Reasoning Web 2008

Lecturers

Index

John G. Breslin
Jorge Cardoso
Stefan Decker
Thomas Eiter
Norbert E.Fuchs
Axel Polleres
Paolo Romano
Sebastian Schaffert
Andrea Splendiani
Steffen Staab
Umberto Straccia

John G. Breslin, DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

Dr. John Breslin was born in Dublin, Ireland. He received the BE degree with 1st class honours and the PhD degree from the National University of Ireland, Galway in 1994 and 2002 respectively. He is currently a researcher and adjunct lecturer at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway, and is researching semantically-enabled social networks and community portals. He is also leader of the Social Software research group there. He is founder of the SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) project which aims to connect online communities. He worked as a lecturer to Electronic and Computer Engineering students at the Department of Electronic Engineering in NUI Galway from 2000 to 2004. Before that, he was a research officer and postgraduate student at the Power Electronics Research Centre there. He also worked as a visiting scholar at Virginia Tech in 1996. Dr. Breslin received an award for co-authoring the best paper in the IEEE PELS Transactions in 2000. He has received a number of awards for website design, including a Golden Spider for the Irish community website boards.ie, which he co-founded in 2000. The Irish Internet Association presented him with Net Visionary awards in 2005 and 2006. He also supervised the undergraduate runner-up project in the Institution of Engineers of Ireland Siemens Young Engineer of the Year awards in 2003. He organised the first workshop on FOAF, social networks and the Semantic Web in 2004, and the first WebCamp workshop on social networks in 2007. He is chair of the 2nd International ExpertFinder workshop (Finding Experts on the Web with Semantics 2007) and of the 5th International Conference on Social Software (BlogTalk 2008). Dr. Breslin is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

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Jorge Cardoso, Universidade da Madeira, Funchal, Portugal

Jorge Cardoso joined the University of Madeira in March 2003. He previously gave lectures at University of Georgia (USA) and Instituto Politécnico de Leiria (Portugal). While at the University of Georgia he was part of the LSDIS Lab, where he did extensive research on workflow management systems. Currently, he is the Director of SEED Laboratory, a group working Emergent Information Systems which has interests in Workflow Quality of Service, Semantic Workflow Composition, Web services, Web processes, Process Complexity, e-Commerce, and Groupware/CSCW.

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Stefan Decker, DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

Prof. Dr. Stefan Decker obtained a Masters degree in Computer Science in 1995 at the University of Kaiserslautern (awarded with distinction). From 1995 to 1999, he worked towards a PhD degree in Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe (awarded 2002 with distinction). From 1999 to 2002, he worked as a postdoctoral and research associate in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and established one of the first Semantic Web research groups. From 2002 to 2005, he worked as a computer scientist and research assistant professor at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, USA. In 2003, he was involved in setting up a new research institute (Digital Enterprise Research Institute), leading the Semantic Web research group as a senior research fellow and adjunct lecturer responsible for ten group members within the institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway. In 2006, Stefan was appointed adjunct professor and director of DERI. His current research interests include the Semantic Web, metadata, ontologies and semi-structured data, web services, and applications for digital libraries, knowledge management, information integration and peer-to-peer technology. He has published around 70 papers as book, journal, conference and workshop contributions. He co-organised around 35 scientific workshops and conferences and has edited several special issues of scientific journals. He was editor-in-chief of Elsevier's Journal of Web Semantics, editoral committee member of the Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (ETAI) (the Semantic Web), the Journal on Internet Research and the Journal on Web Intelligence and Agent Systems (WIAS), and is recognised as one of the most widely cited Semantic Web scientists. His dissertation work was quoted as one of the inspirations for the DARPA DAML programme, which spans the Semantic Web effort.

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Thomas Eiter, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

Prof. Dr. Thomas Eiter is a full professor (since 1998) in the Faculty of Informatics at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria and head of the Institute of Information Systems. Before (1996-1998), he was an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Giessen, Germany. Dr. Eiter's current research interests include knowledge representation and reasoning, logic programming, database foundations, knowledge-based agents, complexity in AI, and logic in computer science. He has more than 150 publications in these areas, many of which appeared in top journals and conferences. He has been involved in a number of national and international research projects, including the EU Networks of Excellence Compulog, CologNet, and REWERSE, and the EU Working Group WASP. He is a PC co-chair of RuleML 2006, and co-chaired in the past KI 2001, LPNMR 2001, FOIKS 2002, and ICDT 2005. He is on the advisory boards of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and the Journal on Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), and a former associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE).

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Norbert E. Fuchs, University of Zürich, Switzerland

Norbert Fuchs is senior research fellow with the Department of Informatics, University of Zurich. His main research interests are requirements engineering, declarative and executable specifications, controlled natural language as specification language, logic program synthesis and transformation, and logic programming in general. His academic background is theoretical physics (MSc, PhD, University of Tübingen, Germany). He spent more than ten years in industry (IBM in Germany and USA, Siemens and Mettler in Switzerland) working on several large software projects. In 1984/85, he was visiting professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

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Axel Polleres, DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

Axel Polleres obtained his PhD in Computer Science at the Vienna University of Technology in 2003 working on AI Planning and Nonmonotonic Reasoning. From 2003 to 2006 he worked at the Leopold-Franzens Universität Innsbruck in the areas of Semantic Web Services, Ontologies, Rules & Query Languages and Logic Programming. While there, he was involved in several EU projects. He worked for one year at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid under a "Juan de la Cierva" research award and joined the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at National University of Ireland, Galway, in April 2007. Dr. Polleres has published more than 30 articles in journals, books, and conference and workshop contributions and has recently co-authored a book on Semantic Web Services. He has organised several international workshops in areas such as logic programming, Semantic Web, Semantic Web services and expert finding. He actively contributes to standardization working groups such as for instance the W3C's Rule Interchange Format (RIF) working group.

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Paolo Romano, National Cancer Research Institute, Genoa, Italy

Paolo Romano graduated in Electronic Engineering at the University of Genoa, and got a PhD in BioEngineering at the Polytechnic of Milan. From 1988 to 1990 he has been a free-lance consultant and from 1990 to 1993 he has been Researcher at the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Oncology of the University of Genoa. Since 1993, he is a researcher at the National Cancer Research Institute of Genoa. Since 2004, he is working in the Bioinformatics Structure. His research interests have always been in the field of biomedical data management. He designed and contributed to the development of the Molecular Probe Data Base and of the Cell Line Data Base and its associated hypertext HyperCLDB. He is in charge of the CABRI (Common Access to Biological Resources and Information) network services, offering living resources from European collections. He has been involved in researches on network standards, technologies, tools and applications in bioinformatics. He designed and developed Biowep, the Workflow Enactment Portal for Bioinformatics. He is author of ca. 30 publications in peer-reviewed international journals. He taught academic courses "Bioimages" and "Bioinformatics" at the University of Genoa. He was the creator of Network Tools and Applications in Biology (NETTAB) workshops, that are running annually since 2001. He participated in many Programme Committees and has been a referee for bioinformatics journals. He coordinates the Italian National Network for Oncology Bioinformatics.

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Sebastian Schaffert, KIS, Salzburg Research, Salzburg, Austria

Sebastian Schaffert works as a senior researcher at the unit for knowledge based information systems at Salzburg Research since August 2005. Since October 2006 he is the scientific head of Salzburg NewMediaLab.

He studied Computer Science and Educational Sciences at the University of Munich, Germany. He graduated in 2001 as "Diplom-Informatiker" and in 2004 as "Doctor rerum naturalium (Dr.rer.nat.)" with a thesis entitled "Xcerpt: A Rule-Based Query and Transformation Language for the Web". From 1998 to 2000, he was working as system administrator at the University of Munich, and from 2001 to 2005, he was employed as a research and teaching assistant, also at the University of Munich.

Sebastian's research interests are in Web and Semantic Web research, (Semantic) Social Software, XML and semistructured data, as well as functional and logic programming. He has contributed to many scientific conferences as author and program committee member and has several publications on the rule-based XML query language Xcerpt and on the Semantic Wiki IkeWiki. Besides this, Sebastian is interested in Linux and Open Source software.

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Andrea Splendiani, University of Rennes 1, France

Andrea Splendiani graduated in Information Technology Engineering at the Polytechnic of Milan, and got a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Milano-Bicocca. He collaborated with the Department of Biotechnology and Bioscience of the University of Milano-Bicocca on the design and development of microarray databases during his graduation thesis and the first part of his PhD, where he addressed issues relative to microarray data standardization. He later joined the Systems Biology Unit of the Institut Pasteur, where he explored the use of ontologies in systems biology. During this time he collaborated with the BioPAX working group on the standardization of pathway ontologies. He is now a postdoc at the Medical Informatics Department of the University of Rennes 1, where he is working on the European Project Bootstrep. He is in charge of the enrichment of ontological resources to support text-mining.

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Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany

Steffen Staab is associate professor for databases and information systems at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, leading the research group on Information Systems and Semantic Web (ISWeb). His interests lie in researching core technology for ontologies and semantic web as well as in applied research for exploiting these technologies for knowledge management, multimedia and software technology. He has participated in numerous national, European and intercontinental research projects on these different subjects and his research has led to over 100 refereed contributions in journals and conferences. Dr. Staab held positions as researcher, project leader and lecturer at the University of Freiburg, the University of Stuttgart/Fraunhofer Institute IAO, and the University of Karlsruhe and he is a co-founder of Ontoprise GmbH. For more information visit http://isweb.uni-koblenz.de/ and http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~staab/

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Umberto Straccia, ISTI-C.N.R., Pisa, Italy

Umberto Straccia was born in 1965 in Zurich (Switzerland), and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Dortmund (Germany), obtained in 1999. He is currently researcher at the "Istituto di Scienze e di Tecnologie dell'Informazione" (ISTI) of the Italian National Council of Research (CNR). He's main research interests include in the broad sense Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) and Information Retrieval (IR). In particular, he has interests in logics for KRR and the Semantic Web (in particular, logic programming and description logics), the management of uncertainty, and logic-based approaches to multimedia information retrieval. The activities have been mainly carried out in the context of EU funded projects he has been co-ordinated and/or has been involved in. He participates in the scientific committee of various conferences involving both research areas.