Friday 29 May 2026 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Seminar Room, Civil Engineering Building, University of Cambridge
About
The DRF Lunchtime Clinic is delighted to welcome Dr Wei Liu, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Western Australia, who will give a talk titled “Knowledge Graphs, Metadata, Ontologies, Mindmaps – Towards Symbiotic RAG.”
About the talk
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) remains the most effective paradigm for incorporating domain-specific knowledge into LLM-driven multi-turn conversations. This talk examines how heterogeneous data sources, structured records in databases alongside unstructured text (potentially image, and video) corpora, can be integrated with curated human knowledge, ranging from formal ontologies to dynamic, on-demand mindmaps, within domain-adapted RAG systems. At the core of this architecture is a query-driven synthetic question-answer generation pipeline, which advances the broader objective of symbiotic intelligence: a collaborative paradigm in which humans and machines co-produce new knowledge. The session will conclude with live demonstrations of two human-in-the-loop web-based RAG systems focusing on document intelligence, DocSpiral and FlexBench, with applications in geological exploration report understanding and user-directed literature synthesis.
About the speaker
Associate Professor Wei Liu received her PhD from the University of Newcastle, Australia, in 2003. A full-time teaching and research academic in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Western Australia (UWA), Wei leads the Centre for Natural and Technical Language Processing, focusing on training machine learning models by fusing multi-modality heterogeneous data and exploring neural-symbolic computation with human-in-the-loop for symbiotic intelligence. Her industry-related research projects encompass knowledge graph refinement for geological survey reports, technical language processing on maintenance work orders, incident/safety log analysis and visualization, short-term traffic prediction, and clinical data integration and analysis in ophthalmology. Wei leads the research theme on Technical Language Processing at the ARC Centre for Transforming Maintenance through Data Science, and the Accelerating Geodata Intelligence for the ARC Centre in Critical Minerals for the Future. In January 2025, Wei was appointed to the inaugural Western Australian Government Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board, which provides expert advice on risk mitigation to support the safe and ethical use of AI in the WA public sector.