KGC Speakers 2021

Wells Fargo
Knowledge Engineer Manager

Morgan Stanley
Executive Director

Dr. Denise Gosnell’s passion for examining, applying, and evangelizing the applications of graph data was ignited during her apprenticeship under Dr. Teresa Haynes and Dr. Debra Knisley during her first NSF Fellowship. This group’s work was one of the earliest applications of neural networks and graph theoretic structure in predictive computational biology. Since then, Dr….

Dr. Matthias Broecheler is a technologist and entrepreneur with substantial research and development experience who is focused on disruptive software technologies and understanding complex systems. Dr. Broecheler is known as an industry expert in graph databases, relational machine learning, and big data analysis in general. He is a practitioner of lean methodologies and experimentation to…

Denis Streitmatter is a research assistant at the KILT/AKSW research group and the Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI). He has been studying computer science at Leipzig University since 2016. Additionally, he has been working on DBpedia-related projects for a few years and was involved in the design and implementation of the DBpedia REST API and…

Marvin Hofer is a research assistant at the KILT/AKSW research group and the Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI). Furthermore, he was part of the DBpedia project for several years and was involved in designing DBpedia FlexiFusion, global.dbpedia.org, the new DBpedia release cycle, and currently Databus Mods.His main research interests focus on data fusion, distributed data…

Dr. Rose is Director of the Structural Bioinformatics Lab and Lead, Bioinformatics and Biomedical Applications at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)/UC San Diego. Prior to joining UCSD, he held research and management positions at Pfizer La Jolla, formerly Agouron Pharmaceuticals, where he was instrumental in the establishment of the structure-based drug design platform. He…

Justin is a Co-Founder of Thinknum, a leading alternative data company specializing in web-crawled data. At Thinknum, Justin works with hundreds of investment firms, banks and corporations to develop innovative data sources which provide new insights into economic activity moving online. Prior to founding Thinknum, Justin worked at a quantitative hedge fund. He graduated from…

Stefan Plantikow is the ISO Project Lead/Editor for the next generation declarative Graph Query Language GQL (ISO/IEC 39075). He works as a Language Designer and Standards expert in Neo4j’s Query Language Standards and Research team. Before GQL, he played key roles in the design of the Cypher graph query language, the openCypher project, the development…

Ben Szekely is co-founder and Senior Vice President of Field Operations of Cambridge Semantics, creator of the industry-leading Anzo data discovery and integration platform. He has spent more than a decade working with life science organizations to implement transformational data and analytic platforms based on semantic and graph data model technologies. Prior to founding Cambridge…

Joshua is a researcher and software developer who specializes in graphs and data integration. He holds a PhD in Web science from RPI’s Tetherless World Constellation, and co-founded what is now Apache TinkerPop, contributing to the first common APIs for graph databases, the RDF-based query language that preceded Gremlin, and the first tools which aligned…

Senior Technology Leader with over 20 years of experience in delivering software solutions. The last several years have been focusing on storing, discovering and analyzing various regulatory text corpora. Currently leading the team of researchers and engineers that apply various AI/ML techniques for regulatory review of unstructured content. Presented at various international conferences including AWS…

Eelke van der Horst is a semantic modelling expert and data engineer at the Biomedical Data Services group at the Hyve. He has years of experience in the application of semantic web technologies for integrating heterogeneous biomedical data sources, in areas such as rare disease research and drug discovery & development. Eelke holds a PhD…

Sabbir M. Rashid is a Ph.D. candidate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute working with Professor Deborah McGuinness on research related to data annotation and harmonization, ontology engineering, knowledge representation, and various forms of reasoning. Prior to attending RPI, Sabbir completed a double major at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he received B.S. degrees in both Physics and…

Trey Botard is a Developer Advocate at Fluree, a North-Carolina based Public Benefit Corporation focused on transforming data security, ownership, and access with an immutable semantic graph database. For the past several years, Trey has developed software solutions at companies such as Lincoln Financial, Volvo, and BoA in various areas from natural language understanding, to…

Guohui Xiao is an assistant professor at the KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data, Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. His main research interests are knowledge representation, Semantic Web, database theory, and virtual knowledge graphs. He is currently coordinating the development of Ontop. 2021 Workshops and Tutorials: Integrating Data through Virtual Knowledge…

Prior to Ontopic, Benjamin Cogrel was a researcher at the KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data, Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. He is one of the maintainers of Ontop, to which he has continuously been contributing for more than six years. 2021 Workshops and Tutorials: Integrating Data through Virtual Knowledge Graphs…

Diego Calvanese  is a full professor at the KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data, Faculty of Computer Science at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, and visiting professor at Umeå University. He is well known for his scientific contributions in knowledge representation and reasoning in AI, and database theory. Diego is one of the inventors…

Charles Ivie is a Sr Graph Architect in the Amazon Neptune graph database group. Charles was part of the team that built the knowledge graph platform for the BBC’s London Olympics 2012 content. Before joining AWS in 2020, he ran a consultancy to help other organisations realise their own ambitions with Knowledge Graph technologies, delivering…

A software developer for over 30 years, Boris has spent over 10 years in the semantic space, including the development of a semantic Wiki for the US Navy and consulting work in the financial services industry. His experience spans from high-performance computing and optimization to autonomous robotic systems and Space Shuttle Launch Control software. 2021…

Jan Hidders is currently lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. Before this he was associate professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and assistant professor at the Delft University of Technology. In the past his research has focused on data management, and specifically on three types of data models: graph data models, JSON and conceptual data…

Olaf Hartig is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Linköping University, Sweden. He is interested in problems related to the management of databases and knowledge. His focus in this broad context is on data on the Web (Semantic Web and Linked Data, in particular) and on graph data, as well as on problems in…

Sergio E. Baranzini is Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). He earned his Ph.D. in human molecular genetics (1997) from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. His lab at UCSF uses a multi-disciplinary approach to science and it is composed by experimental and computational researchers. Dr. Baranzini leads the…

Ryan Wisnesky obtained B.S. and M.S. degrees in mathematics and computer science from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University, where he studied the design and implementation of provably correct software systems. Previously, he was a postdoctoral associate in the MIT department of mathematics, where he developed the CQL query language…

Xian Li is a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon leading the science effort of building retail knowledge graphs. Before joining Amazon, she was a machine learning scientist at LinkedIn, where she was a major contributor to build LinkedIn’s knowledge base of business entities and filed 6 patents in three years. Her research interests include truth…

Peter is an ontologist in the Semantic Arts team. He has a diverse background with experience in medical research, government, and in standards development. He was a contributor to the W3C “Data on the Web Best Practices” recommendation and an editor of the W3C “Data Catalog” vocabulary recommendation. A former interoperability specialist with the UK…

Peter Hicks is a software engineer focused in graph visualizations. 2021 Talk: Visualizing Data Lineage Extracting metadata from data pipelines and building useful graphs for real production environments.

Mike Cafarella is a Principal Research Scientist at MIT CSAIL. His research interests include databases, information extraction, data integration, and knowledge graphs. He has published extensively in venues such as SIGMOD, VLDB, and elsewhere. In addition to his academic work, he co-started (with Doug Cutting) the widely-used Hadoop open-source project. He also co-founded (with Chris…

Matt Gee is an entrepreneur, data scientist, and researcher. He’s the co-founder and CEO of BrightHive, a public benefit corporation building data collaboratives, data trusts, and data cooperatives for networks of individuals and organizations to govern their combined data. He is also a Data and Society Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Knowledge Lab. He…

Krzysztof Janowicz is a professor for Geographic Information Science and Geoinformatics at the Geography Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. Krzysztof is the director of the Center for Spatial Studies, former program chair of the Cognitive Science Program, one of two Editors-in-Chief of the Semantic Web journal, and a Faculty Research Affiliate…

Jonas has a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering from the University Nova of Lisbon, Portugal. Before joining his current position at the National Cancer Institute’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology & Genetics, Jonas worked in teaching positions at multiple universities. As Chief Data Scientist at the National Cancer Institute, he focuses on accelerating the investigation of epidemiologic…

2021 Talk: Multi-Modal retrieval over Knowledge Graphs Recent Advances in representation learning and application of Deep Neural Nets towards structured data and Knowledge Graphs (KG) is enabling opportunities for multi-modal representation of entities and relations. We can now aspire to build access to data encoded in knowledge Graphs through one of many modalities (image, audio,…

Dr. Chaitanya Baru is Senior Science Advisor in the Convergence Accelerator Office. He is there on assignment from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), University of California, San Diego. He previously served at NSF, from August 2014-2018, as Senior Advisor for Data Science in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. During that time,…

Trace Labs
Co-Founder and CTO

Barr Moses is CEO & Co-Founder of Monte Carlo, a data reliability company backed by Accel, GGV, Redpoint, and other top Silicon Valley investors. Previously, she was VP Customer Operations at customer success company Gainsight, where she helped scale the company 10x in revenue and, among other functions, built the data/analytics team. Prior to that,…

Alex Kalinowski is looking to integrate knowledge graphs and natural language processing. He has a Ph.D. in information science from Drexel University. At Wells Fargo, Alex works as a knowledge graph engineer. His interests include applying deep learning techniques to graph-structured data, building tools to expedite knowledge graphs and ontology construction. 2021 Talk: Structured to…

Abhishek Mittal is the vice president of data and operational excellence for Wolters Kluwer Governance, Risk & Compliance division. He is responsible for driving business transformation and new product innovation by embedding data-driven decision-making in core operational processes. Under Abhishek’s leadership, his team has enabled the creation and transformation of the fulfillment and compliance centers…

Microsoft

Friedrich-Alexander-University

Marketing Manager, Lore Star srl

Operations Lead, TerminusDB

CEO stemma.ai, co-creator Amundsen

Co-founder and CTO, AtomGraph

Verizon Media

Roi has a Ph.D. in computer science from Ben-Gurion University and received a Postdoctoral degree from SFU. Roi worked as a machine learning and big data researcher at IBM Research labs in Haifa and was a member of the IDT Committee (Invention-Development-Technology). Roi founded Usearch in 2018, to bring the recent breakthroughs in neuroscience into…

Yext

Finra

Finra

IDLab – imec, Ghent University

Novartis International

KDZ

Tigergraph
VP Product & Innovation

Coreon GmbH
Computational Linguist

Google Research

OpenAIRE AMKE / ISTI-CNR

OpenRefine

AstraZeneca

Nicole helps companies turn data into answers through actionable AI programs. Utilizing NLP technologies, Nicole assists clients in extracting value from their structured and unstructured data (documents, contracts, chat logs, reports, emails, text repositories, relational and graph databases) for the purpose of regulatory reporting, question-answering, chat, search, email classification, and other applications. At Lymba, she…

Derwen, Inc.

Dr. Konstantin Todorov is Assoc. Professor at the University of Montpellier since 2012. He obtained his PhD in Cognitive Science from the Univ. of Osnabrück (Germany) in 2010 after receiving a MSc in Statistical Learning from the Univ. of Provence (France). His research lies in the AI fields of knowledge and data integration and extraction…

Franz Inc
CEO

Thales Canada, Inria France

Ontotext
Founder and CEO

Juan F. Sequeda is co-founder of Capsenta, a spin-off from his research, and Senior Director of Capsenta Labs. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.   As an entrepreneur, Juan’s goal is to help customers use Knowledge Graphs as a bridge between complex data sources and the domain…

Mike Tung is the CEO of Diffbot, an adviser at the Stanford StartX accelerator, and the leader of Stanford’s entry in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. In a previous life, he was a patent lawyer, a grad student in the Stanford AI lab, and a software engineer at eBay, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Mike studied electrical engineering…

Stardog
Co-Founder and SVP of Engineering

Content Strategies LLC
Managing Director

Dr. Gustafson is the CTO at Noonum, a FinTech startup that delivers insights on companies and markets using advances in NLP and AI. He received his PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Nottingham, UK, where he was a research fellow in the Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research Group. Shortly…