SSSW '15

CLAUDIA D’AMATO _Tutor

On January 29th, 2014, I obtained the Italian Habilitation for the functions of Associate Professor for the Scientific Sector "01/B1 - Informatics" (Application: round 2012). Since June 2007 I’m a research fellow at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bari, spending, from time to time, some periods as visiting/invited researcher at other International and Italian research Institutes and Universities. On 4th of May 2007, I obtained my Ph.D. at the University of Bari, defending a dissertation titled “Similarity-based Learning Methods for the Semantic Web” (slides of presentation downloadable), supervised by Prof. Floriana Esposito. My research focus is on Machine Learning for the Semantic Web.

MATHIEU D'AQUIN _Director

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 has been a key member in a number of European projects applying linked data and Semantic Web technologies in a variety of concrete scenarios. 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, senior programme committee member for the International Semantic Web Conference in 2011, Poster and Demo chair of EKAW 2012. He will also be program chair for the K-CAP 2013 conference in Banff, Canada. 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.

EVA BLOMQVIST _Tutor

Eva Blomqvist is an Assistant Professor, in the MDA lab (HCS division) at IDA, Linköping University. Research is focused on decision support systems, in particular for the security and crisis management domain. Particular interests include Semantic Web technologies, ontologies and ontology design patterns etc.

OSCAR CORCHO _Co-Director

Oscar Corcho is an Associate Professor at Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial (Facultad de Informática , Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), and he belongs to the Ontology Engineering Group.
His research activities are focused on Semantic e-Science and Real World Internet, although he also works in the more general areas of Semantic Web and Ontological Engineering. In these areas, he has participated in a number of EU projects (Wf4Ever, PlanetData, SemsorGrid4Env, ADMIRE, OntoGrid, Esperonto, Knowledge Web and OntoWeb), and Spanish R&D projects (CENITS mIO!, España Virtual and Buscamedia, myBigData, GeoBuddies), 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.

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.

He has published several books, from which "Ontological Engineering" can be highlighted as it is being used as a reference book in a good number of university lectures worldwide, and more than 100 papers in journals, conferences and workshops. He usually participates in the organisation or in the programme committees of relevant international conferences and workshops.

PHILIPPE CUDRE-MAUROUX _Tutor

Philippe Cudre-Mauroux is a professor and the director of the eXascale Infolab at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Previously, he was a postdoctoral associate working in the Database Systems group at MIT. He received his Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL, where he won both the Doctorate Award and the EPFL Press Mention in 2007. Before joining the University of Fribourg, he worked on distributed information and media management for HP, IBM Watson Research (NY), and Microsoft Research Asia. He was Program Chair of the International Semantic Web Conference in 2012 and General Chair of the International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis in 2012 and 2013. He recently won the MICS Swiss National Center in Research 2001-2012 CS Award, a Verisign University Award, and a Google Faculty Award. His research interests are in next-generation, Big Data management infrastructures for non-relational data.

FRANK VAN HARMELEN _{Invited Speaker}

Frank van Harmelen is professor in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning at the VU University Amsterdam. He has been involved in the Semantic Web research programme since it's inception in the late '90s. He is one of the co-designers of the W3C ontology representation language OWL, and was involved in the design of Sesame, one of the most widely used RDF repositories world wide. He is co-author of the Semantic Web Primer, the first textbook on Semantic Web technologies, now translated into 5 languages. He was scientific director of the Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC), which aimed to build a platform for very large scale distributed reasoning. Besides research into the fundamental questions such as inconsistency, scalability, heterogeneity, and dynamicity, he is also involved in a wide variety of applications of semantic technologies, among others in medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, scientific publishing and e-science. His work on the Sesame triplestore received the 2012 "ISWC 10 year impact award", and he was elected member of the European Academy of Science in 2014.

AXEL POLLERES _Tutor

Axel Polleres joined the Institute of Information Business of Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien) in Sept 2013 as a full professor in the area of “Data and Knowledge Engineering”.

He obtained his doctorate and habilitation from Vienna University of Technology and worked at University of Innsbruck, Austria, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain, the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and for Siemens AG’s Corporate Technology Research division before joining WU Wien. His research focuses on querying and reasoning about ontologies, rules languages, logic programming, Semantic Web technologies, Web services, knowledge management, Linked Open Data, configuration technologies and their applications. He has worked in several European and national research projects in these areas.

Axel has published more than 100 articles in journals, books, and conference and workshop contributions and co-organised several international conferences and workshops in the areas of logic programming, Semantic Web, data management, Web services and related topics and acts as editorial board member for SWJ and IJSWIS. Moreover, he actively contributed to international standardisation efforts within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) where he co-chaired the W3C SPARQL working group.

VALENTINA PRESUTTI _Co-Director

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.

MARIA-ESTHER VIDAL _Tutor

Maria-Esther Vidal is a Full Professor of the Computer Science Department and Dean Assistant for Research on Applied Science and Engineering at the Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela. Her research in information management covers information integration, federated databases, graph data management, Linked Open Data, and the Semantic Web. Maria-Esther has addressed some of the most important challenges in selecting and modeling sources, rewriting queries, cost based optimization, graph query processing and optimization, and benchmarks for federated SPARQL query processing. Her proposed strategies have had significant relevant from the early days of information integration in the Web, in the late 90s, and to the emergence of the Semantic Web and SPARQL endpoints. She has published her research results in the premier conferences and journals in Database Management, Artificial Intelligence, and the Semantic Web.