Prof. Dr. Andreas Dengel (Germany)

Prof. Dr. Andreas Dengel is a member of the Management Board as well as Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) in Kaiserslautern where he is leading the Knowledge Management research department. In 1993 he was appointed Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Kaiserslautern where he holds the chair “Knowledge-Based Systems”.

From 1980 to 1986 Prof. Dengel studied Computer Science and Economics at the University of Kaiserslautern. He subsequently worked at the Siemens research lab in Munich, at Xerox Parc in Palo Alto as well as at the University of Stuttgart where he completed his doctoral thesis in 1989. Since 2008 he is a member of the Institute for Document Analysis and Knowledge Science "IDAKS" at the Osaka Prefecture University in Japan.

In 2006 Prof. Dengel was appointed a member of the task force for "service and customer oriented IT" to counsel the German Federal Government on questions in the field of Information Technologies. Prof. Dengel is also member of the Advisory Board at the Center of Excellence on Semantic Technologies at MIMOS, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. From 2005 to 2007 he was a member and German representative in the ICT Prize Executive Jury of theEuropean Council of Applied Science (Euro-CASE). He also acts as a Reviewer for the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) as well as for the Dutch Research Council (NOW). He is a member of the advisory boards of the Intl. Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) and the Intl. Conference on Knowledge, Science, Engineering and Management (KSEM). He has also been appointed to the Center of Excellence for Leadership and Learning(CELL) and he is a member of the board of INTERIM2000. From 2003 to 2005 he was a lecturer of the Joint Executive MBA course at the Johannes Gutenberg University at Mainz, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics at Dalian, China. From 1997 to 2001 Prof. Dengel was a member of the METTREC Planning Committee (Metadata/Text Retrieval Conference Committee) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the USA. He was program/technical chair of ICPR, ICDAR, DAS, and KM conferences. Prof. Dengel is founder or initiator of several successful start-up companies. He is co-editor of various international computer science journals and has written or edited 8 books and is author of more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications. He supervised more than 100 PhD and master theses.

In 2004, Andreas Dengel has been elected a Fellow of theInternational Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and has been honoured for his work several times. Most prominent prizes are the “Young Investigator Award” of the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), the Technical Communication Award of the Alcatel SEL foundation, the Multi-Media Award of the State Rheinland-Pfalz as well as a Document Analysis Systems Achievement Award. His main scientific emphasis is in the areas of Knowledge Management, Artificial Intelligence, and Document Understanding.

Prof. Paolo Traverso (Italy)

Paolo Traverso is Director of the Center for Information Technology - IRST at FBK, a center of about 200 researchers and developers working on engineering, content, and interaction.

His main research interests are in Software and Services, Artificial Intelligence, and the Automated Verification and Synthesis of software systems. He contributed to research in automated planning with a novel technique called "planning as model checking", which is now the basis for his work on supporting the automated composition and run-time monitoring of service oriented applications.

He was Program Chair of the International Conference on Automated Planning (ICAPS) and Area Chair for Planning and Control of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) in 2002, General and Program Chair of the International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC) in 2004 and 2005, Program Chair of the 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, Applications (AIMSA), Area Chair for Distributed Systems of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) in 2008, Program Chair of the First Future Internet Symposium (FIS 2008) in 2008, Program Chair of the 6th European Semantic Web Conference. In 2005, he was nominated ECCAI fellow "for pioneering work in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and outstanding service to the AI community".

Paolo Traverso has been involved and has been leading several research and industrial projects in the sector of safety critical systems and embedded controllers. In the area of Software and Services, he has been scientific coordinator of a rather large national basic research (FIRB) project - "Knowledge Level Automated Software engineering" (KLASE), he is responsible at FBK for the VII Framework European Project "Empowering the Service Economy with Service Level Agreements - aware Infrastructures" (SLA@SOI), and he is involved in the European Network of Excellence on Software, Systems and Services (S-Cube), and in the Future Emerging Technologies (FET) European Project on "Adaptable Pervasive Flows" (ALLOW).

He has been in the Editorial Board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), of the Journal of Applied Logic (JAL), of the International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems (IJCIS), and of the Electronic Transaction in Artificial Intelligence (ETAI). He is a member of the Steering Committee of the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing, a member of the Executive Council of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), a member of the Board of Directors of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA), and a Member of the European Coordinating Committee in Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI).

Prof. Klaus Tochtermann (Austria)

Prof. Klaus Tochtermann studied Computer Science with Medicine as subsidiary at the Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel (Germany) and at Dortmund University (Germany). He earned his diploma degree in 1991 from Dortmund University. Prof. Tochtermann wrote his doctoral thesis in the field of formal models for hypermedia and Internet-based services and passed his Dr. degree in 1995. In 2002 he passed post-doctoral thesis (habilitation) entitled “Personalisation in the Context of Digital Libraries and Knowledge Management”.

From 1991 to 1996 Klaus Tochtermann worked as a scientist at the Chair of Informatics 1 at the University of Dortmund. In 1996 he received a scholarship of the Max-Kade Foundation, Inc. USA and spent his post-doc at the Center for the Studies of Digital Libraries at the A&M University in Texas (USA). During this time he conducted studies in the field of digital libraries and Internet-based applications and services for digital libraries.

In 1997 he was deputy head of the department for Environmental Information Systems at the, FAW Ulm (Germany). The FAW was an industry research institute with a strong focus on knowledge management and knowledge technologies. FAW was funded by several industry partners including DaimlerChrysler, IBM, BMW, Bosch, Baan etc. Since 1998 he has been the head of the department for Environmental Information Systems at the institute mentioned above.

Since October 2000, Prof. Tochtermann has been the director of Austria’s first industry-based research institute on knowledge management Know-Center (www.know-center.at). The objective of this institute is to conduct pre-competitive research and development for the IT-based industry partners of the Know-Center. The work of the Know-Center includes projects on knowledge management, knowledge relationship discovery, semantic technologies, workplace-integrated learning, Web2.0. Since 2004 Klaus Tochtermann has also been head of the institute for knowledge management at Graz University of Technology and since 2007 Klaus Tochtermann has been director of the Institute for Networked Media at Joanneum Research.

Prof. Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer (Malaysia)

Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, UNIMAS. He has been working in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge-based systems for the past twenty years. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Graz University of Technology and currently has over 60 refereed publications in related areas.

Dr. Edmund Ng (Malaysia)

Dr. Edmund Ng Giap Weng is currently a lecturer at the Faculty of Cognitive Sciences and Human Development, University Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS). His research interest is in the area of Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Intelligent Interactive Systems. He also has a research interest in the Usability Engineering: Human Computer Interaction, Human Factors in Information Systems, and the Use of Visual Science & Artificial Intelligence to enhance trainer capability, and is overall interested in the social, organizational and technology implications of ICT deployment in organizations.

Currently, he is involved in a number of research projects, such as Intelligent Augmented Reality Finger Tracking System; Knowledge-Based Augmented Reality for Education, Training, Games and etc. He has published novel results in local and international conferences and seminars, and has published intensively in local and international journals in his field of interest.