STI International Alumni

Grigoris Antoniou is Professor of Semantic and Knowledge Technologies at the University of Huddersfield. His main research interests are knowledge representation and reasoning, semantic web technologies and their applications in various domains. He has published over 200 papers and three books, including "A Semantic Web Primer" by MIT Press, now in its 3rd edition. He participates in a number of European projects, including the PlanetData Network of Excellence, PRELIDA Coordination Action and SemData International Research Exchange. He has been Program Committee and Conference Chair of ESWC 2010 and ESWC 2011, respectively. He is an ECCAI Fellow since 2006.

Prof. Sören Auer is head of the Enterprise Information Systems department at Fraunhofer IAIS and professor for Computer Science at the University of Bonn. Prior to joining the University of Bonn and Fraunhofer IAIS in 2013, he founded the "Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web" research group at the University of Leipzig and worked at the TU Chemniz as well as at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include semantic technologies, knowledge representation, engineering & management, as well as information systems. He was a founding chair of the European Data Forum and now leads its steering committee. Prof. Auer coordinated the FP7 flagship project LOD2 - Creating Knowledge out of Interlinked Data till 2014 and is now serving as coordinator of the H2020 CSA BigDataEurope and the H2020 MCSA ITN WDAqua – Answering Questions using Web Data. He serves on the board of directors of the Big Data Value Association. His research group has gained world-wide reputation with projects like DBpedia, SlideWiki, LinkedGeoData and OntoWiki. Technologies developed in his department are in use by notable companies.

Dr. John Davies is Chief Scientist in BT‘s ICT Research Practice. He was involved in the creation of STI International and served as Vice-President, Realisation for 3 years. His interests include the application of semantic technologies to smart cities, business intelligence, information integration, service-oriented environments and knowledge management. He has written and edited many papers and books in these areas. He was Project Coordinator of the SEKT and ACTIVE European FP integrated research projects and currently runs a number of nationally-funded semantic technology projects. He founded and chaired of the European Semantic Technology Conference series and he has served on the program committees of many conferences in related areas and was co-founder of the ESWC conference series. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Chartered Engineer.

Dr. Ioan Toma is the COO and co-founder of ONLIM where he is in charge of operation and product management and is also involved in the research activities of the company. He has also been working as a senior researcher at the Semantic Technology Institute Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck, Austria. His current research areas include Semantics, Intelligent Assistants, Social Media, Services and Linked Data. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, with a thesis on Modelling and Ranking Semantic Web Services based on Non-functional properties and a Diploma of Engineering and a Master`s degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He has been involved in a number of research projects at national and European level, he published around 85 articles. Dr. Toma had also co-organized multiple workshops and has been a member of many conference and workshop program committees.