Event: Colocated at Solid Symposium 2025
Date: 24 April 2025, 10:00 – 13:00
Venue: Leiden University, Faculty of Science, Gorlaeus Building, Einsteinweg 55, 2333 CC Leiden, Netherlands (Room HUY 2.26)
The ESPRESSO team invites everyone, from seasoned Information Retrieval (IR) practitioners to interested parties from closely or distantly related disciplines, to join our workshop at SoSy 2025.
This is an opportunity for practitioners from across the globe to meet face-to-face and learn how each other’s work is contributing to the challenges that matter in our communities.
Increasingly, the international community of Solid practitioners is looking at how we can query pods, and how we can query and search pods while taking into account Solid’s varying and dynamic access permissions. We expect that our workshop will be of particular interest to the wider Solid community, as well as to the wider IR community, including those working with more traditional centralized architectures.
This will be a hands-on session: if you have a project ready to demonstrate, demo it; if you have code you’re still working on, talk us through it; if you have a high-level design, walk us through it. Tell us about the people your project is helping, has helped, or will help; and how.
Schedule
(subject to change)
10:00 – 10:15: Introduction and Welcome from the ESPRESSO Team
Dr Helen Oliver (organizer): Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Knowledge Lab, Birkbeck, University of London (contact)
Helen Oliver is an interdisciplinary computer scientist who researches the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. She has been researching web decentralization for a dozen years now, starting in Cambridge with the Hub-of-All-Things project, moving through participatory design fiction for wearables, and now focusing on privacy-preserving IR for the ESPRESSO project.
Dr Mohammad Bahrani (organizer): Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Web and Internet Science Group, University of Southampton (contact)
Dr Mohamed Ragab: Lecturer (Assistant Professor), Birmingham City University
10:15 – 10:45: Keynote Speakers
10:15 – 10:25: Prof Jon Crowcroft (online), Marconi Professor of Communications Systems, University of Cambridge
Jon Crowcroft has been the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge since October 2001, and before that was at UCL from 1981. He has worked on the Internet, and would like to keep it that way.
10:25 – 10:35: Mr Terry Lee (online), Technical Support Engineer, Dataswyft
Terry is a software engineer with Dataswyft. When he is not working on the Dataswyft Wallet, he dwells deep into data architecture for various use cases of the Wallet. He also enjoys looking at legal and economical aspects of data. He lacks sleep and loves medical dramas.
10:35 – 10:45: Q&A
10:45 – 11:00: ESPRESSO’s Greatest Hits
11:00 – 12:10: Invited Talks and Q&A
Dr Esther De Loof, Business Developer & Operations Director SolidLab; IDLab, imec research group at Ghent University
Esther is the operation director of SolidLab, a cutting-edge center of expertise on bringing personal and smart data spaces alive across all levels of interoperability: legal, organizational, semantic, and technical. Together with the Flemish Data Utility Company, we foster the adoption of semantic standards for data sharing in impactful real-live use cases in Flanders, Europe and across the globe.
Dr Beatriz Estevez, Postdoctoral Researcher in the KNoWS group at Ghent University – imec
Mr Jackson Morgan (online), CEO, SetMeld
Dr Ruben Taelman, Postdoctoral Researcher in Decentralized Web Querying, IDLab, Ghent University
Ruben Taelman is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University with a focus on investigating decentralized Web querying. His goal is to bring query execution over the Web closer to the end-user, so that people become more empowered in how they can find and use data.
Client-Driven Query Execution Across Solid Pods
Mr Jesse Wright, Doctoral Student, EWADA Project, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
Dr Rui Zhao, Postdoctoral Researcher, EWADA Project, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
Rui Zhao is a postdoc at EWADA (Ethical Web and Data Architectures in the Age of AI) in the Human-Centred Computing group at the Department of Computer Science at Oxford. Find out more at https://me.ryey.icu.
(Not necessarily in that order)
12:00 – 12:10: Q&A
12:10 – 12:55: Breakout Sessions
12:10 – 12:40: subgroup discussions
12:40 – 12:55: whole group discussion