Inaugural Lecture: Paul Groth

The Work of Data

Where should I go on my next holiday? How should the government change the tax code? These two questions might seem far apart, but in today’s society, answers to these questions are  fundamentally informed by data. The travel site you go to looks at data about your past vacations and those of millions of others to build machine learning models to give you a recommendation for your ideal holiday. Statistics about income inequality and business sales provide the fodder for policy arguments.

No matter where you look, data lies behind the surface. In the Netherlands alone there are over 290,000 data professionals and the estimated value of data to the country’s economy is €26.5 billion. This will only increase as artificial intelligence applications based on massive datasets proliferate.

Given the central role of data, the social and technical systems used to create it are often overlooked. In his inaugural lecture, Paul Groth, professor of Algorithmic Data Science at the University of Amsterdam, will discuss his research to not only make it easier to construct data but also to make the entire data supply chain more transparent. He will also reflect on the significant technical and societal challenges in making the work of data efficient, effective, accessible and fair.

Paul Groth’s inaugural lecture will be preceded by The Work Behind Data Seminar.

This lecture will be in English.

About the Speaker

Paul Groth is Professor of Algorithmic Data Science at the University of Amsterdam where he leads the Intelligent Data Engineering Lab (INDElab). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southampton (2007) and has done research at the University of Southern California, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Elsevier Labs.

His research focuses on intelligent systems for dealing with large amounts of diverse contextualized knowledge with a particular focus on web and science applications. This includes research in data provenance, data integration and knowledge sharing.

Details

Date: 10th October 2019
Time: 16:00
Location: Auditorium – Old Lutherian Church, Singel 441, 1012XM, Amsterdam