Information Retrieval: Searching in the 21st Century Unknown - 2009

Ayse Goker
Dr. Ayse Goker is a senior academic at City University London. Her research since the early 90s has focused on developing novel search techniques and environments, with an emphasis on personalised and context-sensitive information retrieval and management systems. These occur particularly within mobile and wireless computing, and also in bibliographic and web environments. Her skills are in identifying user needs and developing innovative systems that meet them. In international collaborations she has also been successful, with extensive experience in designing projects and managing teams to implement them. On the teaching side, Ayse has developed course modules in information systems on several degree programmes at both postgraduate and undergraduate levels.

Ayse is also a company co-founder of AmbieSense Ltd, a mobile information system company. This project began as the AmbieSense EU-IST project at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen where she was a Reader and project leader. She holds a lifetime Enterprise Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Scottish Enterprise. More recently she was selected for and completed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Entrepreneurship Development Program in Boston, USA.

In her profession, she has been the Chair of the British Computing Society's Specialist Group in Information Retrieval (BCS IRSG) (2000-2005). She was recognised for the totality of her endeavours by becoming a finalist in the Blackberry Women & technology Awards (2005) for Best Woman in Technology (Academia).

John Davies
Dr John Davies leads the Semantic Technology research group at BT. Current interests centre around the application of semantic web technology to business intelligence, information integration, knowledge management and service-oriented environments. He is Project Director of the 12m ACTIVE EU integrated project. He co-founded the European Semantic Web conference series. He is also chairman of the European Semantic Technology Conference and a Vice-President of the Semantic Technology Institute. He chairs the NESSI Semantic Technology working group. He has written and edited many papers and books in the areas of the semantic technology, web-based information management and knowledge management; and has served on the program committee of numerous conferences in these and related ar4eas. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Chartered Engineer. Earlier research at BT let to the development of a set of knowledge management tools which are the subject of a number of patents. These tools were spun out of BT and are now marketed by infonic Ltd, of which Dr Davies is Group Technical Advisor. Dr Davies received the BT Award for Technology Entrepreneurship for his contribution to the creation of infonic.