Basel Shbita, Ph.D.

scientist, engineer, and multidisciplinary artist

Selected Publications

Teaching

• TA (Teaching Assistant) for DSCI 558: Building Knowledge Graphs (Graduate). Fall 2020 @ USC
• TA (Teaching Assistant) for CSCI 563/INF 558: Building Knowledge Graphs (Graduate). Spring 2020 @ USC

News

• 2024/06: Joined IBM Research in Almaden, San Jose as a Research Scientist at the Enterprise Data & Governance for AI Models as part of the watsonx project. I will be working on knowledge graphs and data integration for LLMs in the domain of business transformation.


• 2024/05: Presented & published a paper on Constructing a Knowledge Graph of Historical Mining Data at the 6th International Workshop on Geospatial Linked Data (GeoLD) co-located with the 21st Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC' 2024).


• 2024/05: I successfully defended my PhD dissertation. I'm very grateful for the invaluable support & encouragement of my committee (Prof. Craig A. Knoblock [chair], Prof. Cyrus Shahabi, Prof. John P. Wilson, Prof. Jay Pujara, Prof. Yao-Yi Chiang).


• 2024/04: I will be serving as program committee member (Industry track) in the 23rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC' 24).


• 2024/03: Served as a reviewer (Research track) in the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD' 24).


• 2024/02: Presented & published a paper on Automatically Constructing Geospatial Feature Taxonomies from OpenStreetMap Data at the 18th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC' 24).


• 2023/12: We authored a comprehensive chapter titled GeoAI for the Digitization of Historical Maps in collaboration with UMN's Knowledge Computing Lab. This chapter is featured in the Handbook of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence.


• 2023/11: Our team's work on polygonal feature extraction for raster map understanding was recently published as full paper at the prestigious 31st ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL' 23).


• 2023/08: Served as program committee member (Industry track) and reviewer (Research & In-use tracks) in the 22nd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC' 23).


• 2023/05: My work last summer at IBM Research just got published at the 20th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC' 23) which will be held in Hersonissos, Greece.


• 2023/04: Published journal paper Building Spatio-Temporal Knowledge Graphs from Vectorized Topographic Historical Maps in the Semantic Web journal!


• 2022/11: Served as program committee member (Industry track) in the The 2023 Web Conference (formerly known as International World Wide Web Conference or WWW).


• 2022/09: I was featured on USC Viterbi web article alongside my colleagues at USC ISI talking about my research internship experience at IBM this summer.


• 2022/07: Served as reviewer (Research track) & program committee member (Industry track) in the 21st International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC' 22).


• 2022/05: Joined IBM Research in Almaden, San Jose. I will be working on knowledge graphs and data integration in the domain of business transformation!


• 2022/05: My work last summer at GE Research just got published at the 16th International Symposium on Functional and Logic Programming (FLOPS' 22).


• 2022/04: Received the University Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award at USC's 41st Annual Academic Honors Convocation. This is the first time since 2017 that this university-wide award is given to a student in Viterbi & the first since the start of these awards in 1991 that the award goes to a student in computer science. So grateful!


• 2021/10: Served as reviewer in the 10th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Graphs (IJCKG' 21).


• 2021/09: I got featured (my favorite is @ 17:37) in the behind-the-scenes video of the Amazon Science's Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4.


• 2021/08: The Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4 has concluded. Although our socialbot Viola was not part of the finalists, we have come far as first-timer semi-finalists. Very proud of the team! Check out our system paper.


• 2021/06: We published 2 papers at the 2nd International Workshop on Knowledge Graph Construction at ESWC 2021: A short paper, and a demo paper. The projects were led by 2 excellent groups of CS MSc students at USC that I've had the honor to TA.


• 2021/05: Joined GE Research as a research fellow intern for 12 weeks this summer. I will be working at the Artificial Intelligence Technical Domain on a project at the intersection of Machine Learning, Knowledge Discovery, Semantic Web, and NLP.


• 2021/05: Passed my Ph.D. qualifying exam!


• 2021/01: I was featured on VoyageLA Magazine! I was really honored and excited to share my story.


• 2020/11: Happy to announce that our team from USC will be competing in the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4, a multimillion-dollar university challenge focused on advancing human-computer interaction!


• 2020/06: Presented paper (talk) on Building Linked Spatio-Temporal Data from Vectorized Historical Maps at the 17th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC' 20) which was held online (originally planned in Heraklion, Crete, Greece).


• 2019/09: Presented paper (talk) on Creating a FAIR Data Catalog to Support Scientific Modeling at AKTS 2019. A workshop co-located with the IEEE eScience Conference in San Diego, CA. Our work was referred to as "Science Fiction" by none other than Wikidata's founder; Read about it here!


• 2019/05: Presented paper (talk) and poster on Parsing, Representing and Transforming Units of Measure at MOMACS's 2019 Modeling the World's Systems Conference in Washington, D.C.


• 2018/12: Delivered a talk at Tira Talks 4 (a TEDx event held in my hometown). I talked about the importance of challenges, change, globalization, diversity and AI. I couldn't be more honored to stand in front of almost 500 people and contribute to the place where I grew-up.