Brief Bio
Frank van Harmelen has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh University, and has been professor of AI at the Vrije Universiteit 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, Springer Nature, XMP, and Renault 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 ifor his work on the open source software Sesame (over 200.000 downloads). 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.
Abstract
It is becoming increasingly clear that a proper understanding of computational forms of intelligence will not come from either purely data-driven learning systems, or from purely knowledge-based reasoning systems. The former are overly data hungry, not transparent, they generalize poorly and are not designed for online learning; while the latter are difficult to scale and not robust to noise. Neuro-symbolic AI is promising to combine the best of these two worlds, and research into this approach is booming. I will discuss how to build neuro-symbolic systems out of loosely coupled components that are configured in repeatable design patterns.