Prof. Peter A. Bruck
World Summit Award
Austria

Brief Bio
Professor DDr. Peter A. Bruck studied law, economics, sociology and communications at the universities of Vienna, Iowa and McGill. He holds doctorates in law and communications and has taught at universities in Canada, the US and Western Europe plus Israel and Poland. He has more than 25 years experience in research, university teaching and information technologies in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Portugal, the US and Canada. Mr Bruck received numerous awards and fellowships in Europe, the US and Canada and is listed in the Canadian and Austrian Who’s Who. He founded, built and headed research institutes at three universities, and he is a senior partner of the ICRA (International Communications Research Associates) in Ottawa, Canada.

Abstract
The World Summit Award (WSA) is a global initiative to select and promote the world’s best e-Content, started in 2003 in the framework of the United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). This paper presents six of the best projects from around the world in the categories of e-Business and e-Government, which have been judged by independent experts to be outstanding examples of how consumer ICT can strengthen SME’s on the marketplace, support and optimize business and administrative processes and strengthen participation of citizens in information society decision making beyond past limitations of space and time. Key facts of the applications are reported and the judgments of the WSA Grand Jury are presented in order to provide an informative overview of how culture is made rich with a good use of ICTs.

Prof. Dieter A. Fensel
University Innsbruck
Austria

Brief Bio
In 1989, Prof. Dr. Dieter Fensel earned both his Master in Social Science (Free University of Berlin) and his Master in Computer Science (Technical University of Berlin). In 1993, he was awarded his Doctoral degree in Economic Science, Dr. rer. pol., from the University of Karlsruhe. And in 1998 he received his Habilitation in Applied Computer Science. Throughout his doctoral and post-doctoral career, Prof. Dr. Fensel has held positions at the University of Karlsruhe (AIFB), the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). In 2002, he took a chair at the Institute for Computer Science, Leopold Franzens University of Innsbruck, Austria. In 2003, he became the Scientific Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway, receiving a large grant acquired from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and in 2006 he became the Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the Leopold Franzens University of Innsbruck, Austria. In 2007, he founded the Semantic Technology Institute International (STI2), which is organized as a collaborative association of interested scientific, industrial and governmental parties of the world wide Semantic Web and Service community that share a common vision. End of 2007, DERI Innsbruck was renamed to STI Innsbruck. STI International already counts 30 associate members from all over the world. His current research interests are around the usage of semantics in 21st century computer science.

He has published over 200 papers via scientific books and journals, conferences, and workshop contributions. He has co-organized over 200 academic workshops and conferences. He is an Associated Editor fourteen scientific journals/publications. He has been an executive member in than 50 international and national research projects with a total volume of more than 40 Million Euro. Furthermore, he worked as scientific or project coordinator in several projects, such as Larck (IP), SOA4All (IP), KnowledgeWeb (NoE) or Tripcom (Strep). His academic experience is not however restricted to academia, having taught over fifty courses at various levels of education, from professional academies and technical colleges to universities and scientific conferences. Topics include: Formal Specification Languages, Software Engineering, Data Warehouse, World Wide Web, Electronic Commerce, Agent-based Information Access, Semantic Web and Ontologies. He has supervised over 50 master theses and PhDs and is a recipient of the Carl-Adam-Petri-Award of the Faculty of Economic Sciences from the University of Karlsruhe (2000). Dieter Fensel has contributed to more than 10 books as an author or editor.

Abstract
The EU is currently leading research efforts towards the Future Internet, an Internet where more and more devices will be connected (sensors, computers, pda, mobile phones, ...) to create what is called the "Internet of Things". Potentially each device will be able to consume and publish services on the Internet. On top of this, current trends towards Service Oriented Architecture will lead a huge increase of available Web services, finally bringing the available machine-to-machine interfaces to a number equivalent the number of Web pages currently available. The Future Internet will create an Internet of Services standing on top of the Internet of Things. This vision requires new technologies enabling automation in order to make it Web scalable. Semantics have already proven, in many contexts, as a viable approach to achieve automation, thanks to its native support for automatic composition, discovery and mediation. In this talk Prof. Dieter Fensel will elaborate on the role of Semantics in the design and implementation of the Future Internet, taking into account current strength and pitfalls of Semantics technologies.

Prof. Ethan Munson
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
U.S.A.

Brief Bio
Ethan Munson is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he also directs the Multimedia Software Laboratory. He holds degrees in psychology and computer science from the University of California, San Diego and received the MS and PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, completing his studies in 1994. His research has ranged across many topics, including tools for managing software documents, Web services, Web image search, and psychological aspects of human-computer interaction. Dr. Munson received a National Science Foundation CAREER award and has also had research support from the Department of Defense and from industry. He has been part of teams that have received four NSF educational grants. He is a leader in the Document Engineering and Web research communities and is currently Chair of ACM SIGWEB.

Abstract
Languages developed by document engineering research, starting with HTML and moving to CSS and the many members of the XML language family, are at the center of modern Web technology. Innovation in document engineering will continue to exert strong influence on the Web for two reasons. First, documents are central artifacts of modern human society, so their creation, manipulation and management are inherently important. Second, document technology tends to create simple paradigms that have many applications. Important future trends will include increased document security, structured versioning and management, the continued blurring of the distinction between authoring form and final form, and increased recognition that syntax delivers much of what semantics promises. These trends will impact the Web and only some of the impacts can be envisioned now.

Prof. Mats Daniels
Uppsala University
Sweden

Brief Bio
Mats Daniels, Senior lecturer, Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Sweden.  I have taught courses since 1980 at Uppsala University, except during 1989-90 when being a guest lecturer at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.  I have since 1991 been director of undergraduate education at the department and as such been intimately involved in the development of the education at the department.  My dedication to education, is manifested in working towards establishing Computing Education Research as a subject and driving several development and research projects, e.g. the Runestone project where students from Sweden and USA collaborate.  My main body of publications is in educational conferences such as IEEE Frontiers in Education, ACM Australasian Computing Conference (ACE), and ACM Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE).  I’m also director of the national center for pedagogical development in technology education in a societal and student oriented context (CeTUSS, www.cetuss.se that was founded 2004.  I have been conference chair and program chair as well as functioning in other roles for the ACM ITiCSE conference, and am currently future ITiCSE Site coordinator.  I was one of the founding members, and is since 2005 acting as chair, of the IEEE Nordic Education Society Chapter, which won the first IEEE Education chapter achievement award 2006.

My ambition when it comes to education is to find new formats and especially such where the students will experience a holistic learning environment, e.g. in Open Ended Group Projects.  Vital in this work is to base it on a sound pedagogical foundation as well as the subject as such in a manner that is well anchored among the teaching practitioners.


Abstract
Learning environments based on open-ended group projects (OEGPs) have the potential to meet complex learning goals such as professional and personal development, as well as more traditional subject related goals. OEGPs offer a setting in which a holistic approach to what the students should learn. There are however several pitfalls to pay attention to. Theories related to learning in OEGPs and practical examples will be presented in an attempt to promote an enlightened use of OEGPs in our education through  raising awareness of the pros and cons of the method.