From time to time, we will invite guests onto specific episodes of the Semantic Web Gang. Their details will appear here.

Christian Becker

Christian is a member of the DBpedia team, where he contributed DBpedia Mobile, the Marbles Browser and several extractors.

He recently graduated from Freie Universität Berlin and currently works at MES. Previous employers include VerdiSoft (now Yahoo!) and Lufthansa Systems.

Guest on July 2008 show.

David Karger

David is a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the EECS department at MIT. His interests include information retrieval (particularly in relation to the Haystack Project) and analysis of algorithms.

Guest on July 2008 show.

Georgi Kobilarov

Georgi is a researcher on Semantic Web technologies who previously worked as a research associate in the Semantic and Adaptive Systems Department at Hewlett-Packard Labs Bristol, United Kingdom. His current research aims to develop exploratory user interfaces and interaction models for the Semantic Web. He is a student at the Freie Universität Berlin.

As founding member and lead developer of the DBpedia project, he is interested in ways to bootstrap Semantic Web adoption. His research aims to find new ways of exploratory interaction with massive Semantic Web datasets like DBpedia.

Guest on April 2008 show.

Peter Mika

Peter Mika is a researcher at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona. He received his BS in computer science from Eötvös Loránd University and his MSc and PhD in computer science (cum laude) from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His interdisciplinary work in social networks and the Semantic Web earned him a Best Paper Award at the 2006 International Semantic Web Conference and a First Prize at the 2005 Semantic Web Challenge. He has been co-chair of the Semantic Web Challenge since 2007. Mika is the youngest member elected to the editorial board of the Journal of Web Semantics. He is the author of the book Social Networks and the Semantic Web (Springer, 2007). In 2008 he has been selected as one of “AI’s Ten to Watch” by the editorial board of the IEEE Intelligent Systems journal.

Guest on August 2008 show.

Barney Pell

Dr. Pell is Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Powerset. For over fifteen years, Barney has pursued groundbreaking technical and commercial innovation in A.I. as a researcher, research manager, business strategist and entrepreneur. He spent 2005 as Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield evaluating early to mid-stage IT and knowledge based companies. Before joining Mayfield, Barney worked for NASA Ames Research Center on two occasions: from 1993-1998 as Project Lead for the Executive component of the prize-winning Remote Agent Experiment; and from 2002-2005 as Area Manager responsible for research in intelligent agents, software architecture, human-centered computing, search, collaborative knowledge management, distributed databases, information integration, spoken dialog systems, and the semantic web. Between 1998 and 2002, Barney worked in technical start-ups: he served as Chief Strategist and Vice-President of Business Development at StockMaster.com, a provider of internet-based stock-market analysis tools, and later as Vice President of Strategy for Whizbang! Labs, a provider of advanced text processing and search engine software. Barney also serves as an advisor or board member to several startup companies and educational nonprofits. Barney holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cambridge University.

Guest on May 2008 show.

Giovanni Tummarello

Giovanni Tummarello is a Research Fellow at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Galway Ireland. He received his Ph.D in Multimedia Semantics at University of Ancona, Italy with a thesis on his Semantic Web Challenge-awarded P2P Semantic Web platform.

He now leads the Data Intensive Infrastructures research Unit at DERI, a group currently participating in the OKKAM, ROMULUS and IMP European projects as well as in other international scientific and industrial projects. He is the leader of the Sindice Data Web Search Engine project, and has been initiator of other projects such as Semantic Web Pipes, Semantic Web Sitemap extention and the ongoing Semantic Web Applications and Perspective conference series.

Guest on August 2008 show.