2016 VIVO Conference Invited Speakers
Ruben Verborgh
Dr. Ruben Verborgh is a researcher in semantic hypermedia at Ghent University iMinds, Belgium and a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders. He explores the connection between Semantic Web technologies and the Web's architectural properties, with the ultimate goal of building more intelligent clients. Along the way, he became fascinated by Linked Data, REST/hypermedia, Web APIs, and related technologies. He's a co-author of two books on Linked Data, and has contributed to more than 150 publications for international conferences and journals on Web-related topics.
Pedro Szekely
Dr.
Pedro Szekely is a Research Team Leader
at the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and a Research Associate Professor at the USC Computer Science
Department. Dr. Szekely joined USC in 1988 after receiving his M.S. and Ph.D.
degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. His current
research focuses on algorithms and tools to acquire and reorganize web content
to uncover hidden connections to create domain-specific knowledge graphs. These
knowledge graphs enable users to use the web for investigative search to answer
questions that are not possible to answer with traditional search engines.
These tools are being used to construct knowledge graphs about cultural
heritage, weapons trafficking, patent trolls, counterfeit electronics and human
trafficking. The knowledge graph for human trafficking has been deployed to
victim-support and law enforcement agencies helping them to identify victims
and prosecute traffickers.
Sandy Payette
Sandy Payette joined Cornell University Library in January 2016 as the new Director of Land Grant and Research IT. She leads a portfolio of projects that support Cornell University's land-grant mission, with a particular focus on exposing scholarly and scientific resources on the Web by building “knowledge infrastructure.” In her previous work, Sandy was the co-inventor and chief architect of the Fedora digital repository architecture at Cornell Computing and Information Science. She was the founding CEO of DuraSpace before VIVO joined in 2014. DuraSpace is a not-for-profit organization that provides open source technologies and community resources to help preserve the world’s intellectual, cultural, and scientific heritage in digital form.
Sandy also served as Research Investigator at the University of Michigan where she provided leadership in building technologies to support sharing and publication of research data in the context of SEAD, an NSF DataNet partner. Sandy's educational background is inter-disciplinary, with degrees in computing and information systems, MBA, MS Communication, and currently a PhD candidate at Cornell’s Department of Communication.
