Keynote Speakers
João da Silva
Director of the Network and Communication in Directorate of DG-INFSO
Dr. JOAO SCHWARZ DASILVA was born in 1944 in Portugal. He received a PhD on the Performance Analysis of Mobile Packet Radio Systems from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada in 1981 and a Master and Bachelors degree on Electrical Engineering from the Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal, Canada in 1971 and 1970. He started his career at the Ministry of Communications of Canada where he occupied several engineering positions in various domains including, spectrum management, educational delivery networks, packet radio, satellite telecommunications and computer communications network design. He was instrumental in the design of CANUNET the first Canadian University Computer Netwok. While in Canada he was appointed on a regular basis as assistant Professor at Carleton University, where he taught courses on Stochastic Processes, Distributed Database Management Systems and Computer Communications. He was invited by the ITU as a senior field expert responsible for the planning of AM and FM broadcast networks in Guinea-Bissau and was seconded to Saudi Arabia for the setting up of the computerised spectrum management system for the Kingdom.
William H. Dutton is Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, Professor of Internet Studies, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He was previously a Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, which he joined in 1980. In the UK, he was a Fulbright Scholar 1986-87, and was National Director of the UK's Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (PICT) from 1993 to 1996. Bill is also Co-Director of the e-Horizons project of the 21st Century School at Oxford, Director and Principal Investigator of the Oxford e-Social Science node within the UK's National Centre for E-Social Science, and Principle Investigator for the OII’s Oxford Internet Surveys (OxIS).
Alexander Hauptmann is a Senior Systems Scientist in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and a faculty member in the Language Technologies Institute at CMU. His current main interest has been on multi-media analysis and retrieval. Other research interests include speech recognition and interfaces, translation and natural language in general. Most of his time is spent on the Informedia Digital Video project. This work has also spawned three spin-off companies related to digital video archiving and video question answering.
He is also pursuing projects on video observations for patient care for the elderly and personal wearable memory devices. His current passion is the pursuit of a large-scale concept ontology for multimedia to help narrow the semantic gap. Alexander Hauptmann holds a BA and MA degree in Psychology from Johns Hopkins University, a 'Diplom' in Computer Science from the Technische Universität Berlin and obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.