Dr Ilaria Tiddi has just won the 2017 SWSA Distinguished Dissertation Award for her Dissertation ‘Explaining the Data Patterns with Knowledge from the Web of Data’.

This is the second year in a row that a KMi PhD student has won this prestigious award with Dr Hassan Saif picking up the award last year.

Ilaria describes her work at the intersection of knowledge discovery and semantic web research, using the Web of Data to generate explanations for patterns found in data through data mining techniques. In her thesis Ilaria investigated the hypothesis that the interpretation of data behaving in a similarly way (“patterns”) could be facilitated and automatized using the Web of (Linked) Data thanks to the shared and cross-domain knowledge in it. To demonstrate this, Ilaria developed Dedalo, a framework that automatically provides  explanations to patterns of data using the background knowledge extracted from the Web of Data. She studied the elements required for a piece of information to be considered an explanation, identified the best strategies to automatically find the right piece of information in the Web of Data, and designed a process exploiting Machine Learning techniques (such as Inductive Logic Programming, Neural networks and Genetic Programming) able to produce explanations to a given pattern using the background knowledge autonomously collected from the Web of Data. The final  evaluation of Dedalo involved users within an empirical study based on a real-world scenario, the interpretation of trends of Google searches. She demonstrated that the explanation process is complex when not being familiar with the domain of usage, but also that this can be considerably simplified when using the Web of Data as a source of background knowledge

Congratulation Ilaria! KMi is so proud of your achievement.