Participants of ai4industry won the All the Agents (ATAC) challenge

Mahda Noura, Valentin Siegert and Martin Gaedke submitted an agent architecture to a Semantic Web challenge, based on what they learnt during ai4industry 2021. The purpose of this challenge, the All the Agents (ATAC) challenge was to evaluate the state-of-the-art of agent technologies for the Semantic Web. Their paper, “WAT: Autonomous Hypermedia-driven Web Agents for Web of Things Devices“, was reviewed by a jury of five senior scholars on their use of Semantic Web technologies, as well as on the ability of agents to react dynamically to changes and to interact with each other.

Out of six submissions, the jury considered WAT the most advanced submission. WAT uses the JaCaMo multi-agent oriented programming paradigm to integrate Linked-Data-Fu, for crawling RDF statements about the physical world, and the W3C Thing Description standard, to communicate with cyber-physical systems that can act on the physical world.

Congratulations to them!

The proceedings of the ATAC challenge, with all six submissions, have just been published on CEUR-WS.org.

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ai4industry2021 is over. How did it go?

The 2021 edition of the summer school is over. All presentations slides prepared by our keynote speakers and lecturers can be downloaded from the program. Videos will be published soon. Code for the hackathon, along with exercises is hosted on Gitlab.

We’ve had 62 participants from 7 countries. Most of the participants attended online. Many online participants appreciated the possibility of joining remotely. We hope to increase on-site participation next year, though; thanks to our sponsors (DFH-UFA and the German-French Academy for the Industry of the Future), we could fund the stay of the majority of participants.

cyberspace: 36, Saint-Étienne: 14, Waischenfeld: 8, St. Gallen: 4.
Distribution of summer school participants over the different locations

16 participants filled out our feedback questionnaire. Keynotes were particularly well received. Participants had more prior knowledge on Knowledge Graphs than on the Web of Things and Multi-Agent Systems, but the Knowledge Graphs lecture was highly appreciated.

We’ve got several suggestions for next year. Keynotes will be given after the lectures so that attendees have sufficient background on advanced keynote topics. In addition, because of the significant leap forward between the Knowledge Graphs lecture and the Multi-Agent Systems lecture, we will switch the two and introduce agent programming first, so that participants access the hackathon’s knowledge graph using an agent programming environment.

To finish, the summer school met expectations for 87% of the respondents and 80% would recommend it.

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Registration is now open!

Registration for the ai4industry summer school is now open: https://ai4industry2021.sciencesconf.org/registration.

Online participation is free. Participation on site is also possible, including accommodation and lunch (registration fee: 150€).

The platform will remain open until Monday, July 12th, noon (12pm CEST).

Some more information:

  • Connection details for online participation will be sent a few days before the event.
  • The location in Saint-Étienne is Espace Fauriel. Accommodation will be at a nearby student dorm. It’s all easily accessible by public transport.
  • The location in Waischenfeld is Fraunhofer Forschungscampus. The campus includes a restaurant and bedrooms. Waischenfeld being a rather small town, a bus will be organized to travel from Nuremberg to Waischenfeld (more info to come after registration).
  • The location in St. Gallen is the university campus. There’s currently no external participant in St. Gallen but if needs be, hotel rooms can be booked.

More information needed? Use contact-ai4industry@listes.emse.fr.

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The ai4industry2021 program is ready!

We have just completed the program of the 2021 edition of ai4industry. We are extremely happy to have four keynote speakers this year:

  • Dominique Guinard, who helped settle the Web of Things as a research field as he worked at ETH Zürich (Switzerland). He then co-founded EVRYTHNG, a company providing one of the leading professional Cloud platforms for the Internet of Things.
  • Armin Haller, who is an associate professor at the Australian National University. He chaired the working group that standardized the Semantic Sensor Network ontology, a major semantic model for exposing sensor and actuator data on the Web.
  • Birgit Vogel-Heuser, who is professor at TU Munich (Germany). She is member of the advisory board of VDI/VDE, the German association of engineers, and chair of the association’s working group on agent-based systems. She has also contributed to IEEE publications on industrial agents.
  • Sonja Zillner, who works for Siemens AG (Germany) on the topic of trustworthy AI in the industry. Through the Big Data Value Association, she is also coordinating advisory work on AI on behalf of the European Commission.

We will also have three instructors:

  • Victor Charpenay is associate professor at Mines Saint-Étienne (France). He has been contributing to the standardization of the Web of Things Thing Description model, to expose heterogeneous devices on the Web.
  • Tobias Käfer is substitute professor at KIT, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technologies (Germany). He is currently leading the European COST action on Distributed Knowledge Graphs.
  • Jomi Fred Hübner is professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil). He is the main developer of Jason, a widely used language and interpreter for Agent-Oriented Programming. Jomi Fred Hübner is also one of the promoters of Multi-Agent-Oriented Programming and the JaCaMo platform, integrating Jason with other frameworks for developing all aspects of multi-agent systems in a unified manner.

You can find the full program here: https://ai4industry2021.sciencesconf.org/program.

How to apply

It’s not too late to apply! We’ve extended the deadline by one week to give everyone enough time to look at the program.

Submit a résumé and a cover letter using the form at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ai4industry2021. Please submit them in a single file. We will limit the number of participants on site to 40 people. Online participation is however unlimited, as long as candidates meet the criteria above.

Registration fees are 150€ including meals, coffee breaks, lunches and accommodation, for those participating on site. Thanks to our sponsorships, some fees may be waived. If you need a fee waiver, please send us a motivation letter, and we will consider your request in the limit of our budget.

you can find the original call for participation here: https://ai4industry2021.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/1.

Dates

  • Opening of application for participation: 06 April 2021
  • Notification of acceptance: within 2 weeks
  • End of application: 06 June 2021 13 June 2021
  • Deadline for registration: 20 June 2021 27 June 2021
  • Summer school: 26-30 July 2021
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Call for participation to the 2021 Summer School on AI Technologies for Trust, Interoperability and Autonomy in Industry 4.0

We invite PhD students and other researchers from academia or industry to apply to the second summer school on AI Technologies for Trust, Interoperability and Autonomy in Industry 4.0 (short ai4industry), in a collaboration between French, German and Swiss institutions. The dates for the 2021 edition of ai4industry are July 26th-30th, 2021.

The ai4industry summer school targets concrete industry use cases: half of the summer school is dedicated to practical work (through a hackathon) while the other half is meant to introduce the theoretical foundations underlying the hackathon’s framework.

Statement related to Covid-19. The dates of the summer school are July 26th to 30th, at a time travel restrictions related to Covid-19 may not be completely lifted. The summer school will therefore be organized in a distributed fashion: participants may join one of the three physical host locations in St-Étienne (France), Waischenfeld (Germany) and St-Gallen (Switzerland), while a shared virtual location will be made available to everyone. All (physical and virtual) locations will be connected via a video stream. This innovative organization scheme ensures all participants have the chance to experience the summer school in the best possible condition for them. In addition, the practical exercises and hackathon programmed during the summer school will take advantage of this distributed organization by accessing industrial assets running at the three host locations. Students will thus participate in the deployment of a truly decentralized network of connected Industry 4.0 systems.

Topics

The summer school will address various aspects of AI in Industry 4.0 (or Industry of the future) with a particular focus on:

  • the Web of Things
  • Knowledge Graphs
  • Multi-Agent Systems
  • Responsible AI

Each of these topics will be covered in lectures and the hackathon. Several pieces of software have been integrated for the purpose of the hackathon, providing tools and implementations of theoretical principles in these four domains.

Expected candidates and benefits

We welcome applications from PhD students and early stage researchers that have already some knowledge in at least one of the topics above, but want to broaden their perspective and have a chance to apply their skills on concrete problems. We also welcome researchers who want to get in touch with a new research community and industry partners who want to get updated on recent advances in AI. The benefit for the participants is that they can:

  • learn or improve knowledge in several areas of Artificial Intelligence
  • get in touch with high profile researchers and professors
  • build a network with other talented young researchers
  • hack together plausible solutions to stimulating concrete industrial problems
  • have the opportunity to further develop your approach in collaboration with industry partners

How to apply

To apply, submit a résumé and a cover letter using the form at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ai4industry2021. Please submit them in a single file. We will limit the number of participants on site to 40 people. Online participation is however unlimited, as long as candidates meet the criteria above.

Registration fees are 150€ including meals, coffee breaks, lunches and accommodation, for those participating on site. Thanks to our sponsorships, some fees may be waived. If you need a fee waiver, please send us a motivation letter, and we will consider your request in the limit of our budget.

Dates

  • Opening of application for participation: 06 April 2021
  • Notification of acceptance: within 2 weeks
  • End of application: 06 June 2021 13 June 2021
  • Deadline for registration: 20 June 2021 27 June 2021
  • Summer school: 26-30 July 2021

Contact and organising institutions

Main contact: contact-ai4industry@listes.emse.fr 

Organising institutions:

  • Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany)
  • Mines Saint-Étienne (France)
  • Technische Universität München (Germany)
  • Universität St. Gallen (Switzerland)
  • Université Jean Monnet Saint-Étienne (France)
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We are launching ai4industry2021

The organizing committee of the ai4industry summer school has come back together to prepare the 2021 edition!

We are excited to welcome Universität St-Gallen (Chair for Interactions- and Communications-based Systems) and TU Munich (Institute of Automation and Information Systems), alongside Mines St-Étienne, Université Jean Monnet and FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg as organizers.

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