About the Speaker: Frank van Harmelen is professor in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, with a PhD from the University of Edinburgh on strategies for theorem provers and past work at the University of Amsterdam on formal foundations of knowledge modelling. He has been very active in recent years in developments around the Semantic Web. One of his five books is the first text book on Semantic Web technology. He is involved in numerous European Semantic Web projects, and he was one of the designers of the W3C standard ontology language OWL. He was the Program Chair of the ECAI 2002, the General Chair of the 2004 International Semantic Web Conference, and the chair the Semantic Web track of the 2005.

About the Speaker: Dr. Makarios is a Research Scientist at Stanford KSL and Stanford Logic Group. Her recent work in KR&R and logic-based AI has included context logic and computational context logic, techniques for declarative control of automated theorem provers, techniques for formal reasoning via reification of structured propositions, techniques for natural representation of proposition-objects that express quantification in formal theories of reified concepts and propositions, and techniques for dealing with systems of action and change. Dr. Makarios graduated from M.I.T. with a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics. She worked for several years in commercial software development of computer animation and hypermedia systems, before undertaking research in artificial intelligence and parallel and distributed computing at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. While a researcher there, she entered the University's graduate program in Computer Science and earned her Ph.D. She spent a year as a post-doctorate working in parallel algorithms, after which she moved to Silicon Valley, where she held an evolving series of software engineering, architectural, technologist, and entrepreneurial roles in artificial intelligence, distributed computing, and web-based systems, before returning to full-time research, joining the staff of the Stanford AI Lab.