DanQingShanShui (483K)

Yihong Ding
ding (3K) yi (2K) hong (3K)

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I'm currently a Ph.D candidate in Brigham Young University with Prof. David W. Embley in Computer Science Department, Prof. Deryle W. Lonsdale in Linguistic Department, and Prof. Stephen W. Liddle in Marriott School of Management. I am also a remote member of Semantics in Business Information Systems (SEBIS) cluster in DERI Innsbruck, Austria, where I closely work with Dr. Martin Hepp and Dr. Ying Ding.

I received M.S. in Computer Science from BYU, M.E. and B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from University of Science and Technology of China.
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Research
The web is going towards its next generation. As an analogy, the traditional World Wide Web (which nowadays is often addressed as Web 1.0) can be seen as a newborn baby. When a child grows up (web evolution), she becomes more knowledgable on formal intelligence (goal of Semantic Web) and more capable on collaborative, social intelligence (goal of Web 2.0). These two processes progress simultaneously and cooperatively. This is what I believe about the evolution of the web. Eventually, I predict that the web would evolve to become the web of specialists.

Semantic Web contains three sequentially connected research domains: knowledge formalization, knowledge instantiation, and knowledge derivation. Knowledge formalization builds machine-processable knowledge specifications, which currently often means ontologies. But it also includes the creation of other formal knowledge such as rules and trust. Particularly, I am interested in the topics about ontology creation and ontology reuse. Knowledge instantiation expresses formally defined knowledge into its real-world presentations. Typically, semantic authoring studies the ways of producing new web content based on defined knowledge, while semantic annotation studies the ways of matching pre-produced web content to defined knowledge. Knowledge derivation derives implicit conclusions from explicit knowledge formalization and knowledge instantiation presentations. Typically, inference and logic reasoning are standard methodologies applied in the Semantic Web domain.

Web 2.0 is about social activities of human knowledge. Three typical examples of these social activities are: blogging, collaborative tagging, and mashup. Blogging simulates unlimited conversation between any two anonymous people through a massager. Collaborative tagging simulates uncontrolled group discussion for a focus topic among many anonymous people. Mashup simulates human-leading organization to accomplish an organized assignment. The philosophy of Web 2.0 is to simulate human activities on web.

Semantic Desktop studies unique activities about combining human social behaviors with intelligent machine semantics. Hence Semantic Desktop is a typical application scenario of coupling Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web.

More details of my current and previous research work can be found in the research and publication descriptions.

I have also participated in many multidisciplinary academic and industrial activities. I have been PC member and referee for several conferences and Journals. Moreover, I participated in the startup of Ontolligence Inc., a company dedicated to the development of tools, technologies, products and custom solutions for the semantic web.

Mechanical Engineering Experiences

Before transferring to the CS major, I had spent several years on Mechanical Engineering with Prof. Zhenyan Liu (formerly in USTC, currently in Shanghai JiaoTong University). My previous research includes the study of heat and mass transfer mechanism within heat pump and HVAC systems, and the usage of clean and renewable energy resources. One research product, the cooling tube, was granted China patent. I had participated in the project about building a new HVAC system using solar-energy-driven cooling tubes in HuaBei Oil Field Inc. (China), and the research on developing an automobile cooling system using waste-heat-driven cooling tubes. Here (in Chinese) is a list of real-world examples of using cooling tubes.

Academic Activity

Member: ACM, AIS SIGSEMIS

Chair:
        co-PC chair of DiSCo '08 (The first International Workshop on Data Semantics in Social Computing Systems) that is affailiated with OTM 2008.

Program Committee Member:

       Conferences
        Technical track "The Semantic Web and Applications" (SWA) in The 23rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (ACM SAC 2008), Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil, March, 2008.
        The 2007 Information Resources Management Association International Conference (IRMA 2007), Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, May 19-23, 2007.
        The 2006 International Conference on Semantic Web & Web Services (SWWS'06), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, June 26-29, 2006.
        The 2006 Information Resources Management Association International Conference (IRMA 2006), Washington D.C., USA, May 21-24, 2006.

       Workshops
        Workshop on Bridging the Gap between Semantic Web and Web 2.0, in affiliation with Fourth European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC-2007), Innsbruck, Austria, June 6-7, 2007.
        Workshop on Semantics for Web Services (SemWS'06), in affiliation with Fourth European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS'06), Zurich, Switzerland, December 4, 2006.
        Semantic Web Education and Training Workshop (SWET'06), in affiliation with First Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC 2006), Beijing, China, September 4, 2006.
        Semantic Web Applications and Tools Workshop (SWAT'06), in affiliation with First Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC 2006), Beijing, China, September 3, 2006.

Referee and Reviewer:

       Journal
       TKDE (IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering): regular referee 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005.
       JNCA (Journal of Network and Computer Applications): regular referee 2008.

       Conference
       AMCIS (Americas Conference on Information Systems) 2006 track on SIG Semantic Web and Information Systems,
       APWeb (Asia Pacific Web Conference) 2004,
       CAiSE (International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering) 2007,
       DeSeGov (International Workshop on Dependability and Security in e-Government) 2007,
       EKAW (International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management) 2006,
       ER (International Conference on Conceptual Modeling) 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002,
       ICEBE (International Conference on e-Business Engineering) 2006,
       ICWE (International Conference on Web Engineering) 2004,
       ICWS (International Conference on Web Services) 2004,
       ISTA (International Conference on Information Systems Technology and its Applications) 2003,
       ISWC (International Semantic Web Conference) 2003,
       SIGMOD (ACM SIGMOD Conference) 2008,
       WIDM (ACM International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management) 2004,
       WISE (International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering) 2006, 2004, 2002.

Teaching
As an instructor, I have team-taught (with Dr. David Embley) a graduate-level course (CS652) in Spring 2004. I taught this course with the focus on connecting the traditional information extraction and integration research to the emerging semantic web technologies.

As a teaching assistant, I have tutored students in several undergraduate and graduate courses such as data structure, theory of programming languages (twice), principle of database systems, and advanced database topics.

Selected Awards

Contact Information
Last updated: Apr 30th, 2008