Dr HARITH ALANI

Knowledge Media institute
The Open University
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA
United Kingdom


Office (direct): +44(0)1908 659399
h alani at open ac uk
Biography
Dr Harith Alani is a senior lecturer at the Knowledge Media institute, The Open University, where he is heading a group specialising in Social Semantics and Web Science. Previously to joining KMi, Dr Alani was a senior research fellow at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton. Dr Alani has published more than 80 articles in various top class journals and conferences, and has been involved as a principle investigator in several European and national research projects. Dr Alani is a frequent member of organisational committees of leading conferences. He was a chair for the Semantic Data track at Hypertext 2012, Semantic Web In-Use track at ISWC 2011, and the Sensor Web track for ESWC 2011. He will be programme co-chair of ISWC 2013 and WebSci 2013. Dr Alani's research interests include social semantics, web science, social computing, social media analysis, ontology searching and ranking, offline-online social network tracking and analysis, and eGovernment2.0.

Projects
WeGov (2010-2012) EU project WeGov will develop a toolset so full advantage can be taken of well-established social networking sites when engaging citizens in two-way dialogs as part of governance and policy-making processes.

ROBUST (2010-2013) The objective of ROBUST is to analyze, manage and care for online communities, in order to support their well being, to measure their created values and to exploit the knowledge and information contained within. This requires the development of metrics, models and algorithms in several fields.

Past Projects
TAGora (2006-2009) This EU funded project helps to define Semiotic Dynamics, a new field that studies how semiotic relations can originate, spread and evolve over time in populations. It investigates web-scale collaborative tagging behaviour to further our understanding of the dynamics of information in online communities.

OntoMediate (2006-2009) Aims to explore the extent to which collaborative environments can be used to support the identification of mappings between ontologies.

AKTivePSI: working with the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) to demonstrate how such information can be semantically described and organised to increase integration and reuse.

ArtEquAKT: The Artequakt project implemented a system that searched the Web and extracted knowledge about artists using ontology guidance, automatically producing tailored biographies of artists.

BioOntoSearch: A three month project funded by the Leverhulme Trust to investigate searching and ranking of biomedical ontologies at the Stanford Medical Institute

AKT AKTThe aim of AKT is to develop and extend a range of technologies to provide integrated methods and services for capturing, modeling, publishing, reusing and managing knowledge.

Publications

All my publications are available here in ePrints.


Invited Talks

 "Monitoring and Analysis of Online Communities" at the Web Science Doctoral Summer School , DERI, NUIG, Galway, Ireland, July 2011. (slides) (video)

"Live Social Semantics" at 8th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web (SSSW 2011), Cercedilla, Spain, July 2011. (slides)

"I know what you did last conference: Tracking and analysis of social networks " at Social Data on the Web (SDoW), at 9th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Shanghai, China, November 2010. (slides)

"Interlinking Semantics, the Social Web, and the Real-world" at Workshop on Adaptation, Personalization and REcommendation in the Social-semantic Web (APRESW), at the Extended Semantic Web conference (ESWC), Crete, Greece, June 2010. (slides)

Conference Organisation

Program Committees

  • International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-Cap), Banff, Canada, June, 2013
  • Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), in Montpellier, France, 2013
  • IEEE International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2012
  • ACM Conference on Web Science (WebSci), Evanston, IL, USA, 2012
  • The International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), Lyon, France, 2012
  • The 18th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW), Galway, Ireland 2012
  • Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), in Heraklion, Crete, 2012
  • International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), Istanbul, Turkey, 2012
  • The 23rd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (Hypertext, Social Media track), Milwaukee, WI. USA, 2012
  • Linked Data on the Web (LDOW), at World Wide Web Conference, Lyon, France, 2012
  • The 11th International Conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE), Rome, Italy, 2012

  • International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 2011
  • Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), in Heraklion, Crete, 2011
  • The 6th International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-Cap), in Banff, Alberta, Canada, 2011
  • The 10th International Conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE), Crete, 2011
  • The 22nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Hypertext), Eindhoven, 2011
  • Linked Data on the Web (LDOW), at World Wide Web Conference, Hyderabad, India, 2011