Invited Speakers & Tutors

Mathieu d’Aquin

Mathieu d’Aquin is a Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute of the The Open University. He obtained is PhD in 2005 from the University of Nancy, France, where he worked on concrete applications of semantic technologies in the medical domain. He is now leading research around concrete solutions for the realization of applications producing and consuming linked data, as well as on more fundamental aspects of the Semantic Web (ontology modularization, evolution and matching, Semantic Web reasoning and analysis). He was a key member of the EU NeOn, and is currently involved in the SmartProducts project applying linked data and Semantic Web technologies in scenarios involving consumer appliances. He was also director of the LUCERO project responsible for setting up the Open University’s Linked Data platform – http://data.open.ac.uk. Mathieu d’Aquin was Vice-Chair for the 2010 conference on Web Intelligence, Chair of the Ontology Track at the Extended Semantic Web Conference 2011, Vice-director of the International Summer School on Ontological Reasoning and the Semantic Web in 2009 and 2011, and senior programme committee member for the International Semantic Web Conference in 2011. Mathieu d’Aquin was recognised in 2011 as one of the 10 most promising young researchers in artificial intelligence, through the “AI 10 to watch” award from the prestigious magazine IEEE Intelligent Systems, and has won numerous other awards especially related to innovative applications of semantic technologies.

Sean Bechhofer

Sean Bechhofer is a Lecturer in the Information Management Group within the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. His interests fall under the broad umbrella of developing middleware and infrastructure to support applications, in particular through the use of semantic technologies. Since joining the School as a researcher in the early 90’s, he has worked on a number of key national and international projects developing and using semantic web technologies including
GALEN, TAMBIS, WonderWeb, OntoWeb, KnowledgeWeb, OntoGrid, HELIO, NeISS, Wf4Ever and myExperiment.

He was responsible for the development of OilEd, one of the first editors for Semantic Web Ontology Languages to make use of a DL reasoner to support classification, and was the principle architect behind initial development of the OWL API, a Java API for creation and manipulation of OWL ontologies, now used in a number of tools and applications including Protege 4 and the NeOn Toolkit. Sean has published over one hundred articles in journals, conferences and workshops, served on numerous program committees, was Research Area Manager for the final two years of the KnowledgeWeb network, and in 2008 was Programme Co-Chair for the 5th European Semantic Web Conference in Tenerife. He has also been a tutor at SSSW since 2005 and has presented other tutorials at a number of conferences and workshops including the World Wide Web Conference, the International Semantic Web Conference, Global Grid Forum and Semantic Technologies.

Sean is an active participant in W3C’s Semantic Web Activity. He was a participant in the WebOnt Working Group, contributing towards the publication of the original OWL Web Ontology Language Specification, in particular providing implementation experience. He also participated in the Semantic Web Deployment Group, acting as an editor for the SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference published in August 2009.

Fabio Ciravegna

Fabio Ciravegna is Director of Research and Innovation in the Digital World at The University of Sheffield. He is also professor of Language and Knowledge Technologies at the Department of Computer Science of the same university where he leads the Organisations, Information and Knowledge Group. His interests are at the intersection between the Semantic Web, Information Extraction and (large scale) Knowledge Management. He is principal investigator in 3 European projects on Semantic Technologies and two industrial projects funded by Rolls-Royce plc. In the past he was the director of the EU Integrated project X-Media on Large Scale Knowledge Management across Media and of the EU project Dot.Kom on Designing Information Extraction for Knowledge Management.
Finally he is director of k-now.co.uk, a university spin out company providing semantic systems and solutions for knowledge management.
Fabio holds a PhD from the University of East Anglia and a Doctorship from the University of Torino, Italy.

Oscar Corcho

Oscar Corcho, PhD, is an Associate Professor at Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). He belongs to the Ontology Engineering Group at UPM.
Previously, he worked as a Marie Curie research fellow at the University of Manchester, and was a research manager at iSOCO. He holds a degree in Computer Science, an MSc in Software Engineering and a PhD in Computational Science and Artificial Intelligence from UPM. He was awarded the Third National Award by the Spanish Ministry of Education in 2001.
His research activities are focused on Semantic e-Science, Semantic Web and Ontological Engineering. In these areas, he has participated in a number of EU projects (SemsorGrid4Env, ADMIRE, OntoGrid, Esperonto, Knowledge Web and OntoWeb), and Spanish R&D projects (CENITS mIO! and Buscamedia), and has also participated in privately-funded projects like ICPS (International Classification of Patient Safety), funded by the World Health Organisation, and HALO, funded by Vulcan Inc.
He has published two books, “Ontological Engineering” and “A layered declarative approach to ontology translation with knowledge preservation”, and more than 50 papers in journals, conferences and workshops. He usually participates in the organisation or in the programme committees of relevant international conferences and workshops.

Jérôme Euzenat

Jérôme Euzenat is senior research scientist at INRIA (Montbonnot, France). He has set up and leads the INRIA Exmo team dedicated to “Computer-mediated communication of structured knowledge” which is also part of the Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble (Grenoble computer science lab). Dr Euzenat has contributed to reasoning maintenance systems, object-based knowledge representation, symbolic temporal granularity, collaborative knowledge base construction, multimedia document adaptation and semantic web technologies. His all time interests are tied to the relationships holding between various representations of the same situation. Hence, his interest in connecting heterogeneous ontologies. His work on ontology matching has been recently published as an eponymous book written in collaboration with Pavel Shvaiko.

Aldo Gangemi

Aldo Gangemi is senior research scientist at the Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technology of the Italian National Research Council, where he coordinates the Semantic Technology Lab.

His research topics include ontology design, semantic social networks, hybridation of NLP and lexical resources, and semantic interoperability for organizational data, with more than 130 international publications.

He has worked in the ontology-related projects Galen, WonderWeb, OntoWeb,
Metokis, IKF. He has been responsible for CNR in the EU IP NeOn (FP6), the Leonardo project BONy, the NSF project DynCoopNet, the CNR internal projects Semantic Scouting and Semantic Technologies, and contributes the EU IP IKS (FP7).
Aldo has contributed to several W3C working groups, and he is member of the advisory boards of EU agencies SEMIC and ECDC. He’s member of the scientific committe of the Semantic Web Journal and the Journal of Applied Ontology.

Asun Gomez-Perez

Prof. Dr. Asunción Gómez-Pérez is Full Professor at the Univ. Politécnica de Madrid. She is the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Department (2008) and Director or the OEG at UPM (1995).
She has a B.A. in Computer Science (1990), M.S.C. on Knowledge Engineering (1991), Ph.D. in Computer Sciences (1993) and MS.C. on Business Administration (1994). She was visiting (1994-1995) the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. She also was the Executive Director (1995-1998) of the Artificial Intelligent Laboratory at the School.
Her main research areas are: Ontological Engineering, Semantic Web and Knowledge Management. She led at UPM the following EU projects: Ontoweb, Esperonto, Knowledge Web, NeOn, SEEMP, OntoGrid, ADMIRE, DynaLearn, SemSorGrid4Env, SEALS and MONNET. She coordinated OntoGrid and now she is coordinating SemSorGrid4Env and SEALS. She is also leading at UPM projects funded by Spanish agencies. The most relevants are: España Vitual, WEBn+1, GeoBuddies and the Spanish network on Semantic Web.
She has published more than 150 papers and she is author of one book on Ontological Engineering and co-author of a book on Knowledge Engineering. She has been co-director of the summer school on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web since 2003 up to now. She was program chair of ASWC’09, ESWC’05 and EKAW’02 and co-organiser of many workshops on ontologies. She reviews papers in many conferences and journals.

Manfred Hauswirth

Manfred Hauswirth is Vice-Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Galway, Ireland and professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). He holds an M.S. (1994) and a Ph.D. (1999) in computer science from the Technical University of Vienna. From January 2002 to September 2006 he was a senior researcher at the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Prior to his work at EPFL he was an assistant professor at the Distributed Systems Group at the TU Vienna. His research interests are on linked data streams, semantic sensor networks, sensor networks middleware, large-scale semantics-enabled distributed information systems and applications, peer-to-peer systems, Internet of things, self-organization and self-management, service-oriented architectures and distributed systems security. He has published over 120 papers in these domains, he has co-authored a book on distributed software architectures and several book chapters on P2P data management and semantics. He has served in over 180 program committees of international scientific conferences and was program co-chair of the Seventh IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (IEEE P2P) in 2007, general chair of the Fifth European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) in 2008, program co-chair of the 12th International Conference on Web Information System Engineering (WISE) in 2011, and program co-chair of the 10th International Conference on Ontologies, DataBases, and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE) in 2011. He is a member of IEEE and ACM and is on the board of WISEN, the Irish Wireless Sensors Enterprise Led Network , the scientific board of the Corporate Semantic Web research center at FU Berlin, and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Center for Sensor Web Technologies (CLARITY) in Dublin, Ireland.

Tom Heath

Tom Heath is Lead Researcher at Talis Systems Ltd, a global leader in the research, development and commercial exploitation of Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies. At Talis, he is responsible for leading internal research exploring how Linked Data affects the sharing and reuse of data, the value and insights that can be derived from this data, and the implications of these changes for human-computer interaction. Tom has a PhD in Computer Science from The Open University. He has been the recipient of a number of awards in the Semantic Web field, including First Prize in the 2007 International Semantic Web Challenge, and STI International PhD of the Year 2008/9.

Ivan Herman

I graduated as mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI I joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where I worked for 6 years (and turned into a computer scientist…). I left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry in Munich, Germany, I joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where I have a tenure position since 1988. I received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. I joined the W3C Team as Head of W3C Offices in January 2001 while maintaining my position at CWI. I served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when I was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position, which is now my principal work at W3C.

Before joining W3C I worked in quite different areas (distributed and dataflow programming, language design, system programming), but I spend most of my research years in computer graphics and information visualization. I also participated in various graphics related ISO standardization activities and software developments. I was member of the Executive Committee of the Eurographics Association for 15 years, and I was vice-chair of the Association between 2000 and 2002. I was the co-chair of the 9th World Wide Web Conference, in Amsterdam, May 2000; since then, I have also been member of IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), responsible for the World Wide Web Conference series. Since autumn 2007 I am also member of SWSA (Semantic Web Science Association), the committee responsible for the International Semantic Web Conferences series.

Peter Mika

Peter Mika is a Senior Research Scientist and Data Architect at Yahoo!, based in Barcelona, Spain. Peter is working on the applications of semantic technology to Web search. He received his BS in computer science from Eotvos Lorand University and his MSc and PhD in computer science (summa cum laude) from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His interdisciplinary work in social networks and the Semantic Web earned him a Best Paper Award at the 2005 International Semantic Web Conference and a First Prize at the 2004 Semantic Web Challenge. From 2006 to 2009, he has been a co-chair of the Semantic Web Challenge. Mika is the youngest member elected to the editorial board of the Journal of Web Semantics. He is the author of the book ‘Social Networks and the Semantic Web’ (Springer, 2007). In 2008 he has been selected as one of “AI’s Ten to Watch” by the editorial board of the IEEE Intelligent Systems journal. Peter is a regular speaker at both academic and technology conferences and serves on the advisory board of a number of public and private initiatives.

Valentina Presutti

Valentina Presutti received her Ph.D in Computer Science in 2006 at the University of Bologna (Italy). Currently, she is a researcher at the Semantic Technology Laboratory of the National Research Council (CNR) in Rome. Her research is currently focused on extracting knowledge patterns from the Web. She has worked as one of the key researchers in EU funded projects such as NeOn and IKS, for the latter she is the scientific responsible of the CNR partner team. She started the ontologydesignpatterns.org initiative, which she actively participates in as one of the editors in chief. She has published in international journals/conferences/workshops on topics such as semantic web and ontology design. She also teaches “Knowledge Management” at the University of Bologna. She works as consultant for private and public organizations. Her research interests include semantic web, ontology design, collaborative knowledge/content management, and ontology-based software engineering.