Franz’s VP of Corporate Development, Sheng-Chuan Wu to be Keynote Speaker at Knowledge Technology Week 2012

OAKLAND, Calif. — August 13, 2012 – Franz Inc.’s Vice President of Corporate Development, Sheng-Chuan Wu will be discussing graph database technologies and practical use cases during the Keynote, and an additional presentation at the September Artificial Intelligence Special Sessions on Semantic Technology Applications in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. The Artificial Intelligence Special Sessions (AISS 2012) is organized by MIMOS BERHAD and co-located with other events during the Knowledge Technology Week 2012 (KTW2012).

Keynote Presentation: Mitigating Agriculture and Biodiversity conflicts with Semantic Technology – September 4th.

Habitat loss due to deforestation is one of the primary causes of reduced biodiversity on planet Earth. With an exploding global population the pressure on increasing agriculture farm lands and food supplies will be immense over the coming decades. According to a study by Frost and Sullivan, yield improvement should account for 2/3 of future agriculture growth for sustainable agriculture. As crop yield improves, there may be reduced pressure to clear forest land for food production thus mitigating the loss of biodiversity. Helping “individual” farmers increase crop yield and reduce fertilizer waste have been the main objectives of Precision Agriculture, by utilizing the latest knowledge in crop, pesticide, fertilizer and up-to-date weather information. Precision Agriculture is particularly relevant in Asia, since most farms are small family plots in difficult terrains, where the latest agricultural knowledge may not be readily accessible. In other words, success in Precision Agriculture will help conserve Biodiversity. And, Semantic Technology makes implementing Precision Agriculture and Biodiversity Conservation practical.

In this talk, Dr. Wu will explain why Semantic Technology is the key enabler. He will also share his experience working on such projects in Asia.

Life Science data is typically stored in disconnected databases with different taxonomy and data schema, making it difficult to characterize and reference them. This lack of data uniformity severely affects drug discovery, system biology, and personalized medicine, all of which rely heavily on integrating and interpreting data sets produced by different experimental methods at different levels of granularity. Furthermore, life-science researchers need to constantly reference extant biological knowledge accumulated at many institutions to draw critical insight into the target biological processes.Semantic Technology – The Only Sensible Knowledge Integration Tool for Life Science Research – September 4th.

In this talk, Dr. Wu will explain how Semantic Technology provides the critical interoperability for the data and harmonization of knowledge to enable researchers to convert “reference” knowledge into “executable” knowledge, greatly strengthening life-science Translational Research. That’s why many research institutes (such as NCBI, NCI, etc.) under NIH in the US have encoded their data with semantic technology. Dr. Wu will also demonstrate how easily semantic technology combines 11 public datasets to enable integrated search and query. He will also show how easy it is to use a semantic technology based tool to identify bio-markers for hepatotoxicants, and to discover and qualify the relationships among chemical compounds (e.g., drugs), genes and diseases.

About Dr. Wu

Dr. Sheng-Chuan Wu received a Ph.D. degree in Structural Mechanics and Computer Graphics from Cornell University. He is currently the Vice President of Corporate Development at Franz Inc., a leading technology and tool provider for AI and Semantic Web, located in Silicon Valley. He has managed and consulted on many Semantic Technology projects in the US, China, Korea, India and Malaysia, and has routinely lectured on AI, CAD software development and Semantic Technology at conferences and workshops. Previously, Dr. Wu was the Vice President of Marketing and Customer Support at ATP, an integrated CAD/CAM/CAE software company in the US.

About Franz Inc.

Franz’s semantic technology solutions help bring Web 3.0 ideas to reality. The company is the leading supplier of commercial, persistent and scalable Graph Database products. AllegroGraph is a high-performance database capable of storing and querying billions of RDF statements. The product provides solutions for customers to combine unstructured and structured data using W3C standard RDF for creating new Web 3.0 applications as well as identifying new opportunities for Business Intelligence in the Enterprise.  AllegroGraph’s Activity Recognition package provides a powerful means to aggregate and analyze data about individual and organizational behaviors, preferences, relationships, plus spatial and temporal linkages between individuals and groups. Franz customers include Fortune 500 companies in the government, life sciences and telecommunications industries. For more information, visit franz.com.

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