Keynote Speakers

| Ricardo Baeza-Yates (ACSW & ACSC) | Philip E. Bourne (APBC) | David Embley (ADC) | David Dagan Feng (APBC) | Sally Fincher (ACE) | Saul Greenberg (AUIC) | Ian Munro (CATS) | Bernhard Thalheim (APCCM) |

Ricardo Baeza-Yates obtained his M.Eng. in EE from the University of Chile in 1986. He won a number of prestigious scholarships while pursuing his PhD in CS at the University of Waterloo, Canada. In 1989, received his PhD while doing a six months post-doctoral position the same year.

He has been the president of the Chilean Computer Science Society (SCCC) from 1992-95, and 1997-98. During 1993, he received the Organization of American States award for young researchers in exact sciences. In 1994 he received the award to the best engineering research in the last 4 years from the Institute of Engineers of Chile, and was invited by the U.S.A. Presidential Office for a one month scientific tour in that country. In 1996, he won a scholarship from the Education and Science Ministry of Spain to have a sabbatical year at the Polytechnic Univ. of Catalunya. In 1997 with two Brazilian colleagues obtained the COMPAQ prize to the best Brazilian research article in CS. From 1998-2000 he was in charge of the IEEE-CS chapter in Chile and has been involved in the South American ACM Programming Contest since 1998. He was recently elected to the IEEE CS Board of Governors for the period 2002-04. In 2002 he was appointed to the Chilean Academy of Sciences, being the first person from computer science to achieve this position in Chile.

Currently he is a professor at the CS department of the University of Chile. He is also director of the Center for Web Research, a project funded by the Millenium Scientific Initiative of the Ministry of Planning. In his involvement as professional volunteer, he is the president of CLEI, a Latin American association of CS departments; and coordinates the Iberoamerican cooperation program in Electronics and Informatics. His research interests include information retrieval, algorithms, and information visualization. He is co-author and author of many publications, most of which can be found on his website. He has been principal researcher of projects funded by the Chilean government and also cooperation programs with Argentina, Brazil, France, and Spain. He has been visiting professor or invited speaker at several conferences and universities all around the world, as well as referee of many journals, conferences, NSF, etc. He is a member of ACM, AMS, EATCS, IEEE (senior Member) & IEEE-CS, SIAM, and SCCC.

| Ricardo Baeza-Yates (ACSW & ACSC) | Philip E. Bourne (APBC) | David Embley (ADC) | David Dagan Feng (APBC) | Sally Fincher (ACE) | Saul Greenberg (AUIC) | Ian Munro (CATS) | Bernhard Thalheim (APCCM) | Back to the top |

Philip E. Bourne PhD is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California San Diego, Director of Integrative Biosciences at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Co-director of the Protein Data Bank, an Adjunct Professor at the Burnham Institute and the Keck Graduate Institute and the Immediate Past President of the International Society for Computational Biology and an elected fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association. He is an Associate Editor of the journal Bioinformatics, on the Advisory Board of Biopolymers and a long standing member of the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health panels responsible for reviewing proposals relating to biological infrastructure. He is a member of the National Committee for crystallography and past chairman of the International Union of Crystallography Computing Commission IUCrCC and past chairman of the American Crystallography Association (ACA) Computing Committee.

Bourne's professional interests focus on bioinformatics and structural bioinformatics in particular. This implies algorithms, metalanguages, biological databases, biological query languages and visualization with special interest in cell signaling and apoptosis.

| Ricardo Baeza-Yates (ACSW & ACSC) | Philip E. Bourne (APBC) | David Embley (ADC) | David Dagan Feng (APBC) | Sally Fincher (ACE) | Saul Greenberg (AUIC) | Ian Munro (CATS) | Bernhard Thalheim (APCCM) | Back to the top |

David Embley is full professor in the Department of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. He is co-director of the Data Extraction research group, the research group for Revitalizing Data in Historical Documents, and has been co-director of the Object-oriented Systems Modeling (OSM) research group. His research interests include database systems and theory, information extraction from data-rich unstructured documents, heterogeneous data integration, revitalization of data in historical documents, and model-driven software development.

He is the author of Object Database Development: Concepts and Principles, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1998, and a coauthor of Object-oriented Systems Analysis: A Model-driven Approach, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1992. He is a member of the steering committee for the International Conferences on Conceptual Modeling (the ER Conferences), and he currently serves as chair for the committee.

Keynote talk: What Do You Want---Semantic Understanding? (You've Got to be Kidding)

Abstract: Information is ubiquitous, and we're flooded with more than we can process. Somehow, we must rely less on visual processing, point-and-click navigation, and manual decision making and more on computer sifting and organization of information and automated negotiation and decision making. A resolution of these problems requires software agents with semantic understanding---a grand challenge of our time. More particularly, we must solve problems of automated interoperability, integration, and knowledge sharing, and we must build information agents and process agents that we can trust to give us the information we want and need and to negotiate on our behalf in harmony with our beliefs and goals.

This talk addresses these problems and suggests that data-extraction ontologies may be an approach that can lead to semantic understanding.

| Ricardo Baeza-Yates (ACSW & ACSC) | Philip E. Bourne (APBC) | David Embley (ADC) | David Dagan Feng (APBC) | Sally Fincher (ACE) | Saul Greenberg (AUIC) | Ian Munro (CATS) | Bernhard Thalheim (APCCM) | Back to the top |

David Dagan Feng received his PhD degree in Computer Science from UCLA in 1988. After briefly working as assistant professor in USA, he joined the University of Sydney, Australia, as lecturer, senior lecturer, reader, and then professor and director of the Biomedical & Multimedia Information Technology (BMIT) Group. He is the former Head of Department of Computer Science and founding Head of School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney. He joined the Hong Kong Polytechnic University as a professor in 1997 and is currently Chair-Professor of Information Technology, Centre for Multimedia Signal Processing, Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, as well as honorary Associate Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney, honorary Research Consultant at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, the largest hospital in Australia, guest Professor of Tsinghua University, and advisory Professor of Shanghai Jiaotong University.

He has published over 300 scholarly research papers, pioneered several new research directions, made a number of landmark contributions in his field with significant scientific impact and social benefit, and received the Crump Prize for Excellence in Medical Engineering. More importantly, however, is that many of his research results have been translated into solutions to real-life problems and have made tremendous improvements to the quality of life worldwide. He is a Fellow of ACS, HKIE, IEE and IEEE, special area editor of the IEEE Transaction of Information Technology in Biomedicine, and is the current chairman of IFAC-TC-BIOMED.

| Ricardo Baeza-Yates (ACSW & ACSC) | Philip E. Bourne (APBC) | David Embley (ADC) | David Dagan Feng (APBC) | Sally Fincher (ACE) | Saul Greenberg (AUIC) | Ian Munro (CATS) | Bernhard Thalheim (APCCM) | Back to the top |

Sally Fincher is a Lecturer in the Computing Laboratory at the University of Kent at Canterbury, where she heads the Computers and Education Research Group. Sally is a board member of the ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE). She is co-Editor of the journal Computer Science Education. Her principal research areas are Computer Science Education and patterns and pattern languages, especially patterns for HCI.

| Ricardo Baeza-Yates (ACSW & ACSC) | Philip E. Bourne (APBC) | David Embley (ADC) | David Dagan Feng (APBC) | Sally Fincher (ACE) | Saul Greenberg (AUIC) | Ian Munro (CATS) | Bernhard Thalheim (APCCM) | Back to the top |

Saul Greenberg, a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Calgary in Canada, is an active researcher in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). As head of the GroupLab team, he and his group investigate how people work together, how the computer and related technologies (groupware) affect group behaviour, and how software can be designed to support and augment group work. He is the author/editor of several HCI and CSCW books, has numerous publications, serves on several journal editorial boards, and has a high involvement in both the ACM CSCW and CHI conferences.

| Ricardo Baeza-Yates (ACSW & ACSC) | Philip E. Bourne (APBC) | David Embley (ADC) | David Dagan Feng (APBC) | Sally Fincher (ACE) | Saul Greenberg (AUIC) | Ian Munro (CATS) | Bernhard Thalheim (APCCM) | Back to the top |

Ian Munro is Professor of Computer Science and Canada Research Chair in Algorithm Design, at the University of Waterloo, where he has been a faculty member since completing his PhD at the University of Toronto in 1971. His research has concentrated on the efficiency of algorithms and data structures. He has authored over 100 research papers and supervised more than a dozen Ph.D.'s on the subject.

Dr. Munro has held visiting positions at a number of major universities and research labs, including AT&T Bell Labs, Princeton University and the Max Planck Insitute for Informatics. His consulting activities have included work with government and several major software companies. He has served on the editorial boards several journals and the program committees of most of the major conferences in his area. He is a former Director of Waterloo's Institute for Computer Research. He is presently a member of the board of the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing, and has just completed a term as member of the International Scientific Committee of the International Olympiad in Informatics. In 2003 Professor Munro was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

| Ricardo Baeza-Yates (ACSW & ACSC) | Philip E. Bourne (APBC) | David Embley (ADC) | David Dagan Feng (APBC) | Sally Fincher (ACE) | Saul Greenberg (AUIC) | Ian Munro (CATS) | Bernhard Thalheim (APCCM) | Back to the top |

Prof. Bernhard Thalheim is Full Professor of Information Systems Engineering at the Institute of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel in Germany. His research interest is concentrated on co-design of information systems structuring, functionality, distribution and interactivity, on information-intensive web sites, including B2B, B2C, e-learning, e-community and information sites, on database and information systems theory, on entity-relationship and other semantical database specification languages, and component-based database applications.

Prof. Thalheim recently joined Kiel University after being one of the founding chairs of the Computer Science Institute of Cottbus University of Technology. He has got his PhD from Lomonossov University in Moscov, his advanced PhD from Dresden University of Technology. He has held a chair in Dresden University of Technology, Kuwait University and Rostock University before joining Cottbus Tech. He has been editing more than 15 proceedings of international conferences such as ER'96, FoIKS'98, ADBIS'00, NLDB'03, published more than 150 research papers, compiled the existing knowledge on the ER model into a comprehensive monograph on the ER model, served in PC of most major database conferences, and he currently serves as vice-chair for the committee of International Conferences on Conceptual Modeling (the ER Conferences).

Keynote talk: Codesign of structuring, functionality, and interactivity.

| Ricardo Baeza-Yates (ACSW & ACSC) | Philip E. Bourne (APBC) | David Embley (ADC) | David Dagan Feng (APBC) | Sally Fincher (ACE) | Saul Greenberg (AUIC) | Ian Munro (CATS) | Bernhard Thalheim (APCCM) | Back to the top |