Bob J Wielinga

University of Amsterdam | UVA · Institute of Informatics

In this paper we propose several approaches for automatic annotation of natural science spreadsheets using a combination of structural properties of the tables and external vocabularies. During the design process of their spreadsheets, domain scientists implicitly include their domain model in the content and structure of the spreadsheet tables. Ho...

Spreadsheets models are frequently used by scientists to analyze research data. These models are typically described in a paper or a report, which serves as single source of information on the underlying research project. As the calculation workflow in these models is not made explicit, readers are not able to fully understand how the research resu...

In this paper I give a short reflection on Knowledge Acquisition as a subfield of AI and Knowledge Engineering over the last 25 years or so. My major message is that knowledge modeling is an underrated but still important method to reduce the complexity problems that arise in constructing knowledge-based applications. Scale – as apparent in the Sem...

The main research question in this article concerns the added value of a prescriptive model in a simulation/gaming environment: KM Quest. KM Quest is meant to support students in the acquisition of both declarative and procedural knowledge in the domain of Knowledge Management (KM). The prescriptive model (KM model) embedded in the KM Quest environ...

This article discusses the use of crowdsourcing in a serious game. A computer game, called Cerberus, which allows players to tag surface features on Mars, has been developed. Developing the game has allowed us to investigate the effects of different help levels in supporting the transfer of knowledge, and also how changing the game features can aff...

In this article we discuss an application scenario for semantic annotation and search in a collection of art images. This application shows that background knowledge in the form of ontologies can be used to support indexing and search in image collections. The underlying ontologies are represented in RDF Schema and are based on existing data standa...

We investigate whether the automatic generation of questions from an ontology leads to a trustworthy determination of a situation. With our Situation Awareness Question Generator (SAQG) we automatically generate questions from an ontology. The experiment shows that people with no previous experience can characterize hectic situations rather fast an...

This study investigates crowdsourcing using a serious game concerning the annotation of semantically rich features of Mars. Photographic data is used transmitted from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recording the surface. A computer game, called Cerberus, was developed allowing players to tag features of the Mars surface. The game investigated in f...

Gold standard mappings created by experts are at the core of alignment evaluation. At the same time, the process of manual evaluation is rarely discussed. While the practice of having multiple raters evaluate results is accepted, their level of agreement is often not measured. In this paper we describe three experiments in manual evaluation and stu...

Within cultural heritage collections, objects are often grounded in a particular historical setting. This setting can currently not be made explicit, as structured descriptions of events are either missing or not marked up explicitly. This paper reports a study on automatic extraction of an historical event thesaurus from unstructured texts. We sho...

Cultural heritage institutions are currently rethinking ac-cess to their collections to allow the public to interpret and contribute to their collections. In this work, we present the Agora project, an interdisciplinary project in which Web technology and theory of interpretation meet. This we call digital hermeneutics. The Agora project facilitate...

Traditional information systems for crisis response and management are centralized systems with a rigid hierarchical structure. Here we propose a decentralized system, which allows citizens to play a significant role as information source and/or as helpers during the initial stages of a crisis. In our approach different roles are assigned to citize...

This paper proposes a model of technology acceptance that is specifically developed to test the acceptance of assistive social agents by elderly users. The research in this paper develops and tests an adaptation and theoretical extension of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) by explaining intent to use not only in terms...

In this paper we explore the use of location aware mobile devices for searching and browsing a large number of general and cul- tural heritage information repositories. Based on GPS positioning we can determine a user's location and context, composed of physical nearby lo- cations, historic events that have taken place there, artworks that were cre...

In this work we present an automatic method for the extraction of time periods related to ontological concepts from the Web. The method consists of two parts: an Information Extraction phase and a Semantic Representation phase. In the Information Extraction phase, temporal information about events that are associated with the target instance are ex...

In this paper we build on our methodology for combining and selecting alignment techniques for vocabularies, with two alignment case studies of large vocabularies in two languages. Firstly, we analyze the vo- cabularies and based on that analysis choose our alignment techniques. Secondly, we test our hypothesis based on earlier work that rst gener-...

Mobile services can provide users with information relevant to their current circumstances. Distant services in turn can acquire local information from people in an area of interest. Socially expressive agent behaviour has been suggested as a way to build reciprocal relationships and to increase user response to such requests. This between-subject,...

In this chapter, we discuss the design of adaptive hierarchical organizations for multi-agent systems (MAS). Hierarchical organizations have a number of advantages such as their ability to handle complex problems and their scalability to large organizations. By introducing adaptivity in the structure of hierarchical MAS organizations, we enable age...

This chapter concerns user responses toward adaptive and autonomous system behavior. The work consists of a review of the relevant literature off-set with the findings from three studies that investigated the way people respond to adaptive and autonomous agents. The systems evaluated in this chapter make decisions on behalf of the user, behave auto...

Exploring the relationship between social presence, conversational expressiveness, and robot acceptance, we set up an experiment with a robot in an eldercare institution, comparing a more and less social condition. Participants showed more expressiveness with a more social agent and a higher score on expressiveness correlated with higher scores on...

Empathy has great potential in human-robot interaction. However, the challenging nature of assessing the user's emotional state points to the importance of also understanding the effects of empathic behaviours incongruent with users' affective experience. A 3×2 between-subject video-based survey experiment (N=133) was conducted with empathic robot...

In this paper we build on our methodology for combining and selecting alignment techniques for vocabularies, with two alignment case studies of large vocabularies in two languages. Firstly, we analyze the vocabularies and based on that analysis choose our alignment techniques. Secondly, we test our hypothesis based on earlier work that first genera...

The human robot interaction community is multidisciplinary by nature and has members from social science to engineering backgrounds. In this paper we aim to provide human robot developers with a straightforward toolkit to evaluate users' acceptance of assistive social robots they are designing or developing for elderly care environments. We will ex...

When using a robot or a screen agent, elderly users might feel more enjoyment if they experience a stronger social presence. In two experiments with a robotic agent and a screen agent (both n = 30) this relationship between these two concepts could be confirmed. In addition, both studies showed that social presence correlates with the Intention to...

Embodied social agents are programmed to display human-like social behaviour to increase intuitiveness of interacting with these agents. It is not yet clear to what extent people respond to agents’ social behaviours. One example is touch. Despite robots’ embodiment and increasing autonomy, the effect of communicative touch has been a mostly overloo...

Even though adaptive (trainable) spam filters are a common example of systems that make (semi-)autonomous decisions on behalf of the user, trust in these filters has b een underexplored. This paper reports a study of usage of spam filters in the daily workplace and user behaviour i n training these filters (N=43). User observation, interview a nd s...

Users who visit a web page for the first time select links on the basis of the link anchors and the descriptions of the links that are provided on the page. If these descriptions give an inaccurate impression of the underlying pages, users make incorrect choices. In this paper we present a novel algorithm to automatically detect links with problema...

Personal robots and screen agents can be equipped with social abilities to facilitate interaction. This paper describes our research on the influence of these abilities on elderly user's acceptance of such a system. Experiments were set up in eldercare institutions where a robotic and screen agent with simulated conversational capabilities were use...

In this paper we present a decision making framework to enable agents to dynamically select a coordination mechanism. To demonstrate our approach we introduce an abstract task environment in which agents have to cooperate to achieve their goals. These agents are capable of using two coordination mechanisms, a centralized and a decentralized mechani...

In-vehicle agents can potentially avert dangerous driving situations by adapting to the driver, context and traffic conditions. However, perceptions of system autonomy, the way agents offer assistance, driving contexts and userspsila personality traits can all affect acceptance and trust. This paper reports on a survey-based experiment (N=100) that...

The increasing availability of (digital) cultural heritage artefacts offers great potential for increased access to art content, but also necessitates tools to help users deal with such abundance of information. User-adaptive art recommender systems aim to present their users with art content tailored to their interests. These systems try to adapt...

In this article we describe a Semantic Web application for semantic annotation and search in large virtual collections of cultural-heritage objects, indexed with multiple vocabularies. During the annotation phase we harvest, enrich and align collection metadata and vocabularies. The semantic-search facilities support keyword-based queries of the gr...

Summary form only given. The possibilities of using robots in eldercare have inspired a growing number of research projects. Not only can robotic technologies be used for rehabilitation, also they could facilitate the work of caregivers and provide social company for elders. In our project we are interested in the acceptance of robotic technology b...

When using a robot or a screen agent, elderly users might feel more enjoyment if they experience a stronger social presence. In two experiments with a robotic agent and a screen agent (both n=30) this relationship between these two concepts could be established. Besides, both studies showed that social presence correlates with the intention to use...

In this paper we describe the development and exploration of the concept of Perceived Adaptiveness, based on observations in previous experiments with a robotic companion in eldercare and on findings in related research. We integrated this concept in our technology acceptance methodology for robotic eldercare companions and found in experiments wit...

In this paper we explore the concept of enjoyment as a possible factor influencing acceptance of robotic technology by elderly people. We describe an experiment with a conversational robot and elderly users (n=30) that incorporates both a test session and a long term user observation. The experiment did confirm the hypothesis that perceived enjoyme...

Perceptions of a system's competence influence acceptance of that system [31]. Ideally, users' perception of competence matches the actual competence of a system. This paper investigates the relation between actual and perceived competence of transparent Semantic Web recommender systems that explain recommendations in terms of shared item concepts....

Based on observations in previous experiments with a robotic companion in eldercare and on findings in related literature, we developed the concept of Perceived Adaptiveness. We integrated this in our technology acceptance methodology for robotic eldercare companions and found in a small experiment that adaptiveness of the system as perceived by el...

If robotic companions are to be used in the near future by aging adults, they have to be accepted by them. In the process of developing a methodology to measure, predict and explain acceptance of robotic companions, we researched the influence of social abilities, social presence and perceived enjoyment. After an experiment (n=30) that included col...

The Semantic Web requires automatic ontology population methods. We developed an approach, that given existing ontologies, extracts instances of ontology relations, a specific subtask of ontology population. We use generic, domain-independent techniques to extract candidate relation instances from the Web and exploit the redundancy of information o...

Analysis of existing methods for automatic optimization of link structures shows that these methods rely heavily on assumptions about the preferences and navigation behavior of users. Authors often do not state these assumptions explicitly and do not evaluate whether the assumptions are consistent with the actual behavior of the users of the site....

This paper reports on a study to explore how semantic relations can be used to expand a query for objects in an image. The study is part of a project with the overall objective to provide semantic annotation and search facilities for a virtual collection of art resources. In this study we used semantic relations from WordNet for 15 image content qu...

User-adaptive information filters can be a tool to achieve timely delivery of the right information to the right person, a feat critical in crisis management. This paper explores interaction issues that need to be taken into account when designing a user-adaptive information filter. Two case studies are used to illustrate which factors affect trust...

While expressiveness in human communication is a natural and widely observed phenomenon, in studies of humans interacting with robots and screen agents it is relatively unexplored. If it occurs however, this could mean that the artificial personality is accepted as a conversation partner by the user. An experiment with a robot and a screen agent in...

Research on organization of Multiagent Systems (M.A.S.) has shown that by adapting its organization, a M.A.S. is better able to operate in dynamic environments. In this paper we describe an experiment with a M.A.S. that consists of agents where the capability to reorganize is integrated in their coordination mechanism. In the RoboCupRescue simulato...

Users of web sites often do not know exactly which information they are looking for nor what the site has to offer. The purpose of their interaction is not only to fulfill but also to articulate their information needs. In these cases users need to pass through a series of pages before they can use the information that will eventually answer their...

Research in the area of Multi-Agent System (MAS) organization has shown that the ability for a MAS to adapt its organizational structure can be beneficial when coping with dynamics and uncertainty in the MASs environment. Different types of reorganization exist, such as changing relations and interaction patterns between agents, changing agent role...

This study examines the influence of perceived social abilities of a robot on user's attitude towards and acceptance of the robot. An interface robot with simulated conversational capabilities was used in a Wizard of Oz experiment with two conditions: a more socially communicative (the robot made use of a larger set of social abilities in interacti...

Goal of this study is to examine the influence of social abilities of a robot on elderly user's attitude towards and acceptance of the robot. Experiments were set up in eldercare institutions where an interface robot with simulated conversational capabilities was used in a Wizard of Oz experiment. The robot was used with two conditions: a more soci...

This study examines the influence of perceived social abilities of a robot on user's attitude towards and acceptance of the robot. An interface robot with simulated conversational capabilities was used in a Wizard of Oz experiment with two conditions: a more socially communicative (the robot made use of a larger set of social abilities in interacti...

The Semantic Web requires automatic ontology population methods. We developed an approach, that given existing ontologies, extracts instances of ontology relations, a specific subtask of ontology population. We use generic, domain independent techniques to extract candidate relation instances from the Web and exploit the redundancy of information o...

In this document we describe our approach to a specific subtask of ontology population, the extraction of instances of relations. We present a generic approach with which we are able to extract information from documents on the Web. The method exploits redundancy of information to compensate for loss of precision caused by the use of domain indepen...

Large amounts of knowledge are available in many knowledge bases for a variety of applications. This knowledge is however usually application specific, and thus not reusable. This paper discusses the problem of making knowledge shareable over applications and reusing it. Three principles are formulated that can form a basis for a methodology for de...

The Semantic Web requires automatic ontology population methods. We developed an approach, that given existing ontologies, extracts instances of ontology relations, a speciflc subtask of ontology population. We use generic, do- main independent techniques to extract candidate relation instances from the Web and exploit the redundancy of infor- mati...

The main objective of the MultimediaN E-Culture project is to demonstrate how novel semantic-web and presentation technologies can be deployed to provide better indexing and search support within large virtual collections of cultural-heritage resources. The architecture is fully based on open web standards, in particular XML, SVG, RDF/OWL and SPARQ...

This paper describes our experiences in collecting user data on human-robot interaction in nursing homes for the elderly. Learnings from two experiments were used to develop guidelines to support human-robot user studies with elderly users, in particular for experiments in an eldercare institution. Our experiences show that this demands a very stri...

A subtask of Ontology Enrichment is the extraction of time periods for temporal concepts. In this paper we describe a method for this period extraction. We show the working of the method in the cul- tural heritage domain, extracting periods for art styles. We also discuss a number of possible ways to transform the uncertain knowledge that this meth...

Triple20 is a ontology manipulation and visualization tool for languages built on top of the Semantic-Web RDF triple model. In this article we explain how a triple-centered design compares to the use of a separate proprietary internal data model. We show how to deal with the problems of such a low-level data model and show that it offers advantages...

The 12th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED-2005) is being held July 18--22, 2005, in Amsterdam, the beautiful Dutch city near the sea. AIED-2005 is the latest in an on-going series of biennial conferences in AIED ...

The goal of one type of recommenders is to mini- mize the number of clicks users need to reach the information they are looking for. Recommenders typically estimate the probability that pages contain the user's target information and provide the user with links to the most promising pages. In this pa- per we show that this greedy strategy can lead...

In this article we address the problem of how agents can handle message-based communication. Our approach is to look at ontology-based communication, in which the meaning and intention of messages is specified in message content ontologies. The idea is that agents can share semantics by committing to shared message content ontologies. We discuss a...

This study focuses on the effect of a task model on learning to solve problems and the use of metacognitive skills. In two conditions, students played KM Quest, a simulation-gaming environment for the domain of Knowledge Man- agement (KM). In one condition, students had the KM model available that pre- scribed how to solve KM problems. The other co...

This paper describes a method for converting existing the- sauri and related resources from their native format to RDF(S) and OWL. The method identifies four steps in the conversion process. In each step, decisions have to be taken with respect to the syntax or se- mantics of the resulting representation. Each step is supported through a number of...

In this work we present a framework for multi-agent system design which is based both on human organizational notions and principles for distributed intelligent systems design. The framework elaborates on the idea that notions from the field of organizational design can be used as the basis for the design of distributed intelligent systems. Concept...

In order to resolve the mismatch between user needs and current image retrieval techniques, we conducted a study to get more information about what users look for in images. First, we developed a framework for the classification of image descriptions by users, based on various classification methods from the literature. The classification framework...

The configuration of Web services is particularly hard given the heterogeneous, unreliable and open nature of the Web. Furthermore, such composite Web services are likely to be complex services, that will require adaptation for each specific use. Current approaches to Web service configuration are often based on pre/post-condition-style reasoning,...

In this paper we discuss a the support of users in adding spatial information semi-automatically to annotations of images. Descriptions of objects depicted in an image are extended with information about the position of those objects. We distinguish two types of spatial concepts: absolute positions of objects (e.g., east, west) and relative spatial...

In order to resolve the mismatch between user needs and current image retrieval techniques, we conducted a study to get more information about what users look for in images. First, we developed a framework for the classification of image descriptions by users, based on various classification methods from the literature. The classification framework...

Ontologies will play a central role in the development of the Semantic Web. It is unrealistic to assume that such ontologies will be developed from scratch. Rather, we assume that existing resources such as thesauri and lexical data bases will be reused in the development of ontologies for the Semantic Web. In this paper we describe a method for co...