Basel Shbita

multidisciplinary artist, scientist, and engineer from SWANA, based in LA

academic handles

art handles

Basel Shbita (باسل شبيطة; באסל שביטה; Басель Шбита) is a scientist, multidisciplinary artist, and engineer. Based in LA, Basel is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California (USC). Basel serves as a research assistant at the Center on Knowledge Graphs at USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) where Prof. Craig Knoblock advises him.

Basel's research focuses on techniques for describing, acquiring, and exploiting data semantics and combining all of these techniques to build knowledge graphs, as a means to solve complex information integration problems. At ISI, Basel is currently partaking in the Linked Maps and Critical-MAAS projects. His past projects include Model Integration (MINT), Table Understanding and the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4. If you're interested to read more about Basel's academic research work, please visit this page.

Basel has a proven 10+ years of experience in software engineering, programming, and debugging in various languages and has assumed several tech lead roles in the past. Before joining USC, Basel worked for Mellanox Technologies (acquired by Nvidia) between 2011-2017 as a Senior Firmware Engineer and Team Leader in the Switch Silicon Core Department; and for Apple in 2018 as an Embedded Software Engineer in the Flash Storage Software Department. Basel received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University in 2015.

Besides his research and academic work, Basel practices plastic and visual arts, his art spans across different mediums, including: hand drawing, painting, and AI-driven artworks. You can find Basel's art projects on this page.

Contact at basel921 at gmail dot com or at shbita at usc dot edu.

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

2024/02: 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!

2023/03: My Ph.D. guidance committee (Prof. Craig A. Knoblock [chair], Prof. Cyrus Shahabi, Prof. John P. Wilson, Prof. Jay Pujara, Prof. Yao-Yi Chiang) has approved my Thesis Proposal. I'm very grateful for the ongoing support & encouragement of my committee members.

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.