U.S. Semantic Technologies Symposium Series
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Louiqa Raschid
Keynote: Explorations of a Data Scientist: From Finance to Therapeutics
Dr. Louiqa Raschid has made pioneering contributions towards meeting data integration and data management challenges in multiple non-traditional domains including the life sciences, health information systems, Web data delivery, humanitarian IT applications, social media monitoring, and the next generation of data science for finance research. Her multi-disciplinary research spans the fields of computer science, information systems and data science.
She is a professor at the University of Maryland where she holds appointments in the Institute of Advanced Computer Studies, the Smith School of Business and Computer Science. She received her primary and secondary education at Bishop’s College and St. Bridget’s Convent in Sri Lanka, and was ranked first in the 1973 island-wide General Certificate of Education Ordinary Level (Year 10) examination. She received a Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1980, and an MS and Ph.D. degree from the University of Florida, Gainesville in 1982 and 1987, respectively, in electrical engineering.
She was Editor in Chief of the ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality and serves on the editorial board of ACM Computing Surveys. Her research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation and she is a Fellow of the ACM.
Dr. Binil Starly
Keynote: Building an Open Knowledge Network (OKN) Graph in Product Design & Manufacturing
Dr. Binil Starly heads the Digital Manufacturing group at the Edward P. Fitts Industrial and Systems Engineering department in North Carolina State University. His laboratory is working on technologies that merge the digital and the physical world towards advancing both discrete and continuous manufacturing processes. His work is supported by the US National Science Foundation, Department of Energy and the Department of Defense. He has received the National Science Foundation CAREER award for research in engineering living tissue systems, the SME Young Manufacturing Engineer and other teaching awards. He started his career at the University of Oklahoma, grew from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor with tenure, spending 7 years with the university. He then worked for NC State University where he has been for the past 6 years and during this time, he was promoted to Full Professor. He currently holds the James. T. Ryan Professorship in recognition for his work on smart manufacturing technologies.
Dr. Joshua Shinavier
Keynote: Building an Open Knowledge Network (OKN) Graph in Product Design & Manufacturing
Dr. Joshua Shinavier is a research scientist at Uber and a co-founder of what is now Apache TinkerPop. He contributed to the first common APIs for graph databases, the original TinkerPop query language which led to Gremlin, and the first tools which aligned the property graph and RDF data models, starting in 2008. At Uber, he leads a company-wide effort to unify data models and schemas across RPC, streaming, and storage. As much as possible, Joshua tries to stand with one foot in industry, another in open source software, and yet another in academia. He feels that these communities have a lot to learn from each other with respect to graphs and knowledge representation. Joshua holds a PhD in computer science from RPI’s Tetherless World Constellation.