by: Jaap van den Herik, Director of SKBS

The Foundation for Knowledge Based Systems (SKBS) continued their policy of awarding the SKBS prize to the best demonstration of the Demo-session of the BNAIC 2012. Since the active BNVKI member Bas Obladen (who was a regular visitor of the BNAICs since the mid 1990s) has retired from the Strukton company their partnership in the SKBS-Strukton prize has come to an end. We are grateful for their very generous gestures over the years and wish the company prosperous times.

The 2012 referee committee consisted of Jaap van den Herik (chair), Linda van de Gaag (Utrecht University), Peter Bosman (CWI), Hans van Mingroot (IBM-België), and Georgios Yannakakis (University of Malta). The referee committee had to consider the following five submissions which were eligible for the SKBS prize, listedin the order of their publication in the Conference Program BNAIC 2012.

  1. Kamala in the Cloud: Bottom-Up Knowledge Modeling Using the Topic Maps Data Model : Fiemke Griffioen, Gabriel Hopmans, Peter-Paul Kruijsen, and Quintin Siebers
  2. User-Computer Persuasion Dialogue for Grounded Semantics : Martin Caminada and Mikołaj Podlaszewski
  3. Demonstration of eMate – Stimulating Behavior Change via Mobile Phone: Michel Klein, Nataliya Mogles, and Arlette van Wissen
  4. Scheduling with Precedence Constraint Posting: Michel Wilson, Cees Witteveen, and Bob Huisman
  5. COCALU: Convex Outline Collision Avoidance under Localization Uncertainty: Daniel Claes, Daniel Hennes, and Karl Tuyls

All in all, the referee committee had a difficult task. All five demonstrations were interesting, but different demonstrations. It was really a pleasure to walk along the different demos and to discuss them with the stand holders. The quality and maturity of presentation, particularly the quality of ideas, ranged from brilliant ideas worth to be elaborated upon to full pledged applications that had found their place in practice. Adding one original idea to such an application would make it an immediate contender for the first place. The members of the referee committee were invited to score on (a) the originality of the submission, (b) the AI content, (c) the actual applicability in society, (d) the applicability (scalability), (e) the applicability (generalisability) to other domains.

There was a balanced discussion with well chozen arguments which finally led to the following winners:

Michel Klein, Nataliya Mogles, and Arlette van Wissen: Demonstration of eMate – Stimulating behavior Change via Mobile Phone

The winning demo, The eMate system, proposes an intelligent system that aims to support patients with Diabetes Mellitus type II, hearth diseases or HIV in adhering to their therapy. the therapy consists of lifestyle advice and/or precise instructions for medication intake. The demonstration consists of a time-lapse walkthrough of the interaction of a patient with the system, illustrated by a visualization of the reasoning process that takes place within the system.

Congratulations to the Maastricht team for the organization of the 24th BNAIC and to the eMate team for winning the 2012 SKBS prize.