Keynote Speakers

Prof. Ajith Abraham

Machine Intelligence Research Labs (MIR Labs), USA VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic

Ajith Abraham received the M.S. degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is currently the Director of Machine Intelligence Research Labs (MIR Labs), Scientific Network for Innovation and Research Excellence, USA, which has members from more than 85 countries. He serves/has served the editorial board of over 50 International journals and has also guest edited 40 special issues on various topics. He has co-authored several publications, and some of the works have also won best paper awards at international conferences. His research and development experience includes more than 20 years in the industry and academia. He works in a multidisciplinary environment involving machine intelligence, network security, e-commerce, Web intelligence, Web services and their applications to various real-world problems. He has given more than 50 plenary lectures and conference tutorials in these areas.

Dr. Abraham is the Chair of IEEE Systems Man and Cybernetics Society Technical Committee on Soft Computing and a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Computer Society representing Europe. Dr. Abraham is a Senior Member of the IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, the Institution of Engineering and Technology (UK) and the Institution of Engineers Australia (Australia), etc. He is the founder of several IEEE sponsored annual conferences, which are now anual events - Hybrid Intelligent Systems (HIS - 11 years); Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA - 11 years); Information Assurance and Security (IAS - 7 years); Next Generation Web Services Practices (NWeSP - 7 years), Computational Aspects of Social Networks (CASoN - 3 years), Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition (SoCPaR - 3 years), Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing (NaBIC - 3 years) are some examples.

Link to Web page: Homepage

Title of presentation: Engineering Future Business Information Systems [abstract]

Prof. Dr Hans Ulrich Buhl

Universität Augsburg, Germany

Prof. Dr Hans Ulrich Buhl is a full professor and Academic Director of the Department of Information Systems & Financial Engineering and the Competence Center IT & Financial Services at the University of Augsburg. His main fields of activity and research include finance and information management, Customer Relationship Management, and Service Science. In 2006 his department was awarded with the renowned IBM Service Science Faculty Award.

Prof. Buhl received a masters degree in Industrial Engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany as well as a M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He received his Ph.D. and his post doctoral lecture qualification (habilitation) from the University of Karlsruhe in 1992 and 1995. From 1983 to 1990 Prof. Buhl worked for IBM Germany Headquarters in Stuttgart, where he acquired practical experiences in the areas of finance, financial marketing, logistics, and information systems and headed the Projects and Methods Department. From 1990 to 1994 he held the Chair of Business Administration and Information Systems at the Justus-Liebig-University, Gießen before going to Augsburg in 1994.

Prof. Buhl is Editor-in-Chief of the acknowledged German journal "WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK", and editor of the journals "Electronic Markets" and "Electronic Commerce Research and Applications". Furthermore he is a member of the Commission "WKWI" (Information Systems) and "Banking and Finance" within the "Association of University Professors of Management" and member of the German Informatics society (GI) where he was speaker of the department "Information Systems" from 1998-2000, founder member and speaker of the section "Information Systems in Finance".

Link to Web page: www.wi-if.de

Title of presentation: Information Systems and Business & Information Systems Engineering: Status Quo and Outlook

Dr. Márta Nagy-Rothengass

European Commission, Information Society and Media Directorate-General, Luxembourg

Márta Nagy-Rothengass was born in Paks, Hungary. In 1987 she graduated in Economics at the University of Economics, Budapest, Hungary majoring in Foreign Commerce/Marketing. She continued at the same university, doing a Doctor's degree in Marketing in 1991. She went on to Danube University, Krems, Austria where she obtained her Masters in Business Administration in 2001. She speaks Hungarian, German, Russian and English.

Márta began her career in Budapest, Hungary dealing with initiation and transaction of trade agreements between Hungarian and Eastern and Western European firms. From 1991 she did freelance work including teaching Business Studies, translating and interpreting German-Hungarian and German-Russian and consultancy work for economic and commercial research. She managed a regional social association and was a member of the management for a federal association. In 1999 Márta changed to the private sector and worked for BOSCH Automation Technology and for a leading producer of electrical tools in Wendlingen in Germany, where she became the Head of New Media in 2001. She established and managed this new department introducing media-neutral product database, including integration into existing IT infrastructure. She designed and implemented brand-specific e-shops in collaboration with specialist dealers and integrating into international industry portal. She managed the workgroup on "Classification" in Electric Tools Division of German Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers' Association (ZVEI).

She joined the European Commission in September 2005 as the Head of Unit of "ICT for the Environment" in the Information Society and Media Directorate-General and developed her Unit further to "ICT for Sustainable Growth" including the areas of enlarged environmental management, disaster risk reduction and the building up of ICT for energy efficiency linked to the integrated climate and energy policy.

Since 01 July 2008 Márta is working as Head of Unit "Technologies for Information Management" in Luxembourg. The mission of her Unit is to contribute to the Lisbon Strategy of making Europe the most competitive knowledge-based economy. In particular, her Unit manages and co-funds research and development projects on innovative ICT technologies dealing with creation of intelligent digital objects and knowledge management, supporting knowledge exchange and "semantic web". Recently she and her Unit have taken the necessary steps to deal with more effective and efficient management of extremely large scale data.

Link to Web page: Homepage

Title of presentation: European Intelligent Information Management Research Supporting Business Intelligence [presentation in PDF]

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tomáš Pitner

Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Tomáš Pitner received his PhD from Masaryk University in 1998 in the area of environmental informatics. From the beginning of 2000s, his main focus is enterprise and web technology. In 2004, he was nominated the vice-dean at the Faculty of Informatics where he co-established the Association of Industrial Partners, currently having 27 member companies. Since 2007, he is an external professor and co-supervisor at the Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna in software architectures and web technologies. He is also interested in technology-enhanced learning based on Person-centered Approach. He is the head of the Lab Software Architectures and Information Systems (LaSArIS, http://lasaris.fi.muni.cz/) at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University. Recently, he helps to establish the environment fostering new innovative companies and start-ups around the Business IT Club and mentoring young firms, such as Celebrio Software or Takeplace.eu. He has been member of the expert group on software services in new EU-member states within the SPRERS project.

He has led many national as well as international research and teaching projects. He has authored several dozens of refered paper including journal publications.

He is member of programme committees at numerous conferences, mainly in Europe and also acts as a reviewer for several journals. He has been invited to the international panel for evaluation of research at Romanian universities in 2011.

Link to Web page: Homepage

Title of presentation: Surveillance and monitoring systems based on Complex event processing [abstract]

Prof. Gerald Quirchmayr

University of Vienna, Austria

Gerald Quirchmayr holds doctors degrees in computer science and law from Johannes Kepler University in Linz (Austria) and currently is Professor at the Department of Distributed and Multimedia Systems at the University of Vienna. In 2001/2002 he held a Chair in Computer and Information Systems at the University of South Australia. He first joined the University of Vienna in 1993 from the Institute of Computer Science at Johannes Kepler University in Linz (Austria) where he had previously been teaching.

In 1989/1990 he taught at the University of Hamburg (Germany). His wide international experience ranges from the participation in international teaching and research projects, very often UN- and EU-based, several research stays at universities and research centres in the US, Asia and EU Member States to extensive teaching in EU staff exchange programs in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Spain, and Greece, as well as teaching stays in the Czech Republic and Poland. International teaching and specialist missions include UN-coordinated activities in Egypt, Russia and the Republic of Korea. He has served as a member of program committees of many international conferences, chaired several of them, has contributed as reviewer to scientific journals and has also served on editorial boards. He is a member of the Austrian and German computer societies and a member of IFIP working groups. For his contributions to the international IT community he was received the IFIP Silver Core Award in 1995.

His major research focus is on information systems in business and government with a special interest in security, applications, formal representations of decision making and legal issues. His publication record comprises approximately 150 peer reviewed papers plus several edited books and conference proceedings as well as nationally and internationally published project reports. In July 2002 he was appointed as Adjunct Professor at the School of Computer and Information Science of the University of South Australia. From January 2005 until January December 2010 he headed the Department of Distributed and Multimedia Systems, Faculty of Computer Science, at the University of Vienna and served as Vice Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science from October 2008 until October 2010. Since January 2011 he serves as deputy head of the MIS group.

Link to Web page: Homepage

Title of presentation: Gateways to Information in Open Systems and the example of KIRAS/MDL [abstract]

Abstracts

Ajith Abraham: Engineering Future Business Information Systems

This talk will first illustrate the need for optimization of conventional approaches like neural networks and fuzzy expert systems etc. for function approximation and pattern recognition problems with an emphasis on business information systems. An indepth discussion will be made related to the different ways to improve the performance (by hybridization) and then start with the review of some of the popular hybrid architectures. Several real world business applications will be used to illustrate the performance of some of the popular hybrid architectures.

Tomáš Pitner: Surveillance and monitoring systems based on Complex event processing

Surveillance and monitoring systems are recently widely used to monitor the operation of various objects, ranging from a single computer or other device to large infrastructures such as enterprise-size computer networks or modern buildings. They help routine operators as well as strategic management to detect faults, outages, external and internal threats, unusual behavior but also to discover frauds and fine tune efficiency. Monitoring systems are based on observing time-series of events, e.g. netflow records in computer networking or values from temperature measurements in rooms. To disclose certain patterns in the series, Complex event processing techniques can be employed. The talk will show selected application cases where also an integrated approach using ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) systems are applied.

Gerald Quirchmayr: Gateways to Information in Open Systems and the example of KIRAS/MDL

As information provided by open systems becomes increasingly important for decision makers, the question arises of how to best access this information. The lack of common information architectures, diverse information types, such as text, audio, images and video, and a variety of legal issues contribute to this challenge. The central question answered by ample literature for enterprise internal information systems in this context still is how to provide the right information to the right person in the right place at the right time. The core challenge remains getting access to the right information.

This talk gives an overview of the major challenges and then presents the approach developed in the KIRAS/MDL project for dealing with information in open sources. The description of the developed prototype system, which is based on media mining technologies, including the presentation of a representative application scenario, is followed by a discussion of achievements and limitations of this research. The presentation then concludes with a look at new challenges and future research planned by the project consortium.