Panel Session

2nd European Semantic Web Conference

May 29 to June 1, 2005

Heraklion, Crete (Greece)

Presentations

	Presentation Title:	Presenters:	Link/Download:
1	Funding Strategies For The Semantic Web	Stefano Bertolo	PPT (65k)
2	ESWS Panel 2005	Rudi Studer	PPT (114k)
3	Funding in the U.S.Semantics, Web, Services 2005	Gio Wiederhold	PPT (1.4Mb)

Tuesday May 31st, 2005

16:30 - 18:00

Funding Strategies for the Semantic Web: Current Activities and Future Trends.

Panel Chair:

Prof. Rudi Studer - University of Karlsruhe

Rudi Studer is Full Professor in Applied Informatics at the University of Karlsruhe, Institute AIFB (www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS). His research interests include knowledge management, Semantic Web technologies and applications, ontology management, data and text mining, Web services, and peer-to-peer systems.

He obtained a Diploma in Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart in 1975. In 1982 he was awarded a Doctor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart, and in 1985 he obtained his Habilitation in Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart.
From 1977 to 1985 he worked as a research scientist at the University of Stuttgart. From 1985 to 1989 he was project leader and manager at the Scientific Center of IBM Germany.

Rudi Studer is also director of the Knowledge Management Group at the FZI Research Center for Information Technologies at the University of Karlsruhe (www.fzi.de/wim) as well as co-founder of the spin-off company ontoprise GmbH (www.ontoprise.de) that develops semantic applications.
He is engaged in various national and international cooperation projects being funded by e.g. the European Commission, the German Ministry of Education and Research, and industry. He is president of the Semantic Web Science Association (www.iswsa.org) and Editor-in-chief of the journal Web Semantics: Science, Services, and Agents on the World Wide Web (www.websemanticsjournal.org).

Participants:

Stefano Bertolo Ph.D - European Commission's Information Society and Media Directorate General

Stefano Bertolo earned his Ph.D in Philosophy and Cognitive Science in 1995 from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (USA) with a dissertation on formal learning theory and human language learning. After three years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Brain and Cognitive Science department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on extensions of his thesis results, in 1998 he joined Cycorp, a privately held company in Austin, Texas, known as the developer of Cyc, the largest common sense knowledge base in existence. At Cycorp he was involved in the development of various commercial and Government funded applications (search engine extensions and question answering systems) whose common theme is the use of information extraction and natural language processing techniques to extract usable formally represented knowledge from text. In October 2004 he joined unit E2 of the European Commission's Information Society and Media Directorate General, where he presently works as a scientific project officer.

Prof. Gio Wiederhold - Stanford University

Gio Wiederhold is now an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Medicine at Stanford University, continuing part-time with ongoing projects and students. Since 1976 he has supervised 34 PhD theses in these departments. Research topics addressed knowledge-based integraition of information, an algebra over ontologies, access to simulations to augment decision-making capabilities, privacy protection in collaborative settings, composition of software, and value assessment of software.

Wiederhold has authored and coauthored more than 300 publications and reports on computing and medicine, including an early popular Database Design textbook, now in the ACM Digital Library. He initiated knowledge-base research through a white paper to DARPA in 1977, suggesting that combining databases and Artificial intelligence technology would be effective. The results led eventually to the concept of mediator architectures.

Wiederhold was born in Italy, received a degree in Aeronautical Engineering in Holland in 1957 and a PhD in Medical Information Science from the University of California at San Francisco in 1976. Prior to his academic career he spent 16 years in the software industry. His industrial career followed computer technologies, starting with numerical analysis applied to rocket fuel, implementation of FORTRAN and PL/1 compilers, real-time data acquisition, a time-oriented database system, eventually becoming a corporate software architect.

He has been elected fellow of the ACMI, the IEEE, and the ACM. He spent 1991-1994 as the program manager for Knowledge-based Systems at DARPA in Washington DC. He has been an editor and editor-in-chief of several IEEE and ACM publications. Gio's web page is http://www-db.stanford.edu/people/gio.html.