Nigel Shadbolt

Professor Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. He is the Director of the EPSRC Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT), which is a multi-million pound, six-year research programme. AKT is developing a variety of tools, techniques and methods to realise the vision of the Semantic Web - a Web in which content can be seamlessly integrated enabling web services to provide an intelligent information infrastructure. Professor Shadbolt has published some 250 articles on various facets of AI, and has written and co-edited four books. Since 1985, Professor Shadbolt has singly or jointly secured and directed 26 research grants worth over £15,500,000.

Professor Shadbolt is a Fellow and Deputy President of the British Computer Society and chairs the Society's Knowledge Services Board. From 2001 to 2004 he was Editor in Chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems and in 2005 he was appointed Emeritus Editor in Chief and sits on the IEEE Computer Society's Publications Board. Professor Shadbolt has been an invited speaker at numerous national and international conferences and technical chairman of a number of conferences and workshops. He is a member of various national committees including the Human Sciences and Technology Sub-Committee of the UK Defence Scientific Advisory Committee (DSAC). He is a member of the EPSRC's Strategic Advisory Team.

Synopses

Plenary Panel - The Next Wave of the Web

The World Wide Web has been revolutionary in terms of impact, scale and outreach. At every level society has been changed in some way by the Web. This Panel will consider likely developments in this extraordinary human construct as we attempt to realise the Next Wave of the Web - a Semantic Web.

Nigel Shadbolt will Chair a discussion that will focus on the prospects for the Semantic Web, its likely form and the challenges it faces. Can we achieve the necessary agreements on shared meaning for the Semantic Web? Can we achieve a critical mass of semantically annotated data and content? How are we to trust such content? Do the scientific and commercial drivers really demand a Semantic Web? How will the move to a mobile and ubiquitous Web affect the Semantic Web? How does Web 2.0 relate to the Semantic Web?

Nigel is joined by Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler, Claire Hart and Richard Benjamins to discuss these challenging issues.

Wednesday 24th May 1400-1530 Opportunities for the Semantic Web - Research & Development session

AKT

This presentation will review research highlights from the six year, UK EPSRC funded, Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT - www.aktors.org) Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration. The project brought together researchers in human language technologies, artificial intelligence, multimedia and Web engineering to undertake fundamental research in the Semantic Web. The project produced fundamental infrastructure components as well as tools, services and application demonstrators. Future directions for this research and the ongoing opportunities and challenges it affords will be discussed.