Harald Sack is Professor for Information Services Engineering at two of the most renowned research institutions in Europe:FIZ Karlsruhe and AIFB. He is a part of SEMANTiCS‘ research and innovation track program committee as well as of the conference’s permanent advisory board. His publications include more than 130 papers in international journals and conferences and three standard textbooks on networking technologies. Harald is also one of the founders of yovisto GmbH. In this interview he speaks about the limited capabilities of search engines, the necessity of data being open and the coffee culture in Vienna.
You have been working in many research areas such as semantic web technologies, knowledge representations, multimedia analysis & retrieval. Which technology will shape our future the most?
Harald Sack: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”, as physicist Niels Bohr is quoted to have said. One thing for sure will change the world as we know it today, and this is the rise of autonomous systems. I would expect major progress in the synthesis of symbolic logic as for (explicit) knowledge representation in combination with (implicit) deep neural networks. This development will lead to autonomous systems that learn while interacting with their environment, that are able to generalize, to draw deductions, and to adapt to new, previously unknown situations.
What are you currently focusing on in your research work? How does this contribute to the advancement of semantic technologies?
Harald Sack:In particular my research is focused on the application of semantic technologies in combination with machine learning for information extraction, semantic analysis, as well as for semantic and exploratory search in information systems. One of my favourite application areas is exploratory search, i.e. searching where you don’t know exactly where the search process might lead you to. Sometimes you might not be able to explicitly phrase your search intention. Probably because you lack the vocabulary or you might not be an expert in the domain in which you are looking for information. Then, first you have to gather information about your domain before you might be able to perform pinpoint retrieval.
