Kris Jack

Kris Jack is a senior data mining engineer at Mendeley. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and has worked on data systems in academia and industry for the past 10 years. He was invited to give keynote presentations on recommender systems for scientific articles at the I-KNOW 2011 and RecSysTEL 2010 conferences. He also presently sits on the Editorial AdvisoryBoard for the Journal of Open Research Software.

Alexander van Opstal

Alexander van Opstal has a Master of Science in Ecology, Soil science and Philosophy of Science. He is an experienced senior policy advisor, leading projects and programmes in the field of programming of research for policy. Alexander is also a member of the ERA-ARD-EIARD-SCAR-Taskforce on Agricultural Research for Development. He has been part of the Dutch delegation to the annual meeting of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee for four years. He is chair of the European branch of the Dutch Scientific Landscape Ecological Society. He has been councilor to the Municipality of Rhenen for two years.

Dave Roberts

Dave Roberts is head of the division of Microbiology in London's Natural History Museum. He has a long-standing interest in biodiversity informatics, having introduced the Scratchpads in the EU project EDIT, where he was a work package leader, and is currently project manager for the EU project ViBRANT, seeking to make the Scratchpad mantra 'small pieces loosely joined' a reality.

Erik Duval

Erik Duval chairs the research unit on human-computer interaction, at the computer science department of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

His research focuses on massive hyper-personalization (“The Snowflake Effect”), learning analytics, openness and abundance - topics on which I regularly keynote. In practical terms, we research information visualization, mobile information devices, multi-touch displays and personal informatics. We typically apply our results to technology enhanced learning, access to music and ‘research 2.0′.

Wouter Los

Dr Wouter Los is currently Project Leader of LifeWatch, the proposed e-science and technology infrastructure for biodiversity research. By training a theoretical chemist, he has held positions at the Universities of Leiden and Amsterdam, as well as being Director of the Institute for Taxonomic Biology. He has also held positions as Chair and Vice-Chair within a number of committees, including the Science Committee of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Society for the Management of European Biodiversity Data.

Peter Ballantyne

Peter began his career working with agricultural information - first at the World Bank, then at a Faculty of Agriculture in Thailand, then in the CGIAR at the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR); he spent the past 15 years working in the international development sector, with the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM), the International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD), and the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP).

Dickson Lukose

Dr. Dickson Lukose is the Head of the Knowledge Technology Cluster at MIMOS BHD. Dr Lukose is also the director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as well as the Centre of Excellence in Semantic Technologies. Prior to MIMOS BHD, Dr Lukose worked extensively in Artificial Intelligence Technology, developing software applications in the areas of Risk Management and Knowledge Management. He has done over 10 years of academic research in Artificial Intelligence, supported by research grants from Graphic Directions, Leverhulme Foundation, CSIRO, and Australian Research Council.

Carole Goble

Carole has worked closely with life scientists for many years and is the Director of the myGrid project, the largest UK e-Science pilot , which has produced the widely-used Taverna open source software. She is also the co-director of the e-Science North West. She has an international reputation in the Semantic Web, e-Science and Grid communities and has led the application of Semantic Web technologies to both the Grid and e-Science, a fusion dubbed the Semantic Grid.

Stefano Cozzini

Stephano Cozzini is a development scientist at INFM (Italian National Institute for Matter Physics) working at National Simulation Center DEMOCRITOS hosted at Sissa (Trieste, Italy). He is presently coordinating all the IT activities within the center and works an external consultant for cluster and grid computing at ICTP (International Center of Theoretical Physics). His main professional interests are in the fields of high-performance computing and grid computing appliced to computational physics.

Samy Gaiji

Samy Gaiji is currently Senior Programme Officer for Science and Scientific Liaison at Global Biodiversity Information Facility. He has extensive experience in delivering agriculture infrastructures for major entities such as the IPGRI, the Convention on Biological Diversity and FAO.