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Talk on "CULTIVATE: Digital Mapping of Food Sharing Initiatives through LLM-based Automated Web Retrieval and Text Classification" by Prof. Gareth Jones, School of Computing & ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Ireland

We are pleased to inform you about the upcoming seminar by Prof. Gareth Jones, School of Computing & ADAPT Centre, Dublin City University, Ireland titled:"CULTIVATE: Digital Mapping of Food Sharing Initiatives through LLM-based Automated Web Retrieval and Text Classification" Everyone interested is cordially invited to attend!

Title:

CULTIVATE: Digital Mapping of Food Sharing Initiatives through LLM-based Automated Web Retrieval and Text Classification

Abstract:

The CULTIVATE project seeks to advance sustainability and resilience within urban and peri-urban food sharing systems within European cities. CULTIVATE is enabling this by employing digital technologies to foster and promote community-based activities. A key element of this is the creation and sustaining of databases gathering details of Food Sharing Initiatives (FSIs) within each city. This talk will focus on the development and deployment of web retrieval and content classification tools designed to scale and automate the mapping of FSIs within cities to populate these databases. We present our novel automated system tailored for retrieving, identifying and categorizing and real-time monitoring of FSIs in over 200 European cities. The automation of these processes plays a vital role in supporting the goals of the CULTIVATE project, notably in promoting sustainable food practices and resilient local food networks. Our system integrates web search using queries constructed automatically using domain-specific vocabulary resources with large language model (LLM) query writing methods. Experimental results using a collection of data derived from real online FSI content underscore the potential of digital automation to make significant contributions of innovative digital solutions to contemporary sustainability challenges, paving the way for future research and implementation in similar contexts.

Speaker Bio:

Gareth J.F. Jones is a Professor in the School of Computing and a Principal Investigator in the ADAPT Centre at Dublin City University (Ireland). His research focuses on topics in information retrieval and search, including multimedia, multilingual and interactive applications. Professor Jones has published more than 500 research papers, and has received a number of Best Paper Awards. He was General Co-Chair for ACM SIGIR 2013 and CLEF 2017 and of Interspeech 2023, He was co-founder of the MediaEval multimedia evaluation benchmark, and has contributed to the organization of a number of tasks at the NTCIR, CLEF, TREC and TRECVid benchmarks. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge (UK) where he worked on one of the first projects in spoken content retrieval. He held a Toshiba Fellowship at the Toshiba Research and Development Center in Kawasaki (Japan), and was a Lecturer at the University of Exeter (UK). He holds Ph.D. and B.Eng. degrees from the University of Bristol (UK).