SVForum Semantic Web SIG was founded in Silicon Valley at the end of 2006 with a single mission: Bring people together to explore new semantic technologies and how they are reshaping the web and enterprises. As the founding Chair of the Semantic Web SIG, AJ regularly organize events to cover the latest technology developments in various exciting ares including search engine, social media, real time monitoring, web intelligence, ad platform, enterprise collaboration, social CRM, semantic web, semantic tools, semantic standards. In 2011, this SIG is merged into a new SVForum Web2.0 SIG. November 3rd, 2010 Make Machine Learn for Us September 1st, 2010 From meaning to intelligence: do implicit semantics hold the key?David Meyer from SAP will present some of the ways SAP is leveraging its deep context in the enterprise (market leader for business applications and business intelligence) to help people work smarter. How do the emerging patterns for work, such as enterprise social computing, followership models, activity streams help us work more intelligently? While the majority of discussion around the semantic web has been focused on explicit metadata and relationships, these new patterns are establishing semantic meaning by simply letting people get work done. Michael Bechauf will discuss how both explicit and implicit semantic models are being used by SAP in managing our customer's business networks. Through social connections, business partners can discover each other in supplier networks. At the same time, social interactions will not eliminate the necessity for transactional business-to-business messaging to automate business processes. However, even with ubiquitous standards like WS* and REST, the semantic interoperability issue is not solved. Establishing mappings between B2B middleware is expensive, and we'll introduce a community-based concept that uses semantic technologies so that business partners are assisted with sharing the mapping knowledge and collaborate with each other to build the necessary technical connections. Please join us to hear SAP's move in the enterprise social computing transformation. Time/Location: 6:30pm - 9pm September 1st, 2010 Cubberley Community Center - Room H-1 4000 Middlefield Road Palo Alto, CA Agenda: 6:30pm - 7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza 7:00pm - 7:10pm Introduction by AJ Chen (Moderator) 7:10pm - 8:00pm David Meyer: From meaning to intelligence: do implicit semantics hold the key? 8:00pm - 8:50pm Michael Bechauf: Semantic Modelling in the Business Network 8:50pm - 9:00pm Joint Q&A. Speaker Bios David Meyer, Vice President, OnDemand, Productivity and Sustainability, SAP David Meyer is impassioned to make software more natural, transparent, and efficient, and will be satisfied once it seamlessly blends into our lives. With 15 years of international experience in emerging technology and markets, David drives SAP’s on-demand strategy and sustainability mission as the senior vice president of the on-demand, productivity, and sustainability solution management. He also leads the charge at SAP to reach users through products that help everyone live and work smarter. Previously, David was senior vice president at SAP responsible for the business intelligence (BI) and emerging technologies portfolio of products. David brings a startup sensibility and relentless execution to this mission. Previously, he was vice president of BEA Systems where he was responsible for product management, program management, and technical publications for the Business Interaction Division (BID). Prior to BEA, David helped create Plumtree Software, inventing and creating the business portal market. David holds a bachelor’s degree in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Washington. Michael Bechauf, Vice President, Platform Strategy, SAP Michael Bechauf is passionate about transforming SAP into an open business process platform. As vice president of platform strategy, he and his team are driving the vision of making SAP data and processes easily consumable and - by utilizing the industry’s best practices, standards and open source - enable rapid innovation within the SAP developer community and larger partner ecosystem. Michael is a member of the Technology Strategy team within the Office of the CTO, which advises the SAP technology development organization on topics like programming languages, business process management, security, model-driven systems and business semantics. To contribute to the larger vision of the open SAP business process platform, Michael is managing SAP’s company-wide engagement in standards and open source organizations. He is on the Board of Directors of the Eclipse Foundation as well as a member of the Java Community Executive Committee. Previously, he was managing the SAP Developer Network (SDN) and the SAP Mentor top influencer program in the SAP developer community. Michael has been with SAP since 1997 and held various development positions. Before SAP, he was with ECM and UNIX pioneer iXOS Software, where he helped launched the U.S. operation. iXOS is now part of Open Text. Outside of work, he enjoys long-distance bicycling. Michael holds a degree in Applied Physics from the University of Applied Sciences in Munich, Germany. July 7th, 2010 Summer Plug & PlaySummer
time, let's play. On this event, Nick Turner from the Plug and Play
Tech Center will be discussing the role of incubators in the valley and
Plug and Play Tech Center specifically. Following Nick's introduction
of how plug & play style helps entrepreneurs, we will hear real
stories from the startups currently playing in the center.
Tech incubators also help international companies to access US market.
Alfredo Coppola from US Market Access Center will discuss this new type
of incubator and two international companies in the semantic web space.
6:30pm - 9pm July 7th, 2010 Cubberley Community Center - Room H-1 4000 Middlefield Road Palo Alto, CA Agenda: 6:30pm - 7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza 7:00pm - 7:10pm Introduction by AJ Chen (Moderator) 7:10pm - 7:40pm Nick Turner: Plug and Play incubators 7:40pm - 7:55pm Denis: Yakr 7:55pm - 8:10pm InfoAxe 8:10pm - 8:40pm Alfredo Coppola: International semantic web companies 8:40pm - 9:00pm Joint Q&A. Speaker Bios Alfredo Coppola, Director, US Market Access Center (USMAC) Alfredo
Coppola has over 20 years of business development and management
consulting experience in the technology sector - working with
early-stage companies, mid-size companies and with global firms such as
Corel, Adobe, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Paramount Pictures,
PricewaterhouseCoopers and the US Market Access Center in Silicon
Valley. Alfredo is currently a director and management consultant with
the US Market Access Center (USMAC), a tech incubator in Silicon Valley,
where he helps international technology companies with US market
expansion strategies. In the past, Alfredo was VP of Business
Development for a Canadian e-commerce startup, ChoiceBot, and he was
also a consultant at San Francisco-based e-Storm International, where he
headed up their market research practice - providing international
companies with a direct channel to US market intelligence and access to
customers, investors and partners. Prior to e-Storm, he was president
and co-founder of three Canadian technology companies, which he led to
multimillion-dollar growth with offices in Ottawa and San Francisco,
California. Yakr Efficient access to information ("Where's the nearest yoga studio?") is very different from an efficient understanding of information ("Which type of workout is right for me?"). Because we rely on people to make sense of information, who we rely on has a substantial impact on how well and how quickly we understand it. Yakr is a service that transforms how we make sense of information, in the same way Google transformed how we access it. By connecting us with the most relevant people for any problem, thought, or concern we have, at the moment we have it, Yakr helps us more efficiently understand information, make decisions, and enrich our perspective. Using a proprietary semantic similarity technology developed over the past two years, the Yakr service determines relevance by understanding the deep meaning for every piece of text users are looking at, and resolves the most relevant sets of people both in real-time and with high precision. May 5, 2010 Making Social CRM Smarter and ScalableEnterprise adoption of social media is happening both internally and externally. Accenture calls social CRM the new frontier of marketing, sales and services. Altimeter has recently described new rules of relationship management for social CRM. Regardless 2010 will become the year of Social CRM or not, this event will try to figure out what social CRM is about, what challenges it's facing, and how text analytics can make it smarter and scalable. Dave Carroll from Salesforce will present " Social Networking in the Enterprise". Social networking in the enterprise brings with it a range of assumptions, opportunities and challenges. The consumer web is defining another compelling technology for success for the business web, Profession Social Networking. What value does social networking technology provide the enterprise? What are some of the assumptions that accompany the term “Social Networking?” What are the challenges inherent in applying another consumer web incubated technology to the enterprise? Learn about these benefits and challenges and how salesforce.com is providing the tools and platforms to realize the benefits and overcome the challenges of Social Networking in the Enterprise. Cheryl Kieliszewski from IBM Research will talk about "Analytics: A Competitive Differentiator". The ability to pull value from data is a crucial competitive differentiator. Substantial value can be realized by making smart data-driven decisions. Vast amounts of heterogeneous data of variable quality requires better tools to identify data that is relevant for smart decision-making. Advanced analytics technologies are becoming a proven and growing domain to create value from data. This talk will provide an overview of advanced analytics research being conducted at IBM, projects currently underway and analytics research frontiers. Time/Location: 6:30pm - 9pm May 5th, 2010 Cubberley Community Center - Room H-1 4000 Middlefield Road Palo Alto, CA Agenda: 6:30pm - 7:30pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza 7:00pm - 7:10pm Introduction by AJ Chen (Moderator) 7:10pm - 7:50pm Dave Carroll: Social Networking in the Enterprise 7:50pm - 8:30pm Cheryl Kieliszewski: Analytics: A Competitive Differentiator 8:30pm - 9:00pm Joint Q&A. Speaker Bios Dave Carroll, Director of Developer Evangelism, salesforce.com Dave Carroll is the Director of Developer Evangelism at salesforce.com. A technologist at heart, Dave’s enthusiasm for programming and technology inspires the developer community to think creatively about using various technologies with the company’s Force.com platform. Dave was instrumental in launching and validating the company’s first Web services API. In addition to speaking about the platform at numerous events and conferences, Dave has also led and participated in the creation of many of the developer tools for the platform. With a range of development experience from Pascal and C to Java, .Net, JavaScript and Actionscript , Dave brings a practical developer perspective to both external developer communication and internal production feedback. Previously, Carroll demonstrated his early understanding of the value of on-demand software as a service serving as Chief Technology Officer at Advanced HR, Inc., a Saratoga-based on-demand software company providing Compensation Benchmarking for pre-IPO companies. Before that, Carroll was a senior technical analyst and technologist for PSW-3, a financial services company and spent many years as a software consultant. Carroll has spent over 15 years developing software on a variety of platforms. Dr. Cheryl Kieliszewski, Research Scientist, IBM Research - Almaden Dr. Cheryl Kieliszewski is a research scientist and manages a team focused on the research, design and implementation of advanced analytics for improved business intelligence technologies at IBM Research - Almaden. She has been with IBM since November 2000, having worked in both the Research Division and Systems and Technology Group. Cheryl has over 15 years of research and applied human factors engineering experience investigating human-system interaction for technology design and implementation. She received her Ph.D. from Virginia Tech in Industrial and Systems Engineering. March 3, 2010
2009/11/04 Real time Social Media Monitoring and Marketing Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook plus millions of blog sites have enabled consumers to react to your products/service/brands in real time. How do you leverage on this real time interactions on social media? This event brings a panel of experts to share their experience in succesful social medial marketing and new real time social media monitoring/marketing tools. Are you ready to engage with your customers in more effective ways? Online consumer conversations offer companies the opportunity to realize increased customer satisfaction & loyalty, shortened sales & product development cycles, expanded markets, competitive insight & more. Social media monitoring tools offer the opportunity to effectively identify the conversations, communities, and the influencers. But it takes more than tools, there needs to be a person responsible for this engagement and the social media tools. Connie Bensen from Techrigy (Alterian) will discuss the new marketing opportunities that exist & how your business can leverage them. Jochen Frey from Scout Labs will present the Scout Labs’ monitoring platform, including some of the benefits and typical uses cases. He will also give a high level technical overview with a discussion of the challenges in dealing with the rapidly changing landscape presented by the social media. Keith Kilpatrick from BuzzLogic will share how the rise of social platforms have transformed the digital media business and discuss the impact social monitoring/analytics have on making online advertising more effective and efficient. He will also provide insight into how BuzzLogic’s conversational media platform helps target and measure advertising across sites engaged in conversations around specific topics. Agenda: 6:30pm - 6:50pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza Speaker Bio: Connie Bensen, Director of Community Strategy, Techrigy (Alterian) Connie Bensen is a leading authority on cultivating online communities and contributes to best practices for this emerging role. She also provides mentorship and inspires others to pursue this new career. Connie is the Director of Community Strategy at Techrigy, an Alterian Company. She is also a 2009 Fellow with the Society of New Communications Research and speaks at leading social media conferences. Connie blogs at CommunityStrategist.com, & Techrigy.com. She has previously worked with Network Solutions, Inc and ACD Systems. Prior to joining ACD Systems, Connie spent 9 years on the brick and mortar side of community building in public library administration, marketing & PR. Jochen Frey, CTO, Scout Labs Jochen Frey is the CTO for Scout Labs and brings significant technical leadership and experience in scalable systems development and natural language processing to the organization. As CTO of Meaningful Machines for 5 years, Mr. Frey managed a combined onshore/offshore research and development team to launch the highest quality machine translation system (Spanish to English, with high quality prototypes for other languages including Arabic and French). He architected and oversaw implementation of a high performance, failure tolerant message passing infrastructure and developed a high-speed distributed full text index. Prior to Meaningful Machines, Frey was the Director of Technology for the Eastern Region at Razorfish (previously iCube), architecting and overseeing numerous large-scale systems implementations. His past experience also includes software engineering for the US Navy and IBM, Germany. Mr. Frey holds a MS / Diplom Ingenieur in Computer Science and Medicine from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Keith Kilpatrick, Director of Product Management, BuzzLogic Keith is a seasoned product innovation veteran with over 10 years of experience leading technical teams in the delivery of online advertising and technology systems. At BuzzLogic, Keith is responsible for executing on the company vision of leveraging socially charged content for effective ad targeting, performance and data analysis. Prior to joining BuzzLogic, Keith worked at Adify, where he drove the delivery of a web-based platform for media companies and vertical advertising networks. Keith has held numerous positions in technology platform companies such as Blue Martini Software, SeeSaw Networks and Adobe. Keith started his career in consulting at Ernst and Young, holds a MBA from UC Berkeley, where he served as Class President, and also has a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. AJ Chen - Technical Architect, Healthline Networks Inc. AJ Chen, Ph.D., is an advocate of semantic web and digital health. As a Technical Architect at Healthline, he applies semantic technology in developing healthcare search engine for consumers. He has founded SDForum Semantic Web SIG to showcase how semantic technology and NLP are making the Web and social media more intelligent. Working with open communities, AJ brings social media content and semantic analysis together on web2express.org website, which enables users to follow and talk about topics in real time. From 2000 to 2006, Dr. Chen had been developing new genome sequencing technologies for personalized medicine, playing technical and product management roles at Hyseq, Callida Genomics, and Complete Genomics. Previously, Dr. Chen worked with Nobel Prize winner Dr. Barry Marshall to commercialize new medical innovations in China. Dr. Chen earned his Ph. D. in Biochemistry from U. of Utah and did postdoctoral research after joining Harvard Medical School and Duke Medical School. ***
2009/09/02 Title: Bing! Bing! Bing! With the recent release of Bing search engine, Microsoft has revitalized its life in the web search world. Moreover, the deal with Yahoo puts Bing behind Yahoo’s search box. Boom! (or shall we say Bing!) Bing is becoming the second largest search engine behind Google. Putting aside the crazy corporate fight, we are going to take a close look at Bing technology on this event. Hopefully, you will learn whether Bing has the real food to win over users and keep them happy. How does it mix semantic approach in web search? We are delighted to have a chief scientist from Microsoft Bing to present on this event. Dr. Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist for Core Search at Microsoft Bing, will discuss some of the technologies that drive the distinctive Bing UI, in particular the Explore Panel and the Instant Answers. Dr. Ronald Kaplan, Chief Scientist at the Powerset division of Microsoft Bing,will describe some of the linguistic and semantic technologies that are deployed in Bing’s Reference section. Agenda: Speaker Bio: Ronald M. Kaplan, Chief Scientist and Principal Researcher at the
Powerset division of Microsoft Bing ***
2009/07/01 Topic: Hacking the Semantics of Twitter We want to do something different for the July 1st event. In stead of having company executives to present, we would like to give the stage to developers to showcase their projects of using NLP/semantics for cool applications. Since Twitter is the most popular topic these days and they are so generously opening their data stream to third-party developers, I think it will serve as the best theme for this developer-focused event. We would like to invite all developers and companies to submit proposal for speaking on the event. Any cool twitter application is welcome, including personal projects actively pursued by developers or entrepreneurs. Preference will be given to applications that apply NLP, semantic technology, text mining, or data mining to make use of twitter data/api. The presentation should be focused on application design, coding and demo. Doug Williams from Twitter API team will first introduce Twitter API. Then, it is showtime for developers. Each speaker gets only 20 min to present/demo/QA so that more projects can be accommodated on this 2-hour event. If you are doing some cool stuff with twitter data, please send us a description on what you would like to talk about. We’ll review the proposals and announce the lineup at the end of month. Agenda: 6:30pm-7:00pm 7:00pm-7:20pm 7:20pm-7:40pm 7:40pm-8:00pm 8:00pm-8:20pm 8:20pm-8:40pm 8:40pm-9:00pm *** Semantic Web SIG Event, June 16, 2009 Panel Discussion: Entering Intelligent Web under Cover (co-hosted with Semantic Technology Conference 2009)
The panel
will be focused on the following intelligent web applications powered by
NLP and semantic technologies:
Free exhibit registration prior to the panel. Enter the coupon code
of ST9A4 and use this link to register: Save $300 on conference registration fees when using the coupon code
of ST9A4 for a paid registration. To register for conference sessions: http://www.semtech2009.com/2009/registration/ Moderator: Agenda: Speaker Bios: Brooke
Aker - CEO of Expert System USA Andraž
Tori – CTO, Zemanta Tom
Gruber – CTO, Siri.com Gam Dias
- VP of Product Management and Research, Overtone Amanda
Reed - Partner, Palomar Ventures AJ Chen -
Technical Architect, Healthline Networks Inc. (Please Note special time and location) Time: Location: Event
Co-Sponsor: *** SDForum Semantic Web SIG March 4th, 2009 Event Healthcare Semantics: Getting Personal The nation’s healthcare system currently is in critical condition. The new President Barak Obama is pushing information technology as a part of the solutions for making our healthcare system more effective and efficient. According to discussion in the Congress, President’s economic stimulus package is considering $20 billion for heath IT spending. That’s going to shape up optimism for traditional health IT as well as innovations in new technologies like semantic technology and NLP. On this event, we will be focusing on semantic applications in healthcare. Three speakers will cover the different areas along the healthcare ecosystem.
If you are wondering where the opportunity is for semantics and NLP, come and join us to explore the frontiers of healthcare IT. Speaker Bios: Dr. Ida Sim, Professor, UCSF Dr. Sim is Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF and Director, UCSF Center for Clinical and Translational Informatics (http://ccti.ucsf.edu/). She received her MD and her PhD in Medical Informatics from Stanford University. Dr. Sim’s research is on knowledge-based technologies for clinical research and evidence-based practice. Her Trial Bank Project is a leading effort on using ontologies to share information about human studies. The goal is to computerize the human studyome – the totality of all human studies worldwide – for large-scale computational analysis and reuse of human studies data. Dr. Sim is a recipient of United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. Niraj Katwala, CTO Healthline Networks Niraj is an experienced software professional who brings 18 years of Internet and Healthcare industry experience to the Healthline executive team. Prior to Healthline, Niraj was a founding member and vice president of Engineering at Entigen Corporation, where he led the development of a search platform for bioinformatics databanks. From 1996 to 1999, Niraj managed critical new product initiatives in Charles Schwab’s Electronic Brokerage and Retail business units serving over 7 million users online. Prior to that, Niraj was a principal for Technology Solutions Company, a management consulting firm, where his clients were Fortune 500 healthcare and product organizations including Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Benckiser International, Pepsi Cola Corporation and Digital Equipment Corporation. Niraj holds a masters and bachelors in Electrical Engineering from M.S.University, India. He is happily married with two children, and enjoys skiing, learning about world history, and coaching baseball and soccer.
Agenda: 6:30pm-7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza Clinical trials and Semantics. Professor Ida Sim, UCSF 7:30pm-8:00pm Taxonomy-powered consumer healthcare search engine. Niraj Katwala, CTO, Healthline. 8:00pm-8:30pm Semantic technology use case at insurance company. John Gilman, Director, BlueShield of CA 8:30pm-9:00pm Q&A. *** SDForum Semantic Web SIG January 7th, 2009 Event Semantics-Powered Search in Enterprises and Communities We have used several meetings in the past to cover applications of semantic technologies in web search and web intelligence. But, the power of semantics does not stop there. In fact, semantics and natural language processing have been powering search in enterprises and recently have started to make impact on community and social search. These topics will be the focus of SDForum semantic web SIG’s January event. Our first speaker Edwin Copper, founder of InQuira, will present InQuira’s semantic search technologies and his perspectives on the power of semantics. InQuira’s semantics products are powering many enterprises in all kinds of industries. The second speaker Jennifer Dulski, co-founder and CEO of Center’d, will share her startup’s story. They are using NLP to make personal planning easier and smarter within web communities, including local and social search. After the presentations, it will be your turn to ask questions and learn more insight from the speakers on how to leverage the power of semantics in your world. Agenda: 6:30pm-7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza Enterprise search presentation by Edwin Copper, founder of InQuira. 7:45pm-8:30pm Community search presentation by Jennifer Dulski, CEO of Center’d 8:30pm-9:00pm Q&A.
Speaker Bios: Edwin Cooper, Founder and Chief Scientist, InQuira Edwin Cooper has been actively involved in natural language search for over ten years. While a PhD student, Edwin conceived of and led the OnPoint project, a Web-based information retrieval system with a natural language interface. He left graduate school to start a search engine company, which continues today as InQuira. He has a BA in History and BS in Cognitive Science from the University of California San Diego, an MA in the History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University, and may someday return to the University of Chicago to complete his PhD in Computer Science. Jennifer Dulski, CEO of Center’d Dulski is a co-founder and the chief executive officer at Center’d. Prior to Center’d, she held a variety of senior executive roles at Yahoo! during the past nine years, including group vice president and general manager (VP/GM) of local markets and commerce; VP/GM of Yahoo! Autos and VP of business unit marketing. As group VP/GM of Yahoo!’s local markets and commerce division, Jennifer was responsible for the strategy, operations and P&L for Yahoo!’s local, maps, shopping, travel, autos and real estate businesses. Under Jennifer’s leadership, all of those businesses became No. 1 or No. 2 in their category for the first time in Yahoo!’s history (ComScore, Sept., 2007). Prior to that, Jennifer was the founder and executive director of Summerbridge Pittsburgh, an academic program for at-risk students. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in psychology from Cornell University. Jennifer also holds an M.B.A. from Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School *** November 5, 2008 event Money’s Semantics Continuing on the topic of our last event – emerging semantic online ad platform, this semantic web SIG event will be focused on the broader market where semantic technology can potentially deliver kill apps. We will have a panel of company executives and a venture capitalist to present and discuss business and market opportunities in online advertising, marketing, consumer voice or sentiment, and market intelligence. The panel will give the audience a broader view of how these exciting markets are currently being addressed by various technologies. Many VC investments have been given to startups in these hot areas. So, bring your questions and join us in the panel discussion on November 5th. Presentations: 1. Tim Musgrove, CEO
of TextDigger, will present their semantic analysis technology for
optimizing online marketing. (30min) Panel discussion with all speakers will be followed, which is open to the audience’s question and moderated by AJ Chen. (60 min) Speaker Bios: Tim Musgrove, Founder & CEO, TextDigger, Inc. Dr. Tim Musgrove is the Founder & CEO of TextDigger, Inc., a Silicon Valley startup providing website owners with semantic profiling services designed to enhance their content aggregation and increase the findability of webpages. The TextDigger team came out of CNET Networks, where Tim was the Senior Research Fellow for Artificial Intelligence. At CNET his team developed patented linguistic technologies which today are used to auto-generate thousands of natural language texts posted on CNET’s award winning websites. Tim’s background areas of ontology, philosophy of language, and cognitive semantics are significantly visible in his development projects at TextDigger. Craig D. Norris, Chief
Executive Officer, Attensity Corporation Sergio Monsalve, Principal, Norwest Venture Partners Sergio brings to NVP over 12 years of operational experience in marketing, product management, business development, sales and finance from a wide range of business and consumer technology companies. Sergio is focused on investments in the consumer internet, media and software sectors. His current investments and board seats include Adzilla, Center’d and myYearbook. Prior to NVP, Sergio was Vice President of Product Marketing at Photobucket, which was successfully sold to News Corp in May for a reported $300 Million. At Photobucket, Sergio drove product marketing, public awareness and user experience, which helped accelerate Photobucket’s growth to more than 40 million unique visitors per month. Prior to Photobucket, Sergio was Director of New Ventures at eBay, Inc. where he pioneered and led eBay’s digital goods marketplace and its user generated content efforts worldwide. Prior to that, Sergio was General Manager of the consumer electronics marketplace at eBay, which he grew from $150 million to over $500 million in gross merchandise sales in less than three years. Prior to eBay, Sergio was the co-founder and led sales and marketing at Cymerc from inception to more than $15 million in revenue. Sergio holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University. *** 9-3-2008 Title: Emerging Semantic Ad Platforms Here in the summer of 2008 the Semantic Web is still waiting for a killer app. Proponents have looked everywhere, but they may have overlooked one big opportunity – the true money-making machines on the Web are the online ad serving platforms that power Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and the like. Recently a host of new startup companies (Peer39, BuzzLogic, etc) have popped up to fill this gap. These startups are spending VC money to try to make smarter money machines themselves, and the large companies are not sitting on the sideline either (Microsoft, Adobe etc). During this Semantic Web SDForum event, we will focus on how semantics can make ad-serving smarter. Walter Chang from Adobe will present a new semantic ad platform that leverages the billions of pdf documents out there. And since natural language processing (NLP) is one of the primary techniques used to understand Web semantics, we will be joined by Tom Tague from Thomson Reuters to showcase the new Calais initiative (OpenCalais.com) which supplies a free Web-based platform for generating Semantic Web data that can be used to produce computable semantics from any text and feed them into any new search service, Semantic Web application or semantic ad platform. If you go home with a big new idea after this event,
please don’t forget to say “Go semantics!” Cubberley Community
Center Price: $15 at the door for
non-SDForum members Agenda: 6:30pm - 7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza 7:00pm – 7:10pm Introduction / Community announcement 7:10pm - 7:50pm Walter Chang: Adobe’s New Semantic Ad Platform 7:50pm - 8:30pm Tom Tague: Calais – The Calais Semantic Web Service and Free API 8:30pm - 9:00pm(+) Dedicated Q&A period Panelist Bios:
Moderator Bios:
*** 7-2-2008 Topic: Weaving the Web of Data Join us for two unique presentations. First we will explore how you can make use of Metaweb’s Freebase free web database technology for hosting your own content, posting stuff, or making mash-ups of other people’s content. Second, our presenter from TopQuadrant will provide an instructional “how-to” for getting started with RDF and just a little bit of OWL – these two Semantic Web languages are a foundational part of the emerging data web since they were designed from the ground-up to be web-based data languages. Finally, we’ll tie things together with a joint question-answer session where both speakers respond to the SD Forum audience to help everybody stay on the same page. Our expert guests include Jamie Taylor, Minister of Information from Metaweb Technologies and Dean Allemang, Chief Scientist from TopQuadrant. AJ Chen from Healthline and Jeff Pollock from Oracle will moderate this event. Panelist: -Dean Allemang, Chief Scientist, TopQuadrant BIOS: Dean Allemang is the Chief Scientist at TopQuadrant Inc., a company specializing in products, training and services based on Semantic Web technologies. As the lead instructor for TopQuadrant’s Semantic Web training courses, he has come into contact with a wide variety of viewpoints about the Semantic Web. In his speaking and writing, he tries to cut through the hype to present a coherent picture of how the Semantic Web can provide value to business. He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Ohio State University and Masters in Pure Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. Along with Jim Hendler, he is co-author of “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist”. Moderator Bios: AJ Chen, Ph.D.,
Technical Architect, Healthline Networks Jeffrey Pollock,
Senior Director, Oracle Fusion Middleware
Agenda: 6:30pm - 7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza 7:00pm – 7:10pm Introduction / Community announcement 7:10pm - 7:50pm Metaweb & Freebase – enabling the data web 7:50pm - 8:30pm Tutorial: Semantic Web standard RDF/RDFS and tools 8:30pm - 9:00pm(+) Dedicated Q&A period
Location: *** 5-20-2008 Panel
Discussion: Will semantics give web search a face-lift? Agenda: Speakers: Time: 6:30 PM -
9:00 PM, May 20, 2008 Event
Co-Sponsor: For more information, contact SDForum Semantic Web SIG Co-Chair AJ Chen (ajchen at web2express.org) or Jeff Pollock (jeff.pollock at oracle.com).
Speaker Bios: Dr.
Fernando Pereira, Research Director, Google Inc. Jeremie Miller,
Search Project Lead, Search Wikia Labs Dr.
Christian Hempelmann, CSO, Hakia
Dr. AJ Chen, Technical Architect, Healthline
Networks Inc. *** 3-5-2008 Are Scalable Graph Data Applications
Possible? With the rising importance of data analytics, there is more evidence than ever that graph style data systems can achieve new benefits by making it easier to link and re-combine complex data. But the Achilles heel of graph style tuple storage has always been a lack of performance at scale. Will the Semantic Web and modern analytics finally drive innovation that makes these systems scalable? In this SDForum interactive panel discussion we will explore that question and more. Join us for three unique presentations that will explore cutting-edge techniques for scalable RDF/OWL storage, and the kinds of applications that make use of those systems. First, we are honored to have representation from Vertica and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to describe how columnar store (C-Store) data warehouse technology can enable large scale data graphs supporting billions of RDF triples. Next, we’ll get a peek at some GeoTemporal and Social Network Analysis applications based off the federated Java RDF database from Franz Technologies. Finally, a short synopsis of Oracle’s various approaches for tuple-based storage (including in-memory, data grid, and Oracle Database RDF solutions) will be presented and tradeoffs discussed. Our expert guests include Andy Palmer from Vertica, Samuel R. Madden from MIT, Jans Aasman from Franz Technologies. Jeff Pollock from Oracle will moderate as well as present a short summary of technical approaches to scalable RDF systems. Agenda: 6:30pm - 7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza 7:00pm – 7:10pm Community announcement 7:10pm - 7:50pm The Vertica C-Store DBMS for Scalable RDF Persistence 7:50pm - 8:30pm Franz Technologies RDF Applications 8:30pm - 8:45pm Oracle Infrastructure for Tuple-based Graph Storage 8:45pm - 9:00pm(+) Dedicated Q&A period Panelist Bios: Andy
Palmer, Founder, Vertica Samuel
R. Madden, Associate Professor, EECS at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Jans Aasman, CEO, Franz Inc. Jans Aasman started his career as an experimental and cognitive psychologist, earning his Ph.D in cognitive science with a detailed model of car driver behavior using Lisp and Soar. He has spent most of his professional life in telecommunications research, specializing in intelligent user interfaces and applied artificial intelligence projects. From 1995 to 2004 he was also a part-time professor in the Industrial Design department of the Technical University of Delft. Jans is currently the CEO of Franz Inc., the leading supplier of commercial, persistent and scalable RDF database products that provide the storage layer for powerful reasoning and ontology modeling capabilities for Semantic Web applications. Moderator Bios: AJ Chen,
Ph.D., Sr. Search Engineer, Healthline.com Jeffrey
Pollock, Senior Director, Oracle Fusion Middleware Location Cubberly Community
Center Price $15 at the door for
non-SDForum members *** 1-8-2008 Title: Solving Semantic Web’s Chicken and Egg Problem with NLP In the first presentation, Dr. Barney Pell, CEO of Poweret, will describe his vision of Natural Language and the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web promises to revolutionize access to information by adding machine-readable semantic information to content which is normally interpretable only by people. In addition, it will also revolutionize access to services by adding semantic information to create machine-readable service descriptions. This ambitious vision has been slow to take off because of a chicken and egg problem. Markup is required before people will build applications, and applications are required before it is worth the hard work of doing markup. Natural language processing (NLP) has advanced to the point where it can break the impasse and open up the possibilities of the Semantic Web. First, NLP systems can now automatically create annotations from unstructured text. This provides the data that semantic web applications require. Second, NLP systems are themselves consumers of semantic web information and thus provide economic motivation for people to create and maintain such information. For example, a new generation of natural language search systems, as illustrated by Powerset, can take advantage of semantic web markup and ontologies to augment their interpretation of underlying textual content. They can also expose semantic web services directly in response to natural language queries. The second presentation will be demonstration of Powset’s NLP search engine and technology, given by Dr. Ron Kaplan, Chief Scientist at Powerset. Lots of cutting-edge researches in this field are happening in academics. We’ll have Rio Snow, a PhD student at Stanford University, to present the Stanford Wordnet Project - Automatic Acquisition of Knowledge from Text. This talk describes their recent work in learning semantic relations and WordNet-like taxonomies from English text. The Stanford team uses machine learning methods to learn the hypernym (is a kind of) and coordinate term (is similar to) relations, and propose a model for inferring taxonomies that combine heterogenous evidence sources for maximal benefit. The Stanford Wordnet Project currently offers an augmented version of WordNet with 400,000 additional automatically-inferred hyponyms. Agenda: 6:30pm - 7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza 7:00pm - 7:10pm Community announcement 7:10pm - 7:40pm Barney Pell: Natural Language and Semantic Web 7:40pm - 8:00pm Ron Kaplan: Powerset demo and technolgy 8:00pm - 8:20pm Rion Snow: Stanford Wordnet Project 8:20pm - 9:00pm Q&A Contact: SIG co-chair AJ Chen (ajchen-at-web2express.org) or Jeff Pollock (jeff.pollock-at-oracle.com) Speaker Bios Barney
Pell, Ph.D., Founder and CTO, Powerset Ron
Kaplan,Ph.D., Chief Scientist, Powerset Rion
Snow, PhD Candidate, Stanford University
*** 11-7-2007 Title: Intelligence at the Interface The interfaces we use to interact with the world’s information are getting smarter. Web portals gave us someone else’s idea of the content we should see. Then came search engines, which let us tell the system what we want, one query at a time. We are about to see the next wave — intelligence at the interface — in which the system knows about us, our information, and our physical environment. With knowledge about our context, an intelligent system can make recommendations and act on our behalf. This SD Forum event will showcase four exciting new examples of intelligence at the interface developed by Bay Area companies.
Panelist Bios: Adam Cheyer, SRI Dr. Mor Naaman, Yahoo! Research
Berkeley Kurt Partridge, PARC Victoria Bellotti, PARC Nova Spivack, Radar Networks Moderator Bio: Tom Gruber is an innovator in technologies that augment human intelligence, individually and collectively. At Stanford University he did foundational work in Ontology Engineering and the precursors of Semantic Web technology. During Web 0.1, he built the first public library for sharing ontologies on the Web; led the team that deployed the first virtual document applications on the Web that generate natural language explanations in response to questions; and invented the first widely-used open source application that turns email conversations into collective memories on the Web. During Web 1.0, he led technology development at Intraspect, an enterprise software company that pioneered the space of Collaborative Knowledge Management — software that helps large, distributed communities of professional people contribute to and learn from a collective body of knowledge. During Web 2.0, he led technology development at RealTravel.com, a popular user-contributed content site where travelers from around the world find and share their travel experiences. During Web 3.0, he is working on technologies that will bring intelligence to the interface.
*** 9-5-2007 How Can We Make Semantic Web Usable? The Semantic Web has been emerging over several decades but has yet to reach a stage where it is easily accessible, useable and beneficial to the majority of end-users on the Web. Everyone still ask the same question: How will the Semantic Web become useable? In the first presentation, Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, will discuss his outlook for the coming years as the Semantic Web begins to mature, and the stages it will go through. He will also discuss barriers to adoption and how to overcome them, and how forward-looking organizations can start working with the Semantic Web today. In addition he will discuss how the Semantic Web can benefit key application categories from advertising to e-commerce to search, publishing, collaboration and entertainment. In the second presentation, Holger Knublauch, VP of Product Development from TopQuatrant, will introduce to you the building blocks of a usable semantic web: RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL and SWRL. These languages provide distributed and federated capabilities for resolving semantic differences between systems and databases. After the hands-on introduction to these powerful languages using TopBraid semantic development platform, he will demonstration how ontology-driven applications can be integrated with Web 2.0 technologies. Time: Wednesday, September 5, 2007, 6:30pm - 9pm Panelist Bios: Nova Spivack, CEO, Radar Networks Holger Knublauch, VP, Product Development, TopQuadrant Moderator Bios: AJ Chen, Ph.D., Sr. Search Engineer, Healthline.com Jeffrey Pollock, Senior Director, Oracle Fusion Middleware
*** 7-30-2007 Will Web 3.0 Finally Give Developers a Real Model Driven Architecture Solution? In this interactive panel discussion we will explore how the Semantic Web family of standards is quietly empowering the decades-old MDA (Model Driven Architecture) community. Despite 20+ years of promises from the software community, the original vision of CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) seems just as elusive as ever. However, recent activities in the past 18 months at the OMG (Object Management Group) indicate that another watershed moment for MDA is upon us. So, the question remains, can the Semantic Web and Web 3.0 technology like OWL (Web Ontology Language) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) substantially improve the ways we conceptualize, design, code, and generate enterprise software? Our two expert guests will address these and other questions during the evening of July 30th at the SDForum Semantic Web SIG. We have the pleasure of hearing from Dr. Deborah McGuinness, who Chairs the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford and Elisa Kendal, the President and CEO of Sandpiper Software – which is one of the principal contributors to the OMG’s specification for the Ontology Definition Metamodel, along with IBM, Adaptive Software and others. Time: Monday,
July 30th 2007, 6:30pm –
9pm Cubberley Community Center Price: $15 at the door for non-SDForum members Agenda: 6:30pm - 7:00pm Registration / Networking / Refreshments / Pizza 7:00pm – 7:10pm Community announcement 7:10pm - 7:50pm Introduction to OMG and MDA with new ODM specifications 7:50pm - 8:30pm In depth review of how OWL plays a central role in future MDA work 8:30pm - 9:00pm Dedicated Q&A period Panelist Bios: Deborah McGuinness, Acting Director, Stanford
Knowledge Systems Laboratory Elisa Kendall, President and CEO, Sandpiper
Software Moderator Bios: AJ Chen, Ph.D., Sr. Search Engineer, Healthline.com Jeffrey Pollock, Senior Director, Oracle Fusion
Middleware
*** 5-22-2007 Web 3.0 Semantics? Silicon Valley Meets the World Experts In this interactive panel discussion we will explore the business and technology implications of the emerging semantic technology standards and tools. Leading experts from across the industry will explain how this technology is already making an impact in our healthcare system, government agencies, enterprise software tools and consumer applications. But more importantly, we’ll ask our esteemed panelists to take a broad and sweeping view of the way that these new data management approaches may fundamentally change our everyday lives in the future. Along the way, and with audience participation, the moderator will challenge our panelists to rebuke the Semantic Web conventional wisdom in an attempt to cut through the fog of misplaced expectations and hyperbole to discover if the Web 3.0 phenomenon is more than a passing fad. Our respected panelists include Eric Miller, President of Zepheira and former Activity Lead for all W3C Semantic Web Working Groups, Susie Stephens of Eli Lilly and current Chair of the W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach Group, Ramanathan V. Guha of Google, Co-Creator of RDF and invited expert to both DARPA and W3C working groups, Mills Davis of Project10x and current co-Chair for the Federal CIO Council’s Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice, Sandeep Maripuri, Senior Associate with Booz Allen Hamilton and an architect supporting several US Government R&D programs that leverage Semantic Web technologies. The Moderator for this Panel will be Jeffrey Pollock, a Senior Director with Oracle, former CTO of two semantic-tech startups and author of Adaptive Information, a John Wiley & Sons book about semantic technologies. Time: Tuesday, May 22nd 2007, 7:00pm – 9pm, 4:30pm – 7:00pm Free Exhibition from Semantic Technology Conference 7:00pm - 7:30pm Registration (FREE for members and non-members) 7:30pm - 8:15pm Position Statements from Panelists 8:15pm - 9:00pm Panel Discussion and Audience Questions Panelist Bios: Mills Davis, Managing Director, Project10x Ramanathan V. Guha, Member Technical Staff, Google Sandeep Maripuri, Senior Associate, Booz Allen
Hamilton Eric Miller, President, Zepheira Susie Stephens, Senior Researcher, Eli Lilly Moderator Bio: Jeffrey Pollock, Senior Director, Oracle Fusion
Middleware *** 3-14-2007 The Tortoise vs the Hare - Ontology vs Folksonomy The highly impatient web 2.0 community has embraced tagging and folksonomy as the best way to organize web content. However, there are over 60,000 registered users of Protege, the leading open-source ontology editor and knowledge-based framework. What exactly are these users building, and why? Join us to hear Timothy Redmond of Stanford explain how and why
Protege is so successful, and to hear Jeff Pollock of Oracle explain the
business motivations for investing in ontologies, and why the market
for ontology-based products is so much larger than the market for
folksonomy-based products. Presenter Bios Dr. Timothy Redmond Dr. Timothy Redmond received a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1980) and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University (1984). Since that time, Dr. Redmond has worked in the area of formal methods and their application to verifying the correctness and security of computer systems. He has extensive experience with formal methods including experience using systems such as HOL, InaJo and SDVS. He is currently working at Stanford on the Protege Project. Jeff Pollock Jeff Pollock is a technology leader and author of the enterprise software book “Adaptive Information” (John Wiley & Sons 2004). Currently a Senior Director with Oracle’s Fusion Middleware group, Mr. Pollock was formerly an independent consultant for the Defense Department, Vice President of Technology at Cerebra and Chief Technology Officer of Modulant, developing semantic middleware platforms and inferencedriven SOA platforms from 2001 to 2006. Throughout his career, he has architected, designed, and built application server/middleware solutions for Fortune 500 and US Government clients. Prior to Modulant, Mr. Pollock was a Principal Engineer with Modem Media and Senior Architect with Ernst & Young’s Center for Technology Enablement. He is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences, author for industry journals, active member of W3C and OASIS, and formerly an engineering instructor with University of California at Berkeley’s Extension on the subjects of object-oriented systems, software development process and enterprise systems architecture. ***
1-10-2007 Shrinking the Meaningless Web: Semantic Technologies for 2007 The semantic web has always been about delivering more knowledge, not more information. While some proponents are fighting standards wars, others are just getting on with new applications. Join us as five experts discuss the emerging market and its emerging technologies. Our panelists are Peter Rip of Crosslink Capital, Lew Tucker of Radar Networks, Giovanni Tummarello of Dbin, Alain Rappaport of Medstory, and Ramana Rao, founder of Inxight Software. After short presentations, the panel will entertain your questions.
No matter whether you are new to the semantic web or already deep into
the “next big thing”, you should leave with a better understanding of
new opportunities and of new tools to help get you there. Presenters Peter Rip – General Partner, Crosslink Capital. Peter joined Crosslink in 2006 as a general partner, and focuses on software, Internet services and infrastructure, and consumer services. Peter brings over 25 years of experience as a successful entrepreneur, venture investor, and institutional investor. He has focused exclusively on early stage technology companies. Before becoming a venture investor, Peter co-founded Silicon Compiler Systems, a major IC design automation software company acquired by Mentor Graphics in 1991. He began venture investing in 1992. He has specialized in investing in early stage companies, several of which have been acquired by AOL, CA, HP, Microsoft and others. Prior to joining Crosslink, Peter was a Managing Director at Leapfrog Ventures and the Managing Director of Knight Ridder Ventures. Lew Tucker, Ph.D. - Vice-President, Chief Technology Officer of Radar Networks. Mr. Tucker has two decades of achievements leading advanced technology ventures in the Internet, Artificial Intelligence, and parallel architecture. Prior to joining Radar Networks, he was Vice-President of AppExchange at salesforce.com where he created and drove the growth of the AppExchange platform and online marketplace. In addition to his role at salesforce.com, Mr. Tucker spent 10 years at Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he was Vice-President of Internet Services, having overall corporate responsibility for Sun Microsystem’s presence on the World Wide Web. Earlier as a core member of the first JavaSoft executive team and evangelist for the advancement of the Java technology platform he delivered Sun’s technology strategy at conferences, industry panels, and financial analyst briefings. These included presentations given at InternetWorld, JavaOne96, JavaOne97, JavaOne98, RedHerring, Byte Research Forum and other CTO conferences worldwide. Before coming to Sun, Mr. Tucker was Director of Development and Advanced Software at Thinking Machines, Inc., where he conducted research into machine learning, A.I., and contributed to the architecture and development of the massively parallel Connection Machine supercomputer. Mr. Tucker holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Polytechnic Institute of Technology, and a B.A. in Biology from Cornell University. He has authored numerous papers on computer architecture, AI, and machine intelligence. Before entering the computer field, he was an Assistant Professor in Neurobiology at Cornell University Medical College and early pioneer in the use of computer technology for the mapping of brain function. Giovanni Tummarello, Ph.D. – Chief Architect, Dbin, & CEO, Sensible Logic. Giovanni Tummarello is the driving force behind the DBin project. DBin is the first, general purpose, complete Semantic Web Application; and in general it has been also a source of innovative ideas and concepts. Dr. Tummarello has a formal background in signal processing and machine learning, but has spent most of his Ph.D. and postdoc studies on Multimedia Metadata and Semantic Web technologies. He currently works at Universita’ Politecnica delle Marche, where he leads the SeMedia group. He is also the CEO of Sensible Logic, a startup focused on Semantic Web consulting and the creation of applications based on the DBin platform. Alain T. Rappaport, M.D. Ph.D. - Dr. Rappaport is Founder and CEO of Medstory. He was previously (1985-1996) Co-Founder, President, and Chief Scientist of Neuron Data, Inc., a world leader in artificial intelligence and other business-critical software components. He was a post-doctoral fellow and is currently Adjunct Faculty in the School of Computer Science and Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. In 1997-1999, he held an appointment as Senior Advisor, Office of the Director, Center of Excellence For Information Technology, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He is a founding member of the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI) Conference. He has published in the areas of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neurosciences, in conferences, workshops and major journals. Dr. Rappaport received his M.D. from the Necker Children Hospital School of Medicine, René Descartes University, Paris, France, and his Ph.D. in Molecular Pharmacology from the Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, France. Ramana Rao – Founder and former CTO, Inxight Software. Ramana Rao is
currently advising a number of startups as he develops possible next
ventures in the information intelligence space. He was most recently
Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Inxight Software, a spinout from
Xerox PARC. Across Inxight’s 10 year history, Ramana developed,
managed, and evangelized Inxight’s strategic vision, products, and
technology as well as played key roles in funding, marketing, and sales.
Previously at PARC for ten years, Ramana performed pioneering work in
intelligent information access, digital libraries, information
visualization, and user interfaces. His work includes 25 patent filings
and many highly-cited research papers. He received bachelor’s and
master’s degrees in computer science and engineering from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. | ||||||||