Keynote Speakers
François Bancilhon is currently the CEO and co-founder of Data Publica, a start up of the open data and big data space in Paris, France. He has been CEO of Mandriva, one of the top world Linux publishers; CIO of SomaLogic, a bio-tech company in Boulder, Colorado; CEO of Arioso, an Internet startup in Denver, Colorado, and CTO of Ardent Software, a Data Warehousing company in the Boston area. In the 90's he co-founded and directed O2 Technology, an object database software vendor, in Versailles, France. He is also a co-founder of several startups (including Xylème) and chairman of the board of Ucopia, a Paris wifi start up.
Before becoming an entrepreneur François was a researcher at INRIA, France, at MCC in Austin, USA and a Professor at the University of Paris. He holds an engineering degree from the École des Mines de Paris, a PhD from the University of Michigan and a Thèse d'État from the University of Paris XI.
ECSS 2013 Keynote Speech:
The gap between the academic research world and the start up innovation scene.
I have been watching the academic research scene and the start up space in Europe over the last 10 years and actively participated in at least one of these worlds. I remain impressed by the remarkable quality of most of the academic research in Europe. I am also impressed by the energy and enthusiasm of the young startupers in many European capitals. In my current and past experiences, I have tried, in all the startups I have worked for, to benefit from the existing R&D produced by academic labs, i.e. to transfer technology from the academic to the industrial world. I still feel, that (i) there could be more transfer than there is today and (ii) that the gap is growing rather than closing. I will try to illustrate my point and suggest some ideas which we could use to improve the situation.
Carl-Christian Buhr is an Economist and Computer Scientist; since 2010 member of the cabinet of Digital Agenda Commissioner and EU Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes; advising Commissioner Kroes on ICT research and innovation policy, including access to scientific information, research infrastructures including e-infrastructures as well as standardisation, interoperability and industrial topics such as the European Cloud Computing Strategy and the European Electronics strategy."
ECSS 2013 Keynote Speech:
Innovation in Informatics: The Horizon 2020 Perspective
With the next EU framework programme for research and innovation support, Horizon 2020, just finalised, this is a good opportunity to present what is planned for the computer science/ICT area for the period 2014 to 2020. The talk will in particular make the link between research support and policy priorities and give first indications of ICT priorities for the years 2014 and 2015.
Frank van Harmelen is a professor in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning at the VU University in Amsterdam, with a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. He is one of the designers of OWL, the W3C standard Web Ontology Language, which is now widely deployed across the world. He has published over 200 papers, many of them in leading journals and conferences, and many of them highly cited, in areas such as automated theorem proving ('80s), knowledge-based systems ('90s) and Semantic Web (since 2000). One of his five books is the first textbook on Semantic Web technology (now deployed in university courses across the world, with translations in Spanish, Greek, Japanese, Chinese and Korean). He has chaired several major conferences, and was the scientific director of the Large Knowledge Collider project that developed technology for very large scale semantic web processing. He is currently Director of the Network Institute (http://www.networkinstitute.org), a large interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers in Computer Science, Social Sciences and the Humanities.
ECSS 2013 Keynote Speech:
Innovative Informatics by bridging the "Two Cultures": experiences from the Network Institute
C.P. Snow's 1959 "Two Cultures" lecture is still remembered for its thesis that "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into the titular two cultures — namely the sciences and the humanities. What is often forgotten is that Snow argued that this split was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems. This is as much true today (if not more so) than it was in 1959.
The mission of the Network Institute at the VU University Amsterdamis is exactly to bridge the gap between Informatics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other. I will try to show in this presentation that not only does this collaboration help to solve real problems in the world, but it also simply leads to good Informatics research, all the way down to fundamental theoretical problems.
I will discuss the mission of the Network, and how we have tried to organise and engage researchers from both "cultures". I will describe some example results of our interdisciplinary research, with an emphasis on the Informatics innovation, and I will discuss lessons learned.
Heleen Kist is a strategy consultant, interim manager and commercial mediator. Working independently for over 10 years, Heleen has advised a range of private and public sector organisations, while focusing on areas of growth strategy, innovation, access to finance and public-private partnerships. She has been a start-up CEO and (interim) manager for SMEs and VCs. She was previously an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company with particular interest in the healthcare sector, and a technical brand manager at Procter & Gamble.
Heleen is considered an expert in access to finance, having led the set-up of the innovative Scottish Co-Investment Fund and of the North East JEREMIE fund, the first one in England. She is currently a non-Executive Director for Capital for Enterprise, the UK government's centre for expertise and delivery of public sector access to finance interventions, and she sits on the Access to Finance Expert Group at the UK government's department of BIS. She is also Chair of Scottish Health Innovations Ltd, an organisation aiming to commercialise innovation from the Scottish national health service.
Heleen has a MSc in Chemistry from Leiden University and a MSc in Engineering- Economic Systems and Operations Research from Stanford University.
ECSS 2013 Keynote Speech:
The role of the state in financing innovation
The public sector has always had a role to play in financing innovation within universities and research institutes - in fact, many of today's key technologies stem from publicly funded research and have enabled commercial opportunities and growth. Increasingly, governments are now taking a role in stimulating and funding innovation in the private sector directly: through support of start-ups, SMEs and established companies. Heleen Kist will examine what's behind this philosophy, and showcase a range of interventions.
Erik Meijer is a Dutch computer scientist and entrepreneur. From 2000 to early 2013 he was a software architect for Microsoft where he headed the Cloud Programmability Team. He then founded Applied Duality Inc. in 2013. Before that, he was an associate professor at Utrecht University. He received his Ph.D from Nijmegen University in 1992.
Meijer's research has included the areas of functional programming (particularly Haskell compiler implementation, parsing, programming language design, XML, and foreign function interfaces).
His work at Microsoft included C#, Visual Basic, LINQ, Volta, and the Reactive programming framework (Reactive Extensions) for .NET. He has been involved in over 300 software patent applications of which 101 have been granted. In 2009, he was the recipient of the Microsoft Outstanding Technical Leadership Award and in 2007 the Outstanding Technical Achievement Award as a member of the C# team.
In 2011 Erik Meijer was appointed part-time professor of Cloud Programming within the Software Engineering Research Group at Delft University of Technology. He is also member of the ACM Queue Editorial Board.
ECSS 2013 Keynote Speech:
Patents or Open Source, Start up or Enterprise: A Silicon Valley Perspective
The renowned computer scientist Donald Knuth has said that "If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice." In other words, the best results surface at the fault lines between opposing (dual) forces. Theory and practice; patents and open source; startups and enterprises.
I have been bridging academic research and large enterprise product development for the past decade, but I found that I was spending all my time on dealing with process and legacy, so it was time to start turning my attention to innovate in the Silicon Valley startup space, to search for new customer problems and novel ways to cure their pain. What has not chanced is the deep connection with academic research. In this talk I will share my real-world experience in transferring ideas between theory and practice in both directions, and argue that academia should focus much more on theoretical and fundamental long term research rather than trying to have short term practical impact. While theory and practice are mutually enforcing, they are very different disciplines that require very different skills. It is our duty as a society to ensure that theory remains vibrant to maintain a healthy balance and ensure future growth of practice.
Anka Mulder studied History at the University of Groningen, where she later lectured in International Relations. After having worked in Brussels and Vienna for a number of years, in 1996 she took up a post as head of department at the ROI, an institute for education, coaching and consultancy for public administration.
From November 2004 to April 2013 she fulfilled the position of Director of Education and Student Affairs (E&SA) at TU Delft. In 2008 she became a member of the board of the international OpenCourseWare Consortium and from 2011 to 2013 she was the OpenCourseWare Consortium president. The Consortium is the largest international organisation in the field of free online provision of education in the form of complete courses. From July 2011 to April 2013 she combined the post of director with that of Secretary General of the university.
Since April 2013, she has been Vice-President at TU Delft responsible for Education and Operations. Furthermore she is a member of the edX Consortium, a network of twelve universities including Harvard, MIT and Berkeley, that produce Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and promote innovation in education worldwide.
ECSS 2013 Keynote Speech:
Open and Online Education: the end of education as we know it?
ICT and the Internet have a major impact on our lives and have change entire economic sectors, such as the travel industry or the music industry. For a long time Higher Education did not seem to be affected, but in the last few years it has become clear that developments in Open Ed will cause a revolution.
● There are more than 20.000 OpenCourseWare (OCW) courses online
● MOOC:s are attracting millions of learners
● Top universities are investing millions
Delft University of Technology is at the forefront of this movement. It is an active member of the OCW Consortium and edX, produces OCW, will run a series of MOOCs and will start accredited online education in three fields from September.
During her presentation, Anka Mulder will discuss why the digital revolution in education is such a strong movement and how it will change the face of Higher Education. She will also address the choices Delft University has made in its strategy on open and online education.
Pamela Zave received an A.B. degree in English from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. degree in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She began her career as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland-College Park. Since 1981 she has worked for the research organization of AT&T, which was part of Bell Laboratories before 1996 and part of AT&T Laboratories afterward.
Her research interests include requirements engineering, telecommunication services, Internet architecture, and modeling languages.
She has received Ten-Year Most Influential Paper Awards at RE (2003, 2007) and ICSE (2005). She is an ACM and AT&T Fellow, and receieived the AT&T Strategic Patent Award in 2004.
ECSS 2013 Keynote Speech:
The Power of Abstraction
From program analysis to data mining, informatics has yielded an abundance of tools and techniques for superficial understanding of our world and our computations. To go deeper, it is necessary to have domain-specific abstractions that capture the semantics of a domain in a useful and enlightening way. Drawing examples from the area of networking, this talk illustrates the power of abstraction in producing commercial products, improving communication among researchers and practitioners, and stimulating invention. It also covers the challenges of abstraction, which result from the inter-disciplinary nature of this work.