Panel Title #1: Convergence of Knowledge Graphs & Large Language Models

Moderator: Prasad Yalamanchi

Panel Date: 17th November 2023

Panel Members:  Mike Bennett, Armando Stellato, Dusan Milovanovic, Sanju Tiwari, Sheng-Chuan Wu

Panel Members

Mike Bennett, Hypercube Limited, United Kingdom

Mike Bennett is the Director of Hypercube Limited, a consultancy that helps companies manage their information assets using semantics, by creating formal ontologies and vocabularies for data governance, integration and knowledge graph development. Coming from a background of industrial software, he has over 20 years of financial industry experience and has delivered ontology solutions to major banks and industry bodies and to the legal services profession. Mike is the originator of the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), a standard repository for financial industry concepts and definitions from the EDM Council and the Object Management Group (OMG). Mike delivers services in semantics strategy, ontology development and training, and also serves as the Technical Director of the OMG, overseeing the processes for technology adoption and ensuring that these reflect the needs of the OMG community. Mike is active in the ontology community, where he has presented papers and published articles on ontology modeling, sits on the Board of Trustees of the Ontolog forum and heads up a think tank on ontology best practice. 

Armando Stellato, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy

Armando Stellato, PhD, is Associate Professor at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata, where he researches and teaches in the fields of Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Based Systems, with particular focus on solutions for the Web of Data. He is author of over 100 publications and has been member of the program committees of over 100 international scientific conferences and workshops in the Semantic Web and Natural Language Processing fields. In his career Armando Stellato has participated to several research projects (last one: EU funded research project KATY) and standardization efforts, such as the W3C Ontology-Lexica Community Group. He has also collaborated with several public institutions (FAO, ESA, UN, USDA, various governments, etc..), providing knowledge transfer, training and consultancy for the management and publication of data, metadata and documental archives. Professor Stellato is currently leading – under projects funded by the DIGITAL program – the development of an ecosystem for knowledge acquisition and management, which already produced widely adopted platforms such as VocBench: an Application for Collaborative Management of RDF Vocabularies and its companion system ShowVoc for knowledge publication and fruition. He is also active in the field of Legal Informatics, being involved in a collaboration with the Italian government for the semantic organization of Italian laws and on the realization of a semantic representation model for legal acts, currently funded and under adoption by the Publications Office of the EU.

Dusan Milovanovic, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland

During his 28 years of professional career, acting in systems engineering, enterprise and solutions architecture, and product management roles, Dušan was engaged in the research and development of disruptive information and communication technologies. His curriculum includes a technology leadership career at Ericsson, then engagements within life science, healthcare, and public health domains.

Prior to joining the WHO, on a mission to changing the healthcare paradigm by empowering individual patients to actively participate in their medical care, supporting healthcare professionals to provide the right diagnosis and corresponding treatment on time and turning medical records into medical knowledge Dusan acted as a machine learning architect and data architect to develop Human Brain Project's Medical Informatics Platform and connect relevant patients’ data for timely discovery of biological signatures of diseases.

At the World Health Organization, he acts as a health intelligence architect within the Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. Dušan inspired and secured the acceptance for creation of three Hub's prime-mover's initiatives – Health Intelligence Knowledge Representation and Reasoning initiative, Laboratory for Collaborative Intelligence, and the Open-Source Program Office. Dušan has BSc in Electrical Engineering, including Computer Science and Telecommunications.

Sanju Tiwari, BVICAM, New Delhi, India & Universidad Autonoma de Tamaulipas, Mexico 

Dr. Sanju Tiwari (CEO and Founder of ShodhGuru Research Labs, India) is a Professor at BVICAM, New Delhi, India and Senior Researcher at Universidad Autonoma de Tamaulipas, Mexico. She is DAAD Post-Doc-Net AI Fellow for 2021 and visited different German Universities (Leibniz University Hannover, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Lubeck University and Luephana University Luneburg) in June 2022 under this DAAD fellowship. She is a Mentor of Google Summer of Code (GSoC 2022-23) at DBpedia and a member of InfAI, Leipzig University, Germany. She is also working as a curator of ORKG Grant Program, at TIB Hannover, Germany. Currently, she is supervising 5 Ph.D. students from India, Germany and Cuba. She has worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher in Ontology Engineering Group, Universidad Politecnica De Madrid, Spain. She has to-date published >50 research papers and 4 Scopus indexed Books. She has edited an Elsevier and ISTE book based on Semantic Web in IoT. Currently she is editing two books on Personal Knowledge Graphs with IETE. She is working as a General Chair and Program Chair, Workshop Chair, Publicity Chair, Steering Committee and PC Member in different renowned International Conferences. She is the speaker of IEEE/IETE N2Women and Women's Empowerment and NiWIIT (Nigerian Women In Information Technology). She has worked as a Judge in G20 Conclave event conducted by All India Radio, Lucknow.

Sheng-Chuan Wu, Franz Inc., USA

Dr. Sheng-Chuan Wu received his Ph.D. in Scientific Computing and Computer Graphics from Cornell University in the US. He has, since graduation, been involved in several software companies, including the founding of a start-up company in Silicon Valley. In the last 20 years, he worked as a senior corporate executive at the leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Semantic Technology company, Franz Inc, in Silicon Valley, with responsibility in application development, marketing, consulting and new business development. Dr. Wu has also collaborated with researchers from academic institutions in the US and Asia on various AI and Knowledge Graph research projects.
Dr. Wu has been focusing on Semantic Knowledge Graph Technology over the last 15 years. He routinely lectured and keynoted on AI and Semantic Knowledge Graph at conferences. Most recently, he was a keynote speaker at KSEM 2015 in Chongqing, KMO 2016 in Germany, PRICAI 2016 in Thailand (also PRICAI 2004 in New Zealand), CCKS 2016 in Beijing and CYPHER Data Analytics India 2017. He has, for the last 15 years, conducted more than 20 week-long workshops on Semantic Knowledge Graph and Artificial Intelligence in Malaysia, China, Singapore, India, Japan and Australia. Dr. Wu has also consulted on several commercial Big Data and Semantic Knowledge Graph projects in the US and Asia. 

Panel Moderator: Prasad Yalamanchi, Lead Semantics, Inc., USA

Founder, CEO of Lead Semantics, Inc. MSCS from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Two decades of hands on experience in Symbolic, Knowledge based systems, Dynamic Programming (Lisp), Computational Linguistics, Data analytics, Distributed and Parallel systems, Compilers & Debuggers. Last 4 years had been working with Neural Language Models. Lead Semantics is the developer and marketer of TextDistil - A modern NLP pipeline that extracts knowledge from language (unstructured text).  TextDistil uses LLMs for extracting knowledge facts in the form of RDF triples and enables a verifiable search by grounding an LLM to the target Knowledge Graph and answering queries in natural language by end users (thus controlling the LLM hallucinations!).

Panel Title #2: AI and the Future of Work

Moderator: Greg J. Bamber

Panel Date: 18th November 2023

Panel Members:  Thomas Anton Kochan, Sharan Burrow, Ripy Mangkoesoebroto, Arif Perdana, Jane L.Y. Terpstra Tong

Panel Members:

Thomas Anton Kochan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Thomas A. Kochan is the George Maverick Bunker Professor Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a faculty member of Work and Employment Research and a co-founder of the Worker Empowerment Research Network. His recent work calls attention to the need for a new social contract at work, one that anticipates and engages current and future technological changes in ways that can drive innovation and build a more inclusive economy and broadly shared prosperity. His most recent book is Shaping the Future of Work:  A Handbook for Action and a New Social Contract (Routledge, 2021).  He is a member of the National Academy of Human Resources and the National Academy of Arbitrators. He is a past president of the International Industrial Relations Association and the Industrial Relations Research Association. He has been honoured him with many awards and fellowships. He served as a member of the MIT Task Force on Work of the Future, and received his PhD in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin.

Sharan Burrow AC, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom

Sharan Burrow AC is a Visiting Professor of Practice at the London School of Economics and Political Science --Grantham Institute. She is the Former General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (2010-2022). Previously she was President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (2000–2010.) She is a global advocate for human rights, climate action and Just Transition. She is well known for her international advocacy on employment, human rights, industrial relations, corporate responsibility, and climate action with just transition solutions. She has represented workers and civil society groups in global policy discussions in United Nations bodies, on the Governing Body of the International Labour Organisation as well as at the tables of the G7, G20, World Bank and International Monetary Fund.  She has twice been a Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos. She is Chair of the State of Victoria Apprenticeship Taskforce, a board member of the European Climate foundation, and of the Green Hydrogen Association; Co-Chair of the International Energy Agency Labour Council, Ambassador for the Well Being Economy Alliance, Commissioner for the Global Commission on Climate Governance, and she received an Honorary Doctorate, University of New South Wales.

Ripy Mangkoesoebroto, PT Hanjaya Mandala Sampoerna Tbk., Indonesia

Ripy Mangkoesoebroto is the People & Culture Director of PT Hanjaya Mandala Sampoerna Tbk. (Sampoerna), Indonesia, a Philip Morris International company. She is a committee member of APINDO (Indonesia Employers’ Association) and has been a delegate to the International Labour Organization Conference for more than five years. She also leads the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion department of PMSM (HR Managers' Association of Indonesia). Before her current role, she was the founder and CEO of 3V and OMNIA, an Indonesian consulting firm specializing in Digital Transformation and People Management Advisory Services. In her 25 years of professional experience, she has had executive roles in various large corporations in Indonesia leading people management and corporate culture transformations.  Her work and consulting experience includes the consumer goods, pharmaceutical and consulting industries with leading national and multinational organisations such as DDI, MSD and Schering-Plough, AXA, and Indosat Ooredoo. She has a record of “making change happen.” Her expertise in corporate culture transformation helps her to ensure that change initiatives are grounded and practical. Her achievements have been acknowledged by professional awards. She received a degree in Psychology, University of Indonesia, and a Master’s degree in Education and Training, University of Twente.

Arif Perdana, Monash University, Indonesia

Arif Perdana is an Associate Professor at Monash University Indonesia specialising in digital strategy and sustainability, data science, analytics, and information systems management. His experience includes prestigious universities such as Singapore Institute of Technology, Aarhus University and University of Queensland. Before his academic career, Arif worked in the IT services and finance industries. He is also the Director of the Action Lab Research Network, Indonesia, Monash University. Arif has secured significant research grants from Singapore institutions, Australian funding agencies, and the Indonesian government and corporations. His research grants and projects include Monash Data Future Institute (MDFI), Whyte Fund, Research Grant Bank Indonesia, and Ministry of Education, Singapore Grants, and Singapore Institute of Technology Ignition Grants. His research illuminates the transformative role of digital technologies such as algorithmic systems, automated decision making, data analytics, and blockchain in many sectors, from finance to education to healthcare transformation. He has expertise on digital technologies and technology-driven strategies. He researches responsible artificial intelligence (AI) in finance, the applicability of blockchain in business, and machine learning algorithms. He received his PhD in Business Information Systems from the University of Queensland.

Jane Terpstra Tong, Monash University, Malaysia

Jane Terpstra Tong is a professor of management at Monash University Malaysia. She specializes in cross-cultural management research, studying organizational behaviour from a cross-cultural perspective. Her current research projects focus on gender similarity using a multilevel modelling approach and global databases. Her research publications have appeared in top-tier international journals, including the Journal of Vocational Behaviour, Journal of International Business Studies, and Journal of Business Ethics. At Monash, Jane has held significant leadership positions, including Deputy Head of School (Education) and Head of Department. She currently serves as the Chairperson of the Campus' Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Committee. and is an experienced and competent educator, having received multiple awards and recognitions from both Monash Malaysia and Monash Australia. These honours include the Pro-Vice Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Contribution in Diversity and Inclusion in 2023, the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence in 2020, and the Pro-Vice Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Educator in 2019. Beyond academia, Jane has conducted corporate training on people and culture issues for multinational enterprises in the ASEAN region and has been a TedX speaker discussing the future workforce. She received her PhD in management from The University of Manchester.

Panel Moderator: Greg J. Bamber, Monash University, Australia

Greg J Bamber is Professor, Department of Management, Monash Business School, and Research Theme Lead: Future of Work, Monash Data Futures Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He has many publications in leading journals and books. Examples include: Human resource management in the age of generative artificial intelligence: Perspectives and research directions on ChatGPT, Human Resource Management Journal; International & Comparative Employment Relations: Global Crises & Institutional Responses, 7th edn, SAGE Publishing. He serves on many journals’ editorial boards. His research covers many sectors including aviation, building, education, health, public sector, manufacturing, telecommunications, and on AI, decent work, dispute settlement, future of work, labour in global value chains, Lean management, outsourcing, and unions. He conducts research with numerous other colleagues, international organizations, private- and public-sector enterprises, unions, governments, and the International Labour Organization. He has served as a director on non-profit boards, and as a mediator with the Advisory, Conciliation & Arbitration Service, UK. He has also served as President of Australian Labour & Employment Relations Association, Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia & New Zealand, and of other associations. Several have honoured him with awards and fellowships. He was educated at The University of Manchester; London School of Economics and Political Science, and Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.