Darren Govoni is a distributed systems architect focusing on semantic web technologies and rule-based systems. He has authored books on subjects such as P2P, web services, and frameworks and has given presentations at major conferences regarding them. Darren has been involved in DoD, commercial and academic research and development efforts building innovative new systems that incorporate a variety of technical disciplines such as artificial intelligence, network protocols, XML, rule languages and ontologies. He can be reached at dgovoni@mcdonaldbradley.com.


Steven R. Ray is Chief, Manufacturing Systems Integration Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He manages a division of roughly 60 staff and visiting researchers solving national problems related to measurements and standards supporting systems interoperation in the manufacturing sector. He established a new program (TIMA - Technologies for the Integration of Manufacturing Applications) on detail assignment to the NIST Advanced Technology Program, and served as Chairman of the IGES/PDES Organization that coordinated the U.S. participation in the creation of the STEP product data standard (STEP - Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data, ISO 10303). Dr. Ray has twice been awarded the Department of Commerce Bronze Medal. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University, and his Bachelor's degree in Physics from the University of Bristol, England.


Mike Personick is a Technical Lead at SAIC Advanced Systems & Concepts. He is working to lead the development of prototyping efforts for government customers. Prior to SAIC, he has extensive experience in the R&D software community working with both GlobalInfoTek and The Mitre Corporation.


Brad Bebee is Director, System Software at SAIC Advanced Systems & Concepts.
He has been involved with various government R&D programs as a developer of key architectural and design
initiatives. He has significant experience in the design and development of commercial software products. Mr.
Bebee has a strong background in software design and development focused on applying Object Oriented
Methodologies to capture user requirements and develop component architectures.


Bryan Thompson is a System Architect at SAIC Advanced Systems & Concepts. Currently, Mr. Thompson is leading an effort to adopt agile, test-first, continuous integration methodologies and tools pioneered in the open source community for clients in the Intelligence community. Mr. Thompson serves on the W3C RDF Data Access Working Group, was a founding member of the XML Topic Maps Authoring Group. He has an  background in decision support systems, cognitive psychology, neural networks, computational linguistics,
non-monotonic pseudo-probabilistic logics, and software architecture.


Bijan Parsia is a research philosopher specializing in the Semantic Web, description and hybrid logics, knowledge representation, knowledge interoperabilty, epistemology, oppression theory, and the philosophy of mathematics.


Mills Davis is a strategy consultant with TopQuadrant specializing in next-wave IT, content and media
technologies, solutions integration, and strategic envisioning. He is a published author of more than 100
research reports, whitepapers, articles, and industry studies. Mr. Davis is a frequent speaker at industry events, and his work has appeared in more than 30 trade magazines.

Mills has recently written a series of monographs in the Seybold Reports on the topic of semantic technologies. His latest whitepaper on "the business value of semantic technologies" will be made available to attendees.


Thomas L. Bascom, is President and Founder of LinkSpace, LLC (www.linkspace.net) a provider of enterprise and personal knowledge management solutions. Mr. Bascom’s interests lie in developing tools that combine the connectedness of the Internet and the orderliness of information technologies to help people in distributed organizations find and share information.

Mr. Bascom is a graduate of SUNY Buffalo (B.S. in Aerospace Engineering, 1984) and The George Washington University (M.S. Engineering Administration, 1989)


Eric Peterson is the Chief Ontologist at the Advanced Programs Group of McDonald Bradley, Inc.

Mr. Peterson has 18 years of experience in ontology and its precursor field, knowledge representation, as well as in commercial software development. He performed significant research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) prototyping, focusing on encoding and reasoning over structured knowledge in knowledge sharing, agents, natural language procession.

Mr Peterson Provided ontological expertise in supporting domains including counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence at CIFA, generation-after-next submarine situation analysis, mid-level echelon fire control and planning, and B-to-B product ontologies. He previously worked for GE’s Advanced Technology Lab, MITRE’s AI Technical Center, SRA’s Knowledge-based Reasoning Group, and Vertical Net’s Ontology Group.


Peter P. Yim is the CEO of CIM Engineering, Inc. (dba CIM3, San Mateo, California; incorporated 1989). He is also the Co-convener of [Ontolog-Forum], an open international community of practice on business
ontologies, and a contributing member of the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) Technical Committee.

His company has been developing and providing hosted infrastructure that enables highly effective distributed project teams, communities of practice and open virtual enterprising. CIM3 is involved in projects ranging from the development of the ebXML Core Component Type Ontology ([cctont]), to the eGov - COLAB and SINE (Sustainable Intergovernmental Network Exchange) collaborative work environments.


John Morgan has over 25 year of experience in the computer industry working at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and as a private consultant. He is currently the Manager of Information Engineering at TVA. The Information Engineering Group is responsible for developing and maintaining TVA’s Enterprise Architecture, data administration, metadata management, providing support for business process re-design efforts, and providing data analysis support.


Arun K. Sood is a Professor of Computer Science at George Mason University since 1987, and Chair of the Department of Computer Science since 2003. He has held academic positions at Wayne State University, Detroit, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge and Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India. 

His research has been supported by the Office of Naval Research, National Imagery and Mapping Agency, US Army Belvoir RD&E Center, US Army TACOM, US Department of Transportation; and private industry including Ford Motor Company, General Motors Company, General Dynamics Corporation, Planning Research Corporation, and Vidar Systems Corporation. He initiated an effort which led to the establishment of an industry - university consortium; the Michigan Automated Vehicle Research Consortium (MAVRC). He was elected as the first President of MAVRC. 

Dr. Sood was awarded two grants by NATO to organize and direct Advance Study Institutes in Relational Database Machine Architecture, July 85 and Active Perception and Robot Vision, July 89. He was a recipient of the DeVlieg faculty research award in 1983-1984 and 1984-1985 for research in computer integrated manufacturing. Dr. Sood's research interests are in image and multimedia computing, signal processing, parallel and distributed processing, software agents, high performance databases, performance modelling and evaluation, simulation and modelling, and optimization. 


Nagaraj Garimalla has over fifteen years of professional experience in the strategic application of information technology to creative and practical solutions for businesses and governmental entities. His experience in the public sector has most recently concentrated on the development of Child Support Enforcement Systems in the states of Arkansas, Maine, Michigan, Massachusetts, County of Philadelphia, and State of Oklahoma. Mr. Garimalla holds a master’s degree in Statistics (M.S.) and a post-graduate diploma in Operations from the Indian Institute Of Statistics, Delhi, India. He is currently the Director of Protech Solutions, Inc.; a company which he was instrumental in the formation of in 1995.


Claude Vogel is currently Chief Technology Officer of Convera, Claude Vogel is well-known as one of the world's leading authorities on linguistic analysis and categorization. He has a background in Anthropology, Semiotics and Artificial Intelligence from the Paris Sorbonne (Ph.D. Social Anthropology, 1976; Ph.D. Cultural Anthropology, 1992). 

Joshua Powers is Convera’s Principal Ontologist. He has extensive experience in semantic tagging as well as taxonomy design and implementation. He has a background in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University (B.S., 1994).

Andrew Podolsky, a Senior Ontologist at Convera, leads taxonomy training sessions and implements categorization solutions for customers in Government and commercial organizations. He has a background in U.S. History from Northwestern University (Ph.D., 1998).

Dr. Adrian Walker is the CEO of Reengineering is a privately held company, located in Bristol, CT, USA, providing novel semantic and security products. Please see www.reengineeringllc.com. His previous experience include the following positions:

* Assistant Professor, Rutgers University

* Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill New Jersey

* Manager, Principles and Applications of Logic Programming,
IBM Yorktown Heights Research Laboratory

* Manager, Internet Development, Eventra (a manufacturing supply chain company)

Dr. Leo Obrst is a principal artificial intelligence scientist at MITRE (www.mitre.org) where he leads the Information Semantics team (semantics, ontological engineering, knowledge representation and management), and has been involved in projects on context-based semantic interoperability, ontology-based knowledge management, conceptual information retrieval, metadata and thesaurus construction for community knowledge sharing, intelligent agent technology, ontology-based enterprises, and modeling of complex decision-making.

He was recently Director of Ontological Engineering at VerticalNet.com, a department he formed to create ontologies in the product and service space to support Business-to-Business electronic commerce. Leo's PhD is in theoretical linguistics with a concentration in formal semantics from the University of Texas-Austin. He has worked 20 years in computational linguistics, knowledge representation, and in the past nine years in ontological engineering. 

Leo was a member of the W3C Web Ontology Working Group (http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/) that developed the Web Ontology Language OWL. He is a member of IEEE Standard Upper Ontology working group (http://suo.ieee.org/), the Semantic Web Services Initiative (http://www.swsi.org/), and the Ontolog group (http://ontolog.cim3.net), which he co-founded and which focuses on ontologies and business. He is a member of AAAI, ACL, LSA, and ACM. His research interests include semantic interoperability/integration, formalization of context for ontology mapping and merging, formal upper ontologies, and Semantic Web rules. He is co-author (with Mike Daconta and Kevin Smith) of the recent book The Semantic Web: The Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management, by John Wiley, Inc., June, 2003.
 

Zavisa (Zac) Bjelogrlic has a long experience in software and networking technologies with more than twenty years of a technical and management career at university, international organizations, industry and media groups. Zac started developing Web applications since the first days, mainly for the European Space Agency and for European telecomunications industry. He was a co-founder and CEO of Web Bridges, an Italian software company which developed successful network surveillance and web/wireless business before merging into a major Italian newspaper group. Zac has a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering. Zac is co-founder of @semantics and he is responsible for aerospace and government markets.

Denise Bedford is a Senior Information Officer at the World Bank Group in Washington, DC. Since 1997, her duties at the Bank have included management of the World Bank Group’s Thesaurus; development of the Bank’s core metadata strategy and the various taxonomies that support Bank metadata; member of the enterprise content architecture/ management and long-term search strategy team, member of the Knowledge and Learning Environment working group, project manager for the implementation of the Teragram concept extraction and categorization technologies; and project manager for the World Bank Catalog in support of the Bank’s Policy on Information Disclosure. Her work also includes collaboration with UNESCO and UNAIDS on metadata, thesaurus and taxonomy issues.

She is an associate of the faculty of Catholic University of America and Georgetown University. Dr. Bedford received a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley, in Information Sciences, an M.A. from University of Michigan in Russian History, an M.S. in Library Science from Western Michigan University, and a B.A. from the University of Michigan in Russian Language, German Language, and Russian/East European History. Her experience prior to joining the World Bank Group includes: University of California System-wide Administration, Stanford University, Intel Corporation, NASA, University of Michigan, University of Maryland, University of Southern California. She serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations Steering Committee, and is a Senior Fellow at the Montague Institute.

Dr. Mark Maybury is Executive Director of MITRE's Information Technology Division. Mark also serves as Executive Director of ARDA’s Northeast Regional Research Center . Mark has published over sixty technical and tutorial articles and is editor of Intelligent Multimedia Interfaces (AAAI/MIT Press 1993), Intelligent Multimedia Information Retrieval (AAAI/ MIT Press 1997), New Directions in Question Answering (AAAI/ MIT Press 2004), co-editor of Readings on Intelligent User Interfaces (Morgan Kaufmann Press 1998), Advances in Text Summarization (MIT Press 1999), Advances in Knowledge Management (MIT Press 2001) and Personalized Digital Television (Kluwer Academic, 2004), and co-author of Information Storage and Retrieval (Kluwer Academic 2000). 

Mark was Program Chair of ACM's 1999 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI).  Mark is a member of the IUI Steering Council, a member of the Board of Directors of the Object Management Group, and Secretary/Treasurer of ACM SIGART. He serves on several international conference program committees and journal editorial boards.  Dr. Maybury received his B.A. in Mathematics from the College of the Holy Cross, an M. Phil. in Computer Speech and Language Processing from Cambridge University , England , an M.B.A. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Cambridge University .

Ralph Hodgson is a Co-Founder and Executive Partner of  TopQuadrant. Ralph started TopQuadrant in 2001 as the first US consulting company devoted to Semantic Technology. 

Prior to TopQuadrant he was with IBM Global Services. Ralph was hired by IBM to help to create IBM's Object Technology Practice. He was also a founding member and Executive Consultant in the first Java and Emerging Technology practice in IBM and, later, of the Portal practice. Ralph was a method architect and author IBM's Object Technology consulting methods. In the standards arena, he was IBM's representative on XBRL (XML Language for Business Reporting).

Mr. Hodgson is a recognized thought leader in the object technology and methodology communities. Prior to IBM, he was the founder and Technology Director for the European subsidiaries of a CASE company, IDE. He has held executive positions in a Process Control and Instrumentation group, Eurotherm International and started his career with Hewlett-Packard as an R&D engineer. 

Ralph is a published author, with some 30 papers and 6 chapters of books, patent holder and a frequent speaker at international software engineering conferences. He is a co-author (with Jeff Pollock) of "ADAPTIVE INFORMATION: IMPROVING BUSINESS THROUGH SEMANTIC INTEROPERABILITY, GRID COMPUTING & ENTERPRISE INTEGRATION" , Wiley Computer Publishing, September, 2004.

Frank R. Petroski is the Chief Engineer for the Joint and Defense Wide Systems Division.  Mr. Petroski is the division focal point for the MITRE Technology Program, and is responsible for technical content of the division work program for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), the DOD CIO (Assistant Secretary of Defense, Networks and Information Integration), and other DOD Sponsors.  This responsibility includes identifying technology needs, participating in the definition and execution of the MITRE research program,  and identifying technology transition opportunities into the MITRE work program. 

Prior to joining the Joint and Defense Wide Systems Division, Mr Petroski was the Director for Air Traffic Management,  Mr. Petroski was responsible for management of approximately 140 technical staff in McLean , Va.  whose activities included the This division’s work included the prototyping, operational procedures, and daily use of the advanced air traffic management research tools, and the subsequent transfer of the resulting technologies to industry.

Zvi Schreiber has many years of international experience as a software innovator and executive in the US, UK and Israel. He currently serves as CEO of Unicorn Solutions (www.unicorn.com) which he founded - Unicorn is successfully rolling out a semantic approach to managing and integrating information at leading Global 1000 enterprises and the Federal Government. Schreiber previously founded Tradeum Inc., which pioneered the concept of business-to-business e-commerce exchanges; Tradeum was acquired for $500 million and was chosen as the platform for the Converge consortium of high-tech companies in a deal worth $115 million.

Prior to that Schreiber worked in the UK introducing model-based software development methods to the UK's rail industry for safety-critical use and before that working on communications software which was OEM'd by IBM & HP. Schreiber is the inventor of over a dozen patents and is a frequent writer and speaker at major industry events. He holds a Ph.D. Theoretical Computer Science dealing with semantics from Imperial College, London, an MSc in theoretical physics and a BA in mathematics from the University of Cambridge.

Schreiber's recent speaking engagements included: PC Forum, the World Wide Web Consortium's annual conference, the Wilshire Meta-Data Conference/DAMA International Symposium, Enterprise Data Forum, TTI/Vanguard Knowledge Management, Semantic Technologies for E-Government at the White House Conference Center, DCI Business Process Management, the DAMA International Europe Conference, Army Knowledge Management and Enterprise Integration Expo.

Jim Hendler is a Professor at the University of Maryland and the Director of Semantic Web and Agent Technology at the Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Laboratory. He has joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science, the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and the Institute for Systems Research, and he is also an affiliate of the Electrical Engineering Department. He has authored close to 150 technical papers in the areas of artificial intelligence, robotics, agent-based computing and high performance processing. Hendler was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, is a member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and is a prominent player in the World Wide Web Consortium's Semantic Web Activity.