National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG), Ireland

National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) - Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) is one of the main actors in research and development of the semantic technologies in Europe. NUIG-DERI performs research in the Semantic Web, Sensor Network platforms, and Semantic Web Services and applies its research results to solve integration problems in various application-oriented projects in eLearning, eGovernment, eBusiness, and eHealth. In Semantic Web, NUIG-DERI develops advanced Semantic Web infrastructures, which facilitate collaborative social working environments, scalable storage and reasoning engines, distributed computing, and ontology development. In Sensor Networks, NUIG-DERI is co-developer (together with EPFL, Switzerland) of the Global Sensor Networks (GSN) platform which provides a flexible middleware layer which abstracts from the underlying, heterogeneous sensor network technologies and supports fast and simple deployment and addition of new platforms, facilitates efficient distributed query processing and combination of sensor data, provides support for sensor mobility, and enables the dynamic adaptation of the system configuration during runtime with minimal (zero-programming) effort. In Semantic Web Services, NUIG-DERI extensively contributes to the framework of SWS technology in the context of the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO), the Web Service Modeling Language (WSML) and the corresponding architecture and Web Service Execution environment (WSMX). NUIG-DERI actively participates in and leads research funded by the EU FP6 program (DIP, SUPER, SemanticGov, NEPOMUK, TripCom, RIDE), Science Foundation Ireland (LION) and Enterprise Ireland (SAOR, LITE). NUIG-DERI members actively participate in a number of sensor network and semantic community initiatives and standardization activities such as the Wireless Sensors Enterprise Led Network (Ireland), the W3C Semantic Annotations for Web Services Description Language and XML Schema Working Group (W3C SAWSDL WG), OASIS Semantic Execution Environment Technical Committee (OASIS SEE TC), Semantic Web Services Challenge (SWS Challenge), Semantic Web Services Initiative (SWSI), and Ontology Management Working Group (OMWG).

Manfred Hauswirth is vice-director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Galway, Ireland and professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). He holds an M.S. (1994) and a Ph.D. (1999) in computer science from the Technical University of Vienna. From January 2002 to September 2006 he was a senior researcher and research project manager at the Distributed Information systems Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Prior to his work at EPFL he was an assistant professor at the Distributed Systems group at the TU Vienna. His research interests are on sensor networks middleware, Internet of things, large-scale distributed semantic information systems, peer-to-peer systems, self-organization and self-management. He has published a large number of papers in these domains and has co-authored a book on distributed software architectures and several book chapters on P2P data management and semantics. He has served in over 120 program committees of international scientific conferences and recently was local chair of WDAS2004 and program co-chair of SME05, STD3S, MCISME, and DMC2006. In 2007 he is program co-chair of the Seventh IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing and is general chair of the European Semantic Web Conference in 2008. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.

Marco Zuniga is a Post Doctoral Researcher at DERI. He received his M.Sc. (2002) and PhD (2006) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California (USC). In 2008, he received an IRCSET Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Before joining DERI, he was a member of the Research Staff at Xerox Research Labs (NY, USA). He has authored several conference and journal papers in wireless sensor networks, and actively participates in technical program committees.
Webpage: http://www.marcozuniga.com

Vinny Reynolds is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in his second year at DERI. He is currently completing his PhD with the Distributed Systems Group based in Trinity College Dublin. He is involved in several EU projects researching areas including scalable data processing, simulation of cooperating object systems and the intersection between pervasive computing and embedded systems. He has authored several conference papers and is a member of several program committees and working groups in these research areas. He is also coordinator of the DERI Mobile Application Research Centre.