Keynote Speakers

Frank van Harmelen

Frank van Harmelen

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
(NL)
Short Bio

Frank van Harmelen is professor in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning at the VU University Amsterdam. He has been involved in the Semantic Web research programme since it’s inception in the late ’90s. He is one of the co-designers of the W3C ontology representation language OWL, and was involved in the design of Sesame, one of the most widely used RDF repositories world wide. He is co-author of the Semantic Web Primer, the first textbook on Semantic Web technologies, now translated into 5 languages. He was scientific director of the Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC), which aimed to build a platform for very large scale distributed reasoning. Besides research into the fundamental questions such as inconsistency, scalability, heterogeneity, and dynamicity, he is also involved in a wide variety of applications of semantic technologies, among others in medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, scientific publishing and e-science. His work on the Sesame triplestore received the 2012 “ISWC 10 year impact award”. He was elected as member of the European Academy of Science in 2014 and of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences in 2017.

Juan Sequeda

data.world
(US)
Short Bio

Juan Sequeda is the Principal Scientist at data.world. He joined through the acquisition of Capsenta, a company he founded as a spin-off from his PhD research in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin. His goal is to reliably create knowledge from inscrutable data. His research and industry work has been on designing and building Knowledge Graph for enterprise data and metadata management.

Juan has researched and developed technology on semantic data virtualization, graph data modeling, schema mapping and data integration methodologies. He pioneered technology to construct knowledge graphs from relational databases, resulting in W3C standards, research awards, patents, software and his startup Capsenta acquired by data.world in 2019. Juan strives to build bridges between academia and industry as former co-chair of the LDBC Property Graph Schema Working Group, member of the LDCB Graph Query Languages task force, standards editor at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and organizing committees of scientific conferences, including being the general chair of The Web Conference 2023. Juan is the co-author of the book “Designing and Building Enterprise Knowledge Graph” and the co-host of Catalog and Cocktails, an honest, no-bs, non-salesy data podcast.

Luc Steels

Luc Steels

Barcelona Supercomputing Center
(ES)
Short Bio

Luc Steels studied linguistics at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA). His main research field is Artificial Intelligence covering a wide range of intelligent abilities, including vision, robotic behavior, conceptual representations and language. In 1983 he became a professor of computer science at the University of Brussels (VUB). He has been co-founder and chairman (from 1990 until 1995) of the VUB Computer Science Department (Faculty of Sciences). He founded the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris in 1996 and became its first director. Currently he is ICREA research professor at the Institute for Evolutionary Biology(CSIC,UPF). Steels has participated in dozens of large-scale European projects and more than 30 PhD theses have been granted under his direction. He has produced over 200 articles and edited 15 books directly related to his research. During the past decade he has focused on theories for the origins and evolution of language using computer simulations and robotic experiments to discover and test them.

Maria-Esther Vidal

The Leibniz University of Hannover &
TIB-Leibniz Information Centre of Science and Technology (DE)
Short Bio

Prof. Dr. Maria-Esther Vidal is a professor at the Institute of Data Science at the Leibniz University of Hannover (LUH). She leads the Scientific Data Management group at the TIB-Leibniz Information Center of Science and Technology and the Data Science Institute at LUH. She is also a member of the L3S Research Center at LUH. She has contributed to data management with semantic data integration and query processing methods over various data infrastructures, e.g., the Web of data. Maria-Esther is a co-author of more than 220 peer-reviewed articles on the Semantic Web, Databases, Bioinformatics, and Artificial Intelligence. She has been awarded the Science Award on Responsible Research by Stifterverband (Germany 2020), and the Leibniz Best Minds: Programme for Women Professors has partially supported her research since 2021. Maria-Esther is also actively shaping her research communities. She has been an editorial board member of renowned journals (e.g., Journal of Web Semantics) and general chair, co-chair, and senior reviewer of major scientific events (e.g., WWW, ISWC, and AAAI). Under her direction, her team has developed technologies of predominant relevance in the whole process of knowledge graph creation from heterogeneous data and query processing. She is an expert in several advisory boards, summer schools, and doctoral consortiums. She has advised more than 30 doctoral students, and 120 Master’s and bachelor’s students in Computer Science. She has been a doctoral and habilitation committee member in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Argentina, Uruguay, and Venezuela. She is leading data management tasks in national and international projects (e.g., EU H2020 CLARIFY, IASIS, and BigMedilytics) and principal investigator of Marie Sklodowska-Curie doctoral networks (e.g., WDAqua and NoBIAS). She has been a visiting professor at universities (e.g., Uni Maryland, UPM Madrid, UPC, KIT Karlsruhe, and Uni Nantes).