Ontologies for Web Information Systems and Open Applications

     Ph.D in Mathematics at the Free University Of Brussels (VUB) in 1976. Appointed as Full Professor at VUB in 1995. Earlier positions include the University of Antwerp (UIA, 1975-78), Control Data Corp. (Data Management Lab, Brussels, Belgium, 1978-83). Worked there on the definition of the NIAM (now ORM) method as well as languages (RIDL) and first tools for this methodology. Held chairs and founded the InfoLabs at University of Limburg (Belgium, 1983-86) and at University of Tilburg (The Netherlands, 1986-95). Current research is focused on ontologies and their relationship to databases, semantic web and design methodologies and tools.
    Member and Past Chairman (1983-1992) of the IFIP WG2.6 on Database. Past Chairman of the IFIP TC 12 (Artificial Intelligence, 1987-92), current Chairman of TC 2 (Software Theory and Practice). Co-Founder and current President of the International Foundation for Cooperative Information Systems (IFCIS, since 1994) and of the Distributed Objects Applications Institute (DOA, since 2000).
    Founded the Semantics Technology and Applications Research Laboratory (STAR Lab) at VUB in 1995. Director of STARLab since. Current scientific interests include ontologies, database semantics, domain and database modeling, interoperability and use of databases in applications such as enterprise knowledge management and the Semantic Web.

    Ontologies are the key enabling resource for the meaningful deployment of information in open environments such as the WWW.
    Examples however today of so-called ontologies in the research literature on the Semantic Web are often in fact just their author's (extended) data model for a particular, a priori known, application that author has in mind. Ontologies as computer-based repositories of a domain's semantics however should not be bound to the context of a single "application". Indeed they must express a form of community-based agreement, in an "application-independent" language, on the concepts, relationships, events, rules and processes present in that domain, according to that community. Agreements therefore imply (virtual) communities of users and/or developers that collaborate towards a shared, and formal, understanding. Enterprises today that want to deploy IT activity on "the" semantic web are confronted with multiple such "webs", and must face the relative unfamiliarity of the research community with the legacy data problem and with rael issues of scalability.
    In the DOGMA Framework (Developing Ontology-Grounded Methodology and Applications) in VUB STARLab we study the theoretical foundations of ontologies and of collaborative ontology engineering, and are building an experimental tool suite to illustrate the principles that we claim are involved such as scalability and involving non-computer trained domain experts. This seminar reports on some results and applications as well as difficulties.

 Agents, Information, and Negotiation

    Carles Sierra is Full Professor at the Institute of Research on Artificial Intelligence of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). He received the M.S. in Computer Science (1986) and the Ph. D. in Computer Science (1989) from  the Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain. His current research interests include: formal methods, multi-agent systems, uncertainty, and applications of AI to robotics. Recently, he has been particularly active in the area of multi-agent systems, specially on methodological aspects and on trust modelling. He has participated in around thirty research projects funded by the European Commission and the Spanish Government, and has published more than two hundred papers in specialized scientific journals, conferences and workshops. He is member of the program committees of around a dozen conferences and workshops per year, and is a member of the editorial board of JAAMAS, IJHCS, and WIAS. He was the General Chair of the conference Autonomous Agents 2000 in Barcelona and PC chair of the AAMAS 2004 Conference in New York. He will be General Chair of AAMAS 2009 and Local Chair of IJCAI 2011.

 Abstract of Keynote Presentation:

    Successful negotiators prepare by determining their position along five dimensions: Legitimacy, Options, Goals, Independence, and  Commitment, (LOGIC). I'll introduce a negotiation model based on these dimensions and on two primitive concepts: intimacy (degree of closeness) and balance (degree of fairness).  The intimacy is a pair of matrices that evaluate both an agent's contribution to the relationship and its opponent's contribution each from an information view and from a utilitarian view across the five LOGIC dimensions. The balance is the difference between these matrices. A relationship strategy maintains a target intimacy for each relationship that an agent would like the relationship to move towards in future. The negotiation strategy maintains a set of Options that are in-line with the current intimacy level, and then  tactics wrap the Options in argumentation with the aim of attaining a successful deal and manipulating the successive negotiation balances towards the target intimacy.

The Value of Information as a Theoretical Foundation for Digital Ecosystems

    Dr. George A. Fodor holds a PhD in Computer Science from Linkoeping University in Sweden; his formal training is in Electrical Engineering. George held different positions at ABB Process Automation in Sweden, currently being manager for the Systems Development department, Flatness Control. George is adjunct professor in Intelligent Systems at Orebro University, Sweden, and adjunct professor in Soft Computing at Western Michigan University, USA. He is founding Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics and member in the organizing committees of several technical conferences in Automation and Intelligent Control. His research interests and publications are in the field of Automation, Intelligent Systems, Discrete Fault Detection and Isolation, Fuzzy Systems, Ontological Control. He has published 1 book, 45 conference articles, 5 journal papers and 3 patents.

 Abstract of Keynote Presentation:

    The concept of information is at the core of the digital network shaping a Digital Business Ecosystem. Determining the value of information in a DBE network is a relevant theoretical step since it would allow predicting benefits, market impacts and return on investments for firms acting in a Digital Business Ecosystem. However, estimating the value of information is a notoriously difficult operation. While the cost of information varies between being almost free on the Internet and up to billions paid for patents, the value of information is concealed behind the multitude of its roles: information about markets, information as a main product of a firm, information as an intangible asset of a firm, information as input into the strategic planning e.g. created by a think tank. Classical results in economics explain the signaling role of information in determining market equilibrium (Arrow-Debreu); the role of transaction cost economics in determining the size of firms (Coase) or the mechanisms behind the information flow within hierarchies of an organization (Harsanyi). Innovative information technologies and the new markets created by Digital Ecosystems require new research efforts in understanding the impact of all these factors in creating value. The talk presents a theory of value that unifies several of these aspects in a digital ecosystem space of firms, markets and information technologies.

Engineering Artificial Immunity

    Dr Timmis is a Reader at the University of York in a joint appointment with the Department of Computer Science and Department of Electronics. His primary research interest is in the computational abilities of the immune, neural and endocrine systems and how they relate to computer science and engineering.  He has published numerous papers on artificial immune system related research and is the co-author of the first text book on artificial immune systems. He has worked on real-time immune-inspired: fault detection in ATM machines, autonomous robotic systems, machine learning, optimisation, bioinformatics; and homeostatic electronic systems, complex systems modelling, theoretical aspects of AIS.  He recently edited abook with Dr Darren Flower entitled ''In Silico Immunology'', which brings together ideas from theoretical immunology, experimental immunology, immunoinformatics and AIS.

He is on the steering committee of the Grand Challenge in Non-Classical Computation in the UK. In collaboration with Dr Peter Bentley he founded the International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems (ICARIS) in 2002 and is now chair of the ICARIS steering committee. He is on the editorial boards of Natural Computation and Evolutionary Intelligence.

 Abstract of Keynote Presentation:

    Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) is a diverse area of research that attempts to bridge the divide between immunology and engineering and are developed through the application of techniques such as mathematical and computational modeling of immunology, abstraction from those models into algorithm (and system) design and implementation in the context of engineering.  Whilst AIS has become known as an area of computer science and engineering that uses immune system metaphors for the creation of novel solutions to problems, I argue that the area of AIS is much wider and is not confined to the simple development of new algorithms. In this talk I would like to broaden the understanding of what AIS are all about, thus driving the area into a true interdisciplinary one of genuine interaction between immunology, mathematics and engineering. In this interdisciplinary context I will discuss the role that  AIS might be able to play in digital ecosystems.

The End of the Computing Era: Hephaestus meets The Olympians

     Dr. Michael L. Brodie works on large-scale strategic Information Technology (IT) opportunities and challenges for Verizon Communications senior executives. His primary interest is in delivering business value from advanced and emerging technologies and practices to enable business objectives while optimizing and transforming IT. In addition to Computer Science he addresses business and economic issues such as computing-communications-entertainment-business convergence and the economic impact of IT. His research focus is on advanced computational models and architectures and the large-scale information systems that they must support. He is concerned with the Big Picture, business and technical contexts, core technologies, and integration within a large scale, operational telecommunications environment.

     Our Digital World is becoming increasingly real (and vice versa), is being extended to include the physical world, and is growing in size, scope, and significance apparently on its own trajectory. The elimination of the ancient boundaries of time, space, location, and organizational structure appear to be unleashing social and other forces that threaten to disrupt real and automated systems replacing them with organically evolving digital ecosystems. Yet at the threshold of these amazing changes do we have the tools to understand, design, or harness these changes for safety, improvement, innovation, and economic growth?
    In ancient times, Hephaestus, the Greek god of technology, devised cunning machines with which to right transgressions only to find that his machines aggravated problems that were beyond his understanding.
    This talk will briefly review the amazing growth of the Web and of our increasingly digital world as indicators of two fundamental shifts. We will first look at the End of the Computing Era and the Emergence of the Problem Solving Era in which the problem owners attempt to solve problems with increasing realism and complexity aided by technology – not vice versa. Second, we will examine the emergence of a fundamentally more flexible, adaptive, and dynamic computing, Computer Science 2.0, and how it might serve the next generation of problem solving with its pillars of semantic technologies, service-oriented computing, and the semantic web.

  Prof. Bertrand Meyer

 ETH Zurich and Eiffel Software

      Bertrand Meyer is Professor of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute ofTechnology), which he joined in 2001, and was chairman of the computer science department from 2004 to 2006. He remains Chief Architect of Eiffel Software, the company he founded in California in 1985. He is the author of a number of books translated into many languages, including "Object-Oriented Software Construction"(Jolt Award 1997), "Reusable Software", "Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages", "Eiffel: The Language", as well as numerous articles and over 60 edited conference proceedings. He has led thedesign and implementation of numerous tools and libraries used inproduction applications, including the open-source Eiffel Studio environment, and serves as consultant to industry and government agencies.
    He is the principal designer of the Eiffel language and method, and theeditor of the Eiffel language standard, accepted by the International Standards Organization in 2006. His research interests range overobject-oriented analysis, design and programming, concurrency (SCOOPmodel), object persistence, development environments, software projectmanagement, software verification, automatic testing, formal methods,programming language semantics, and educational issues. 
   With Peter Kolb he has been teaching an ETH course on "Software Engineering for Outsourced and Offshore Development", apparently the first of its kind anywhere, since 2004; with Mathai Joseph he initiated the first international conference on the topic, SEAFOOD (Software Engineering Approaches For Outsourced and Offshore Development), whose second instance will take place in Zurich in July 2008 (http://seafood.ethz.ch).
    Bertrand Meyer is a member of the French Academy of Technologies and  therecipient of the Dahl-Nygaard object technology award and, in 2007, ofthe ACM Software System Award.

Abstract of Keynote Presentation:

  Prof. Ernesto Damiani

 Research Professor, University of Milan, Italy

      Ernesto Damiani is a professor at the Department of Information Technology of the University of Milan. He has held visiting positions at several international institutions, including George Mason University, VA (USA), La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, and is an adjunct professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Prof. Damiani coordinates several research projects on business process innovation funded by the Italian Ministry of Research, the European Commission and leads research funded by a number of private companies including Cisco, ST Microelectronics, Siemens Mobile and BT Exact. His research interests include knowledge extraction and metadata design, secure mobile architectures, software engineering and soft computing. On these topics he has filed international patents and published more than 100 refereed technical papers in international journals and conferences. He is the Vice-Chair of the IFIP WG on Web Semantics (WG 2.12) and the secretary of the IFIP WG on Open Source Systems (WG 2.13). He is the author, together with B. Grosky and R. Khosla, of the book ‘Human-Centered e-Business’ (Kluwer 2003). In 2000, he was the recipient of ACM SIGAPP Outstanding Service Award.