Deborah McGuinness
Tetherless World Senior Constellation Chair and Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science
Deborah McGuinness is the Tetherless World Senior Constellation Chair and Professor of Computer, Cognitive, and Web Sciences at RPI. She is also the founding director of the Web Science Research Center.
Deborah has been recognized with awards as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for contributions to the Semantic Web, knowledge representation, and reasoning environments and as the recipient of the Robert Engelmore award from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for leadership in Semantic Web research and in bridging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and eScience, significant contributions to deployed AI applications, and extensive service to the AI community.
Deborah currently leads a number of large diverse data intensive resource efforts and her team is creating next generation ontology-enabled research infrastructure for work in large interdisciplinary settings.
Michael Gruninger
Professor of Industrial Engineering
Semantic Technologies Laboratory
University of Toronto, Canada
Michael Gruninger is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. He has been working in the area of formal ontology and its applications to industrial problems for the past twenty years. He has published over 140 peer-reviewed papers with over 16000 citations, including a seminal paper in the methodology of ontology design and evaluation.
Several of Gruninger’s projects have been adopted as international standards, including the Process Specification Language (published as International Standard ISO 18629) and Common Logic (published as International Standard ISO 24707).
Gruninger is Past-President of the International Association of Ontology (IAOA) and its Applications, and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Applied Ontology. He has been Programme Chair and Conference chair of international conferences, particularly Formal Ontology and Information Systems, which is the flagship conference for IAOA.
John Heil
Professor,
Department of Philosophy in the Washington University, the Durham University
John Heil is professor of philosophy at Washington University and Durham University. He is listed among the 50 Most Influential Living Philosophers. He works primarily in metaphysics and philosophy of mind and has teaching interests in metaphysics, logic, philosophy of mind, and early modern philosophy. Heil’s most recent books include From an Ontological Point of View (Oxford University Press 2006) and The Universe as We Find It (Oxford University Press 2012). Appearance in Reality (Oxford University Press), What is Metaphysics? (Polity Press), and First-Order Logic: A Concise Introduction (Hackett) appeared in 2021.