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.

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.