Tetherless World Constellation

James Hendler is the Tetherless World Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science, and the Assistant Dean for Information Technology and Web Science, at Rensselaer. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Experimental Multimedia Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), serves as a Director of the UK's charitable Web Science Trust and is a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technology at DeMontfort University in Leicester, UK. Hendler has authored about 200 technical papers in the areas of Semantic Web, artificial intelligence, agent-based computing and high performance processing. One of the inventors of the "Semantic Web," Hendler was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, is a member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the British Computer Society, the IEEE and the AAAS. He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002. He is the Editor-in-Chief emeritus of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. In 2010, Hendler was named one of the 20 most innovative professors in America by Playboy magazine and was selected as an "Internet Web Expert" by the US government.

Dr. Joanne Luciano joined the Tetherless World Constellation in August of 2010 as a Research Associate Professor.

Dr. Luciano has played a leading role in the BioPathways Consortium, in the creation and development of BioPAX and the establishment of the W3C initiative in the Health Care and Life Sciences. She is co-developer of the OWL-based BioPAX pathway ontology which has become the standard for pathway-related bio-research. She has made significant contributions to pathway modeling, and is familiar with systems such as EcoCYC, BIND, WIT, KEGG, SBML, and others. She has intimate familiarity with the relevant tools such as Stanford’s Protégé knowledge acquisition tool and the underlying Semantic Web technologies including OWL and RDF. These skills together with her extensive interactions with the multi-disciplinary community of researchers, places her in a unique position to contribute to projects with her skill, contacts, and know-how. Of particular significance is her ability to effectively communicate with specialists in a range of disciplines (computer science, biology, medicine, physics) which enables effective cross-disciplinary collaborative research.

Dr. Deborah McGuinness is a leading expert in knowledge representation and reasoning languages and systems and has worked in ontology creation and evolution environments for over 20 years. Most recently, Deborah is best known for her leadership role in semantic web research, and for her work on explanation, trust, and applications of semantic web technology, particularly for scientific applications. Deborah is co-editor of the Ontology Web Language which has emerged from web ontology working group of the World Wide Web (W3C) semantic web activity and has now achieved W3C Recommendation status. She helped start the web ontology working group out of work as a co-author of the DARPA Agent Markup Language program's DAML language. She helped form the Joint EU/US Agent Markup Language Committee which evolved the DAML language into the oil-reference DAML OIL description logic-based ontology language. She is a co-author of one of the more widely used long-lived description logic systems (CLASSIC) from Bell Laboratories. Her work on languages (including OWL, oil-reference.html DAML OIL, OIL, CLASSIC, etc.) is aimed at providing languages that enable the next generation of web applications moving from a web aimed at human consumption to the semantic web aimed at machine consumption in support of intelligent assistants and web agents. Deborah is a leader in ontology-based tools and applications. She is a co-author and technical leader of the Stanford KSL ontology evolution environment. She also consulted to help VerticalNet design and build its Ontobuilder/Ontoserver ontology evolution environment. She also provided technical leadership for the Stanford project to help Cisco systems form its ontology evolution plan for its meta data formation work.

Deborah's main research thrusts are in languages, tools, and environments for the semantic web. Deborah leads the Stanford Inference Web (IW) effort. IW provides a framework for increasing trust in answers from heterogeneous systems by explaining how the answers were derived and what they depended on. Inference Web supports this goal by providing infrastructure and an implemented web-based environment for storing, exchanging, combining, annotating, comparing, search for, validating, and rendering proofs and proof fragments provided by reasoners and query answering systems. Inference web is being used as an infrastructure for explanations in a number of DARPA, DTO, and NSF projects and in a few demonstration systems including the Explainable Semantic Discovery Service and the KSL wine agent. Deborah led the wine agent project as an early semantic web services demonstration system that integrates explanation (via Inference web), semantic web languages (via DAML OIL and OWL), semantic web query languages (via OWL-QL), and web services (via OWL-S).