Keynote Speakers

Elena Simperl

Elena Simperl

King’s College London
(UK)
Short Bio

Elena Simperl is professor of computer science at King’s College London, a Turing Fellow and a Fellow of the British Computer Society. Before joining King’s College early 2020, she held positions at Southampton as well as in Germany and Austria. She has contributed to more than 20 research projects, often as principal investigator or project lead. Currently, she is the PI of two grants: H2020 ACTION, where she develops human-AI methods to make participatory science thrive, and EPSRC Data Stories, where she works on frameworks and tools to make data more engaging for everyone. She authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications in knowledge engineering, semantic technologies, open and linked data, social computing, crowdsourcing and data-driven innovation. Over the years she served as programme and general chair to several conferences, including the European and International Semantic Web Conference, the European Data Forum and the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing

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.

Luc Steels

Luc Steels

Barcelona Supercomputing Center
(ESP)
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.