Peter Brusilovksy
Associate Professor
University of Pittsburgh

Peter Brusilovsky teaches and conducts research at the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh. He is also Adjunct Associate Professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and a faculty of Intelligent Systems Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to joining University of Pittsburgh in 2000, he served as Director of Computer-Managed Instruction at Carnegie Technology Education, a wholly owned, non-profit subsidiary of Carnegie Mellon University (1998-1999).

Peter holds a PhD from Moscow State University in Computer Science. His research interests span a range of topics, including adaptive systems and interfaces, intelligent tutoring systems, psychology of programming and applications to teaching.

Peter recently co-edited a book on Adaptive Web (2007):  http://www.springerlink.com/content/x646782t122p/.

Mark Carden
SVP and General Manager, EMEA Ingram Digital Group

Mark Carden joined Ingram Digital Group in April 2007, having worked at senior level in the library and information world for over ten years.  He was a Board member of OCLC’s European division (OCLC PICA), and prior to that he served as Vice President for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) for both Dynix and Innovative Interfaces. 

Mark’s first position in library automation was as Marketing Director at UK firm SLS Information Systems. Previously, he worked in senior information technology and project management roles, notably at Barclays Bank, NatWest Life and Accenture.  

Mark holds PhD in Philosophy and Psychology from New College, Oxford University.

Kareem M. Darwish
Researcher
Cairo Microsoft Innovation Centre

Kareem Darwish is Researcher at the Cairo Microsoft Innovation Centre in Egypt, pursuing research in information retrieval, digital libraries, and natural language processing.

Kareem received PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2003 and subsequently worked as consultant with Kevric (in bio-informatics) and the IBM Human Language Technologies group in Cairo, Egypt. Dr. Darwish also taught in the Electrical Engineering Department at the German University in Cairo and the Faculty of Computer and Informatics at Cairo University.

David A. Evans
President, CEO, Chief Scientist
JustSystems Evans Research, Inc.

David A. Evans is President, CEO, and Chief Scientist of JustSystems Evans Research, Inc. (formerly Clairvoyance Corporation, founded in 1992). He also serves as the Chief Scientist and Director of Advanced Technology Innovation, for JustSystems Corporation of Japan.

David received his Ph.D. degree in Linguistics from Stanford University in 1982, specializing in Computational Linguistics. He joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University in 1983 where he established the Computational Linguistics Program (in 1985) and the Laboratory for Computational Linguistics (in 1986), both of which he directed until 1996.

David’s work on the CLARIT system pioneered the use of NLP-based language analysis to support such diverse information retrieval and management functions. He has published three books and produced more than two hundred articles and other technical reports. 

Gene Golovchinsky
Senior Researcher
FX Palo Alto Laboratory

Gene Golovchinsky is a Senior Research Scientist at FX Palo Alto Laboratory (FXPAL), where he leads the Usable Smart Environments group. He joined FXPAL in 1996 after finishing his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering (Multimedia/Usability Lab of the Human Factor group) at the University of Toronto.

Gene is currently leading the Usable Smart Environments group and the Distributed Interactive Conference Environment (DICE) project which focuses on a task-oriented interface and infrastructure for controlling meeting spaces. He is also involved in the Collaborative Exploratory Search project.

Gene’s research interests span user interfaces for information seeking, dynamic hypertext, and pen-based computing. He worked on Xlibris and PowerPoint Annotation, web services, and distributed analysis projects.

Geneva Henry
Executive Director
Center for Digital Scholarship
Rice University

Geneva Henry is managing research and operations of digital library projects and the Digital Media Center. She is also the Principal Investigator (PI) and co-PI for a number of digital library projects and a board member for several projects and organizations. From 2002 through 2005 Ms. Henry also served as the temporary Executive Director for the Connexions project at Rice. In 2006 she was a Distinguished Fellow with the Digital Library Federation for the Services Framework Initiative.

Throughout her career, Geneva has been conducting applied research in a number of areas, including artificial intelligence (expert systems and natural language processing), text search, data modeling, and digital libraries (at IBM, TRW and the RAND Corporation).

Brewster Kahle
Director and Co-Founder
Internet Archive

Brewster Kahle is Director and Co-Founder of the Internet Archive. Brewster has built technologies, companies, and institutions to advance the universal access to knowledge. He currently oversees the non-profit Internet Archive as Founder and Digital Librarian, which is now one of the largest digital archives in the world.

As a digital archivist, Brewster has been active in technology, business, and law. After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1982, he helped start a supercomputer company, Thinking Machines, that built systems for searching large text collections. In 1989, he invented the Internet's first publishing and distributed search system, WAIS (Wide Area Information Server). In 1996, Brewster co-founded Alexa Internet, which provides search and discovery services included in more than 90 percent of web browsers, and was purchased by Amazon in 1999.

Brewster has also worked to revise law and policy in light of technical advances. He is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a plaintiff in Kahle v. Gonzales (formerly Kahle v. Ashcroft), which challenges recent copyright term extensions.

Jae-Kyung Kim
Visiting Scholar
University of Pittsburgh

Jae Kyung Kim, from the Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea is currently Visiting Scholar with the Personalized Adaptive Web Systems (PAWS)  Lab at the School of Information Science, University of Pittsburgh.

PAWS was established in 2004, with support from National Science Foundation and School of Information Sciences, to develop and evaluate innovative inter-adaptive and group-adaptive Web-based technologies, systems, and architectures.

Gabriella Kazai
Associate Researcher
Microsoft Research Cambridge

Gabriella Kazai is Associate Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, working with the Integrated Systems team on development of designs and technologies for natural and effective use of computer technology. Gabriella’s research interests include design and evaluation of systems for structured document retrieval, book search, and personal digital library.

Gabriella is the organiser of the Book Search track at the INEX evaluation initiative, which investigates full-text searching over digitized books and studies users’ interactions with e-books. Her PhD work at Queen Mary, University of London covered evaluation of XML Information Retrieval.

Monica Landoni
Senior Researcher
Faculty of Informatics
University of Lugano

Monica Landoni is Senior Researcher at the Faculty of Informatics, University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland. She is also Adjunct lecturer at the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK.

Monica has received her PhD in Information Science from the University of Strathclyde in 1997 and Laurea in Scienze dell'Informazione from Universita degli Studi of Milan in 1987. Her research is mainly in the fields of Information Retrieval and Electronic Publishing, particularly in the area of design and evaluation of user interfaces for electronic books. Her other interests include hypertext and hypermedia, human computer interaction, affective computing, electronic libraries, and natural language processing.

Michael Lesk
Chair
Library and Information Science Department Rutgers University

Michael Lesk is Chair of the Library and Information Science Department at Rutgers University. He is best known for work in digital libraries. The second edition of this book "Understanding Digital Libraries" was published by Morgan Kaufmann (first edition in 1997).

After receiving PhD degree in Chemical Physics in 1969, Michael Lesk joined the computer science research group at Bell Laboratories, where he worked until 1984. From 1984 to 1995 he managed the computer science research group at Bellcore, and from 1998 to 2002 he was in charge of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. 

His research has included the CORE project for chemical information,  some Unix system utilities including those for table printing (tbl), lexical analyzers (lex), and inter-system mail (uucp).

Catherine Marshall
Senior Researcher
Microsoft Research SVC

Cathy Marshall is Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley, CA. At Microsoft, she has worked in both product and research divisions, pursing research and projects in the disciplinary interstices of computer science, information science, and the humanities, with occasional collaborations in the arts and the sciences.

Cathy is also an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University.

More information about her publications  and her blog can be found on her Web site: http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~marshall.

Ricardo Mazza
Institute of Communication Technologies
University of Lugano

Riccardo Mazza has been teaching at the Institute of Communication Technologies of the University of Lugano since 1997. Since September 1999 he has also been a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Innovative Technologies at the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland.

In 2004, Riccardo received a Ph.D. in Communication Sciences at the University of Lugano with a dissertation on the visual representation of students' tracking data in Web-based distance education. He is currently involved in research projects founded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European Union. His main research interests are Information Visualization and eLearning.

Natasa Milic-Frayling
Director, Research Partnership Programme
Microsoft Research Cambridge

Natasa Milic-Frayling is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge (MSRC), setting research directions for Integrated Systems group.  She is also Director of Research Partnership (RPP) with industry, the MSRC programme that facilitates collaboration between MS Research, MS teams across EMEA, and Microsoft clients and partners.

The RPP programme reaches out to organizations who wish to exchange knowledge and experience in specific areas of research and collaborate on tackling strategic problems. As a result, MSR Cambridge works with consortia of partners on the EU sponsored project PLANETS (www.planets-project.eu), focussed on long term preservation of digital content, and the CFMS (www.cfms.org.uk) programme looking at rich context of engineering workflows and ways to capture and disseminate knowledge and best practices. Natasa is actively involved with a wider industry and academic community, promoting research and innovation through public speaking and engagements.

Magdy Nagi
Head of ICT Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Professor, Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University

Magdy H. Nagi is Professor in the Computer Science department at the Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. Since 1995, he has served as a consultant to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Among his activities are the design and installation of Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s network and its information system. This includes the design and implementation of the information system that supports three languages and full library automation. He is currently serving as the Head of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Sector at Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

In affiliation of Alexandria University and Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Magdy has been involved in many national projects, designing and implementing automation projects for governmental authorities or public sector companies such as the Ministry of Interior, the Health Insurance Organization (HIO), the Social Insurance Organization (SIO), and the Customs Authorities.

Magdy obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Karlsruhe, in 1974, where he served as Lecturer for two years and as a consultant in the Computer Center from 1974-1990. During that period he worked with a number of companies in Germany such as Dr. Otker, Bayer AG, SYDAT AG, and BEC. His research interests are in operating systems and database systems. He has authored more than 80 papers.

Prakash Reddy
Senior Researcher
HP Labs

Prakash Reddy is Senior Researcher at HP labs and is currently leading the effort to develop a service for Printing books on demand. He has considerable experience in the areas of image processing and scalable web services.

Prakash was involved in developing personalized portals with behavioural targeting. He founded two start-ups: OneSpot, a web based collaborative web service, and Redwood Design Automation, developing design and verification tools for the chip/system designers. OneSpot was acquired by HP while Redwood was acquired by Cadence Design Systems.

Prakash has been pioneer in the system/chip level design tool space. He was involved in building compiled code simulators and developing modelling methodology for system level design.

Raymond G. Siemens
Professor, Chair
Humanities Computing University of Victoria

Ray Siemens is Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing at the University of Victoria, with cross-appointment in Computer Science. Ray is also President (English) of the Society for Digital Humanities/Societe pour l'etude des medias interactifs (SDH/SEMI), Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London, and Visiting Research Professor at Sheffield Hallam University.

Ray is a founder and director (2001-present) of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, founding editor (1994) of the electronic scholarly journal Early Modern Literary Studies, and founding director of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at University of Victoria (2004-present). He is author of works on convergences between literary studies and computational methods, editor of several Renaissance texts, series co-editor of Topics in the Digital Humanities (U Illinois P), and co-editor of several book collections on humanities computing.

Lisa Spiro
Director
Digital Media Center & ETRAC Fondren Library, Rice University

Lisa Spiro directs Rice University's Digital Media Center, where she plans and manages digital projects, studies the impact of information technology on higher education, and oversees a media production lab.

Lisa was Principal Investigator for the Travelers in the Middle East Archive, sponsored by the Institute for Museum and Library Services and the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology. She also created the Learning Science and Technology Repository, funded by Microsoft Research.

Lisa has published and presented on a range of topics, including the use of digital collections by humanities’ scholars, digital storytelling, building multimedia digital archives, and tracking innovations in educational technology. Lisa received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. Lisa's blog on Digital Scholarship in the Humanities can be found at http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com.

Bob Stein
Founder
The Institute for the Future of Book

Bob Stein is the founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book (2004) and a visiting fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC. The Institute is sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and the Mellon Foundation's Higher Education Digital Infrastructure Initiative. Bob was also the founder of The Voyager Company where, for 13 years, he led the development of over 300 titles in The Criterion Collection, a series of definitive films on videodisc, and more than 75 CD ROM titles.

Prior to Voyager, Bob worked with Alan Kay in the Research Group at Atari on a variety of electronic publishing projects. He also started Night Kitchen to develop authoring tools for electronic publishing.

Carlos Teixeira
Department of Informatics
University of Lisbon

Carlos Teixeira is Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics, Faculty of Sciences at the University of Lisbon and a member of the Scientific Commission of the Large-Scale Informatics Systems Laboratory (LaSIGE) since 2004. He has participated in national and international projects in the area of speech processing and authored a number of publications on the topic.

Carlos received the B.Sc. degree in 1984, M.Sc. in 1989 and PhD in 1999 in Electronic Engineering and Computers from the Instituto Superior Técnico from Technical University of Lisbon.

Nina Wacholder
Associate Professor
Department of Library and Information Science
Rutgers University

Nina Wacholder is Associate Professor at the Department of Library and Information Science at the Rutgers University.

Nina’s research is situated at the intersection of information science and computational linguistics. At a theoretical level, it focuses on the attempt to understand properties of human language such as ambiguity, irregularity and redundancy and their impact on the exchange of information among people and between people and computers. At the applied level, it deals with the problem of how to use computer technology to improve people's access to information stored in the form of language.

Nina holds PhD in Linguistics from the City University of New York Graduate Center.