Elena Demidova

University of Southampton

Dr. Elena Demidova is a Senior Research Fellow at the Web and Internet Science (WAIS) Group, Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), University of Southampton, UK. In the past, Elena worked as a researcher, post-doctoral researcher, and a project manager at the L3S Research Center in Hannover, Germany. Elena received her Ph.D. degree from the Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany, in 2013 and her M.Sc. from the Universität Osnabrück (Germany) and the University of Twente (The Netherlands) in 2006. Elena has been involved in the leading roles in several EU projects including most recently WDAqua ITN, ALEXANDRIA, FP7 IP ARCOMEM and KEYSTONE COST Action. Her work has been published throughout major conferences and journals, including ACM SIGIR, ACM CIKM, and IEEE TKDE, and she has been a reviewer and committee member for numerous scientific events and publications, most recently including the roles of PC member for ESWC 2016, ESWC 2015 and CIKM 2013 and guest editor for IJSWIS. Elena's main research interests are in multilingual data analytics, Open Data and Web archives.

John Domingue

KMi, The Open University and STI International

Prof John Domingue is the Director of the Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University and the President of STI International, a semantics focused networking organization. He has published over 200 refereed articles in the areas of Semantics and the Web and his current work is focused on: how semantic technology can automate the management, development and use of Web services; the relationship between Linked Data, rich media, the Future Internet and education; and supporting personal wellbeing and health through wearable sensors and semantic technologies.

He currently serves as: the OU representative to W3C; the Chair of the Steering Committee for the ESWC Conference Series and the Project Coordinator for two European projects (FORGE within the Future Internet Research and Experimentation Unit and the European Data Science Academy within the Big Data Value Unit). From 2008-2012 he served as a member of the Future Internet Assembly Steering Committee which helped coordinate the activities of over 150 EU projects with a combined budget of over 500M Euros. He is the founder and Director of the ESWC Summer School and serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Web Semantics and the Applied Ontology Journal.

Blaž Fortuna

Jozef Stefan Institute

Blaž Fortuna is a senior research assistant at JSI in the area of text and stream analytics, statistical learning and semantic technologies. In the recent years he had publications at international conferences on the topic of news personalization, text and web analytics, cross-lingual information retrieval and classification and ontology learning. He is the major contributer to QMiner data analytics platform for processing of large-scale real-time streams containing structured and unstructured data, OntoGen system for ontology learning and Document Atlas text visualization tool.

Marko Grobelnik

Jozef Stefan Institute

Marko Grobelnik expertise is the areas of “data science” including Machine Learning, Data/Text Mining, Network Analysis, Semantic Technologies, and Data Visualization. He works at “Jozef Stefan Institute”, the national research institute for natural sciences in Slovenia co-managing a group of approx. 30 researchers. Marko co-authored several books, co-founded five start-ups, is W3C AC representative and member of the boards for ELRA and STI. Currently he coordinates FP7 project X-LIKE on large scale formal knowledge extraction from text.

Carlos Pedrinaci

Knowledge Media institute

Dr. Carlos Pedrinaci is a Senior Research Fellow of the Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University. He holds an MSc in Computer Science and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of the Basque Country (Spain). His research interests include Data Science, Service Science, the Internet of Things, and the Semantic Web. Over the years Carlos has participated in many European Research projects exploiting semantic and service technologies for data integration and analysis in highly distributed systems. More recently Carlos served as Scientific Director for the European project COMPOSE devising a Big Data infrastructure for supporting large-scale heterogeneous Internet of Things applications. Dr. Pedrinaci has published over 90 papers in major conferences and international journals and has co-organized a number of conferences, workshops, and summer schools including notably ESWC, ISWC, Web Science, as well as the European summer school on Service and Software Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering (SSAIE) where he has served as member of the steering committee and tutor.

Chris Phethean

University of Southampton

Dr. Chris Phethean is a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, in the Web and Internet Science (WAIS) research group. He gained his PhD in Web Science, also from Southampton, in 2015 with his research examining the potential value of social media organisations for charities. His current research interests include online community analysis, particular around food and cuisine communities on the Web. Chris works on the European Data Science Academy project, primarily on the development of data science curricula and the design and delivery of data science courseware. He also teaches the Foundations of Data Science and Data Visualisation modules on Southampton's Data Science MSc course.

Jan Rupnik

Jozef Stefan Institute

Jan Rupnik is a researcher at JSI. He received his BSc in Applied Mathematics at University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics and will defend his PhD thesis at Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School in June 2016. His main research area is machine learning, specifically on statistical methods for cross-modal data analysis, sensor mining and anomaly detection. He worked on several academic and industrial research projects on the problems of: vehicle traffic analysis, cross-lingual text analysis, predictive analytics of energy consumption, and mining machine logs.

Elena Simperl

University of Southampton

Dr. Elena Simperl is Associate Professor at the Web and Internet Science (WAIS) group at the University of Southampton. Her research interests include knowledge engineering, Social Web technologies, and crowdsourcing. She has contributed and lead over 15 national and European research projects and authored more than 75 scientific publications, and chaired the European Semantic Web Conference in 2011 and 2012. Elena initiated several activities targeted at the supervision and guidance of doctoral students and young researchers such as the PhD Network Berlin Brandenburg, and the Knowledge Web PhD Symposium series organized at the European Semantic Web Conference ESWC since 2006. Further educational activities include the lecture of Master and Bachelor courses at the Free University of Berlin, University of Innsbruck, and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the founding and organization of the ESWC summer school; the Asian Semantic Web School; the IEEE Summer School on Semantic Computing; and the Semantic Web Services Winter Retreat; as well as the management of the education service within Semantic Technologies Institute International (STI), an association bringing together major players in the fields of semantic technologies, and co-founder of semsphere GmbH, a professional training company in the same area.

Allan Third

Knowledge Media institute

Dr. Allan Third is a Research Associate in the Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University. His research specialisation is in ontologies and semantics, particularly with regard to natural language semantics and generation, and with a focus on healthcare and geographic domains. He has contributed to several European projects, including VPH Share – developing semantic web services for health research – and CARRE – using wearable fitness trackers and semantic representations of medical knowledge to aid patients with chronic conditions. From 2008-2009 he worked on the Cancer Research UK-funded COSSAC project at the University of Oxford, heavily involved in a major overhaul of the TALLIS clinical decision support software, during which time he developed a novel theory of the semantics of vagueness based on argumentation logic. Since 2010, he was a key member of the EPSRC-funded SWAT (Semantic Web Authoring Tool) project, which has given him valuable experience in ontology verbalisation (generating controlled English text from Web ontology language (OWL)) and authoring. He has published in top conferences (including COLING, INLG and ISWC) and journals (e.g., the Notre-Dame Journal of Formal Logic), and edited a special issue of the journal Synthese

Claudia Wagner

GESIS

Claudia Wagner is postdoctoral researcher at GESIS – the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (Germany) since October 2013. Starting in April 2016 she will be an assistant professor at University Koblenz-Landau and head of the Data Science team at GESIS. From 2007-2013 she worked as a research assistant at JOANNEUM RESEARCH in Graz (Austria) and conducted several international research internships, amongst others at the Social Computation Group at HP labs (CA, US), The Augmented Social Cognition Group at Xerox PARC (CA, US) and the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University (UK). She received her master degree in Computer Science from Graz University of Technology in 2009 and was awarded with a DOC-fFORTE fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Science for her PhD research on the structure, semantics and usage of social streams in 2011. Claudia is frequently serving in program committees for international conferences and journals about social computation, semantic technologies and user behavior analytics.