French Scientist Amedeo Napoli Gave Lectures for HSE-Perm Students
From 29 November to 1 December Amedeo Napoli, head of the Orpailleur research group, Laboratory of Lorraine, gave a number of lectures on description logic for students of “Business-informatics” and “Software engineering” educational programmes.
Amedeo Napoli is a head of the Orpailleur research group, Laboratory of Lorraine on research in informatics and its applications – LORIA (CNRS Inria Université de Lorraine), France. Amedeo is involved in teaching in France and abroad and is also a specialist on automatic knowledge discovery and representation. He is interested in Formal Concept Analysis and extensions such as pattern structures and relational concept analysis, in pattern and rule mining, and in text mining as well.
Description logic is a mathematical base for information processing via ontologies. To understand how it works let us take the phrase “apple juice” as an example. People know full well that it is liquid and potable, but to explain this to a computer, we need ontologies. In these we can describe that apple juice is juice which in its turn is a drink. We can also describe that juice is made from fruit while a drink is liquid and potable. At the same time, in order to reduce the sample size and labour costs of building an onthology, we will not indicate that “apple juice” is potable; the system must have a capability to make this conclusion itself. This conclusion is what we need description logic for.
From 29 November to 1 December Amedeo read a course on ontologies and description logic for students of “Business-informatics” and “Software engineering” educational programmes. The first lecture was introductory. It was dedicated to fundamentals of formal systems and logic, which are necessary for definition of description logic. After that Amedeo moved to description logic which was demonstrated on simple models. In these lectures he showed the students how description logic is connected with ontologies.
Amedeo came to Perm for the first time, but the city made a positive impression to him. However, he liked HSE-Perm students more, because they are “very tactful, polite and, which is more, – interested.”
On 30 November Amedeo Napoli spoke at the seminar of the Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Empirical Research where he told about the work of his research group and showed current research projects and findings. The seminar ended with active discussion of the projects and then an informal talk started about the work with PhD students, publication strategy and the tactics of receiving grants.
During the meeting with Amedeo Napoli I saw how methods of machine learning and data mining can be applied in practice to such fields of science as medicine, chemistry and even text analysis, although it seems that these approaches were developed for completely different purposes.
It was also useful to learn how research activity is organized abroad, what opportunities are open for local and foreign students and how international laboratories all over the world cooperate with each other.
Amedeo is my academic supervisor, so I welcome any opportunity to meet with him. Once you talk to him a little, you become greatly motivated.
He told our employees about publication strategy and cooperation with journals, and he told GAMES research fellows about fund raising. He also recommended us some scientific articles and books.
I am sure that Amedeo’s lectures will be certainly useful for “Business informatics” and “Software engineering” students in their future studies, and for HSE-Perm the visit of such prominent scientist will be an honour. I hope that Amedeo will become a visiting professor at HSE-Perm and will come to read lectures for our students from time to time.
Aleksey V. Buzmakov
Senior Research Fellow
Danil Kusakin
4th year student, Economics educational programme