Since 2006 I am working in the area of Intelligent Information Systems as an assistant professor in the Web and Media Group, Department of Computer Science VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Until 2010 I was also an associate member Information Systems Group Department ofMathematics and Computer Science Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. My main research interest are in the field of personalization on the Web, focussing on user and context modelling for web-based recommender systems. Main application areas for this research are Interactive TV and Cultural Heritage. See below the list of my publications and the list of the projects I am currently involved in.
I received my M.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Sofia University in Bulgaria. I did my PhD research at the department of Educational Science and Technology, University of Twente, the Netherlands, in the field of adaptive information retrieval for web-based education. I was granted a PhD on a thesis entitled "Task-based approach to information handling support with web-based education". After my PhD I worked as an assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology and was an associate member of the Multimedia and Human-Computer Interaction Group of CWI in Amsterdam.
Keynotes
Prof. John Domingue is the Deputy Director of the Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University and the President of STI International, a semantics focused networking organization with 50 members. He has published over 160 refereed articles in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and the Web and his current work is focused on how semantic technology can automate the management, development and use of Web services. Currently he serves as the Scientific Director of SOA4All a 13M Euro project which aims at creating a Web of billions of services. Prof. Domingue is also Chair of the Steering Committee for the European Semantic Web Conference Series, and Co-Chair of the Conceptual Models of Services Working Group within STI. Within the Future Internet arena he helps coordinate the Future Internet Service Offer Working Group within the Future Internet Assembly – a collaboration between over 100 European projects with a combined budget of over 600M Euros aiming to develop a next-generation Internet. Prof. Domingue is also serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of Web Semantics and the Applied Ontology Journal.
Enrico Franconi is associate professor at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, where he is director of the KRDB research centre for Knowledge and Data. He is currently principal investigator of the European People Marie Curie action on a Network for Enabling Networked Knowledge (NET2), and of the European large-scale integrating project (IP) on ONTOlogies meet business RULEs (ONTORULE). In the recent past he was principal investigator of the European network of excellence "Realizing the Semantic Web" (KnowledgeWeb), of the European network of excellence "Interoperability Research for Networked Enterprises Applications and Software" (InterOp), of the European IST RTD project SEmantic Webs and AgentS in Integrated Economies (SeWAsIE), and co-investigator of the European basic research project "Thinking Ontologies" (Tones). He is member of the Advisory Committee of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), of the editorial board of the Journal of Applied Logic (Elsevier), and of the editorial board of the AAAI Press (the American Association of Artificial Intelligence). His main research interest is on knowledge representation and reasoning technologies applied to databases - and in particular description logics, temporal representations, conceptual modelling, intelligent access to information, information integration, natural language semantics.
Marko Grobelnik is an expert in the areas of analysis of large amounts of complex data with the purpose to extract useful knowledge. In particular, the areas of expertise comprise: Data Mining, Text Mining, Information Extraction, Link Analysis, and Data Visualization as well as more integrative areas such as Semantic Web, Knowledge Management and Artificial Intelligence. Apart from research on theoretical aspects of data analysis techniques he has considerable experience in the field of practical applications and development of business solutions based on the innovative technologies.
His main achievements are from the field of Text-Mining (analysis of large amounts of textual data), having leading role on scientific and applicative projects funded by European Commission, having projects with industries such as Microsoft Research, British Telecom, New York Times, Siemens, and organizing several international events on the related topics.
Spyros Kotoulas is a Research Scientist at the Smarter Cities Technology Center (SCTC), IBM Research, working on very large-scale processing and integration of semi-structured data.
His research interests lie in data management for semi-structured data, parallel methods for data intensive processing, Semantic Web, Linked Data, reasoning with Web data, flexible data integration methods, stream processing, peer-to-peer and other distributed systems.
The application domain of his current research is Smarter Cities. In particular, he is working on integrating large numbers of dataset heterogenous in terms of size, format, update rate and semantic domain.
He has been part of the teams that won the third prize at the Billion Triple Challenge in 2008 and the first prize at the IEEE Scale Chalenge 2010.
Spyros was previously at the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Group at theVrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he has also completed his PhD in Scalable Peer-to-Peer Data Discovery and his MSc in Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems.
Chris Welty is a Research Scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. Previously, he taught Computer Science at Vassar College, taught at and received his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnice Institute, and accumulated over 14 years of teaching experience before moving to industrial research. Chris' principal area of research is Knowledge Representation, specifically ontologies and the semantic web, and he spends most of his time applying this technology to Natural Language Question Answering as a member of the DeepQA/Watson team and, in the past, Software Engineering.
Dr. Welty is a co-chair of the W3C Rules Interchange Format Working Group (RIF), serves on the steering committee of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems Conferences, is president of KR.ORG, on the editorial boards of AI Magazine, The Journal of Applied Ontology, and The Journal of Web Semantics, and was an editor in the W3C Web Ontology Working Group. While on sabbatical in 2000, he co-developed the OntoClean methodology with Nicola Guarino. Chris Welty's work on ontologies and ontology methodology has appeared in CACM, and numerous other publications.
