A group of semantic technology enthusiasts descended on San Jose for the Semantic Technology Conference last week, and the Powerset division at Bing was there to show off Bing and take part in the semantic technology discussion.
There was a crew of people from team Powerset in attendance: Scott Prevost (general manager), Mark Johnson (senior program manager), Ron Kaplan (chief scientist), Stuart Robinson (research engineer), Savas Parastatidis (Microsoft research) and Katie Conry (product/marketing).
Dr. Ron Kaplan participated in a panel discussion entitled, “Semantic Search Beyond RDF” along with Riza Berkan from Hakia, Christian Hempelmann from RiverGlass, and Wen Ruan from TextWise. According to Ron, though RDF is useful for many tasks, it isn’t sufficient when it come to processing natural language semantics, the kind of technology being developed at Powerset. For example, RDF isn’t able to capture ambiguity, which is one of the critical components of any natural language system. During Ron’s talk, he talked about the limitations of RDF and contrasted it with the technology at Powerset. Check out our podcast below for more information.
Dr. Scott Prevost, general manager of the Powerset division, participated in a keynote panel entitled “Semantic Search Roundtable.” Scott Prevost, Peter Norvig from Google, Tomasz Imielinski from Ask.com, Andrew Tomkins from Yahoo! Search, William Tunstall-Pedoe of True Knowledge, and Riza Berkan, Hakia, all weighed in with their vision of semantic search. Early on in this panel discussion, moderator and Guidewire Group Senior Analyst Carla Thompson remarked, “semantic search is the answer to a question that no one is asking…so why do we need to change search?” Tomasz commented that no one was asking for an iPod before they became popular and semantic search will be the same way - people will want it when they see it. Carla later commented that there have been “three news-making launches in the past month- Wolfram Alpha, Bing and Siri.” This sparked a conversation regarding ‘conversational interfaces.’ Scott Prevost commented that, “If people are given a conversational interface, they won’t use keywords.” Later on Peter Norvig from Google was asked what he thought of Bing and he responded, “I like the idea of innovation in the user interface.” ClickZ, CNET, ZDNet, InternetNews.com, and Examiner.com all published coverage of this panel discussion.
In he exhibition hall the Powerset team demoed Bing, and discussed a wide variety of topics with conference attendees ranging from algorithms, to semantic technology, to the new brand name. Quite a few wanted to hear about Powerset’s integration into Bing. Many people left excited to start Binging.
Tweet from Aaron Gladders regarding Bing @ SemTech
Ron Kaplan had this to say on the conference: “I was very impressed with the momentum of the semantic web community. These things are really coming together, they’re beginning to be applications, beginning to be the datasets that make the applications worthwhile. And my perception is that semantic technology…is now at the take-off point. There was a kind of maturity to the technology and the discussions that I hadn’t seen a year ago or so.”
SemTech 2009 proved to be a great place to make connections with interesting people, and learn about cutting edge new technologies. We look forward to returning next year.
-Katie Conry, Powerset division of Bing Tweet from Marc Hadfield regarding SemTech 2009
SemTech 2009 proved to be a great place to make connections with interesting people, and learn about new technologies.
