Reasoning Web 2009

Lecturers and Coauthors

List of lecturers: Marcelo Arenas, Franz Baader, Diego Calvanese, Souripriya Das, Thomas Eiter, Claudio Gutierrez, Siegfried Handschuh, Giovambattista Ianni, Thomas Krennwallner, Maarten Marx, Jorge Perez, Michael Sintek.

Marcelo Arenas, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Marcelo Arenas is an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto (2005), and his research interests are in different aspects of database theory, such as expressive power of query languages, database semantics, integrity constraints, inconsistency handling, database design, XML databases, data exchange and database aspects of the Semantic Web. Marcelo has received an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship (2004), three best paper awards (PODS 2003 in San Diego, California, PODS 2005 in Baltimore, Maryland and ISWC 2006 in Athens, Georgia) and an Honourable Mention Award in 2006 from the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) for his Ph.D dissertation, "Design Principles for XML Data".

Franz Baader, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany

Franz Baader received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Erlangen in 1989. From 1989-1993 he was a senior researcher at the German Research Center for AI (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern and Saarbrücken. In 1993 he was appointed as associate professor for computer science at RWTH Aachen, and in 2002 as full professor for computer science at TU Dresden. His research interests include knowledge representation (in particular, description logics, nonmonotonic logics, and modal logics) and automated deduction (in particular, unification theory, term rewriting systems, and combination of constraint solving methods). Franz Baader has been program chair of the conferences KI'01, CADE'03, LPAR'04, and RTA'07, and he has been in the program committee of various national and international conferences in the areas automated deduction, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, and logics, has organized many international workshops, and is in the editorial board of several journals in AI and Logic in Computer Science. He has published over 150 refereed articles in major journals and conferences.

Diego Calvanese, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

Diego Calvanese is associate professor at the KRDB Research Centre of the Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, where he teaches courses on theory of computing, formal languages, and information integration. His research interests include formalisms for knowledge representation and reasoning, ontology languages, Description Logics, conceptual data modelling, data integration, semistructured data management, and web service modelling and composition. He participated in several national and international research projects, and he is the coordinator of the EU STREP FET Project "Thinking ONtologiES" (TONES). He has been co-chair of the Int. Workshops on Description Logics DL 2003 and DL 2007, and PC co-chair of the Int. Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems RR 2008. He is the author of more than 150 publications in international journals, conferences, and workshops, and he is one of the editors of the "Description Logics Handbook".

Souripriya Das, Oracle, Boston, USA

Dr. Souripriya Das, a.k.a. Souri, pioneered the work on semantic technologies in Oracle and has led the development effort over two product cycles since its inception in 2002. Prior to semantic technologies, he was the lead developer and project leader for novel database features at Oracle. Souri is a Consultant Member of Technical Staff at Oracle. Besides working on semantic technologies development, he also represented Oracle at the W3C Data Access Working Group that was responsible for the SPARQL query language and protocol. Souri has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and has been interested in all areas of Computer Science right from his undergraduate days at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur. His other interests are in trying to understand the philosophy of life, evolution of the Universe, and playing soccer with friends.

Thomas Eiter, Technische Universität Wien, 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).

Claudio Gutierrez, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Claudio Gutierrez received a degree in mathematics from Universidad de Chile, a M.Sc. in mathematical logic from Universidad Catolica de Chile, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Wesleyan University, U.S.A. Currently, he is associated professor in the Computer Science Department at the Universidad de Chile, and associated researcher at the Center for Web Research. His research interests lie in the intersection of databases and the Semantic Web, particularly in data models and query languages for RDF layer. He has received best paper awards at the European Semantic Web Conference in 2005, at the International Semantic Web Conference in 2006, and at the European Semantic Web Conference in 2007.

Siegfried Handschuh, DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

Siegfried Handschuh is a SFI Stokes Lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) and research leader of the Semantic Collaboration team at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI). Siegfried holds Honours Degrees in both Computer Science and Information Science and a PhD from the University of Karlsruhe. He published over 90 papers as books and journal, book chapters, conference, and workshop contributions, mainly in the areas of Annotation for the Semantic Web, Knowledge Acquisition and Social Semantic Collaboration.

Giovambattista Ianni, Università della Calabria, Italy

Giovambattista Ianni, is Assistant Professor at the Dipartimento di Matematica of Università della Calabria. Ph.D. in Computer Science and Systems Engineering since 2002, he is currently responsible of the design of some of the linguistic extensions of the DLV system, one of the most prominent Answer Set Programming solvers. He authored several works published in international journal and conferences such as Artificial Intelligence, ACM TOCL, IJCAI, PODS. It is worth noting that some of his scientific contributions were acknowledged with the best paper award (ESWC 2006, ASP 2003). He participated in several international projects and was the project manager of the EU project consortium INFOMIX.

Thomas Krennwallner, Technische Universität Wien, Austria

Thomas Krennwallner is a project assistant since June 2008 at the Institute of Information Systems at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria, funded by the Austrian Science Fund project "Modular HEX-Programs." In 2007 and 2008, he was working as research intern at Digital Enterprise Research Institute Galway, Ireland, in the EU FP6 funded project "inContext." Between 1999 and 2004 he was a software developer in several companies. He has contributed to various software systems, most recently to DLVHEX, DLVHEX-SPARQL, and XSPARQL. He is currently pursuing his PhD at the Knowledge-Based Systems Group at TU Wien, where he is developing extensions for modular and distributed evaluation of HEX-programs. He obtained a master's degree in Computational Intelligence in 2007 and a bachelor's degree in Software and Information Engineering in 2005, both at TU Wien.

Maarten Marx, Universiteit van Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Maarten Marx (1964) obtained his master in political science (1990) and his PhD in mathematical logic (1995), both at the University of Amsterdam. Hi (co)-authored 3 books and more than 75 scientific articles. Since 2002 his main research topic is XML, in particular XPath dialects. In 2004 he won the ACM Principles of Database Systems best paper award for his Codd-completeness result for "Conditional XPath". His current research interest is integration of large amounts of semi-structured, text-centric, data. An example of a recent data integration and mediation project of his is www.polydox.nl. This site makes the Dutch parliamentary data easily accessible. The site won the 2008 XML Holland award.

Jorge Perez, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Jorge Perez is currently a Ph.D. student at the Computer Science Department at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. His research interests are primarily in database theory and the application of database technologies to the Semantic Web. Jorge has received a Microsoft Ph.D. Fellowship (2009-2011) and two best papers awards (ISWC 2006 in Athens, Georgia and ESWC 2007 in Innsbruck, Austria).

Michael Sintek, DFKI, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Germany

Michael Sintek studied computer science and economics at the University of Kaiserslautern and received the Diplom (master's degree) in 1996. Since then, he's working as a research scientist at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) Kaiserslautern. In the research department for Intelligent Engineering Systems he investigated in the VEGA project logic programming and machine learning approaches for the maintenance of knowledge-bases. In 2000 and 2001, he was project leader of the FRODO project (DFKI Knowledge Management Group) where they develop a framework for building distributed organisational memories. As a visiting researcher at the Stanford Medical Informatics department (August - October 1999 and November 2000 - February 2001) Michael Sintek developed various plugins for the the frame-based knowledge acquisition tool Protégé-2000, including the OntoViz ontology visualisation tab and the RDFS and OIL backends. In 2002, he was a visiting researcher at the Stanford Database Group and at ISI, working on the Edutella project and the Semantic Web rule language TRIPLE. Currently, he is co-head of the Competence Center Semantic Web (CCSW) at DFKI.