Bridging Academia and Industry in Knowledge Graphs

François Scharffe and Thomas Deely The Knowledge Graph Conference is one of the premier events in the semantic technology space. François Scharffe and Thomas Deeley started the conference to bridge the gap between academic researchers and industry practitioners. The community they have built around the conference and the conference programming - a mix of workshops, classes, presentations, and demos - reflect this purpose. They also intend to democratize knowledge graph use, and toward that end are participating in a number of efforts to develop education programs - both professional certifications and academic curricula. We talked about: the origins of the Knowledge Graph Conference, and its balanced inclusion of both academic and industry entities how generative AI is propelling interest in knowledge graphs their mission to broaden awareness of knowledge graph technology and practice the importance of education and the need for a practical approach the origins of the Open Knowledge Network, part of the National Science Foundation's Proto-Open Knowledge Network program, and KGC's role in it their ambition to build an educational institute around KG technology how to help enterprise executives understand the benefits of knowledge graphs how modeling an enterprise's knowledge and capturing it in a knowledge graph can help organizations address complex challenges the advantages of knowledge graphs over LLMs and GenAI, which have yet to prove their reliability how LLMs can assist in the construction and use of knowledge graphs how study of the human brain illustrates how GenAI and KGs can work together the community that has arisen around the Knowledge Graph Conference François' bio François Scharffe is a hands-on technology executive with a track record of improving decision making in complex data environments. His career as a technical leader and entrepreneur has led him to perform engineering, product management and leadership roles in various organizations. François has also worked as a lecturer and researcher, most recently at Columbia University (New York) and at the University of Montpellier (France). François is the founder and chief executive of The Data Chefs, a data management consulting firm, and the founder of the Knowledge Graph Conference, the leading event on knowledge-centric AI technologies. Thomas' bio Thomas Deely is co-founder of The Knowledge Graph Conference and Community, a global community bridging research and industry on Knowledge Graphs, AI, and related technologies. Thomas is also the Customer Community Manager at Box, the leading cloud content management platform. Thomas started his career as an engineer at JPMorgan in London, before joining Goldman Sachs where he advanced to become a senior engineer in the NY office. Thomas launched an Applied Analytics program and executive education initiatives at Columbia University, before venturing into the customer experience, product, and community domain at companies such as Unqork, where he launched the Community, and Stack Overflow, where he helped grow and develop the StackOverflow for Teams product and business, as part of the customer success team, before joining Box. Thomas has an electronic engineering undergraduate degree from University College, Dublin, and a Masters in Science in Technology Management from Columbia University, and lives in NY where he is married with two children. Connect with François and Thomas online François at LinkedIn Thomas at LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/gjtoPXY3Ka8 Podcast intro transcript This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 1. I'm really happy to launch this new podcast with a conversation with François Scharffe and Thomas Deeley, the founders of The Knowledge Graph Conference. Their annual gathering in New York City attracts knowledge graph practitioners, researchers, and vendors from around the world for a full week of workshops, presentations, and tech demos. To further advance their democratization of knowledge graphs, they're also launching new educational offerings. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number one of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show François Scharffe and Thomas Deely. They are co-founders of The Knowledge Graph Conference. François is an independent consultant and an entrepreneur. He's also got an academic position he's on leave from right now. Thomas manages... A community manager for Box, a content sharing cloud application. So welcome, folks. Larry: François, do you want to tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days? François: Sure. Hey, Larry. Thank you for the invitation. Very glad to be here. Such an honor. First episode of what will be another eight years long-running podcast hopefully. So very cool. Thanks. François: Yeah, I'm up to a number of projects. I'm kind of emerging off parenting season with two small kids. And I'm looking at different opportunities always around AI and knowledge engineering, neuro-symbolic AI. And in that context, I'm looking at different topics and domains. François: I won't go into the details into the projects, but I look at things like agriculture, climate. I look at education very strongly, and I think we are going to talk about this more today. And I also look at personal knowledge graphs. We published a book last year on that topic, and I think that's an interesting space there. There's a lot that we could do with that. Larry: Cool. Thanks. And Thomas, what are you up to these days? Thomas: Yeah. So also thanks Larry for hosting us for your first in this series. I expect it'll be the first of many. So my day job, I work at Box, where I'm community manager. Box is a SaaS application which makes it easy for people to securely share content internally and externally. And it's interesting times right now with AI, generative AI, and Box has some interesting propositions in that space. Thomas: And then my passion project is obviously KGC. And this year we were excited to get some NSF funding to build the community around knowledge graphs around education and community. So that's also something that I'm really excited about. Yeah. Larry: Well, let's talk, there's a nice bundle of stuff to talk about there. I want to talk first about the founding of KGC because that's kind of where all this fun stuff starts. But very quickly, after this comes the Open Knowledge Network and the educational stuff. I want to talk about that whole bundle of activities. Larry: So how did you... First of all, if I recall correctly, KGC came up when you were both at Columbia. Is that how it happened... Or tell me the start. Thomas: Yeah. So we were both working at Columbia University. And I was building out an executive education program and looking for faculty to come up with ideas. And I connected with François and he had the idea of taking, he felt there had been a lot of academic conferences on this domain, and doing something very industry focused. Thomas: So that was the genesis. We got some budget from Columbia to get it off the ground. And the first conference, May 2019, went really well, and that was really the genesis of KGC. Larry: Cool. And François, can you tell me more about that connection. Because this is something that's always struck me about the conference, is the connection between the academy and industry. Were you the mastermind behind that part of it? François: Well, so mastermind is a big term. But basically for me, it was building my ideal conference, the one I missed and I would love to attend. I had worked for half of my career in academia, and there were many events in the space on that topic in academia. But after that, I devoted to mostly industry. And there were no events that were about this topic and relevant. François: And so being at Columbia University in New York, having tons of contacts in the field, it sounded like, well, maybe we should just start it, start that event. And then naturally, evolve from the contacts. Having contacts both in industry and in academia, we could reach and invite speakers, and there's that flare. So over time, we've evolved it more towards the industry side. But indeed, we have a lot of... Our community also has a lot of academics in it. François: I think bridging the gap is very important. There are a bunch of things that are important and that were the goals, like the original goals. One is really... Originally the real one was say, "Hey, knowledge graphs are not an academic topic." There's tons of people using it for solving real problems in the industry, knowledge graphs in production. Let's give them a voice. Let's hear them. Let's have a forum where we can share our experience, our issues. François: But also let's bring academia to tell us about state of the art, but also to hear about what the problems actually working with this technology in the real life, what their problem are. So that can influence researchers to say, "Maybe we should give priorities to this problem in our research because they're more important than others," to give you an example of the kind of interactions that is making possible. Yeah. I'll stop there. Larry: Thomas, did you have anything to add to that? Because I know you're.. I perceived of you as more the business... I mean, you're both academics, of course, but... Thomas: Yeah. I think this is a fascinating space. It's arguably one of the most interesting spaces in technology. And particularly generative AI is propelling this field forward. And I think the goal was to bring an industry lens to a really interesting space, democratize it, raise awareness. Thomas: So our mission, we had a tagline at the conference this year is,