Staff
Berners-Lee, Tim
3Com Founders Professor of Engineering, MIT
Director, Decentralized Information Group (DIG), CSAIL, MIT
Professor, Electronics and Computer Science Department, University of Southampton, UK
A graduate of Oxford University, England, in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.
He is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a Web standards organization founded in 1994 which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. He is a founding Director of the Web Science Trust (WST) launched in 2009 to promote research and educaton in Web Science, the multidisciplinary study of humanity connected by technology.
He is also a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, launched in 2009 to fund and coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.
In 2001 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has been the recipient of several international awards including the Japan Prize, the Prince of Asturias Foundation Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize and Germany's Die Quadriga award. In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth and in 2007 he was awarded the Order of Merit. In 2009 he was elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of "Weaving the Web".
In June 2009 Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Sir Tim will work with the UK Government to help make data more open and accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information Task Force.
Kagal, Lalana
Deputy Director, Decentralized Information Group (DIG)
Lalana Kagal is a Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Deputy Director of the Decentralized Information Group, and a Fellow of the Web Science Research Institute (WSRI). She has over 12 years of research experience in policy languages and frameworks, knowledge representation, intelligent agents, and security and privacy in distributed information systems. She has authored over 55 refereed publications. She earned her PhD and MS degrees in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Rae, Katie
Managing Director, Project 11
Katie Rae is a founder of Project 11, a firm that invests in and assists early-stage startups.
Katie specializes in rapid product development and customer growth strategies for Internet businesses that scale.
She has spent her career building significant Internet businesses in the community, self-publishing and search space. Most recently she was the head of Product for Microsoft Startup Labs, an early stage product development lab focused on collaboration, location-based services and social applications, where concepts were tested for consumer enthusiasm. Before that she was SVP of Product at Eons, a business focused on new products for 50+ community. Katie pioneered early freemium business models at Lycos for the Tripod and Angelfire communities. She learned the ropes of product and business development at Zip2 and Mirror Worlds.
She holds an MBA from Yale University and a BA in Biology from Oberlin College.
Sturtevant, Reed
Managing Director, Project 11
Reed has successfully sparked an array of entrepreneurial ventures. He is co-founder of Project 11, a firm that invests in and assists early-stage startups.
Reed was recently founding Director of Microsoft Startup Labs. Before that, he was Chief Technology Officer of EONS, Inc., Managing Director and Vice President of Technology for Idealab, where he helped found several companies including Picasa and Compete, and prior to Idealab Reed was co-founder of Radnet and RadioAMP.
He began his career as architect and designer of Freelance Graphics, the best selling presentation package acquired by Lotus Development in 1986. Reed was an innovative force at Lotus where he served as a key member of the senior technical staff and launched many products including InterNotes, Lotus' first web product.
Reed is a founding trustee of The Awesome Foundation.
Waterman, K. Krasnow
Visiting Fellow, DIG, CSAIL, MIT
CEO, LawTechIntersect, LLC
K. Krasnow Waterman has had dual careers in technology management and the practice of law. She worked as a Chief Information Officer, Chief Operations executive, and Attorney (in-house advisor and trial counsel). She now divides her time between research on web-scale, policy-aware, accountable systems as a Visiting Fellow at the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab and work as a private consultant, primarily in enterprise architecture, privilege management, information retrieval, and technology policy. K was an MIT Sloan Fellow, earned her law degree at Cardozo School of Law, and her BA at the University of Pennsylvania.
Teaching Assistant
Wang, Victor
Invited Speakers
Feigenbaum, Lee
VP Technology and Client Services, Cambridge Semantics
Lee has been using Semantic Web technologies to architect and develop enterprise middleware and applications since 2003 and is currently responsible for applying Cambridge Semantics' Anzo product suite to rapidly solve customers' data collection, data reporting, and data collaboration challenges.
Lee is an active member of the W3C Semantic Web standards community, and currently serves as the Co-Chair of the W3C's SPARQL Working Group. Lee co-authored "The Semantic Web in Action," a December 2007 article in Scientific American. Lee writes about Semantic Web technologies at his blog, TechnicaLee Speaking.
Presbrey, Joe
CTO, Qwobl
Presbrey graduated MIT in 2009 after completing his undergraduate thesis project with Tim Berners-Lee. Prior to founding Qwobl, a Semantic Search company, he founded Sconex, a social networking website for high-school students acquired by Alloy Inc. At MIT, Presbrey introduced several linked data projects including SPARUL in Tabulator and Apache, FOAF+SSL authentication and authorization modules for Apache, and rdf.mit.edu, an RDF bridge to MIT's global principal and ACL database. He also created and led the technical design and deployment of scripts.mit.edu and sql.mit.edu, a web and database infrastructure supporting over 2500 MIT research groups, faculty and students, and quickprint.mit.edu, an HTTP/IPP interface to MIT's Athena clusters.
Prud'hommeaux, Eric
Technology & Society, W3C
Eric is currently team contact for the Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLS).
He has worked at all three W3C hosts: MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio University in Japan. His major work responsibilities have included libwww and the client applications, a PEP model library, perl modules for RDF databases, SQL databases, RDF visualizers, annotations support, apache, mozilla,web services and lots of systems stuff.
Eric has a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Sirin, Evren
Semantic Web researcher, Clark & Parsia
Evren Sirin is a Semantic Web researcher focusing on the areas of automated reasoning for Web ontologies, Description Logic (DL) reasoning, composition of Web Services and AI planning. He joined Clark & Parsia in September 2006 after getting his PhD degree from Computer Science department of University of Maryland, College Park.
At the University of Maryland, Evren was a graduate research assistant at the MINDSWAP research group directed by Jim Hendler. He worked in close collaboration with Bijan Parsia and they co-authored many technical papers on the Semantic Web. During his graduate study, Evren also developed various tools for the Semantic Web including the popular OWL-DL reasoner Pellet which is now being commercially supported by C&P.
Evren's research at MINDSWAP mostly focused on combining DL reasoning and AI planning techniques to automate the composition of Web Services. His research was closely related to and in large funded by the Task Computing project of Fujitsu Labs of America, College Park. Evren also participated in the standardization efforts of Semantic Web Services as a member of the OWL-S coalition and contributed to the development of OWL-S ontologies. He also developed several tools based on OWL-S such as the software library OWL-S API and the Web Service composer, one of the first prototypes that demonstrated the semi-automated composition of Web Services.
Wood, David
CTO, 3roundstones
Dr. Wood has contributed to the evolution of the World Wide Web since 1999, especially in the formation of standards and technologies for the Semantic Web. He has architected key aspects of the Web to include the Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (PURL) service and several Semantic Web databases and frameworks. David is the editor of Linking Enterprise Data (Springer, 2010) and Linking Government Data (Springer, 2011).
David is co-chair of the W3C RDF Working Group. He co-chaired the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group and is a member of the Semantic Web Coordination Group. David has represented international organizations in the evolution of Internet standards at the International Standards Organization (ISO), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium. David is a founding and contributing member of many Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects, including the Mulgara Semantic Store, Persistent URL (PURLs), Freemix and the Callimachus Project.
David earned a Ph.D., Software Engineering, University of Queensland, Australia; Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineer, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School; MS, Astronautical Engineering, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and BS, Mechanical Engineering, Virginia Military Institute.