Organizer's bios

Susanne Boll is Professor for Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems at the Department of Computing Science at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Also since 2002 she is a member of the Oldenburg Institute for Information Technology (OFFIS) where she is a Member of the Executive Board and heading the Multimedia and Internet Information Services division. In 2001, Susanne Boll received her doctorate with distinction at the Technical University of Vienna, Austria, in the field of multimedia information systems. She received her diploma degree with distinction in computer science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, in 1996. Focus of her research are context-aware multimedia information retrieval, context-aware mobile systems, and user-centered multimedia applications and systems. Susanne Boll has been publishing her research results on many international workshops, conferences and journals. Susanne Boll is an active member of SIGMM of the ACM and GI, and also an active member of IEEE Computer Society. She is also an invited expert of the W3C Multimedia Semantics Incubator Group (MMSEM-XG).

Mor Naaman is a research scientist at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. His research focuses on context and location-based tools and algorithms for interacting with media, and creating mobile and web-based media applications. Mor holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, awarded at 2005. His research in the Stanford Infolab also focused on management of digital photographs, thereby allowing (and requiring!) him to take photos throughout his working life. Mor has got a B.A. degree in Computer Science and Business Management at Tel Aviv University. In previous careers, Mor was a professional basketball player as well as a software developer and a college radio DJ.

Ross Purves is a lecturer in the GIS division at the University of Zürich. Together with Chris Jones he initiated and organized the successful ongoing series of workshops on Geographic Information Retrieval, which have been hosted by ACM SIGIR and CIKM. He has written a range of papers on GIR, together with a wider range of publications within GIScience covering diverse themes such as environmental modeling and uncertainty. Prior to coming to Zürich he was a Research Fellow, and latterly Lecturer in the Geography Department of the University of Edinburgh.

Arno Scharl is the Vice President of MODUL University Vienna, where he heads the Department of New Media Technology. Prior to his current appointment, he held professorships at the University of Western Australia and Graz University of Technology, was a Key Researcher at the Austrian Competence Center for Knowledge Management, and a Visiting Fellow at Curtin University of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. Arno completed his doctoral research, and habilitation at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. Additionally, he holds a PhD from the University of Vienna, Department of Sports Physiology. He has edited a recent book on the Geospatial Web, founded the ECOresearch Network and served as co-chair of the 20th International Conference on Informatics for Environmental Protection. His current research interests focus on the integration of semantic and geospatial Web technology, Web mining and media monitoring, virtual communities and environmental online communication.

Christopher Jones is Professor of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in the School of Computer Science at Cardiff University, UK. He has held previous academic positions at the University of Glamorgan, where led the GIS Research Group, and the University of Cambridge as a Lecturer in the Department of Geography. Prior to his academic career, he was employed on geological computing applications at BP Exploration and at the British Geological Survey. Research interests include the development of geographical place ontologies and spatio-textual indexing methods for spatially-aware web search engines; multiscale spatial databases; environmental change detection; spatio-temporal data modelling; and automated cartographic design with regard to map generalization and automated text placement. He has received research funding from UK Research councils, industry and European Commission. He has published widely in journals and conferences in the field of geographical information science as well as publishing a text on GIS and Computer Cartography.

Erik Wilde's experience in Web technologies dates back to 1998, when he published the first comprehensive book looking at all Web technologies in an architectural overview. Since then, he has been working in the field of Web architecture, publishing another book on advanced linking for the Web. His current work focuses of XML technologies (with an emphasis on XML Schema) and Web architecture.

Eric Kansa is Executive Director of the Information and Service Design (ISD) program at UC Berkeley's School of Information. Before joining UC Berkeley in 2007, he was cofounder and Executive Director of the Alexandria Archive Institute, and led development of Open Context, an online system for publishing collections and field research in archaeology and natural history. After earning his doctorate in 2001 at Harvard University, he joined their Anthropology faculty for two years as Lecturer and Undergraduate Tutor. His research efforts focus on open scholarly communication, information architectures for the field sciences, and intellectual property frameworks for field-based research.

Puneet Kishor is an independent consultant in open geospatial information systems and an elected Charted Member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. He assists small private companies, local governments and large international NGOs solve their geospatial information problems. For the past year Puneet has been working with the National Academies on open access to scientific information. He was deeply involved from start to end in the dialog and process that led to the recently announce Science Commons Open Access Data Mark. He is currently working on his Ph.D. in Environment and Resources at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he is working in an inter-disciplinary team creating a highly automated Community Knowledge-Base. Prior to that, Puneet worked at The World Bank's only GIS lab for five years and followed that with almost a decade working at a private GIS consulting firm. Most recently he was a S&T Policy Fellow at the National Academies in Washington DC.