Daniel Keim
Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Konstanz, Germany
Daniel A. Keim is full professor and head of the Information Visualization and Data Analysis Research Group in the Computer Science Department of the University of Konstanz, Germany. He has been actively involved in data analysis and information visualization research for about 20 years and developed a number of novel visual analysis techniques for very large data sets. He has been program co-chair of the IEEE InfoVis and IEEE VAST symposia as well as the SIGKDD conference, and he is member of the IEEE InfoVis and VAST steering committees. He is an associate editor of Palgrave’s Information Visualization Journal (since 2001) and the Knowledge and Information System Journal (since 2006), and has been an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (1999 – 2004) and the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2002 – 2007). He is coordinator of the German Strategic Research Initiative (SPP) on Scalable Visual Analytics and the scientific coordinator of the EU Coordination Action on Visual Analytics.
Dr. Keim got his Ph.D. and habilitation degrees in computer science from the University of Munich. Before joining the University of Konstanz, Dr. Keim was associate professor at the University of Halle, Germany and Technology Consultant at AT&T Shannon Research Labs, NJ, USA.
Keynote: “Solving Problems with Visual Analytics: Challenges and Applications” (Slides)
Never before in history data is generated and collected at such high volumes as it is today. As the volumes of data available to business people, scientists, and the public increase, their effective use becomes more challenging. Keeping up to date with the flood of data, using standard tools for data analysis and exploration, is fraught with difficulty. The field of visual analytics seeks to provide people with better and more effective ways to understand and analyze large datasets, while also enabling them to act upon their findings immediately. Visual analytics integrates the analytic capabilities of the computer and the abilities of the human analyst, allowing novel discoveries and empowering individuals to take control of the analytical process. Visual analytics enables unexpected and hidden insights, which may lead to beneficial and profitable innovation. The talk presents the challenges of visual analytics and exemplifies them with several application examples, which illustrate the exiting potential of current visual analysis techniques but also their limitations.
Gloria Mark
Professor at University of California, Irvine, USA
Gloria Mark is a Professor in the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. Her principle research areas are in human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. Her research focuses on the design and evaluation of collaborative systems. Her current projects include studying multi-tasking of information workers, IT use for resilience and adaptation in disrupted environments, and mobile platforms for telemedicine. She received her PhD in Psychology from Columbia University. Prior to joining UCI in 2000, she worked at the GMD in Bonn, Germany (now Fraunhofer Institute). In 2006 she received a Fulbright scholarship where she worked at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. She has been the technical program chair for ACM CSCW’06 and ACM GROUP’05 conferences, is the technical program chair for ACM CSCW’12, and is on the editorial board of ACM TOCHI, and Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing. Her work has appeared in the popular press such as The New York Times, Time, and The Wall Street Journal.
Keynote:”Multi-Tasking in the Information Age: Tasks, Information, and Interaction Contexts”
Multi-tasking is a way of life for information workers. In this talk I will present empirical results from fieldwork observations and experiments over the last few years which detail the extent to which information workers multitask, irrespective of their organizational role. I will discuss how multi-tasking impacts various aspects of collaboration and communication in the workplace. More recently, our current work uses sensors to measure multi-tasking. Not only do information workers switch continually among multiple tasks but they also switch continually among interactions in varied workplace contexts, such as the work home and organization. We found that people compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price of experiencing more stress. These results challenge the traditional way that most IT is designed to organize information, i.e. in terms of distinct tasks. Instead, I will discuss how IT should support information organization in a way consistent with how most people were found to organize their work, which is in terms of much larger thematically connected units of work. I will present a prototype of a technology that can help support people in their multi-tasking and will also discuss how the results present opportunities for new social and technical solutions to support multi-tasking in the workplace.
Stefan Rüger
Professor at the Knowledge Media Institute of The Open University, United Kingdom
Professor Rüger read Physics at Freie Universität Berlin and gained his PhD at Technische Universität Berlin (1996). He carved out his academic career at Imperial College London (1997-2006), where he also held an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship (1999-2004). In 2006 he became a full Professor of Knowledge Media when he joined The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute to cover the area of Multimedia and Information Systems. Since 2009 he has held a Honorary Professorship from the University of Waikato, New Zealand, for his collaboration with the Greenstone Digital Library group on Multimedia Digital Libraries. Rüger has published widely in the area of Multimedia Information Retrieval. Rüger’s research interests are firmly rooted in the area of automated multimedia understanding with a view to improving multimedia indexing, search and browsing in digital collections and beyond. The relevant research contributes to — and is informed by — machine learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence. He was Principal Investigator in the EPSRC-funded Multimedia Knowledge Management Network, of a national EPSRC grant to research and develop video digital libraries and Principal Investigator for The Open University in the European FP6-ICT project PHAROS that established a horizontal layer of technologies for large-scale audio-visual search engines. As of 2011, he has served the academic community in various roles as conference chair (3x), programme chair (3x), journal editor (3x), guest editor (3x) and as referee for a wide range of Computing journals (>25), international conferences (>50) and research sponsors (12). Rüger is a member of the EPSRC College, ACM, BCS, the BCS IRSG committee and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Keynote: “Knowledge Discovery in the Web: Potential, Automation and Limits”(Slides)
The talk reflects on the value and potential of social networks, interlinked data, semantic web and data-mining. At the same time I would like to elicit new research directions, which are only enabled by the sheer mass of data, sensors, facts, reports, opinions and inter-linkage of people. There are a number of information requests that traditional web services can cover well: best route from A to B, opening times of theatre plays, book reviews given a snapshot of a book cover, extensive and competent wikipedia articles on virtually every aspect of our lives. We can hardly imagine a world that does not offer these web services, which have complemented traditional methods of resource discovery, say, in libraries. It is quite possible that automated processing of excessive amounts of data paired with new methods of semantic web, information retrieval, human information interaction, social networks, and cloud computing opens up novel and unprecedented areas of knowledge discovery: What are the prospects of wikiversities? Will search and inference engines built at TrueKnowledge and Wolfram Alpha be in a position to answer all complex questions that have factual answers? Will automated mechanisms or social network activity be able to answer questions for the scientific evidence for global warming? What can we learn by computers being able to read 1 million books? Or watch the news of thousands of television channels in 100 countries for that matter?
Christian Dirschl
Content Architect at Wolters Kluwer Germany GmbH
Christian Dirschl holds the position of Content Architect and is head of the content strategy department at Wolters Kluwer Germany since 2005, after joining the company in 2001 as a project manager.
Key aspects of his responsibilities are content structuring, content conversion, automatic text classification and developments around the Semantic Web as well as Linked Open Data.
With Wolters Kluwer as a global information provider in the in the areas of Legal & Regulatory, Tax & Accounting, Financial & Compliance Services and Health & Pharma Solutions, he is amongst other projects engaged in the research project LOD2 as an industrial partner.
Before he joined Wolters Kluwer Germany, Christian Dirschl already gained considerable experience as IT-Consultant in several Software Companies, including customers like Swiss International Air Lines or Paulaner Brauerei Munich.
He obtained his masters degree in information science at the University of Regensburg.
Keynote: “Semantic Web and Legal Publisher: Strategy and Vision” (Slides)
Semantic Web and Semantic Web technologies address many problems, which are currently to solve by information providers as Wolters Kluwer; mainly in the fields of content acquisition, content enrichment and content usage. To meet the challenges of e.g. huge amounts of data, missing possibilities of content annotation or lacking information quality, Wolters Kluwer decided to participate in the EU funded FP7 Project LOD2. The project’s aim is to develop the Semantic Web in a way that allows information providers as Wolters Kluwer to support its customers with regard to these challenges.
Christian Dirschl, Content Architect at Wolters Kluwer Germany will give an insight into the Wolters Kluwer Linked Data strategy and discuss process innovation and business development opportunities on top of Semantic Web metadata.