Daniel Weitzner is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium's Technology and Society activities. As such, he is responsible for development of technology standards that enable the web to address social, legal, and public policy concerns such as privacy, free speech, protection of minors, authentication, intellectual property and identification. He is also the W3C's chief liaison to public policy communities around the world.
Weitzner holds an appointment as Principal Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, co-directs MIT's Decentralized Information Group with Tim Berners-Lee, and teaches Internet public policy at MIT.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. He wrote the first WWW client (a browser-editor running under NeXTStep) and the first WWW server along with most of the communications software, defining URLs, HTTP and HTML. Prior to his work at CERN, Tim was a founding director of Image Computer Systems, a consultant in hardware and software system design, real-time communications graphics and text processing, and a principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications in Poole, England. He is a graduate of Oxford University.
Tim is now the overall Director of the W3C. He is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. He is also a Professor at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science
Jim Hendler is a Professor at the University of Maryland and the Director of the Joint Institute for Knowledge Discovery at the University of Maryland. He has joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science, the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and is an affiliate of the Institute for Systems Research. He has authored about 200 technical papers in the areas of artificial intelligence, Semantic Web, agent-based computing and high performance processing. One of the inventors of the Semantic Web, Hendler was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, is a former member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002, and is a member of the World Wide Web Consortium's Semantic Web Coordination Group. He is the Editor in Chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science.
Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University. He is a member of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group, Head of the BIO@ECS Group, Director of Interdisciplinary Research within ECS and Director of the EPSRC Advanced Knowledge Technologies IRC.
Since 1978 he has been carrying out research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive Science. In the course of his career he has studied and researched in Philosophy, Linguistics, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence and Electronics and Computer Science. He has published and presented results in all of these disciplines and has sought to develop programmes of research across traditional disciplinary boundaries. In 2000 he led a consortium of five Universities that secured an EPSRC Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in Advanced Knowledge Technologies. Professor Shadbolt is the Director of this eight million pound, six-year research programme that is pursuing basic and applied research in the provision of technologies to support Knowledge Management and realise the promise of the Semantic Web. An output of this work CS AKTive Space with which he was closely involved won the 2003 International Semantic Web Challenge.
David Kargeris a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science at MIT's Computer Sciece and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory. His interests have ranged broadly, starting in
theoretical computer science and combinatorial optimization, and
moving on to information retrieval, machine learning, computer
networking and systems (particularly peer-to-peer systems), and
Human-Computer Interaction. His interest in efficient distributed
systems led to research on distributed Web caching and to
participation at the founding of Akamai technologies, while his
interest in signal processing brought him to the technical advisory
board of Vanu Inc.
A constant interest, however, has been personal information
management, and particularly the question of how tools can be built
that will actually let users do what they want with their information,
instead of what their applications demand. He organized the Haystack
group, and built a system by the same name, to explore this question.
The need for a flexible but universal data model to support such tools
led him to the Semantic Web.
Panelists
Moderator
Professor Wendy Hall is Head of School at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science. She is the founding Head of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia (IAM) research group and has published over 350 academic papers. Now established as one of the leading research groups in computer science, the 80-strong IAM team has made huge advances in intelligent information systems.
Wendy's personal research achievements range from the pre-Web Microcosm hypertext system, to the development of a range of prototype applications for intelligent searching of global information systems, and the development of the Semantic Web. Wendy is currently working with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, and others at Southampton and MIT, to create a new Research Foundation in the emerging field of Web Science.
As part of SWUI06 programme, we will be hosting a panel of distinguished Semantic Web experts to talk about what they see as Grand Challenges for the collaboration between Interaction Design and the Semantic Web. Questions to be addressed include the how the Semantic Web can be incorporated to enhance existing tasks/applications; where new challenges and opportunities exist because of access to heterogeneous data sources. Other questions include the relationship of interaction design expertise / research to the Semantic Web community: what are the expectations of researchers within the field: that HCI types are outsiders invited to collaborate or are they part of the core research mission? Where is interaction design in the Semantic Web layer cake or is another representation required? What are the expectations for review of HCI oriented papers within Semantic Web organs such as conferences and journals? How do we open up the space for discussion in the main stream venues?
This panel is sponsored by WSRI - the Web Science Research Initiative