above). The host, Signal AI, kindly provided food and drinks and our ESRs socialised with around 50 meetup participants.

Event Evaluation and Feedback

Five supervisors of the QUARTZ team attended the afternoon workshop either remotely or in person, namely, Prof. Diederik Aerts (Free University of Brussel, Belgium), Dr. Emanuele Di Buccio (University of Padua, Italy), Dr. Ingo Frommholz (University of Bedfordshire, UK), Dr. Haiming Liu (University of Bedfordshire, UK), and Prof. Ingo Schmitt (Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany). Apologies were received from the other absent supervisors and Suzette Geriente (ESR-12).

The feedback gathered for both events and at the closing session was positive. The ESRs found that the trainings were useful for their skill development. They appreciated the opportunity to receive feedback for their work as well as socializing with practitioners and academics. During lightning talks the present ESRs had to pitch their own projects as well as those of one peer ESR assigned to them who could not attend, which was part of their employability training. They also had to discuss the relevance and impact of the respective projects to a non-expert audience coming from industry and academia. During the preparation of their talks all ESRs received feedback and guidance from Dr. Ingo Frommholz and Dr. Dyaa Albakour (Signal AI).

As mentioned above, some ESRs were not able to attend the events in London, partially due to visa issues and partially due to concerns regarding the Coronavirus epidemic.

The 8th International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR 2018)

The ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of research related to the foundational aspects of Information Retrieval (IR), including, for example, human search processes; search and recommendation; learning and optimization; language and representations; sensory information; artificial intelligence, ethics and responsibility in information retrieval.

The conference explicitly welcomes papers on core IR and any paper on connections between IR and its neighboring disciplines. We welcome experimental and industrial papers that validate approaches from the lens of practical applicability. Such papers should, apart from validating the practical applicability of an existing approach, provide a clear message to the community as to which aspects need further (theoretical) investigation, based on the experimental findings.

See more information...

First Conference on Cognitive Technologies and Quantum Intelligence

17-19 May, 2018

About the Conference

Our mission is to to bring together world top experts in the quantum theory approach to cognitive, socio-humanitarian and computer sciences for brainstorming on the most important problems of probabilistic modeling of systems of artificial intelligence, cognitive, social and political sciences, economics, and finances.

http://ctqi.tilda.ws/

Conference Committee

  • Alexander P. Alodjants, deputy chair (ITMO University, Saint Petersburg, Russia)
  • Andrei Yu. Khrennikov, deputy chair (Linnaeus University, Sweden/ ITMO University, Russia)
  • Sergei V. Khmelevsky, deputy chair (ITMO University, Saint Petersburg, Russia)

Topics

  • Quantum cognition is across-disciplinary field of research which seeks to describe cognitive and psychological phenomena in the human system with formalisms and methods of quantum theory. The aim is to found out fundamental similarities in behavior of complicated social and quantum systems. Exploration of these analogies allows to obtain new information about the behavior of complex biological and social systems, on the other hand, to use well-developed methods of quantum mechanics, laser physics, and nonlinear dynamics for modeling human and social behavior.
  • Cognitive computations are newest technologies that partially repeat the features of the human brain and are able to work much more efficiently. It is promising to use of such systems in a huge variety of fields and directions, including banking, materials science, business optimization, urban infrastructure management, environmental assessment, research in various fields of science and medicine. The main task of cognitive technologies is to enable a person to work with unstructured data in a convenient way.
  • Quantum machine learning and quantum algorithms are high performance programing technologies for solutions on quantum (or quantum-like) computers (simulators) complex problems like data search in big data bases, classification etc. The software for quantum machine learning uses quantum algorithms to processinformation, that does not available to the "ordinary" classical computer. This opens entirely new possibilities and prospects in terms of accelerating the solution of computational hard problems that can surpass the most famous classical algorithms used in machine learning.

Symposium Worlds of Entanglement, 28-30 Sept. 2017, Free University of Brussels (VUB)

Symposium Worlds of Entanglement 2017

In the last decades, quantum theory has advanced from a “passive attitude,” where quantum features of physical systems were exploited to obtain useful technologies, to an “active attitude,” where the deep structure of quantum reality has been manipulated to design new systems and processes. This new “quantum way of thinking” not only has expanded the application of quantum theory from the micro-physical to the macro-physical domain, but has also brought new perspectives on how we should think about some of the most fundamental notions conceived by the human intellect, such as information, complexity, life, rationality and consciousness.  We aim at interdisciplinary dialogues between experts in quantum theory and experts in life and social sciences to discuss how the most recent advances in our understanding of the nature of reality impact science and the future of our society.

Accepted abstracts will be invited to give a presentation and to prepare an article to be published in the journal Foundations of Science

More information on the symposium can be found at http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/workshop/woe17/

Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and Technology (FQMT) International conference

The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and Technology (FQMT) conference is arranged by International Centre for Mathematical Modelling in physics, engineering and cognitive sciences (ICMM) at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden, in June 12-15, 2017.

This is the 18th Växjö conference devoted to quantum foundations and applications of quantum theory, especially quantum information. It is devoted to quantum foundations (including philosophical issues), experiment, and recently developed quantum technologies (with emphasize of their foundational aspects). The conference is supported by the Department of Mathematics, Linnaeus University and the Entropy journal.

More information about the conference can be found here

Call for papers: Special Issue in Quantum Structures in Computer Science - Theoretical Computer Science

Submission Deadline: 2nd July 2017.

The Special Issue in Quantum Structures in Computer Science aims at opening the quantum theoretical approach to the community of computer and information scientists, explaining how the quantum mechanical formalism addresses the challenges of the dynamic and multi-modal nature of data and user interaction context, and hence can be successfully applied to natural language, semantics and information access and retrieval, and related problems.

More information about submissions here