Amit Sheth
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Amit Sheth is a
computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...
at University of South Carolina in
Columbia, South Carolina Columbia is the capital of the U.S. state of South Carolina. With a population of 136,632 at the 2020 census, it is the second-largest city in South Carolina. The city serves as the county seat of Richland County, and a portion of the cit ...
. He is the founding Director of the
Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...
Institute, and a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. From 2007 to June 2019, he was the Lexis Nexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, director of the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, and a Professor of Computer Science at
Wright State University Wright State University is a public research university in Fairborn, Ohio. Originally opened in 1964 as a branch campus of Miami University and Ohio State University, it became an independent institution in 1967 and was named in honor of aviation ...
. Sheth's work has been cited by over 48,800 publications. He has an
h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with obvious success indicators such as ...
of 106, which puts him among the top 100 computer scientists with the highest h-index. Prior to founding the Kno.e.sis Center, he served as the director of the Large Scale Distributed
Information Systems An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, store, and distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, information systems are composed by four components: task, people ...
Lab at the
University of Georgia , mottoeng = "To teach, to serve, and to inquire into the nature of things.""To serve" was later added to the motto without changing the seal; the Latin motto directly translates as "To teach and to inquire into the nature of things." , establ ...
in
Athens, Georgia Athens, officially Athens–Clarke County, is a consolidated city-county and college town in the U.S. state of Georgia. Athens lies about northeast of downtown Atlanta, and is a satellite city of the capital. The University of Georgia, the ...
.


Education

Sheth received his bachelor's in engineering from the
Birla Institute of Technology and Science Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani) is a Deemed university in Pilani, Jhunjhunu, India. It focuses primarily on higher education and research in engineering and sciences. After expansion to a campus in Dubai, it has ...
in computer science in 1981. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from
Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best pub ...
in 1983 and 1985, respectively.


Research


Semantic interoperability/integration and semantic web

Sheth has investigated, demonstrated, and advocated for the comprehensive use of
metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
. He explored syntactical, structural, and semantic metadata; recently, he has pioneered ontology-driven approaches to metadata extraction and semantic analytics. He was among the first researchers to utilize description logic-based ontologies for schema and information integration (a decade before W3C adopted a DL-based ontology representation standard), and he was the first to deliver a keynote about Semantic Web applications in search. His work on multi-ontology query processing includes the most cited paper on the topic (over 930 citations). In 1996, he introduced the powerful concept of Metadata Reference Link (MREF) for associating metadata to hypertext that links documents on the Web and described an RDF-based realization in 1998, before RDF was adopted as a W3C recommendation. Part of his recent work has focussed on
information extraction Information extraction (IE) is the task of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured and/or semi-structured machine-readable documents and other electronically represented sources. In most of the cases this activity concer ...
from text to generate semantic metadata in the form of RDF. In his work, semantic metadata extracted from biological text is made up of complex knowledge structures (complex entities and relationships) that reflect complex interactions in biomedical knowledge. Sheth proposed a realization of
Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all warti ...
's MEMEX vision as the Relationship Web, based on the semantic metadata extracted from text. Sheth and his co-inventors were awarded the first known patent for commercial Semantic Web applications in browsing, searching, profiling, personalization, and advertising, which led to his founding of the first Semantic Search company, Taalee. In 1992, he gave an influential keynote titled "So far (schematically) yet so near (semantically)", which attested to the need for domain-specific semantics, the use of ontological representation for richer semantic modeling/knowledge representation, and the use of context when looking for similarity between objects. His work on using ontologies for information processing encompassed the approach for searching for an ontology-automated reasoning for schema integration, semantic search, other applications, and semantic query processing. The latter involved query transformations using different ontologies for user queries and resources and federated queries—a concept with associated measures and techniques for computing information loss when traversing taxonomic relationships.


Workflow management and semantic web services

In the early 1990s, he initiated research in the formal modeling, scheduling, and correctness of workflows. His METEOR project demonstrated the value of research with real-world applications; its tools were used in graduate courses in several countries, and its technology was licensed to create a commercial product and was followed up by METEOR-S. He led the research (later joined by IBM) that resulted in the W3C submission of WSDL-S (Semantic Annotation of WSDL), the basis for SAWSDL, a
W3C recommendation The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working t ...
for adding semantics to WSDL and
XML Schema An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself. These constra ...
. For both SAWSDL and SA-REST, he provided leadership in the community-based process followed by the W3C. He coauthored a 1995 paper in the ''Journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases'', which is one of the most cited papers in the area of workflow management literature, with more than 2,330 citations, as well as the most cited among over 430 papers published in that journal. His key technical areas of contribution in workflow management include adaptive workflow management, exception handling, authorization and access control, security, optimization, and quality of service.


Information integration, database interoperability/integration, and database federations

In the 1980s, large organizations wanted to couple multiple autonomous databases to accomplish certain tasks, but how this could be accomplished from a technical perspective wasn't understood. Starting in 1987, Sheth gave a number of tutorials at ICDE, VLDB, SIGMOD, and other major conferences in the area of distributed (federated) data management and developed scientific foundations and architectural principles to address these issues of database interoperability. He developed a clean reference architecture, covered in his most cited paper on federated databases. It provides an architecture consisting of a range of tightly (i.e., global as a view) to loosely coupled (i.e., local as a view) alternatives for dealing with three dimensions: distribution, heterogeneity, and autonomy. Later, he led the development of a schema integration tool in the USA. Sheth analyzed the limitations resulting from the autonomy of the individual databases and worked towards deep integration by developing specification models for interdatabase dependencies, allowing for a limited degree of coupling to ensure global consistency for critical applications. Together with Dimitrios Georgakopoulos and Marek Rusinkiewicz, he developed the ticketing method for concurrency control of global transactions that need to see and preserve a consistent state across multiple databases. This work, which was recognized with a best paper award at the 1991 International Conference on Data Engineering Conference, was awarded a patent and resulted in progress on multidatabase transactions by other researchers. His work continued in the areas of the integration and interoperability of networked databases in enterprises to Web-based database access. He has also helped to characterize metadata and develop the techniques that extract and use metadata for integrated access to a variety of content, ranging from databases to multimedia/multimodal data.


Richer relationship identification on linked open data

Sheth has been a strong proponent of identifying a richer and broader set of relationships, such as meronomy and
causality Causality (also referred to as causation, or cause and effect) is influence by which one event, process, state, or object (''a'' ''cause'') contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an ''effect'') where the cau ...
, on the Semantic Web. His idea of a "relationship web" is inspired from the vision of memex given by
Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all warti ...
. Since the inception of
linked data In computing, linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data) is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but ...
he emphasized the utilization of schema knowledge and the information present on the Web and in linked data for this purpose. These ideas led to a system called BLOOMS for the identification of schema-level relationships between datasets belonging to linked data. Another related system called PLATO allowed for the identification of partonomical relationship between entities on linked data.


Semantics and knowledge-empowered information extraction/NLP/ML, search, browsing, and analysis

In 1993, he initiated InfoHarness, a system that extracted metadata from diverse content (news, software code, and requirements documents) using a Mozilla browser-based faceted search. This system transitioned into a product by Bellcore in 1995 and was followed by a metadata-based search engine for a personal, electronic program guide and Web-based videos for a cable set-top box. He licensed this technology he developed at the University of Georgia for his company Taalee in the same year that Tim-Berners Lee coined the term Semantic Web. In the first keynote on Semantic Web given anywhere, Sheth presented Taalee's commercial implementation of a semantic search engine, which is covered the patent "System and method for creating a semantic web and its applications in browsing, searching, profiling, personalization and advertising". This 1999–2001 incarnation of semantic search (as described in the patent document) started with extensive tooling to create an ontology/WorldModel (today's knowledge graph) to design a schema and then automatically extract information (through knowledge extraction agents) and incorporate knowledge from multiple high-quality sources to populate the ontology and keep it fresh. This involves machinery for disambiguation to identify what is new and what has changed. Then the data extraction agents which supported diverse content either pulled (crawled) or pushed (e.g., syndicated news in NewsML), called upon a nine-classifier committee (using bayesian, HMM, and knowledge-based classifiers) to determine the domains of the content, identify the relevant subset of the ontology to use, and perform semantic annotation. "Semantic Enhancement Engine: A Modular Document Enhancement Platform for Semantic Applications over Heterogeneous Content" is one of the earliest publications demonstrating the unusual effectiveness of knowledge-based classifiers compared with more traditional ML techniques. The third component of the system utilized ontology and metadata (annotation) to support semantic search, browsing, profiling, personalization, and advertising. This system also supported a dynamically generated "Rich Media Reference" (a.k.a. Google's Infobox) which not only displayed metadata about the searched entity pulled from the ontology and metabase but also provided what was termed "blended semantic browsing and querying". He also led efforts in other forms/modality of data, including social and sensor data. He coined the term "Semantic Sensor Web" and initiated and chaired the W3C effort on Semantic Sensor Networking that resulted in a de facto standard. He introduced the concept of semantic perception to reflect the process of converting massive amounts of IoT data into higher level abstractions to support human cognition and perception in decision making, which involves an IntellegO ontology-enabled abductive and deductive reasoning framework for iterative hypothesis refinement and validation.


Real-time scalable social media analytics

In early 2009 he initiated and framed the issue of social media analysis in a broad set of semantic dimensions he called "Spatio-Temporal-Thematic" (STT). He emphasised the analysis of social data from the perspective of people, content, sentiment analysis and emotions. This idea led to a system called Twitris, which employs dynamically evolving
semantic model A conceptual model is a representation of a system. It consists of concepts used to help people know, understand, or simulate a subject the model represents. In contrast, physical models are physical object such as a toy model that may be assembl ...
s produced by the Semantic Web project Doozer for this purpose. Twitris system can identify people's emotions (such as: joy, sadness, anger, fear, etc.) from their social media posts by applying machine learning techniques with millions of self-labeled emotion tweets.


Entrepreneurship

Sheth founded Infocosm, Inc. in 1997, which licensed and commercialized the METEOR technology from the research he led at the University of Georgia, resulting in distributed workflow management products, WebWork and ORBWork. He founded Taalee, Inc. in 1999 based on licensing VideoAnywhere technology based on the research he led at the University of Georgia. The first product from Taalee was a semantic search engine. Taalee became Voquette after merger in 2002, and then Semagix in 2004. In 2016, Cognovi Labs was founded based on the Twirtis technology resulting from the research he led at the Kno.e.sis Center of the Wright State University. He also served as its chief innovator and serves on the board. The technology was successfully used to predict Brexit and the US 2016 presidential election.


Awards

* Selected 2020 ACM Fellow “For contributions to data semantics and knowledge-enhanced computing. * IEEE TCSVC Research Innovation Award, “in “recognition of his pioneering and enduring research, applications and adoption of distributed workflow processes and semantics in services computing,” 2020. *Distinguished Alumni Award for Academic Excellence, College of Engineering, Ohio State University, 2019. * Elected
AAAS Fellow Fellowship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (FAAAS) is an honor accorded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to distinguished persons who are members of the Association. Fellows are elected ...
(Class of 2018) for his pioneering and enduring contributions on information integration, distributed workflow, and semantics and knowledge-based big data analytics. * Elected AAAI Fellow (Class of 2018) for significant and enduring contribution to semantics and knowledge-based techniques to transform diverse data into insights and actions. * 2017 Ohio Faculty Council Technology Commercialization Award (runner-up) * Elected
IEEE Fellow As of 2019, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has 5,082 members designated Fellow, each of whom is associated with one of the 41 societies under the IEEE. The Fellow grade of membership is the highest level of membershi ...
(Class of 2006) for contributions to information integration and
workflow management A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence of ...
. * Received the
Trustees Trustee (or the holding of a trusteeship) is a legal term which, in its broadest sense, is a synonym for anyone in a position of trust and so can refer to any individual who holds property, authority, or a position of trust or responsibility to t ...
Award for Faculty Excellence, the highest award given by
Wright State University Wright State University is a public research university in Fairborn, Ohio. Originally opened in 1964 as a branch campus of Miami University and Ohio State University, it became an independent institution in 1967 and was named in honor of aviation ...
. * IBM Faculty Award 2004.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sheth, Amit Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Indian computer scientists Indian emigrants to the United States Ohio State University College of Engineering alumni Wright State University faculty American Jains Fellow Members of the IEEE American academics of Indian descent Semantic Web people Indian American