Abraham Bernstein is a Full Professor of informatics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His current research focuses on various aspects of the semantic web, knowledge discovery, service discovery/matchmaking, and mobile/pervasive computing. His work is based on both social science (organizational psychology/sociology/economics) and technical (computer science, artificial intelligence) foundations. Mr. Bernstein is a Ph.D. from MIT, where he has played a key role in the development of the Process Handbook (PH), which has been under development at the Center for Coordination Science (CCS). Prior to joining the University of Zurich Mr. Bernstein was on the faculty at New York University. He also worked for Union Bank of Switzerland, first as a research scientist at the corporate research center for information technology (UBILAB) and then as a project manager for IT-projects, where he worked on a variety of research issues such as HCI for complex tasks, document management, workflow management and data warehousing. Mr. Bernstein also holds a Diploma in Computer Science (comparable to a M.S.) from the Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich (ETH). |
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Adrian Paschke is head of the Corporate Semantic Web group (AG-CSW) at the institute of computer science at the Freie Universität Berlin (FUB). He is also director of RuleML Inc., vice director of the Semantics Technologies Institute Berlin (STI Berlin) and leads the Berlin Semantic Web Meetup Group. He received his Ph. D. (Dr. rer. nat.) from the Technical University Munich (TUM, German Elite University) with a thesis on Rule-based IT Service Management and Service Level Agreements. His academic carrier has let him to the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (LMU, German Elite University), the Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen/Nuernberg (FAU), the Technical University Munich (TUM, Germany Elite University), the Technical University Dresden (TUD), and the Freie Universitaet Berlin (FUB, German Elite University). He was also working as a research staff member at the National Research Council (NRC) in Canada, and the Biotec Innovation Centre Dresden in Germany. Adrian was involved in multiple industrial software development und business engineering projects and has led several knowledge and business/service engineering projects. He is project leader of several open-source projects such as RBSLA, Rule Responder, Prova, project leader of national projects such as the BMBF project Corporate Semantic Web, and project leader of international projects such as the Transatlantic BPM Education Network. He is steering-committee chair of the RuleML Web Rule Standardization Initiative, co-chair of the Reaction RuleML technical group, founding member of the Event Processing Technology Society (EPTS) and chair of the EPTS Reference Architecture working group, voting member of OMG, and member of several W3C groups such as the W3C Rule Interchange Format working group, where he is editor of several W3C Semantic Web standards. |
Aidan Hogan is a post-doctoral researcher at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), based in the National University of Ireland, Galway. His area of research is the Semantic Web and Linked Data, with specific interest in developing scalable, distributed and pragmatic techniques for integrating large, heterogeneous, Linked Data crawls. As such, the topic of his PhD was large-scale and robust reasoning and consolidation over such data. He has also worked on techniques for crawling, indexing, searching, querying, ranking, and browsing for large corpora of RDF Web data. He has nearly six years experience on such topics, where is one of the main contributors to the Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE) project, is one of the co-founders of the Pedantic Web group, and has published numerous research works at various international venues. |
Professor Barry O'Sullivan holds the Chair of Constraint Programming in the Department of Computer Science at University College Cork. He is the Director of the Cork Constraint Computation Centre. Professor O'Sullivan has been a Science Foundation Ireland Principal Investigator since 2006. His SFI PI Award from 2006-2010 focused on the use of artificial intelligence techniques to improve the usability of combinatorial optimisation technology. His SFI PI Award from 2011-2015 focuses on optimisation technology for energy management in data centres and information networks of internet scale. He is the current President of the International Association for Constraint Programming; Chair of the Artificial Intelligence Association of Ireland; Coordinator of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) Working Group on Constraints; Council Member, Management Science Society of Ireland; and Irish National Representative COST Action IC0602 (Algorithmic Decision Theory). |
My main research interests are knowledge representation and reasoning. In particular, I enjoy developing and implementing algorithms and optimisations for reasoning in expressive description logics. Most recently, I have implemented a novel kind of blocking technique that significantly reduces the memory requirements for the HermiT reasoner. Apart from developing new algorithms and techniques for reasoning, I am currently working in the Data Access Working Group of the W3C on the SPARQL 1.1 standard. In particular, I am extending SPARQL to work with semantics other than simple entailment, e.g., RDF and RDFS semantics and OWL Direct and RDF-Based Semantics. I am also an editor of the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Conformance specification, which describes the conditions that OWL 2 tools must satisfy in order to be conformant with the language specification. |
Claudio Gutierrez is associated professor at the Computer Science Department, Universidad de Chile. His research experience lies in the intersection of Databases and the Semantic Web, focusing in data models and query languages for RDF layer, particularly RDF and SPARQL. Currently is interested in Open Data, Linked Data and data management at Web scale. He has published extensively in the area, edited three books, and received three best paper awards at Semantic Web Conferences. He is involved in both, Database and SW communities, where has been in PC committees of ICDT, PODS, WWW, ESWC, ISWC, RR, and several workshops; currently is in the editorial board of the JWS. |
Prof. Dr. Denis Trcek is with the Faculty of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Ljubljana, where he heads the Laboratory of e-media. He has been involved in the fields of IT security, privacy and trust for almost twenty years. He has taken part in various EU and national projects in the government, banking and insurance sectors (projects under his supervision totaled to approx. one million EURs). His bibliography includes over one hundred titles, including a monograph published by the renowned publisher Springer. Dr. Trcek has served (or still serves) as a member of various international bodies and boards (MB of the European Network and Information Security Agency, etc.). |
Heiner Stuckenschmidt is Professor for Artificial Intelligence at the university of Mannheim, Germany. He received his PhD from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for a thesis on Ontology-Based information sharing on the semantic web. Since then he has worked on various topics related to the use of knowledge representation and reasoning for the semantic web including distributed and modular representations and inference mechanisms, Ontology Matching and Integration and approximate logical reasoning. More recently he and his group is looking at ways to combine logical and statistical information for Knowledge Extraction and Integration on the web. |
Jeff Z. Pan received his Ph.D from University of Manchester in 2004 and joined the faculty in the Department of Computing Science at University of Aberdeen in 2005. He serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Web Semantics (JoWS), the International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS), and as program chair of RR2007, ESWC2010 Ontology and Reasoning Track, ISWC2010 Doctoral Consortium and ESWC2011 Ph.D. Symposium. He is a key contributor to the W3C OWL2 standard. He leads the work of the TrOWL Tractable OWL2 reasoning infrastructure (http://trowl.eu/). He is widely recognised for his work on scalable and efficient ontology reasoning; he gave/will give tutorials on this topic also in e.g. AAAI2010, ESWC2010, the Reasoning Web Summer School 2010, ESWC2011 and SemTech 2011. |
Katja Hose is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany. She obtained a diploma (M.Sc.) in Computer Science from Ilmenau University of Technology and joined the Databases & Information Systems Group at Ilmenau University of Technology as a research associate. Katja received her doctoral degree in Computer Science in 2009 and joined the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken in the same year. Her current research interests range from query processing in distributed systems to Linked Data processing, information retrieval, and knowledge extraction. |
Martin Theobald is a Senior Researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics. He obtained a doctoral degree in computer science from Saarland University in 2006 and spent two years as a post-doc at Stanford University, where he worked on the Trio probabilistic database system. Martin received an ACM SIGMOD dissertation award honorable mention in 2006 for his work on the TopX search engine for efficient ranked retrieval of semistructured XML data. His current research interests include information extraction, probabilistic databases and uncertain data management, as well as querying and ranking of semistructured data. |
Mathias Niepert is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Mannheim working in the Knowledge Representation and Management Research Group. He received his PhD from Indiana University in 2009 for his thesis investigating logical and algorithmic properties of probabilistic graphical models. Mathias is also co-founder of InPhO (Indiana Philosophy Ontology), a digital humanities project combining statistical text processing, logic programming, and user feedback to build and maintain a computational ontology. His research areas include probabilistic graphical models, statistical relational learning, digital libraries, and, more broadly, the (social) semantic web. Recently, he has been working on developing probabilistic-logical systems for data integration, ontology learning, and activity recognition. |
Pascal Hitzler is assistant professor at the Kno.e.sis Center for Knowledge-enabled Computing, which is an Ohio Center of Excellence at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, U.S.A. From 2004 to 2009, he was Akademischer Rat at the Institute for Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB) at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, and from 2001 to 2004 he was postdoctoral researcher at the Artificial Intelligence institute at TU Dresden in Germany. In 2001 he obtained a PhD in Mathematics from the National University of Ireland, University College Cork, and in 1998 a Diplom (Master equivalent) in Mathematics from the University of Tübingen in Germany. His research record lists over 140 publications in such diverse areas as semantic web, neural-symbolic integration, knowledge representation and reasoning, denotational semantics, and set-theoretic topology. He is Editor-in-chief of the IOS Press journal "Semantic Web - Interoperability, Usability, Applicability" and the IOS Press book series "Studies on the Semantic Web". He is vice-chair of the steering committee of the conference series on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR), and the RR2010 PC co-chair. He is co-chair of the 2010 International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) "Semantic Web In Use" and "Industry" tracks and co-chair of the 2011 Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) "Reasoning" track. He is co-author of the W3C Recommendation "OWL 2 Primer", of the first German introductory textbook to the Semantic Web published by Springer Verlag, and of the book "Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies" by CRC Press, 2009. |
Ralf Schenkel is senior researcher at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik in Saarbrücken, Germany, and leader of the research group on “Efficient Search in Semistructured Data Spaces” at Saarland University. His research interests include efficient and effective search on structured, semistructured, and unstructured data. Of partical interest are social networks and distributed knowledge sources, as well as large-scale, long-term Web archiving. Ralf is deputy spokesperson of the German special interest group on IR and editor-in-chief of the "Datenbank-Spektrum", the German journal on databases and IR. He is co-chair of INEX, the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, and he co-organized the 3rd ESAIR workshop on exploiting semantic annotations for IR at CIKM 2010. He has served on many program committees in DB and IR, including SIGIR 2010-2011, WSDM 2010-2011, ICDE 2012, SIGMOD 2010, and VLDB 2010. |
Dr. Sebastian Rudolph is Senior Lecturer at the Institute AIFB, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). He obtained his PhD in mathematics at the Dresden University of Technology in 2006. His active research interests include logic, knowledge representation and reasoning, algebra, database theory, and computational linguistics. Sebastian coauthored two textbooks on the foundations of the Semantic Web. He is a guest lecturer at Heidelberg University, guest researcher at FZI Karlsruhe, and he was a member of the W3C OWL Working Group. Sebastian has published widely in the area of Description Logics and is Program Chair of DL2011. |
Dr. Sören Auer leads the research group Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) at Universität Leipzig. His research interests include semantic data web technologies, knowledge representation, engineering & management, usability, agile methodologies as well as databases and information systems. He aims to combine strong theoretical results with high-impact practical applications. Sören is author of over 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications resulting in a Hirsch index of 15. Sören is leading the large-scale integrated EU-FP7-ICT research project "LOD2 - Creating Knowledge out of Interlinked Data". Sören is founder (respectively co-founder) of several high-impact research and community projects such as the Wikipedia semantification project DBpedia or the social Semantic Web toolkit OntoWiki. He is co-organiser of several workshops, programme chair of I-Semantics 2008, OKCON 2010, ESWC 2010 and ICWE 2011, area editor of the Semantic Web Journal, serves as an expert for industry, the European Commission, the W3C and is member of the advisory board of the Open Knowledge Foundation. |
