LOGO Langtech 2003

Knowledge management and the semantic Web conference session - Speakers and companies profiles

Presentation: Integrating Linguistic Products into Corporate Applications

Elisabeth Maier is one of the founders of Canoo Engineering AG and responsible for Canoo's NLP group. She has over 15 years of experience in Natural Language Processing, being specialized in Natural Language Generation, Dialogue Processing, Machine Translation and Morphology. Prior to joining Canoo in 1999, she held positions as a researcher at GMD-IPSI (Darmstadt, Germany), IRST (Trento, Italy), and DFKI (Saarbrucken, Germany). She was Vice President of the R&D department of the Web Competence Center of UBS AG in Basel, Switzerland.

Canoo Engineering AG was founded in 1999. Since then it has established itself as a leading provider of complex Web applications in Switzerland. Canoo offers both IT services and a range of innovative products, including the linguistic products WMTrans and Canoo.net. Canoo is one of the major providers of morphological data and software in the German-speaking area. Its product line includes components for the processing of German, English and Italian. Canoo components have been successfully integrated into a range of customer products and applications. As a spin-off of Basel University, Canoo has long-standing experience in the execution of applied research, and the transformation of research results into competitive products.

Dr. Bernt A. Bremdal is the co-founder and CEO of CognIT. Dr. Bremdal has 20 years experience from development of intelligent applications both in research, industry and finance. He is the co-inventor of the CORPORUM MIMIR Engine, the CORPORUM Knowledge Server and the CORPORUM Summarizer. Dr. Bremdal is an Associate Professor at Narvik Institute of Technology and a senior lecturer at Norwegian School of Business Administration.

Presentation: Semantic Markup and Annotation - a Business Case on Web-based Technology

Robert H. P. Engels currently works for CognIT a.s (Norway) as Director R&D. He is also attached to the Trondheim Polytechnic (NTNU), Norway, as an examinator and supervisor. He has been a guest lecturer at the BI in Oslo (Norwegian School of Management), Hoegskolen i Narvik and is project coordinator for international student exchange (cooperating with the Universities of Amsterdam, Netherlands and Karlsruhe, Germany). He also teaches primary school level at the Dutch School in Oslo (NTC) and is a peer reviewer/referent in a variety of EU projects, several international conferences on AI, Knowledge Engineering and Acquisition as well as conferences and workshops on Knowledge Management.

CognIT is a provider of solutions and technology for knowledge and information management. CognIT provides a uite of tools under the name CORPORUM. CORPORUM is a consists of knowledge-based systems and computational lingustic technology. The CORPORUM approach is built on artificial intelligence, NLP and complexity theory.
We service both end-users and application providers with software that enables improved search, categorisation, content management, knowledge sharing and knowledge building. CognIT was one of the pioneer companies in the world that offered commercial software for semantic analysis and context oriented search. The company today provides a whole suite of software and technology components that supports information extraction, names extraction, intelligent tagging, concept-to-concept classification, ontology building, intelligent indexing and associative search.

Presentation: Integration of NLP Technology into KM can save People's Lives

Mr. Laga is an entrepreneur who has been active in the field of Medical Informatics since 1986 when he started his first company. This successful company, developing RIS and EPR systems for customers all over Europe, is now part of the Agfa-group. Within Language and Computing, Mr. Laga is responsible for the organization's strategic direction. He has extensive experience that provides L&C with a valuable perspective on the needs and challenges of a modern healthcare organization. Mr. Laga holds a Masters Degree in Informatics from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium and holds additional degrees in SME-management and Healthcare management & policy.

Language and Computing specializes in cutting edge information management solutions for the healthcare and pharmaceutical markets, supported by the latest Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. L&C offers solutions for semantic indexing of free text documents, information analysis, document mining, information retrieval and extraction, terminology management and automated clinical coding.
Our solutions benefit from the computer-understandable medical knowledge base that is represented in our LinKBaseŇ product. The LinKBaseŇ is the largest and most advanced formal medical knowledgebase that exists today and the only medical knowledge base specifically designed to support NLP applications.

Paul Buitelaar has been a senior researcher in the Language Technology Lab at DFKI since March 1998. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brandeis University, Waltham MA, USA. At DFKI he has been working as a senior researcher on the EC funded projects MIETTA and OLIVE, as project leader and coordinator of the EC/NSF funded project MUCHMORE and as coordinator of the SIG on Language Technology in Ontology Development and Use within the EC funded thematic network OntoWeb. He also acts as co-chair of the DFKI Competence Center Semantic Web. He organized several international workshops on topics in semantic annotation and has been an invited speaker at many panels and workshops in the areas of lexical semantics, semantic annotation, ontology development and semantic web. His main research interest is in Concept-Based Information Access in relation with research and development in Semantic Annotation, Ontology Development, Information Extraction and Corpus-Based Lexical Semantics.

Founded in 1988, DFKI today is one of the largest nonprofit contract research institutes in the field of innovative software technology based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods. DFKI is focusing on the complete cycle of innovation - from world-class basic research and technology development through leading-edge demonstrators and prototypes to product functions and commercialization. An important element of DFKI's mission is to move innovations as quickly as possible from the lab into the marketplace. Only by maintaining research projects at the forefront of science DFKI has the strength to meet its technology transfer goals.

Wolfgang Giere was trained as physician in Tuebingen, Munich, Montpellier and Marseille. He has been a pioneer in medical computing since 1966. In 1970, he was chairman of organization and clinical computing at the German Clinic for Diagnostic, Wiesbaden. In 1976, he held the chair of medical informatics in Frankfurt/Main, emerited since Mai 2003. He has been working on text generation since 1967, text analysis and automated classification since 1970, initiator of the German ICD-10-Thesaurus and coauthor of the German Specialist Lexicon for UMLS.

The Center of Medical Informatics (ZInfo) (www.zinfo.de) is part of the J.W.Goethe-university "Klinikum" (Medical School and university hospital). It founded data processing for administration as well as for teaching and research support. It provided hospitals and practicing physicians with software and net services. ZInfo was medical partner in the transatlantic joint project MuchMore.

Presentation: Language Technology for Associative Memories and Semantic Web

Hans Uszkoreit is Scientific Director and Head of the Language Technology Lab at DFKI. He is also Professor of Computational Linguistics and Computer Science at Saarland University as well as current Chair of the Computational Linguistics Dept. He received his PhD in 1984 from the University of Texas at Austin and held positions at Stanford U., SRI Intl. and IBM Germany. He is President of the European Association of Logic, Lamguage and Information, Member of the European Academy of Sciences, of the Intl. Committee for Computational Linguistics, of the Board of the European Chapter of the ACL and of the Executive Board of the European Network of Language and Speech. He is Co-director of the German Competence Center for Language Technology. He is also co-founder and board member of two spin-off companies, He serves on many advisory and editorial boards, among them the editorial board of the new Springer book series Cognitive Technologies. His research interests focus on the scientific foundations and advanced applications of language technology.

DFKI is one of the largest contract research centers in the field of Artificial Intelligence and innovative software technology based on AI methods. It is a non-profit R&D company organized as a public-private partnership. The center has 15 years of experience in top level research. It has a staff of nearly 200 complemented by more than 100 research assistants. DFKI has participated in numerous EU projects and networks. It covers the entire spectrum from application-oriented fundamental research to market and client-oriented development of product functions, and succeeded in rapidly transforming top research into practical applications. The Language Technology Lab of DFKI focusses on computer models of human language. It is one of the few centers at which deep linguistic processing methods are combined with new computing paradigms and insights from cognitive science. The Lab possesses technology for all levels of language processing from speech and text to semantics as well as lexicons and grammars for several languages. One of the specialties of the Lab is the integration of statistical processing techniques with logical and linguistic methods. The lab has successfully applied language processing to knowledge management, document production and natural communication. More information at www.dfki.de/lt/ .

Presentation: A new KM Approach based on the Neolithic Experience: from foraging to farming Knowledge

Antonio S. Valderrábanos is the Founder and Director of Bitext. He works in the area of Language Engineering since 1989, mainly in the industrial sector. Before founding Bitext, he worked for IBM (in Spain), and for WordPerfect and Novell (in the Benelux) in the application of linguistic technology to the fields of: multilingual information retrieval, linguistic resources development, electronic publishing, and grammar checking.
At the academic level, he holds a PhD degree on linguistics from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). He has been member of different scientific committees and has published different papers at international conferences. He has cooperated with different research centres (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Pisa-Italia) and universities (Universidad de Sevilla, Spain; Universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain).

Bitext - The Bit and Text Company - is focused on integrating Language Engineering solutions into business and industrial applications. On the development side, Bitext provides solutions that exploit linguistic technology in the areas of knowledge management (for Carrot); information retrieval (for RENFE, the National Railway Company; in partnership with dtSearch Corp), and translation automation (Atril). Bitext also develops basic language resources for Spanish and other languages.
On the research side, Bitext provides technical consulting services for different IST-funded projects (LIQUID-IST, TT2 IST-2001-32091, ALLES IST-2001-34246) for SchlumbergerSema Spain, and technical information services on translation technology for Atril (www.TransRef.org).

Presentation: Semantic, Annotation, Indexing & Retrieval

Atanas Kiryakov obtained his M.Sc. degree in C.S. from the Sofia University, Bulgaria, in 1995 with thesis on knowledge representation. His research interests include ontologies, lexical semantics, information extraction, information retrieval, and web services. He is organizer and member of PC of a number of international forums, author of more than 20 publications. Mr. Kiryakov joined Sirma AI as a software engineer in 1993, and partner in 1996. He has led and participated in projects in CASE, CSCW, e-Government, and b2b. Since 2000 he is member of the board of Sirma Group and head of Ontotext Lab. At present, he is member of the board of BASSCOM (www.basscom.org) and chair of the Research and Education SIG there. Recently, Kiryakov led Ontotext in a number of outstanding research projects (like On-To-Knowledge and SWWS) in the area of Semantic Web and Web Services.

Ontotext (www.ontotext.com) is a laboratory within Sirma AI (Sofia) – a top-3 Bulgarian software house and R&D backbone of Sirma Group. Ontotext is focused on research and core technology development in areas ranging from formal knowledge representation and management to information extraction and web services. Ontotext cooperates with the leading research centers in the framework of a number of European research projects on Semantic Web and KM (On-To-Knowledge, SWWS, SEKT, DIP, PrestoSpace).
The lab is involved in the development of a couple of the most prominent software architectures for language engineering (GATE, www.gate.ac.uk) and Semantic Web (Sesame, sourceforge.net/projects/sesame/). Ontotext’s latest development is the KIM platform (www.ontotext.com/kim) for semantic annotation, indexing, and retrieval.

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