Koblenz, Germany, 23.-28. August 2009
 

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Karlheinz Brandenburg
IDMT Fraunhofer, Germany


Karlheinz Brandenburg has contributed to the audio compression format MPEG Audio Layer 3, more commonly known as MP3.
He received a Dipl. Ing. degree from Erlangen University in Electrical Engineering (1980) as well as a Dipl. Math. degree in Mathematics (1982). In 1989 he obtained his Ph.D. from the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg in Electrical Engineering for his work on digital audio coding and perceptual measurement techniques. The research results of his dissertation are the basis of MPEG-1 Layer 3 (mp3), MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) and most other modern audio compression schemes. From 1989 to 1990 he worked with AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, U.S. on ASPEC and MPEG-1 Layer 3. In 1990, he returned to the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and, in 1993, he became head of the Audio/Multimedia department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen. Since 2000, he is full professor at the Institute for Media Technology at Technical University of Ilmenau. In addition, he is the director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Ilmenau. Brandenburg is a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) and head of the AES Standards Committee working group SC-06-04 Internet Audio Delivery Systems. He has been granted 27 US patents as a co-inventor; all patents have multiple inventors. from: Wikipedia

Prof. Dr. Fabio Ciravegna
The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom


Fabio is Full Professor of Language and Knowledge Technologies at the University of Sheffield where 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 has considerable engagement with industry and user communities with projects funded by Rolls Royce, Kodak Eastman, Lycos, and the Environment Agency. 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

Prof. Dr. Lynda Hardman
CWI, The Netherlands


Lynda Hardman is the head of the Interactive Information Access research group at the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her research interests include the automatic generation of user-tailored hypermedia presentations (K-Space NoE and MultimediaN/E-Culture) and document models for hypermedia and synchronized multimedia on the Web (SMIL). She is part-time professor of multimedia interaction at the University of Amsterdam, in the Human Computer Studies group of the Informatics Institute. She co-edited a special issue of the Multimedia Systems Journal on the canonical processes of media production. She was co-programme chair for SAMT 2008. She's currently co-editing a special issue for IEEE Intelligent Systems on AI and Cultural Heritage. Steven Pemberton and Lynda co-edited a special issue of ERCIM News on The Future Web. She is a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Web Semantics and the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. She runs the Interaction Design for the Semantic Web module of User System Interaction at the TU/e.

Prof. Dr. Andreas Hotho
University of Kassel, Germany


Andreas Hotho holds a Ph.D. from the University of Karlsruhe, where he worked from 1999 to 2004 at the Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB) in the areas of text, data, and web mining, semantic web and information retrieval. He earned his Master's Degree in information systems from the University of Braunschweig (Germany) in 1998. Since 2004 he is a senior researcher at the University of Kassel where he leads the development of the social bookmark and publication sharing tool BibSonomy. His research focus is on the combination of machine learning/data mining and semantic web - called semantic web mining - and on the analysis of the emerging structures in social bookmarking systems.

He was involved in organizing several workshops in conjunction with machine learning conferences (ECML/PKDD, KDD and ICDM) as well as with semantic web conferences, with topics related to semantic web mining and web 2.0 mining. He co-chaired the working group "Ubiquitous Data Types" of the EU Coordination Action "KDubiq - Knowledge Discovery in Ubiquitous Environments".

Dr. Yiannis Kompatsiaris
ITI, Greece


Dr. Yiannis Kompatsiaris, received the Diploma degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in 3-D model based image sequence coding from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), Thessaloniki, Greece in 1996 and 2001, respectively. He is a Senior Researcher with the Informatics and Telematics Institute, Thessaloniki and currently he is leading the Multimedia Knowledge Laboratory. His research interests include semantic multimedia analysis, social media analysis, multimedia and the Semantic Web, multimedia ontologies, knowledge-based analysis, context aware inference for semantic multimedia analysis, personalization and retrieval. He is the coauthor of 10 book chapters, 30 papers in refereed journals and more than 90 papers in international conferences. He has served as a regular reviewer for a number of international journals and conferences. He is a member of IEEE, ACM and IEE.

Prof. Dr. Andreas Nürnberger
University Magdeburg, Germany


Prof. Dr. Andreas Nürnberger studied computer science and economics at the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany where he graduated in 1996. After he received his Ph.D. in computer science from the Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg in 2001 he moved to the University of California at Berkeley, USA where he worked in a joined research project with BTexact Technologies, UK on adaptive soft computing and visualisation techniques for information retrieval systems. In 2003 he had been called to the chair of a Professor (Juniorprofessor) for Information Retrieval at the University of Magdeburg and headed the research group on adaptive information retrieval systems. In October 2007 he was called to a Chair of a tenured professor for 'Data and Knowledge Engineering' at the same university.

Andreas Nürnberger is involved in the organisation of several information retrieval and data mining related conferences and workshops, is regular reviewer for major journals and conferences in this field and is author and editor of seven books and more than 100 reviewed publications in books, journals and international conferences. He was and is actively participating in several EU projects (EUFIT, EUNITE, NiSIS, BISON) and was initiator and activity responsible of several EU project task forces. He is an Emmy Noether Fellow of the German Science Foundation (DFG).

Prof. Dr. Noel E. O'Connor
Dublin City University, Ireland


Prof. Noel E.O'Connor is an Associate Professor in the School of Electronic Engineering at Dublin City University and a Principal Investigator (PI) in CLARITY: The Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, an Irish national research centre that focuses on the intersection between two Adaptive Sensing and Information Discovery. His research is focused on multi-modal analysis for knowledge extraction from a variety of sensor data sources. His research is funded under Science Foundation Ireland and Enterprise Ireland national programmes, EU framework projects and industry contracts. Since July 2000, he has generated over € 7.9M in funding, edited 3 books of proceedings and published over 140 peer-reviewed papers in journals and conferences. He is a reviewer for Signal Processing: Image Communication, IEEE Trans. on Circuits Systems and Video Technology, IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision and Image Understanding.

Dr. Ansgar Scherp
University Koblenz-Landau, Germany


Ansgar Scherp studied computer science at the University of Oldenburg in Germany and received his degree in 2001. He worked at the OFFIS research institute in Oldenburg from 2001-2006 and received his doctoral degree with distinction in August 2006. He spent a one-year research stay at UC Irvine, USA in the frame of a Marie Curie Outgoing International Fellowship granted by the EU in 2006-2007. In May 2008, he joined the University of Koblenz, working on the WeKnowIt project and leading the work package on organizational intelligence. In the context of this work, Mr. Scherp is developing a common event model based on a foundational ontology. He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed scientific papers and won the best paper award at the Multi-media Modeling Conference in Melbourne, Australia in 2005.

Prof. Dr. Steffen Staab
University Koblenz-Landau, Germany

Steffen Staab is associate professor for databases and information systems at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, leading the research group on Information Systems and Semantic Web (ISWeb). His interests lie in researching core technology for ontologies and semantic web as well as in applied research for exploiting these technologies for knowledge management, multimedia and software technology. He has participated in numerous national, European and intercontinental research projects on these different subjects and his research has led to over 100 refereed contributions in journals and conferences. Dr. Staab held positions as researcher, project leader and lecturer at the University of Freiburg, the University of Stuttgart/Fraunhofer Institute IAO, and the University of Karlsruhe and he is a co-founder of Ontoprise GmbH.

Dr. Marcel Worring
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands


Marcel Worring received the MSc degree (honors) and PhD degree, both in computer science, from the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 1988 and the University of Amsterdam in 1993, respectively. He is currently an associate professor in the Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam of the University of Amsterdam. His interests are in multimedia search and systems. With the MediaMill team he has been developing techniques for semantic video indexing as well as systems for interactively searching large video archives which have been successful over the last years in the TRECVID benchmark, the de-facto standard on the topic. The methodologies developed are now being applied to visual search in broadcast archives as well as in the field of Forensic Intelligence in particular for fighting child abuse and surveillance. He has published over 100 scientific papers covering a broad range of topics from low-level image and video analysis up to applied papers in interactive search. He serves on the program committee of the major conferences in the field. He was the chair of the IAPR TC12 on Multimedia and Visual Information Systems and general co-chair of the 2007 ACM International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval in Amsterdam and co-organizer of the first and second VideOlympics, a real-time evaluation of video retrieval systems. He is associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and of the Pattern Analysis and Applications journal.