People

Syed Zahid Ali

Syed Zahid Ali is a Research Associate at Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. He holds a Masters degree in Computer Science (Communication and Interactivity) from Linköping University, Sweden. Zahid has Completed his thesis work at Rwth-Aachen and now working towards his Doctorate in Computer Science. His research interests includes ubiquitous computing, communication, and communications middleware .

Matthias Beckerle

Matthias Beckerle is a Doctoral Researcher at Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. He holds a Masters degree in Computer Science (Diplom Informatiker). His emphasis are machine learning, IT-security and usability. Matthias current research interests are security for ubiquitous computing with a focus on usable access control and anomaly based intrusion detection.

Andreas Budde

Andreas Budde is a Research Associate at SAP Research CEC Zurich and a PhD candidate at the Chair for Information Management at ETH Zurich. He holds an honours Master's Degree in Software Engineering from the Technical University Munich, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich and University of Augsburg.

Prof. Dr. Fabio Ciravegna

Fabio is Full Professor of Language and Knowledge Technologies at USFD. He coordinates the Organisations, Information and Knowledge (OAK) Group. His research field concerns Human Language related technologies for Web Intelligence and the Semantic Web, with focus on Knowledge Management applications. He is Director of the integrated project IST X-Media, and principal investigator in the EU IPs WeKnowIt and SmartProducts. He is principal investigator in the DTI funded project IPAS co-funded by Rolls-Royce plc and the UK DTI and in its follow-up IPAS-XWB funded By Rolls-Royce. He is also principal investigator in the ERC-funded project Archaeotools about analysing 1m documents from the grey literature. In the past he was director of the EU project Dot.Kom (http://nlp.shef.ac.uk/dot.kom/) and co-investigator in the EPSRC IRC AKT project (www.aktors.org) He is part of the editorial board of the International Journal on “Web Semantics” and of the International Journal of Human Computer Studies. He is director of research of K-Now, a spin-off company of the University of Sheffield focusing on supporting dynamic distributed communities in large organizations. He holds a PhD from the University of East Anglia and a doctorship from the University of Torino, Italy

Aba-Sah Dadzie

Aba-Sah is a Research Associate at Sheffield University. Her research fields are visual analytics and human computer interaction, with application currently focusing on knowledge management and the use of semantic web technologies. She holds a PhD from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, applying information visualisation to bioinformatics. She has worked on the research projects XSPAN, IPAS and X-Media.

Marina Giordanino

Marina holds a Laurea degree in Computer Science (Turin, Italy), 1990. She is currently a project manager at the Infomobility Department in Centro Ricerche FIAT (CRF). Her expertise includes research and development of methodologies and tools to support knowledge management in automotive product development processes. Since 1993 she has been involved in several European project most related to KM. In this area, last activities carried out are: Coordination of Application and Testing Area, case study definition, user requirements management and design of a knowledge management system able to extract and sharing knowledge from multimedia sources (XMEDIA); user requirements survey, testing and evaluation of an integrated platforms for the development of web services based applications (SeCSE); contribution to realization of data model and ontology for the management of information to support vehicle repair (MyCarevent); coordination of user requirements management, testing and evaluation of a KM system for the automatic classification of document (Peking).

Jérôme Golenzer

Jérôme Golenzer is a Research Engineer at EADS Innovation Works. He currently works on topics dealing with mobile and interactive systems, with a strong focus on on-the-field use of Digital Mock-Up, Augmented Reality and stochastic approach. Jerome holds an engineer diploma in electronic and computer sciences from Institut Supérieur d’Electronique de Paris and a master of sciences in image processing and artificial intelligence from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Brest.

Melanie Hartmann

Melanie Hartmann is a Research Associate at Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. She holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from TU Darmstadt. Melanie has published papers both in journals and conferences across Europe. Melanie's research interests range from task switching to prediction algorithms, context-awareness and adaptive user interfaces. Melanie is currently working towards her Doctorate in Computer Science writing a thesis about context-aware intelligent user interfaces.

Mika Hillukkala

Mika is a research scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. His research interests include low power microcontroller operated embedded systems, including hardware and software, sensor devices, and wired/wireless communication technologies.

Leszek Holenderski

Leszek Holenderski is a Senior Scientist at Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. He graduated Computer Science at Warsaw University where he also got his PhD in 1992. His main research interests are in the application of formal methods to the design, verification and implementation of complex reactive systems. In particular, the architecture of such systems. Recently he has been also working on robotics, user interface technologies, and easy end-user programming. He participated in several European projects (AMICO, SYNCHRON, VIRES, Trust4All). Before joining Philips Research in 2000, he hold several research positions at Warsaw University, Imperial College (London), GMD (Bonn), Siemens Research (Munich), and Technical University of Eindhoven.

Pascale Hugues

Pascale Hugues is a Research Team Leader at EADS Innovation Works in France. She coordinates research projects on “Multimodal Services" and "Mediated Worker” topics, dealing with mobile and interactive systems, from multimedia document authoring to information access, including user interfaces. The common aim of these projects is to validate the use of new communication and information technologies in industrial processes and to introduce innovation within the different business unit of EADS. Pascale holds an engineer diploma in computer sciences since 2000 from Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Toulouse.

Julia Kantorovitch

Julia is a Senior Research Scientist at VTT Technical Research Center of Finland, Software Architectures and Platforms knowledge center. She holds the Lic.Sc degree in Telecommunications from the University of Oulu, Finland. Her current research field concerns service management, middleware, and semantic technologies applied to real physical environments and smart spaces.

Stephan Karpischek

Stephan Karpischek is Senior Researcher at the Auto-ID Labs St.Gallen and ETH Zurich. His research focus is on mobile applications for the Internet of Things. Before, he worked as self-employed Internet Technologist in Berlin and Vienna. He has more than ten years experience in software development and contributed to several IT startups and projects. Stephan Karpischek holds a diploma in Electronic Business from the University of Arts in Berlin and is currently a !PhD candidate at the Chair for Information Management at ETH Zurich.

Dr. Oliver Kasten

Oliver is a Senior Researcher at SAP Research (Switzerland) in Zurich. He received a Masters degree (Diplom) in computer science from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, and a Doctorate from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Oliver’s research interests include ubiquitous computing, wireless sensor networks, reactive systems programming, distributed systems, and communications middelware. Oliver is also responsible for the technical coordination of SAP's activities in the areas of data discovery, item-level traceability, as well as supply chain integrity and anti-counterfeiting of the EU-funded integrated project BRIDGE.

Dr. Vita Lanfranchi

Vita is a Senior Research Fellow at USFD. Her research field concerns Human Computer Interaction for Web Intelligence and the Semantic Web, with focus on Knowledge Management. She is currently the coordinator of the HCI and Application activity of the WIT Lab. She is co-investigator in the EU IP WeKnowIt, the technical manager of IPAS, an industrial project co-funded by DTI and Rolls-Royce plc concerning knowledge management for the aerospace industry and she has been responsible for the coordination of Sheffield activities in the knowledge sharing and reuse and application and testing areas of the integrated project IST X-Media.

Sonia Lippe

Sonia Lippe is a Project Manager at SAP Research and is responsible for the research labs in Switzerland. She holds a Master of Information Systems from the University of Muenster, Germany. She has previous experiences with the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, GAD eG in Muenster and T-Systems / German Telecom. She is involved in EU funded projects since 2003 and has been successfully managing EU projects since the 6th Framework Programme.

Sjir van Loo

Sjir van Loo is a Principal Systems Architect at Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. He received his M.Sc. degree in Applied Physics from the University of Technology in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in 1974. Sjir has been working as software and systems architect for over 30 years, both in industry as well as research, and was involved in the design and realization of many industrial and research systems, in the professional as well as in the consumer domain. These systems include Distributed Real-time Operating systems, MRI scanners, Video-on-Demand servers, mobile phones, digital set-top boxes and TV-sets. Sjir joined Philips in 1985 and Philips Research in 1993. In his current position at Philips Research he works on functionally complex systems, incorporating sensor-technology and reasoning. In 2005 Sjir was a part-time associate professor Embedded Systems Architecting at Fontys University for Professional Education in Eindhoven. In that year he also joined the Embedded Systems Institute (ESI) in Eindhoven as a part-time Senior Research Fellow, researching systems architecture and modelling for complex embedded systems. Sjir was a co-founder of the Philips Research Systems Architecting training programme, and also the manager of the programme from 1997 until 2008. He gives regular lectures on systems architecting and design, among others in the ESI systems architecting competency development program.

Vanessa Lopez

Vanessa Lopez is a research associate and a part time phd student at the Knowledge Media Institute (Open University) since 2003, where she has been working on the Dot.Kom, AKT, Open Knowledge, XMedia and Smart-Products projects. Previously she worked for the European Space Agency's (ESA) IT department. She graduated at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) in computer engineering. During this period she collaborated with the Artificial Intelligence Lab (UPM), where she obtained her MSc with honors in 2002. Her research focuses on open large scale Natural Language systems to distributed repositories on Linked Data and the Semantic Web. Her work lead to several publications on high impact conferences and journals.

Miriam Fernandez

Dr Miriam Fernandez received her BS, MSc (first student of promotion) and PhD (cum laude European mention) from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain. Her research interests are focused on information retrieval and semantic web, and more specifically on how semantic technologies can help to enhance current keyword-based retrieval models. During her PhD she did internships in both academia (Knowledge Media Institute) and industry (Google Zurich) where she continued her research in semantic search and search quality, respectively. She has participated in several European projects (aceMedia, Mesh, Xmedia) and produced publications in top-level conference proceedings (ECIR, ESWC, WWW, ICSC) and journals (TKDE, TCSVT). She joined the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) in April 2009, as a Research Associate, where she is working on semantic search models and evaluation methodologies.

Jani Mäntyjärvi

Jani Mäntyjärvi is a chief research scientist and a research team leader in Context Aware Interaction and Services-knowledge center (lab) in VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, and adjunct associate professor on adaptive user interaction technologies at the University of Oulu, Department of Electrical and Information Engineering. He has received his Ph.D. in Information Processing from the University of Oulu in 2004. His research topics include mobile context aware computing, multimodal and adaptive interaction techniques, and information processing.

Julien Mascolo

Julien is a project manager in the Infomobility Business Line of CRF. His areas of work in FIAT include the optimisation of industrial processes (Manufacturing, Logistics, Product Development Process). In the framework of joint research project with IVECO, CNH and FIAT Group Automobiles he is also involved in the development of mobility and productivity services based on telematics. He coordinated several European research projects and was involved in many others in the area of Product Lifecycle Management, including the FP6 IP PROMISE (Product Lifecycle Management and Information Tracking using Smart Embedded Systems).

Peter Mayer

Peter Mayer is a Research Associate at the Institute of Technology Management at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland). In 2002, he received his diploma in Industrial Engineering & Business Administration from the University of Karlsruhe (Germany). Since then, he lead various consulting and research projects at different software and system integration firms with a focus on Supply Chain Management and Enterprise Interoperability. Recently, he participated in the EU-funded FP 6 projects ATHENA and GENESIS. His research interests are concerned with the business value of ICT in general and Ubiquitous Computing in particular.

Dr. Florian Michahelles

Dr. Florian Michahelles is a Project Manager and Associate Director of the Auto-ID Labs at ETH Zurich part of a joint industry-funded research initiative of MIT Cambridge, Cambridge university, ETH Zurich and University of St. Gallen and a number other renown research institutes in Asia focusing on standardization and new business applications of RFID technology. He obtained a M.Sc (Diplom-Informatiker) in computer science and psychology from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Germany in 2001. In spring 2000, Florian was also a Sloan Visiting Fellow at MIT Sloan School of Management where he focused his studies on entrepreneurship and management of innovation. During this time he also worked as an MIT E-Lab consultant. In 2004, he received his PhD from ETH Zurich for his research in participative design of wearable computing applications and the development of innovative business cases for ubiquitous computing. His research interests comprise RFID and sensor technologies in anti-counterfeiting, the design of an infrastructure of an internet of things for involving consumers, HCI aspects of consumer RFID systems, and the development of novel internet of things applications tailored towards consumers' needs. In recent years, Michahelles has published several papers in international journals (e.g. IEEE Pervasive Computing, Computer & Graphics) as well as at major conferences. More recently, Michahelles was also involved in the organization of the Internet of Things Conference 2008 held in Zurich, Switzerland. Michahelles has been working as a free-lance trainer for RFID technology for three years.

Markus Miche

Markus is a Research Associate at SAP Research CEC Zurich and a PhD Candidate at the department of Telecooperation at the University of Technology Darmstadt (Prof. Dr. Max Mühlhäuser). He holds a diploma degree in Information Management (with distinction) from the University of Technology Darmstadt with a focus on software engineering and supply chain management. Markus gained professional experience working for Robert Bosch GmbH within a one year project organized by the University of Technology Darmstadt as well as within diverse projects he worked on as a freelancer. He wrote his diploma thesis at SAP Research CEC St. Gallen and developed an evaluation framework, which facilitates the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of software architectures. Markus is involved in the European research projects FP7 IP SmartProducts, FP7 STREP PRE-DRIVE C2X, and the harmonization and standardization initiative COMeSafety. His research interests include optimistic distributed storage algorithms plus P2P-based content distribution and mobility concepts for resource-constraint devices, architectures for cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), thereby focusing on Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications and Vehicle-to-Business (V2B) integration, as well as the Internet of Things.

Prof. Enrico Motta

Prof. Motta is a Full Professor in Knowledge Technologies at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) at the Open University in the UK. Prof. Motta has a first Degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa in Italy and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Open University. His current research focuses primarily on the integration of semantic, web and language technologies to support knowledge acquisition and management and problem solving. Over the years, Prof. Motta has led KMi’s contribution to numerous high-profile projects, such as the highly prestigious, EPSRC-funded Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration on Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT). He has also led The Open University’s contribution to several EU-funded projects, such as Dot.Kom and Knowledge Web, a FP6 Network of Excellence. Currently he is involved in the NeOn, OpenKnowledge and XMedia EU projects. He is Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Human Computer Studies and also sits on the editorial board of IEEE Intelligent Systems and the Journal of Web Semantics. Prof Motta is also the founder of the European Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web, which is now in its fifth edition. He has published more than 180 papers and a book, Reusable Components for Knowledge Modelling, published by IOS Press. Prof. Motta chaired the 14th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2004), he was the Programme Chair of the 4th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2005) and will be the General Chair of the next ISWC conference in 2009.

Prof. Dr. Max Mühlhäuser

Prof. Max Mühlhäuser is a Full Professor of Computer Science at Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. He received his Doctorate in Informatics from the University of Karlsruhe and founded a research centre for Digital Equipment. Since 1989, he worked as either a professor or visiting professor at Universities in Germany, Austria, France, Canada, and the US. Max published over 200 articles and co-authored and edited books about eLearning, distributed and multimedia software engineering, and ubiquitous computing.

Andriy Nikolov

Andriy Nikolov is a Research Associate at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) of the Open University, UK. He holds a Master's Degree in Artificial Intelligence from the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. In 2005-2009 he studied at KMi as a PhD student focusing on the topic of Semantic Web data fusion. His work was carried out in the context of the X-Media project.

Daniel Schreiber

Daniel Schreiber is a Research Associate at Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. He holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and his research interests range from mobile devices to multi-level programming. Daniel is currently working towards his Doctorate in Informatics writing a thesis about Proactive User interfaces.

Marcus Ständer

Marcus Ständer is a Research Associate at Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. He holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and his research interests range from data format structures to user interface theory. Marcus just finished his Masters thesis and now wants to work towards his Doctorate in Computer Science.

Frédéric Thiesse

Dr. Frédéric Thiesse is a 'Nachwuchsdozent' (equivalent to Assistant Professor)at ITEM-HSG. He holds a diploma degree in management information systems (Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Inf) from the University of Mannheim, Germany as well as a doctoral degree in business administration (Dr. oec.) with highest distinction from the University of St. Gallen. He worked as Research Assistant to Professor Hubert Österle at the Institute of Information Management at the University of St. Gallen from 1997 to 2000. From 2000 to 2003 he worked as the leader of software & methodology development at Intellion AG, a St. Gallen based technology start-up. Since September 2003, Dr. Thiesse has been project manager of the M-Lab, an industry-funded consortial project, and Associate Director of the Auto-ID Lab St. Gallen. Frédéric Thiesse is the author of 50+ academic papers in the areas of computer science, information systems, and operations research, which were published by leading international journals and presented at major conferences.

Andrew Tokmakoff

Andrew Tokmakoff is a Senior Research Scientist at Philips Research Laboratories, Europe. He has extensive experience in the areas of Mobile Services Platforms, MPEG-21 technologies and Systems Architecture, Design and Implementation. He graduated from the University of South Australia with a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Systems Engineering (with honours) in 1992. He holds a PhD. degree, from the University of South Australia, in the area of Formal Methods and Service Brokering in Distributed Systems, which he received in 1998. Andrew has been active in numerous European projects including IST FP6 Amigo, ITEA Trust4All and IST FP7 iNEM4U. Additionally, he has been active in a number of Dutch National projects within the GigaPort and Freeband research programmes, which operate in collaboration between industry and academia. He currently leads the Smart Networked Environments cluster within the Connected Consumer Solutions Group, located at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven. His current research interests the application of emerging networking and sensing technologies towards context-aware applications, and next-generation IPTV applications and standards.

Roberto Tola

Roberto has an academic background in Computer Science (Degree in 1997, Turin, Italy). He is a senior Researcher, with a wide experience in Knowledge Management: development of Knowledge based systems in the areas: Product Development Process, Resource Evaluation System for the management of CRF competencies and product engineering (development of a knowledge based system for the automatic configuration of the ideal bill of material in FIAT). He has participated in the following EC sponsored projects: CALIM, COSMOS, PEKING, PIKON, SeCSE , XMEDIA, SOFIA belonging to several areas and especially SW engineering, knowledge management and ambient intelligence. His current interest is mainly focused on the new technologies for the development of smart objects in the automotive field.

Victoria Uren

Victoria is a Senior Research Fellow at Sheffield University. Her research field concerns the use of structured information, particularly ontologies, in knowledge management. Her background is in information systems for scientific and technical data. She holds a PhD from th University of Portsmouth in the area of text categorization. She has worked on research projects such as X-Media, DotKom, AKT and ScholOnto.

Elena Vildjiounaite

Elena is research scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. Her research interests include adaptation of applications to users and contexts and machine learning.

Dirk Volland

Dirk is a Research Associate at SAP Research Zurich and a PhD candidate at the Institute of Technology Management at the University of St. Gallen (Prof. Dr. Elgar Fleisch). Dirk holds a diploma degree in Information Management from the Technical University of Darmstadt with a focus on project management and IT security. During his studies he gained professional experience working for Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Boerse as well as working as a consultant on IT projects on behalf of the student consultancy Campus Consult. He further studied at the Udayana University in Denpasar/Indonesia and the University of Technology in Helsinki/Finland, where he also worked as a research assistant. Dirk's research interests include servitization strategies, business models, user acceptance, and the economical aspects of the Internet of Things.

Ziqi Zhang

Ziqi is a Research Associate at USFD. His research field concerns Human Language related technologies with focus on Information Extraction and Knowledge Acquisition. He has worked on a number of Knowledge Acquisition related projects within the WIT group, and participated in the research and development of the technologies for Knowledge Acquisition.

Xiaoming Zhou

Xiaoming Zhou is a Senior Scientist at Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, the Netherlands. He holds a PhD in Telecommunications from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, in the area of Internet performance and analysis. He is working in the Connected Consumer Solutions group of Philips Research since January 2007. Xiaoming has been active in numerous European projects including IST FP7 iNEM4U. His current research interests are in the area of next-generation IPTV applications and standards, and smart kitchen lifestyle.