HT’24 keynote speakers: Enrico Motta
“Formally Representing and Capturing the Dynamics of Mainstream News” is a keynote speech by Professor Enrico Motta, an outstanding expert in knowledge technologies, which will open this year’s ACM Hypertext 2024 conference in Poznań, Poland. Professor Motta, Director of the Intelligent Systems and Data Science research group at the Knowledge Media Institute, will deliver a lecture on the crucial role of academic media studies. Despite the seismic changes brought about by the web and social media, the speaker argues, mainstream news sources still play a vital role in democratic societies. In particular, a healthy democracy requires a balanced and diverse media landscape, able to provide an arena where the various topics and viewpoints relevant to political discourse are presented and discussed.
At the same time, Professor Motta will argue that digitized news content is now available on an enormous scale, with commercial providers offering real-time online access to tens of thousands of news sources in different languages. This unprecedented resource has opened up numerous opportunities for large-scale news monitoring and analytics, as well as the development of novel intelligent services for media users. However, because the available solutions for capturing the dynamics of mainstream news are rather limited, current analyses by researchers and practitioners tend to be small in scale and often rely on manual investigations of topic and viewpoint coverage. To address this issue, the speaker will discuss his work in scholarly analytics and the research program in computational news analytics that he has developed.
In his talk, the Director of the Knowledge Media Institute will provide an overview of the results from his research group so far, illustrating both a typology of news topics, which has been formally defined and realized into a family of reusable ontologies, and a hybrid human-machine approach. This approach uses a Large Language Model to help analysts identify the range of viewpoints relevant to debates around a given topic and to classify the claims expressed in a news corpus of interest with respect to the identified viewpoints.
Prof. Enrico Motta is an expert in data-intensive solutions. These include Artificial Intelligence (AI), Intelligent Systems, Data Science, Semantic Web Technologies, Visual Analytics, Cognitive Robotics, Machine Learning, Human-Computer Interaction and others. Application domains include Smart Cities, Scholarly Data, Media Analytics, and Digital Humanities. In March 2019, I also took up a Professor II position at the University of Bergen, to contribute to the development of the MediaFutures Centre and progress a novel research line on the application of AI technologies to Computational Journalism and Media Analytics.
Since 2014 his group has been collaborating closely with Springer Nature, a very successful strategic partnership that has enabled the group to ground its research in concrete business requirements, leading to several highly innovative techniques, applications and resources. Another key area of his current research concerns the development of intelligent robots, able to integrate state of the art machine learning techniques with knowledge-based reasoning, to improve their visual intelligence and make sense of their environment. A current application context for this work concerns the use of cognitive robots for in-house healthcare assistance.
See the details about the ACM Hypertext 2024.