INVITED SPEAKERS

Jeffrey T. Pollock, Vice President, Technology, Network Inference

Mr. Pollock is a technology leader and author of "Adaptive Information: Improving Business Through Semantic Interoperability, Grid Computing, and Enterprise Integration." (John Wiley & Sons, 2004) As VP of Technology at Network Inference, Mr. Pollock is responsible for product strategy and envisioning next-generation adaptive enterprise software. Previously, as Chief Technology Officer of Modulant, he delivered one of the industry’s first market-ready semantic integration middleware platforms in 2001. Throughout his career, he has architected, designed, and built application server/middleware solutions for Fortune 500 and US Government clients. Prior to Modulant, Mr. Pollock was a Principal Engineer with Modem Media and Senior Architect with Ernst & Young’s Center for Technology Enablement. He is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences, author for industry journals, active member of W3C and OASIS, and engineering instructor with University of California at Berkeley’s Extension on the subjects of Object-Oriented systems, software development process and software systems architecture.

Invited Talk - How Business Users Leverage AI Every Day

Is this the second coming of Artificial Intelligence in business? Shhh, don’t tell anyone, but the momentum being driven by the W3C’s Semantic Web vision is paving the way for AI methodologies, systems, and applications to be adopted by businesses everywhere. This keynote presentation will examine implementations of Semantic Web applications during 2004 that have had dramatic impact on business operations. AI systems and applications that leverage data semantics in new ways for information retrieval, semantic interoperability, and knowledge portals are changing the way corporations work with and represent their data. Several use cases will be discussed that include architectural descriptions of known business software systems using AI technology at their core. Special attention will be given to how these systems are creating tangible business return on investment (ROI). As large corporations continue to flirt with AI in business they will become ever more focused on understanding how they impact the business bottom line and how average IT users can make the leap into these sometimes confusing technologies.

Darina Dicheva - Paul Fulton/Delta Sigma Theta Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Winston-Salem State University, USA.

Mrs Dicheva's research interests include Application of AI methods and tools in education, Intelligent tutoring systems and Web-based educational systems, Knowledge networks and management, Adaptive information retrieval and filtering, User modeling. She is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-long Learning (IJCEELL), the International Journal of Advanced Technology for Learning (ATL), and the IEEE Educational Technologies & Society Journal (ET&S), East-European section. Recently she acted as Co-chair of the Program Committee of the Workshop on Concepts and Ontologies in Web-based Educational Systems, December 2002, Auckland, New Zealand and Applications of Semantic Web Technologies for E-Learning, in conjunction with ITS 2004, Maceió, Brazil, and AH 2004, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

Invited Talk - Impact of the Semantic Web on E-Learning

The growing popularity of e-learning in both formal and informal education, including academic instruction, corporate training, and lifelong learning, escalates the importance of the issues of sharing, reuse, and exchange of online learning materials and achievement of semantic interoperability between different educational applications on the Web. Since e-learning problems are a projection of the global problems of effective creation, maintenance and retrieval of information on the Web, it is only natural to seek solutions of these problems by applying technologies associated with the emerging Semantic Web.

This invited presentation will address the challenges and opportunities of the Semantic Web for e-learning and will identify current and future directions of research in this area. I will discuss the use of ontologies in e-learning systems to support and improve various educational aspects, such as learning content authoring and retrieval, personalization and learner modeling, etc., the role of software agents (e.g. learner, instructor, content agents) to enhance e-learning processes, recent efforts for binding existing educational standards to Semantic Web standards, etc. The presented ideas will be illustrated with examples of e-learning systems and projects using or related to Semantic Web technologies. I will also discuss our research efforts in that direction, including an ongoing project on using Topic Maps to build efficient e-learning repositories