The project supports graduate student participation in the Sixth International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR 2012) Conference and the Reasoning Web Summer School to be held in Vienna, Austria during September 10-12, 2012 and September 3-8, 2012 respectively, in Vienna, Austria. Specifically, the project provides funds to defray the cost of travel for students enrolled in doctoral programs at US institutions who might not otherwise be able to attend the conference or the summer school because of financial reasons. The recipients of student travel fellowships will attend and the Reasoning Web Summer School designed to introduce graduate students to current research topics and recent advances in web reasoning followed by the RR 2012 conference which includes a scientific program of talks and a doctoral consortium that provides a venue for the students to have one-on-one discussions and receive mentoring from some of the leading researchers in semantic web and semantic technologies. The project offers natural integration of research and education and contributes to the training of a new generation of researchers in semantic technologies, an area of growing importance and impact in not only Computer Science but also many application domains that rely on advances in knowledge representation and reasoning on the web e.g., information retrieval, e-science, e-commerce, e-government, e-health, among others. Additional information about the RR 2012 conference and the Reasoning Web Summer School can be found at: www.rr-conference.org/RR2012/.
The 6th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, RR2012, took place in Vienna, Austria at the Vienna University of Technology from September 10-12, 2012. Conference attendance increased by approx. 15% compared to 2011. The conference continues to develop into a major event for the community. The event also continues to attract satellite events, like the Datalog2.0 workshop in 2012. The quality of submitted papers is high, while the conference maintains a competetive acceptance rate. Several specific activities were targeted at attending PhD students. These included a mentoring lunch where small groups of students shared a lunch table with a senior researcher, a poster session, and the doctoral consortium. As a result of this project, 9 US students received grants of $1,500 each to participate in the conference. The students participated full-time in the conference, and most of these students were also involved in some of the activities specifically provided for them. Three of them were first authors of conference papers. For the mentoring lunch we were able to attract high-profile researchers as mentors. Each of them shared a lunch table with 4-5 students. The researchers were in charge of initiating and driving a discussion on both general and specific topics concerning research, career, and Web Reasoning as a discipline. The student poster presentation session,was very well attended and lively, with extended discussions between participating students and senior researchers, which included the lecturers of the Reasoning Web summer school. Poster presentations were accompanied by a written research summary distributed at the conference and preceded by a spotlight presentations session where poster presenters gave 5-minute teaser talks as advertisement for their posters. The doctoral consortium received a total of 10 submissions, of which 5 were accepted into the Springer LNCS conference proceedings. Web Reasoning, as a research area which is a central component of Semantic Web, and thus at the intersectionof World Wide Web, Big Data, and Knowledge Representation research, is a strategically important area for meeting the growing demands of the information age on data and information management. It is therefore necessary that corresponding educational paths be developed in order to train Web Reasoning experts. This project contributed to this endeavor by enhancing the educational experience of selected PhD students by enabling them to interact with leading reasearchers in the area.
