The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Increasingly adopted Web-based knowledge sources, such as knowledge graphs and crowdsourcing platforms, pose a great challenge in making them accessible to non-expert end-users. In particular, being unaware of the properties, structure and contents of available knowledge sources, end-users may not know which sources to use and in what manner. In this talk I will present several directions towards bridging this gap. First, we assist users in identifying adequate knowledge sources, via a declarative framework that supports "soft" constraints reflecting, e.g., the relevance of the knowledge source to a given topic or query and diversification considerations. We accompany the proposed sources with intuitive explanations, which enable the user to provide further feedback and refine the source selection. Next, we adopt an exploratory approach allowing the user to discover relevant contents within knowledge sources, based on information-theoretic principles and via an interactive process. Short Bio: Yael Amsterdamer is a senior lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University. Her research interests include the management of data obtained via Web-based platforms, such as crowdsourced data, online knowledge bases and social networks. Previously, Yael has been a visiting scholar of the Computer and Information Science Department at UPenn (Philadelphia, PA), and at the INRIA institute (Paris, France). She received her PhD from Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Prof. Tova Milo. In 2016 Yael received the Alon Fellowship for Outstanding Young Researchers. During her PhD, she won, among others, the Wolf Foundation Scholarship and the Dan David Prize for outstanding PhD students.