Semantic Web Days
2007

Biographies

Keynote: The New Rules of Business: Semantic Web as Disruptive Innovation

Benjamin Grosof

Benjamin Grosof is an assistant professor of Information Technology at MIT, in the Sloan School of Management. He creates and studies information technologies for the new generation web, in which e-services and business communication become more knowledge- and agent-based. He has pioneered semantic technology and standards for rules, their combination with ontologies and the Semantic Web, and their pilot applications in business policies (e.g., security/trust), e-commerce (notably, e-contracts and shopping), information integration (e.g., financial reporting), and e-services engineering (e.g., lifecycle reuse of knowledge). He invented several key rule and ontology techniques that are being widely adopted commercially, including for semantics, interoperability and knowledge integration, conflict resolution and user convenience, and XML syntax. He co-founded the influential RuleML industry standards design effort, and the International Conference on Rules and Rule Markup Languages for the Semantic Web. He was prime architect and project leader for the SweetRules open source platform for semantic rules and ontologies on the web, while principal investigator and rules co-lead in the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) program. The W3C’s Rule Interchange Format standard (in draft) is based largely on his work. He was a lead author of the Semantic Web Services Framework. His current work is exploring further advances in semantic rules techniques, Web 3.0 and social knowledge networking, search, and new applications including in advertising, security and privacy, financial services, and health care. He interacts extensively with industry in areas related to his research and standards activities, including via consulting. Prior to joining MIT Sloan in 2000, he had substantial industry experience, including 12 years at IBM Research where he led work on intelligent agents and rule-based e-commerce, and 2 years at software startups. His background also includes a PhD in Computer Science (specialty Artificial Intelligence) from Stanford University, and a BA in Applied Mathematics (specialty Economics and Management Science) from Harvard University.

Tutorial: Rule Modeling and Rule Interchange

Gerd Wagner

Gerd Wagner is Professor of Internet Technology at the Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus, Germany. His research interests include agent-oriented modeling and agent-based simulation, foundational ontologies, (business) rule technologies and the Semantic Web. He has published a book on "Foundations of Knowledge Systems" with Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1998. He is the leader of a work package on rule modeling and markup in the European research network REWERSE.net. He is also participating in the rule standardization activities of the Object Management Group and the World-Wide Web Committee.

Adrian Giurca

Adrian Giurca received a PhD degree in computer science in 2004 from the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest (Romania). His current research interests are in the area of the Semantic Web, Rule Engineering, and integration between software engineering and knowledge engineering techniques. From 1990 until 2005 he worked as a research assistant, assistant and lecturer at the University of Craiova (Romania), Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science. During this time he was also independent consultant for a number of small-size companies. He taught various lectures including: logic programming, natural language processing, Java programming, UML analysis and design, software engineering. He is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Internet Technology, Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus (Germany).

Presentation: Rule Interchange on the Web

Axel Polleres

Axel Polleres obtained his PhD in Computer Science at the Vienna University of Technology in 2003. He was working at DERI at the Leopold-Franzens Universitaet Innsbruck in the areas of Semantic Web Services, Ontologies, Rules Languages and Logic Programming from 2003 to early 2006. Continuing this research he worked at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, under a "Juan de la Cierva'' research fellowship. Since April 2007 he works as a Postdoctoral researcher for DERI Galway at the National University of Ireland. Axel Polleres published more than 30 articles in journals, books and as refereed Conference and Workshop contributions. Ongoing research projects and working groups he is participating in include WSMO, WSML, and the W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) WG.

Paula-Lavinia Pătrânjan

Paula-Lavinia Pătrânjan holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany (2005). She works as standardization coordinator for the Network of Excellence REWERSE on reasoning on the Web with rules and semantics. She is currently actively involved as a member within the W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group (http: //www.w3.org/2005/rules/), part of W3C’s Semantic Web Activity. Her research interests are in Web and Semantic Web systems with reactive capabilities.

Presentation: Semantic Technology for Business Intelligence

Thierry Declerck

Thierry Declerck joined the DFKI's Language Technology Lab (www.dfki.de/lt) June 1996, where he first worked within the COSMA project (Automated Appointment Scheduling by E-Mail), till March 1997, and then in the PARADIME project (Information Extraction), which ended in March 2000. He then took the responsibility of the SHOW-SOG project, dealing with the topic of language technology based automatic hyperlinking and organisation of knowledge on the web, a project which was achieved at the end of 2001. Thierry Declerck also worked at the Computational Linguistic Department of the University of the Saarland from 2002 till 2004 in order to conduct the IST Esperonto project and the eContent INTERA project. Thierry Declerck was also representing the University of the Saarland in the European IST Network of Excellence SCHEMA and he was teaching on a related topic at ESSLLI 2004 and 2005. He is now senior consultant at DFKI and he is currently leading the DFKI contribution to the European Network of Excellence "K-Space" (Knowledge Space of semantic inference for automatic annotation and retrieval of multimedia content, see http://www.k-space.eu/). He is also in charge of the ACL Natural Language Software Registry hosted at DFKI's LT lab and was involved in the LT-World information platform (http://www.lt-world.org/). Since Mai 2004, he was conducting the DFKI contribution of the eTen WINS project. He is currently coordinating the research activities of the EU Integrated Project MUSING (http://www.musing.eu/), dealing with the Semantic Web for Business Intelligence. Thierry Declerck studied Philosophy at the University of Brussels and Computational Linguistics at the University of Tuebingen.

Presentation: Knowledge based search - towards answering questions

Michael Alvers

Michael Alvers received a degree in Geophysics. Among his activities around that time was a scientific expedition to Andes and North Pole. In 1994 he held a one year research position at Stanford University. 1998 Michael Alvers earned his PhD with a thesis on model optimization. He then spent five years working as Director Product Marketing at DEFINIENS AG. He worked closely together with Gerd Binning (Nobel Laureat, 1986 physics) and designed the Proteomweaver. 2004 he was director business and product development at interactive Systems GmbH, Berlin, Germany. Presently he is founder and managing director of Transinsight GbR, Berlin (founded 2002).

Presentation: Protune: Rule Based Policies on the Semantic Web

Daniel Olmedilla

Daniel Olmedilla is a research scientist at the L3S Research Center and Hannover University. He is the coordinator of the PeerTrust project and participates, among other projects, in the EU Network of Excellence REWERSE. His research interests ranges from Semantic Web and reasoning to trust, security and privacy in distributed environments like the Web, P2P and Grid. He is currently active in the field of (semi-)automatic negotiations on the Web and policy languages. He has co-organized several workshops and tutorials and he has served as reviewer for numerous international conferences and journals.