Marti A. Hearst

Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, USA

Prof. Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She received BA, MS, and PhD degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997.

A primary focus of Prof. Hearst’s research is user interfaces for search. She just completed the first book on the topic of Search User Interfaces and she has invented or participated in several well-known search interface projects including the Flamenco project that investigated and the promoted the use of faceted metadata for collection navigation. Professor Hearst’s other research areas include computational linguistics, information visualization, and analysis of social media.

Prof. Hearst has received an NSF CAREER award, an IBM Faculty Award, a Google Research Award, an Okawa Foundation Fellowship, two Excellence in Teaching Awards, and has been principle investigator for more than $3M in research grants.

Keynote: Emerging Trends in Search User Interfaces

Search is an integral part of peoples’ online lives; people turn to search engines for help with a wide range of needs and desires. Web search is a familiar tool today, but it is surprisingly difficult to design a new search interface that is successful and widely accepted. In this talk, Prof. Hearst will discuss new ideas and trends that she thinks will impact search in future.

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Peter A. Gloor

Research Scientist at the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, USA

Peter A. Gloor is a Research Scientist at the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT’s Sloan School of Management where he leads a project exploring Collaborative Innovation Networks. He also teaches at the University of Cologne and Aalto University, Helsinki and is Chief Creative Officer of startup galaxyadvisors.

Earlier, Peter was a Partner and European e-Business Practice leader with Deloitte Consulting, a Partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers and Section Leader for Software Engineering at UBS.

His new book “Coolfarming: Turn Your Great Idea into the Next Big Thing” comes out in June 2010 at AMACOM. Peter also blogs about Swarm Creativity.

Keynote: Coolfarming – Turn Your Great Idea into the Next Big Thing

Collaborative Innovation Networks, or COINs, are cyberteams of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by technology to collaborate in innovating by sharing ideas, information, and work. Although COINs have been around for hundreds of years, they are especially relevant today because the concept has reached its tipping point thanks to the Internet. COINs are powered by swarm creativity, wherein people work together in a structure that enables a fluid creation and exchange of ideas. ‘Coolhunting’ – discovering, analyzing, and measuring trends and trendsetters – and ‘Coolfarming’ – developing these trends through COINs – puts these concepts to productive use. Patterns of collaborative innovation always follow the same path, from creator to COIN to collaborative learning network to collaborative interest network. The talk also introduces Condor, a tool for dynamic semantic social network analysis. Condor applies a novel set of social network analysis based algorithms for mining the Web, blogs, and online forums to identify trends and find the people launching these new trends. The talk is based on Peter Gloor’s latest book “Coolfarming” coming out in June 2010 at AMACOM.

Márta Nagy-Rothengass

Head of Unit European Commission DG Information Society and Media – Unit Technologies for Information Management, Luxembourg

Márta Nagy-Rothengass is Head of Unit “Technologies for Information Management” in the Information Society and Media Directorate-General of the European Commission. Her Unit manages and co-funds research and development projects on innovative ICT technologies dealing with creation of intelligent digital objects and knowledge management, supporting knowledge exchange and “semantic web”. Recently she and her Unit have taken the necessary steps to deal with more effective and efficient management of extremely large scale data.  Earlier Márta was engaged in the private sector across Europe and voluntarily contributed to building up of social associations. Her focus is since 1999 on information and knowledge management. She established and then expanded the “New Media” department (implementing and integrating media-neutral product database, international web presence of the company, eServices and eBusiness platforms) by a German leading producer of electrical tools. Furthermore she managed the workgroup on “Classification” in Electric Tools Division of German Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers’ Association (ZVEI). In 2005 she joined the European Commission as the Head of Unit of “ICT for the Environment” and developed her Unit further to “ICT for Sustainable Growth” including the areas of enlarged environmental management, disaster risk reduction and the building up of ICT for energy efficiency linked to the integrated climate and energy policy.  Márta graduated and received a Doctor’s degree in Economics at the University of Economics Budapest, Hungary and has an MBA from Danube University, Krems, Austria.

Keynote: “European ICT Research and Development Supporting the Expansion of Semantic Technologies and Shared Knowledge Management”

The European Commission has had significant funding and supporting activities to develop and deploy semantic technologies and to improve content and knowledge management methods and tools, demonstrated in different sectors of society and in business environment. In this talk I will briefly introduce the related working fields of the Directorate General Information Society and Media and present the main policy paths driven by the Digital Agenda for Europe. Further I will give an overview on recently finished and ongoing EC co-funded research and development activities based on FP6 and FP7 projects dealing with intelligent management of extremely large data and content creation.  In the second part of my talk I will focus on the upcoming research activities and calls supporting more Intelligent Information Management including the real time dimension and on the launch of the ICT SME initiative on Digital Content. I will describe the main research challenges in this field focusing on large and constantly growing data management, will highlight the expected impact and target outcome of the addressed research. Last but not least I will inform about the upcoming ICT 2010 conference, the Proposers´ Day (to be held in May 2011 in Budapest) and further information and networking occasions.

Rafael Sidi

Vice President, Product Management for ScienceDirect, Elsevier

Rafael Sidi is Vice President, Product Management for ScienceDirect, Elsevier’s main online journal and book platform. He also leads the new search and discovery solutions and applications initiatives for Elsevier’s Academic and Government Products Group. Rafael has been with Elsevier since 2001 and has been leading product development efforts for Engineering Information and then for the Engineering & Technology division. He has been instrumental in developing and creating new online productivity enhancing products for the corporate and academic markets including Engineering Village, Referex and illumin8. Engineering Village won the SIIA 2006 Codie Award for Best Content Aggregation Service. illumin8 is the first technology intelligence research tool for R&D knowledge workers, which uses natural language processing technology with Elsevier’s premium scientific content and web content.

Prior to joining Elsevier, Rafael was Director of e-commerce operations for Bolt Media Inc. a portal for teen-agers. Rafael has a Bsc in Electrical Engineering from Bosphorus University, Istanbul and MA from Brandeis University.

Keynote: “Bring in ‘da developers, bring in ‘da apps- Developing search and discovery solutions using scientific content APIs”

During a multi-year study of more than 3,000 scientific researchers and developers, we at Elsevier uncovered key trends that are shaping the lean research globally – workflow efficiencies, funding pressures, government policies and  global competition. We also looked at key trends defining the future of web – openness & interoperability, personalization, and collaboration and  trusted views. As a global publisher of scientific literature, we wanted to know what categories of search and discovery applications were needed and how we could make it easy to connect researchers – at their moment of need – with the most targeted applications or the right development partner – the developers! We collected impressive insights into the categories of applications- recommenders, filtering tools, personalized search, clustering tools, visualization apps, and information extractors. We would like to present to the conference community our thoughts about how developers could use scientific content APIs to develop highly targeted research and discovery applications, collaborate with the scientific community and create partnerships that leverage efficient market channels.