This paper discusses the different roles that explicit knowledge, in particular ontologies, can play in Explainable AI and in the development of human-centric explainable systems and intelligible explanations. We consider three main perspectives in which ontologies can contribute significantly, namely reference modelling, common-sense reasoning, and knowledge refinement and complexity management. We overview some of the existing approaches in the literature, and we position them according to these three proposed perspectives. The paper concludes by discussing what challenges still need to be addressed to enable ontology-based approaches to explanation and to evaluate their human-understandability and effectiveness.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive instruction abilities across various open-ended tasks. However, previous methods primarily focus on enhancing multi-modal capabilities. In this work, we introduce a versatile multi-modal large language model, mPLUG-Owl2, which effectively leverages modality collaboration to improve performance in both text and multi-modal tasks. mPLUG-Owl2 utilizes a modularized network design, with the language decoder acting as a universal interface for managing different modalities. Specifically, mPLUG-Owl2 incorporates shared functional modules to facilitate modality collaboration and introduces a modality-adaptive module that preserves modality-specific features. Extensive experiments reveal that mPLUG-Owl2 is capable of generalizing both text tasks and multi-modal tasks and achieving state-of-the-art performances with a single generic model. Notably, mPLUG-Owl2 is the first MLLM model that demonstrates the modality collaboration phenomenon in both pure-text and multi-modal scenarios, setting a pioneering path in the development of future multi-modal foundation models.

Modern agriculture faces grand challenges to meet increased demands for food, fuel, feed, and fiber with population growth under the constraints of climate change and dwindling natural resources. Data innovation is urgently required to secure and improve the productivity, sustainability, and resilience of our agroecosystems. As various sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) instrumentation become more available, affordable, reliable, and stable, it has become possible to conduct data collection, integration, and analysis at multiple temporal and spatial scales, in real-time, and with high resolutions. At the same time, the sheer amount of data poses a great challenge to data storage and analysis, and the \textit{de facto} data management and analysis practices adopted by scientists have become increasingly inefficient. Additionally, the data generated from different disciplines, such as genomics, phenomics, environment, agronomy, and socioeconomic, can be highly heterogeneous. That is, datasets across disciplines often do not share the same ontology, modality, or format. All of the above make it necessary to design a new data management infrastructure that implements the principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). In this paper, we propose Agriculture Data Management and Analytics (ADMA), which satisfies the FAIR principles. Our new data management infrastructure is intelligent by supporting semantic data management across disciplines, interactive by providing various data management/analysis portals such as web GUI, command line, and API, scalable by utilizing the power of high-performance computing (HPC), extensible by allowing users to load their own data analysis tools, trackable by keeping track of different operations on each file, and open by using a rich set of mature open source technologies.

The semantic description of music metadata is a key requirement for the creation of music datasets that can be aligned, integrated, and accessed for information retrieval and knowledge discovery. It is nonetheless an open challenge due to the complexity of musical concepts arising from different genres, styles, and periods -- standing to benefit from a lingua franca to accommodate various stakeholders (musicologists, librarians, data engineers, etc.). To initiate this transition, we introduce the Music Meta ontology, a rich and flexible semantic model to describe music metadata related to artists, compositions, performances, recordings, and links. We follow eXtreme Design methodologies and best practices for data engineering, to reflect the perspectives and the requirements of various stakeholders into the design of the model, while leveraging ontology design patterns and accounting for provenance at different levels (claims, links). After presenting the main features of Music Meta, we provide a first evaluation of the model, alignments to other schema (Music Ontology, DOREMUS, Wikidata), and support for data transformation.

Ontology (and more generally: Knowledge Graph) Matching is a challenging task where information in natural language is one of the most important signals to process. With the rise of Large Language Models, it is possible to incorporate this knowledge in a better way into the matching pipeline. A number of decisions still need to be taken, e.g., how to generate a prompt that is useful to the model, how information in the KG can be formulated in prompts, which Large Language Model to choose, how to provide existing correspondences to the model, how to generate candidates, etc. In this paper, we present a prototype that explores these questions by applying zero-shot and few-shot prompting with multiple open Large Language Models to different tasks of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI). We show that with only a handful of examples and a well-designed prompt, it is possible to achieve results that are en par with supervised matching systems which use a much larger portion of the ground truth.

Technical advances in collaborative robots (cobots) are making them increasingly attractive to companies. However, many human operators are not trained to program complex machines. Instead, humans are used to communicating with each other on a task-based level rather than through specific instructions, as is common with machines. The gap between low-level instruction-based and high-level task-based communication leads to low values for usability scores of teach pendant programming. As a solution, we propose a task-based interaction concept that allows human operators to delegate a complex task to a machine without programming by specifying a task via triplets. The concept is based on task decomposition and a reasoning system using a cognitive architecture. The approach is evaluated in an industrial use case where mineral cast basins have to be sanded by a cobot in a crafts enterprise.

The monograph discusses certain aspects of modern real-world problems facing humanity, which are much more challenging than scientific ones. Modern science is unable to solve them in a fundamental way. Vernadsky's noosphere thesis, in fact, appeals to the scientific worldview that needs to be built in a way that overcomes the interdisciplinary barriers and increases the effectiveness of interdisciplinary interaction and modern science overall. We are talking about the general transdisciplinary knowledge. In world practice, there is still no systematic methodology and a specific form of generally accepted valid scientific theory that would provide transdisciplinary knowledge. Non-linear interdisciplinary interaction is the standard of evolution of modern science. At the same time, a new transdisciplinary theory (domain of scientific research) is being de facto created and the process is repeated many times: from an individual or group of disciplines, through interdisciplinary interaction, in a direction that brings us closer to creating a holistic general scientific worldview.

In this paper, we focus on three sparse matrix operations that are relevant for machine learning applications, namely, the sparse-dense matrix multiplication (SPMM), the sampled dense-dense matrix multiplication (SDDMM), and the composition of the SDDMM with SPMM, also termed as FusedMM. We develop optimized implementations for SPMM, SDDMM, and FusedMM operations utilizing Intel oneAPI's Explicit SIMD (ESIMD) SYCL extension API. In contrast to CUDA or SYCL, the ESIMD API enables the writing of explicitly vectorized kernel code. Sparse matrix algorithms implemented with the ESIMD API achieved performance close to the peak of the targeted Intel Data Center GPU. We compare our performance results to Intel's oneMKL library on Intel GPUs and to a recent CUDA implementation for the sparse matrix operations on NVIDIA's V100 GPU and demonstrate that our implementations for sparse matrix operations outperform either.

For these types of mathematical research data, the Mathematical Research Data Initiative has developed, merged and implemented ontologies and knowledge graphs. This contributes to making mathematical research data FAIR by introducing semantic technology and documenting the mathematical foundations accordingly. Using the concrete example of microfracture analysis of porous media, it is shown how the knowledge of the underlying mathematical model and the corresponding numerical algorithms for its solution can be represented by the ontologies.

In this paper, we introduce Linked Papers With Code (LPWC), an RDF knowledge graph that provides comprehensive, current information about almost 400,000 machine learning publications. This includes the tasks addressed, the datasets utilized, the methods implemented, and the evaluations conducted, along with their results. Compared to its non-RDF-based counterpart Papers With Code, LPWC not only translates the latest advancements in machine learning into RDF format, but also enables novel ways for scientific impact quantification and scholarly key content recommendation. LPWC is openly accessible at https://linkedpaperswithcode.com and is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0. As a knowledge graph in the Linked Open Data cloud, we offer LPWC in multiple formats, from RDF dump files to a SPARQL endpoint for direct web queries, as well as a data source with resolvable URIs and links to the data sources SemOpenAlex, Wikidata, and DBLP. Additionally, we supply knowledge graph embeddings, enabling LPWC to be readily applied in machine learning applications.