Panels: Program and Abstract

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Panels on Wednesday, May 11

[PANEL01] 10:50 - 12:20 "Can semantic web be made to flourish?"

Moderator:

David Wood, Software Memetics

Panelists:

Zavisa Bjelogrlic, Co-founder, @semantics

Bernadette Hyland, Co-founder, Tucana Technologies

Prof. Jim Hendler, Director, MIND Lab, University of Maryland

Kanzaki Masahide, Consultant, Kanzaki.com

This panel's objective will be to discuss whether the Semantic Web can be made to grow in a “viral” manner, like the World Wide Web did in the early 1990s. The scope of the discussion will include efforts by the World Wide Web Consortium's Semantic Web Best Practices & Deployment Working Group to identify and publish best practices of Semantic Web practitioners, and the barriers to adoption of those practices by a wider community. The concept of “best practices” as it applies to a distributed, diverse and partially-defined Semantic Web will be discussed and its relevance debated. Specifically, panelists will discuss the capability of standards bodies, commercial companies and early adopters to create a viral technology.

[PANEL02] 14:40 - 16:10 "Current trends in the integration of search and browsing"

Moderators:

Andrei Z Broder, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Yoelle S. Maarek, IBM Research, Israel

Panelists:

Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist, Google Inc.

Susan Dumais, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research

Steve Papa, Founder and CEO, Endeca

Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist, Yahoo Inc.

Prabhakar Raghavan, Senior Vice President and CTO, Verity, Inc.

Since the early days of the Web., searching and browsing have been the two basic information discovery paradigms. After more than ten years down the road, three schools have emerged: (1) the search-centric school argues that guided navigation is superfluous since free form search has become so effective and widely accepted, that users can satisfy all their needs via simple queries (2) the taxonomy navigation school claims that users have difficulties expressing informational needs, thus browsing is more effective when users don't quite know what they are looking for, and finally (3) the metadata centric school advocates the use of metadata for narrowing large sets of results, in particularly in the e-commerce context in the form of ?multi faceted search?.

Our panel brings together experts and advocates for all three schools, to argue for and against these approaches and share their experiences in the field. The panelists will have prepared positions, but the moderators will challenge them to explain how their approach works for a mystery_site.com, whose exact nature will be revealed only at the start of the panel. Eventually the audience will vote on the best approach, and the winning panelist will receive a valuable prize, courtesy of IBM research. We invite the audience to ask hard questions, criticize or laud our panelists positions, and share their own experience designing information access systems.

[PANEL03] 16:30 - 18:00 "Do we need more web performance research?"

Moderator:

Michael Rabinovich, AT&T Labs - Research, USA

Panelists:

Giovanni Pacifici, IBM Watson Research Center, USA

Michele Colajanni, University of Modena, Italy

Krithi Ramamritham, IIT Bombay, India

Bruce Maggs, CMU/Akamai, USA

This panel will discuss the future and purpose of Web performance research, concentrating on the reasons for modest success in the adoption of research results in practice. The panel will in particular examine factors that hinder technology transfer in the Web performance area, consider examples of past successes and failures in this arena, and stimulate the discussion on how to make Web performance research more relevant.

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Panels on Thursday, May 12

[PANEL04] 10:30 - 12:00 "Mobile Multimedia Services"

Moderator:

Behzad Shahraray, AT&T Labs - Research, USA

Panelists:

Wei-Ying Ma, Microsoft Research, China

Avideh Zakhor, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Noboru Babaguchi, Osaka University, Japan

This panel will mainly focus on the role that media processing can play in creating mobile communications, information, and entertainment services. A major premise of our discussion is that media processing techniques go beyond compression and can be employed to monitor, filter, convert, and repurpose information. Such automated techniques can serve to create personalized information and entertainment services in a cost-effective way, adapt existing content for consumption on mobile devices, and circumvent the inherent limitations of mobile devices. Some examples of the applications of media processing techniques for mobile service generation will be given.

[PANEL05] 14:40 - 16:10 "On culture in a world-wide information society: Toward the knowledge society - the challenge"

Moderator:

Alfredo M. Ronchi, Politecnico di Milano, Milano Italy

Panelists:

Lynn Thiesmeyer, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan

Antonella Quacchia, International Labor Office, Geneve, Swiss

Georges Mihajes, Oslo Platform, Oslo, Norway

Katsuhiro Onoda, Foundation for Computer & Communication Promotion, Japan

Ranjit Makkuni, Sacred World Foundation - New Delhi - India

Starting from more then ten years of experience and achievements in online cultural content, the panel aims to provide a comprehensive view on controversial issues, or unsolved problems, both in the WWW and Cultural community to stimulate lively, thoughtful, and sometimes provocative discussions. Panelists will outline the relevance of digital collections of intangible heritage and endangered archives and discuss the following topics: the “global” Web vs. the preservation of “local” cultural identities, cultural diversities and their relevance in delivering web based services, preservation & future of digital memories, Web-based development and sustainability models. We expect the panelists to actively engage the audience and help them broaden their understanding of the issues.

URL: http://www.medicif.org/Events/MEDICI_events/WWW2005/default.htm

[PANEL06] 16:30 - 18:00 "Exploiting the dynamic networking effects of the web"

Moderator:

Ramesh Sarukkai, Yahoo, USA,

Panelists:

Prof. Soumen Chakrabarthi, Professor, IIT Bombay

Dr. Gary William Flake, Head of Research Labs, Yahoo!

Dr. Narayanan Shivakumar, Director of Ad Systems, Google

Prof. Asim M. Ansari, Professor, Columbia Business School

This panel aims to explore the dynamic networking effects of the Web. Today, linkages on the Web are augmented with dynamic connectivities based on various monetization strategies: e.g. ads and sponsored links. Such linkages change the dynamics of user click/flow on the Web. The key focus of this panel is to debate whether/how such dynamic effects on the Web can be modeled and best exploited. How can we derive cooperative placement strategies that are optimal from a customer perspective? As the World Wide Web becomes more dynamic with fluid link placements guided by different factors, optimizing link placement in a cooperative fashion across the Web will be an integral and crucial component.

URL: http://research.yahoo.com/workshops/www2005/NetworkingEffectsWeb/

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Panels on Friday, May 13

[PANEL07] 10:30 - 12:00 "Querying the past, present and future: where we are and where we will be"

Moderator:

Ling Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Panelists:

Andrei Z Broder, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Dieter Fensel, Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Europe

Carole Goble, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

Christopher Olsen, MIT, USA

Calton Pu, CERCS, Georgia Tech, USA

This panel will focus on exploring future enhancements of Web technology for active Internet-scale information delivery and dissemination. It will ask the questions of whether the current Web technology is sufficient, what can be leveraged in this endeavor, and how a combination of ideas from a variety of existing disciplines can help in meeting the new challenges of large scale information dissemination. Relevant existing technologies and research areas include: active databases, agent systems, continual queries, event Web, publish/subscribe technology, sensor and stream data management. We expect that some suggestions may be in conflict with current, well-accepted approaches.

URL: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~lingliu/panels/WWWPanelMay13am.htm

[PANEL08] 13:30 - 15:00 "Web engineering: technical discipline or social process"

Moderator:

Bebo White, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, USA

Panelists:

David Lowe, University of Technology, Sydney

Martin Gaedke, University of Karlsruhe

Daniel Schwabe, PUC Rio de Janeiro

Yogesh Deshpande, University of Western Sydney

This panel aims to explore the nature of the emerging Web engineering discipline. It will attempt to strongly engage with the issue of whether Web Engineering is currently, and (more saliently) should be in the future, viewed primarily as a technical design discipline with its attention firmly on the way in which Web technologies can be leveraged in the design process, or whether it should be viewed primarily as a socio-positioned discipline which focuses on the nature of the way in which projects are managed, needs are understood and users interact.

[PANEL09] 15:30 - 17:00 "Web services considered harmful?"

Moderator:

Rohit Khare, CommerceNet Labs, USA

Panelists:

Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services

Mark Baker, Developer's Day Chair

Adam Bosworth, Google

Tim Bray, Sun Microsystems

Jeffery McManus, eBay Web Services

It has been estimated that all of the Web Services specifications and proposals (“WS-*”) weigh in at several thousand pages by now. At the same time, their predecessor technologies such as XML-RPC have developed alongside other “grassroots” technologies like RSS. This debate has arguably even risen to the architectural level, contrasting “service-oriented architectures” with REST-based architectural styles. Unfortunately, the multiple overlapping specifications, standards bodies, and vendor strategies tend to obscure the very real successes of providing machine-automatable services over the Web today. This panel asks: Are current community processes for developing, debating, and adopting Web Services are helping or hindering the adoption of Web Services technology?

URL: http://labs.commerce.net/wiki/images/1/19/CN-TR-04-05.pdf