When: January 23, 2026 at 13:00 (Paris time)
Where: TBD
Abstract. TBD
Biography. Paul Groth is Professor of Algorithmic Data Science at the University of Amsterdam where he leads the Intelligent Data Engineering Lab (INDElab) and is scientific director of the UvA’s Data Science Center. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southampton (2007) and has done research at the University of Southern California, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Elsevier Labs. His research focuses on intelligent systems for dealing with large amounts of diverse contextualized data with a particular focus on web and science applications. This includes research in data provenance, data integration and knowledge sharing.
When: February 20, 2026 at 13:00 (Paris time)
Where: TBD
Abstract. Language Models have brought major breakthroughs in natural language processing. Notwithstanding this success, I will show that certain applications still need symbolic representations. I will then show how different methods (language models and others) can be harnessed to build such symbolic representations in the form of knowledge bases. I will highlight several challenges in this endeavor, from finding good embeddings to improving entity linking and dealing with fallacies and textual entailment. I will also discuss how language models can be evaluated along several dimensions. Finally, I will talk about the knowledge bases themselves, most notably our YAGO project. I will present our work on detecting and alleviating incompleteness in knowledge bases, on querying the data, on using the data for the digital humanities, and on reasoning on beliefs.
Biography. Fabian M. Suchanek is a full professor at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris in France. He obtained his doctorate at the Max-Planck Institute for Computer Science in Germany. In his thesis, Fabian developed the YAGO knowledge base, one of the largest public knowledge bases, which earned him an honorable mention of the SIGMOD thesis prize, as well as, 10 years later, the “Test of Time” of The Web Conference 2018. Fabian was a postdoctoral fellow at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley and at INRIA Saclay. Then he led a research group at the Max-Planck Institute for Computer Science. In 2013, he became an associate professor, and in 2016 a full professor at Télécom Paris, now part of Institut Polytechnique de Paris. With his students, Fabian works on natural language processing, neuro-symbolic reasoning, information extraction, rule mining, and knowledge graph management. He has published over 100 scientific papers, and his work has been cited over 19,000 times.
When: March, 2026 (Paris time)
Where: TBD
Abstract.
Biography.