KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

The search computing project (SeCo), funded by the European Research Council as an advanced IDEAS grant, aims at building concepts, algorithms, tools, and technologies to support complex Web queries. The project is now entering the fourth of five year lifespan (Nov. 2008-Nov. 2013); it proposes a new paradigm for solving complex queries based on combining data extraction from distinct sources and data integration by means of specialized integration engines. Data extraction retrieves data from different sources, ordered based on local rankings, and data integration merges such results into result combinations, with an associated global ranking, such that combinations with the highest ranking are produced as fast as possible; a result combination represents the solution of a complex search problem. Thus, the search computing project has the ambitious goal of lowering the technological barrier required for building complex search applications, thereby enabling the development of many new applications which will cover relevant search needs.

Stefano Ceri is professor at the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione (DEI), Politecnico di Milano; he was a visiting professor at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University between 1983 and 1991. He is the Director of Alta Scuola Politecnica (ASP), a school of excellence emphasizing innovation and multidisciplinarity, for master-level students of Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino. He is author of more than 300 articles on International Journals and Conference Proceedings and of 11 international books, with an H-index 56. He is co-inventor of WebML, a model for the conceptual design of Web applications (US Patent 6,591,271, July 2003), and co-founder in 2001 of Web Models, a spinoff company of Politecnico di Milano which commercializes WebML by means of the product WebRatio. He is the recipient of the ERC IDEAS Grant “Search Computing” (SeCo), a multi-disciplinary project providing the abstractions, foundations, methods, and tools required to give answer to complex search queries. The project spans from Nov. 1, 2008 to Oct. 31, 2013; the major results include a series of three books with Springer-Verlag, numerous articles and demos, and a recently awarded patent.

 
Masataka Goto, Prime Senior Researcher / Leader of Media Interaction Group, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan, http://staff.aist.go.jp/m.goto/.

Masataka Goto received the Doctor of Engineering degree from Waseda University in 1998. He is currently a Prime Senior Researcher and the Leader of the Media Interaction Group at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan. In 1992 he was one of the first to start work on automatic music understanding, and has since been at the forefront of research in music technologies and music interfaces based on those technologies. Since 1998 he has also worked on speech recognition interfaces and since 2006 he leads web services based on content analysis and crowdsourcing (http://songle.jp and http://en.podcastle.jp). He serves concurrently as a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, an Associate Professor (Cooperative Graduate School Program) in the Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba, and a Project Manager of the Exploratory IT Human Resources Project (MITOH Program) by the Information Technology Promotion Agency (IPA).

Over the past 20 years, Masataka Goto has published more than 190 papers in refereed journals and international conferences and has received 29 awards, including several best paper awards, best presentation awards, and the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Young Scientists' Prize). He has served as a committee member of over 80 scientific societies and conferences and was the Chair of the IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan) Special Interest Group on Music and Computer (SIGMUS) in 2007 and 2008 and the General Chair of the 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2009).  Since 2011 he started a 5-year research project (OngaCREST Project) on music technologies as the Research Director, whose project is funded by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (CREST, JST).