Pieter Bonte and Ruben Taelman receive FWO senior postdoctoral fellowships
Not one but two of our post-docs received a FWO senior postdoctoral fellowship: Pieter Bonte and Ruben Taelman.
This 3-year fellowship is intended to support researchers, who have completed their PhD a few years ago,
in developing an independent, international research career.
Pieter and Ruben had to pass through multiple selection rounds
where they had to demonstrate
their competences, and the scientific quality and originality of their envisioned work.
Their applications got reviewed by an expert panel as well as external reviewers.
They deemed both Pieter's and Ruben's applications of a high quality and
expect the corresponding work to result in great contributions to our field.
We are very proud that two of our post-docs get this fellowship.
Congratulations, Pieter and Ruben! 🎉
Below you can find more information about their applications.
"Efficient and scalable cascading reasoning over heterogeneous IoT data streams to enable real-time edge analytics" by Pieter Bonte
We are at a tipping point where more data is being produced by the Internet of Things (IoT) than can be meaningfully processed,
as this requires tackling the sheer Volume, Velocity and Variety of the data simultaneously.
Semantic web reasoning has proven to be ideal for targeting Variety, enabling the integration of data from various sources.
However, reasoning is too computationally expensive, compared to the velocity of the IoT.
Therefore, a paradigm shift is happening from cloud computing towards computing the data as close as possible to its source,
i.e. at the edge.
The objective of this proposal is to enable efficient and scalable real-time processing of IoT data with Cascading Reasoning (CR),
i.e. a layered reasoning approach consisting of various levels of complexity.
CR naturally matches the edge processing paradigm, as the low-complexity processing techniques can be pushed down to the edge,
while complex layers can be processed on intermediate & cloud nodes with more resources.
Due to the size and complexity of the edge environment,
it is extremely hard for users to issue efficient queries across such a CR layered framework.
I will investigate how queries can be optimized and automatically translated to the various levels of
the cascade to enable efficient and real-time edge analytics. As IoT data requires to solve an integration problem,
efficient reasoning techniques will be investigated that can deal with the velocity, volume, and variety of IoT data.
"Adaptive Query Optimization of Link-Traversal within Decentralized Knowledge Graphs on the Web" by Ruben Taelman
Data on the Web is increasingly becoming part of centralized data silos, where personal data is in control of large companies.
Due to recent data abuse scandals, there is an increasing push towards the decentralization of data on the Web into a large number of user-owned data vaults.
While query engines are typically used for interacting with data due to their ability to abstract the complexities behind data access, they are optimized for centralized data storage. To build usable applications over decentralized data, new querying algorithms for massively distributed data are needed.
The recent link traversal query execution paradigm is a promising match, as I have shown that it can effectively discover data over large decentralized environments during query execution. However, it is often too slow due to a lack of query planning algorithms that are compatible with this live data discovery aspect.
Hence, I will introduce new query planning algorithms that can adaptively optimize the query plan upon discovery of structural information and heterogeneous interfaces within decentralized environments. To evaluate these algorithms, I will compare them to existing approaches by simulating realistic decentralized environments.
In general, adaptive query plan optimization upon live discovered sources will be the primary academic breakthrough of this research, which is an open problem in Semantic Web research, and an urgent need by decentralized application developers and organizations.