Keynotes

Dr. Marti Hearst is a Professor in the School of Information at the University of California in Berkeley (USA). She defended her PhD in Computer Science at the University of California in 1994. Her research is focused on design, development and evaluation of the systems for information access. She has developed several innovative information visualization and text analysis techniques including TextTiling, TileBars and the Cat-a-Cone. In the recent Flamenco project she explores the use of faceted metadata to improve searching for information for general public; this design is now used on hundreds if not thousands of websites worldwide. She has studied the effects of social computer-mediated communication on blogs, online dating, and collaborative knowledge creation.

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences and the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University, USA. He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks. His research program has been funded continuously for 15 years by major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation with additional current funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), Air Force Research Lab, Army Research Institute, Army Research Lab and the MacArthur Foundation.

Professor Contractors book titled Theories of Communication Networks (co-authored with Professor Peter Monge, published by Oxford University Press, and translated into Chinese in 2010) received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association. He is the lead developer of C-IKNOW (Cyberinfrastructure for Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web), a socio-technical environment to understand and enable networks among communities, as well as Blanche, a software environment to simulate the dynamics of social networks. Professor Contractor has a Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a PhD from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California.

Prof. dr. dame Wendy Hall is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton (UK). She defended her PhD in Mathematics at the University of Southampton in 1977. One of the first computer scientists to undertake serious research in multimedia and hypermedia, she has been at its forefront ever since. The influence of her work has been significant in many areas including digital libraries, the development of the Semantic Web, and the emerging research discipline of Web Science. She is Managing Director of the Web Science Trust. Wendy Hall became a "Dame Commander of the British Empire" in 2009 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. From mid 2008 to mid 2010 she was President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the first person from outside North America to hold this position. She is a member of the UK Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology and is a founding member of the Scientific Council of the EU Research Council.