Invited SPEAKERS
Prof. Norman Foo (Australia)
Prof Norman is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He is also a visiting Professor University of Bath, UK and the Honorary Research Scientist, National ICT Australia. He obtained his Bachelor and Master of Engineering at Unversity of Canterbury at 1964 and 1966. Then, he had his PhD from University of Michigan in 1974. He was employed by Telecom Malaysia from 1966 to 1969 and then moved to State University of New York from 1974 to 1975. He spent about twenty years at University of Sydney from 1975. From 1996 to 2006, he was with University of New South Wales.
Prof. Dr. Horst Bunke (Switzerland)
Horst Bunke received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Erlangen, Germany. In 1984, he joined the University of Bern, Switzerland, where he is a professor in the Computer Science Department. He was Department Chairman from 1992 -1996, Dean of the Faculty of Science from 1997 to 1998, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Science from 2001 to 2003. From 1998 to 2000 Horst Bunke served as 1st Vice-President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). In 2000 he also was Acting President of this organization.
Horst Bunke is a Fellow of the IAPR, former Editor-in-Charge of the International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Electronic Letters of Computer Vision and Image Analysis, Editor-in-Chief of the book series on Machine Perception and Artificial Intelligence by World Scientific Publ. Co., Advisory Editor of Pattern Recognition, Associate Editor of Acta Cybernetica and Frontiers of Computer Science in China, and Former Associate Editor of the International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition, and Pattern Analysis and Applications.
Horst Bunke received an honorary doctor degree from the University of Szeged, Hungary, and held visiting positions at the IBM Los Angeles Scientific Center (1989), the University of Szeged, Hungary (1991), the University of South Florida at Tampa (1991, 1996, 1998-2007), the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (1994), Kagawa University, Takamatsu, Japan (1995), Curtin University, Perth, Australia (1999), and Australian National University, Canberra (2005).
He served as a co-chair of the 4th Int. Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition held in Ulm, Germany, 1997 and as a Track Co-Chair of the 16th and 17th Int. Conference on Pattern Recognition held in Quebec City, Canada and Cambridge, UK in 2002 and 2004, respectively. Also he was chairman of the IAPR TC2 Workshop on Syntactic and Structural Pattern Recognition held in Bern 1992, a co-chair of the 7th IAPR Workshop on Document Analysis Systems held in Nelson, NZ, 2006, a co-chair of the 10th Int. Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, held in La Baule, France, 2006, and a program co-chair of the 11th Int. Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition held in Montreal, Canada, 2008.
Horst Bunke was on the program and organization committee of many other conferences and served as a referee for numerous journals and scientific organizations. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). Horst Bunke has more than 600 publications, including 40 authored, co-authored, edited or coedited books and special editions of journalsDr. Sheng-Chuan Wu (USA)
Dr. Sheng-Chuan Wu received a Ph.D. degree in Structural Mechanics and Computer Graphics from Cornell University in the U.S. He is currently the Vice President of Corporate Development at Franz Inc. (Franz is a leading technology and tool provider for AI and Semantic Web, located in Silicon Valley). He has managed and consulted on many Semantic Technology projects in the US, China, Korea, India and Malaysia, and has routinely lectured on AI, RAD software development and Semantic Technology at conferences and workshops. Previously, Dr. Sheng-Chuan was the Vice President of Marketing and Customer Support at ATP, an integrated CAD/CAM/CAE software company in the US.
Prof. John Sowa (USA)
John F. Sowa spent thirty years working on research and development projects at IBM and is a cofounder of VivoMind Intelligence, Inc. With his colleagues at VivoMind, he has been developing novel methods for using logic and ontology in systems for knowledge representation, natural language understanding, and logical and analogical reasoning.
Dr. Sowa has worked with ISO standards committees, and the language of conceptual graphs, which he designed, has been adopted as one of the three dialects of the ISO/IEC 24707 standard for Common Logic. He has a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from MIT, a Master's in applied mathematics from Harvard, and a PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and he has published several books and numerous articles on artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and related areas of cognitive science.Eric Tsui (Hong Kong)
Eric Tsui joined Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) in 1989 after years of academic research in automated knowledge acquisition, natural language processing, case-based reasoning and knowledge engineering tools. His research was supported by grants and scholarships from Arthur Young, Rank Xerox, CSC, Graphic Directions, and the Australian Research Council. He was also a gratis visitor to Microsoft Research in February, 2000.
Between August 2000 and January 2005, he had assumed the roles of Chief Research Officer, Asia Pacific for CSC as well as Innovation Manager at Australian Mutual Provident (AMP) and Maybank, two strategic outsourcing accounts at CSC in Asia Pacific region. Eric was responsible for strategic research, knowledge brokering (between CSC and the clients), innovation management and university-industry collaborations. During his tenure at CSC, he had made significant contributions to CSC’s expert systems products, applied research and innovation programmes.
In his academic capacities, Eric has designed and delivered KM, AI, BPR, Portal, and MIS courses at the University of Sydney, University of Technology, Sydney, University of New South Wales, RMIT University, University of Kentucky, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and City University of Hong Kong. He is the program leader of Asia’s only master degree in Knowledge Management which is delivered in an online blended learning environment. He has B.Sc. (Hons.), PhD and MBA qualifications.
Prof. Abdul Sattar (Australia)
Professor Abdul Sattar is the founding Director of the Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems and a Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Griffith University. He is also a Research Leader at National ICT Australia (NICTA) Queensland Research Lab (QRL) where he held the position of QRL Education Director, the leader of the SAFE Agents project (July 2005-June 2008), and currently leading the QRL node of the NICTA's largest project, Advance Technologies for Optimisation and Modelling In Constraints (ATOMIC). He has been an academic staff member at Griffith University since February 1992 as a lecturer (1992-95), senior lecturer (1996-99), and professor (2000-present) within the School of Information and Communication Technology. Prior to his career at Griffith University, he was a lecturer in Physics in Rajasthan, India (1980-82), research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India (1982-85), the University of Waterloo, Canada (1985-87), and the University of Alberta, Canada (1987-1991).
He has won several awards starting from the national scholarships during his studies in India (1974-79), a Commonwealth scholarship in Canada (1985-1990), to a number of research grants. The main grants include 7 ARC Large/Discovery grants (worth approximately $1.5M). He has published over 120 refereed papers in international journals and conferences, a large number of these papers appeared in A* and A category conferences and journals. His research team has won 3 international awards in recent years including IJCAI 2007 Distinguished Paper award, Gold Medals in the 2005 and 2007 SAT solver competitions, and one his PhD students won a first prize in the 2008 ICAPS planning competition. He has supervised successful completion of 12 PhD students as a principal supervisor.
Prof Henry Lieberman (U.S.A.)
Prof Henry Lieberman has been a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory since 1987. His interests are in the intersection of artificial intelligence and the human interface. He directs the Software Agents group, which is concerned with making intelligent software that provides assistance to users in interactive interfaces.
Many of his current projects revolve around applying Common Sense Reasoning to interactive interfaces. He is using a large knowledge base of Commonsense facts about everyday life to streamline interfaces, provide intelligent defaults, and proactive help. Application areas include predictive typing, multilingual communication, management of photo and media libraries, product recommendation and e-commerce tools.
He has edited or co-edited three books, including End-User Development (Springer, 2006), Spinning the Semantic Web (MIT Press, 2004), and Your Wish is My Command: Programming by Example (Morgan Kaufmann, 2001).
He had also worked with graphic designer Muriel Cooper on tools for visual thinking, and new graphic metaphors for information visualization and navigation. He holds a strong interest in making programming easier for non-expert users. He is a pioneer of the the technique of Programming by Example, where a user demonstrates examples, which are recorded and generalized using techniques from machine learning. He has also worked on reversible debuggers, 3D programming, and natural language programming.
He was also in the group with Seymour Papert that originally developed the educational language Logo, and wrote the first bitmap and color graphics systems for Logo. He also worked with Carl Hewitt on actors, an early object-oriented, parallel language, and developed the notion of prototype object systems and the first real-time garbage collection algorithm. He holds a doctoral-equivalent degree (Habilitation) from the University of Paris VI and was a Visiting Professor there in 1989-90.