Biography
Prof. Dr. Sören Auer
Director TIB, Head of research group Data Science and Digital Libraries
Following stations at the universities of Dresden, Ekaterinburg, Leipzig, Pennsylvania, Bonn and the Fraunhofer Society, Prof. Auer was appointed Professor of Data Science and Digital Libraries at Leibniz Universität Hannover and Director of the TIB in 2017. Prof. Auer has made important contributions to semantic technologies, knowledge engineering and information systems. He is the author (resp. co-author) of over 200 peer-reviewed scientific publications. He has received several awards, including an ERC Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council, a SWSA ten-year award, the ESWC 7-year Best Paper Award, and the OpenCourseware Innovation Award. He has led several large collaborative research projects, such as the EU H2020 flagship project BigDataEurope. He is co-founder of high potential research and community projects such as the Wikipedia semantification project DBpedia, the Open Research Knowledge Graph ORKG.org and the innovative technology start-up eccenca.com. Prof. Auer was founding director of the Big Data Value Association, led the semantic data representation in the Industrial/International Data Space, is an expert for industry, European Commission, W3C, the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
Towards Neuro-Symbolic AI with Knowledge Graphs and Generative AI
Abstract
In this talk, we delve into the cutting-edge realm of Neuro-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence (AI), focusing on the synergistic integration of Knowledge Graphs and Generative AI such as Large Language Models. Neuro-Symbolic AI represents a transformative approach that combines the robust, interpretable reasoning capabilities of symbolic AI with the adaptive, data-driven strengths of neural networks. The talk will illuminate how this fusion offers a promising pathway towards more intelligent, explainable, and reliable AI systems. As a showcase of our approach towards neuro-symbolic AI we will demonstrate Corporate Memory, an enterprise ready Knowledge Graph and Neuro-Symbolic AI platform used by major Enterprises as well as the Open Research Knowledge Graph. The ORKG is representing research contributions in a structured and semantic way as a knowledge graph. The advantage is that information represented in a knowledge graph is readable by machines and humans. For creating the knowledge graph representation, we rely on a mixture of manual (crowd/expert sourcing) and (semi-)automated techniques leveraging Large Language Models. Only with such a combination of human and machine intelligence, we can achieve the required quality of the representation to allow for novel exploration and assistance services for enterprises and researchers. As a result, a scholarly knowledge graph such as the ORKG can be used to give a condensed overview on the state-of-the-art addressing a particular research quest, for example as a tabular comparison of contributions according to various characteristics of the approaches.