Andrea Calì, Georg Gottlob and Thomas Lukasiewicz win 2019 ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award

The ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award is awarded every year to a paper or a small number of papers published in the PODS proceedings ten years prior that had the most impact in terms of research, methodology, or transfer to practice over the intervening decade. The award was established in 2007 and was awarded for the first time in 2008.

Winner 2019: General Datalog-Based Framework for Tractable Query Answering over Ontologies by Andrea Calì, Georg Gottlob and Thomas Lukasiewicz

CITATION:
This paper introduces and studies the Datalog+- framework for query answering over ontologies, which subsequently became highly influential in both the database and knowledge representation communities. Its main contribution is an in-depth study of the data complexity of Datalog+-, and several extensions and restrictions tailored to ontologies. The paper identifies a tractable family of Datalog+- formalisms based on linear tuple-generating dependencies, that generalize description logics of the DL-Lite family. Extensions with keys and stratified negation are also studied. Other technical results of the paper concerning the chase have been fundamental to further developments in the field. The paper received over 450 citations, evidencing its significant impact.

The award will be presented to the authors during the 2019 ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference, to be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on June 30 - July 5, 2019.

The department's Knowledge Lab participated on 4th December in a Virtual World Tour on the Future of Work, as one of twelve globally distributed research institutions presenting their work via livestreaming. We gave presentations on AI in Learning and Teaching and on Putting AI to Work. Both were followed by lively discussions on the curricular, technical, ethical and diversity concerns of AI’s role in education and work. Full Details

The 10th South of England Regional Programming Language Seminar (S-REPLS 10) will be hosted at Birkbeck on 18 September 2018. S-REPLS is a regular and informal meeting for those based in the South of England with a professional interest - whether it be academic or commercial - in the semantics and implementation of programming languages.

Attendance is free of charge, and we are currently accepting talk suggestions and attendance registrations: Full Details

The team - Professor Mark Levene, Professor Trevor Fenner and Dr. Martyn Harris from Birkbeck's Department of Computer Science and Information Systems and Professor Judit Bar-Ilan from the Department of Information Science at Bar-Ilan University – has proposed a new bibliometric indicator, the χ-index (chi-index), as a more informative way to indicate academic performance. Further details.

A vacancy is available for a Web Developer/Researcher to join the AHRC-funded Mapping Museums project on 1st October 2018. The post is full-time for 12 months and will involve designing and developing a high-quality website to showcase the project and its outputs, working with other members of the interdisciplinary research team, which combines expertise from the arts and humanities, computer science, and social sciences.
The application deadline is 24th June. Full details of the post and how to apply

Our departmental application for an Athena SWAN Bronze award was accepted by the Equality Challenge Unit. The purpose of the Athena SWAN Charter is to recognise commitment to the advancement of gender equality in academia, to address unequal gender representation across academic disciplines, professional and support functions and to remove the obstacles faced by women.

Join HackXLR8: the official hackathon of London Tech Week at ExCel, London. Team up and collaborate with designers, startups and developers to create an app or prototype for an IoT, Smart Mobility or GreenTech solution.

The winners will pitch their ideas on the main stage of TechXLR8 and be awarded with great prizes.

We are now looking to appoint a lecturer in Computer Science to help develop our participation in the Institute of Coding (www.instituteofcoding.org), a new, exciting, national initiative that brings together over 60 universities, industry, training providers and professional bodies to address the UK’s digital skills gaps.

We are particularly seeking applicants with a growing reputation for research in Data Analytics/Data Science, who will also contribute to one or more of the interdisciplinary research themes of the Birkbeck Knowledge Lab (www.klab.bbk.ac.uk/research) and the Birkbeck Institute for Data Analytics (www.bida.bbk.ac.uk).

Full details