Wolfgang Nejdl - Short curriculum vitae#

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl, born 1960 in Vienna, Austria, has been full professor of computer science at the University of Hannover since 1995. He received his M.Sc. (1984) and Ph.D. degree (1988) at the Technical University of Vienna, was assistant professor in Vienna from 1988 to 1992, and associate professor at the RWTH Aachen from 1992 to 1995. He worked as visiting researcher / professor at Xerox PARC, Stanford University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, EPFL Lausanne, and at PUC Rio.

Prof. Nejdl heads the L3S Research Center (http://www.L3S.de) as well as the Distributed Systems Institute / Knowledge Based Systems (http://www.kbs.uni-hannover.de), and does research in the areas of search and information retrieval, information systems, semantic web technologies, peer-to-peer infrastructures, databases, technology-enhanced learning and artificial intelligence. Some recent projects in the L3S context include the PHAROS Integrated Project on audio-visual search, the OKKAM IP focusing on entities on the Web, the Digital Library EU project LiWA, coordinated by L3S, which investigates Web archive management and advanced search in such an archive, and the FET IP project LivingKnowledge, which is developing algorithms and methods to handle and exploit diversity, bias and opinion on the Web.

Wolfgang Nejdl published more than 230 scientific articles, as listed at DBLP and ISI, and has been program chair, program committee and editorial board member of numerous international conferences and journals, most recently including the role of general chair for AH'08 in Hannover, and PC chair for WWW'09 in Madrid, see also http://www.kbs.uni-hannover.de/~nejdl.

In 2006 Wolfgang Nejdl started the iSearch IT Solutions company, http://www.isearch-it-solutions.de, which focuses on commercializing research results from L3S projects in the area of digital libraries, search and web engineering.

2BThe L3S Research Center

The L3S Research Center, http://www.L3S.de was opened in January 2002 in the German Pavillon in Hannover, starting with a set of projects in cooperation with colleagues from Stanford and Sweden in the area of technology enhanced learning. Its research focus and projects have continuously expanded since then, now focusing on the field of Web Science, developing innovative methods and technologies to support and connect individuals and communities in all sectors of the knowledge society, and harnessing the information ecosystem to connect today’s Web to real-world entities.

Several interrelated topics guide our research in this context. The Web of People provides the focal point of our efforts, acknowledging the central role people play in the complex ecosystem of the Web, including work on social networks, human computing and trust and reputation. Our research into Foundations of Web Science and Web Infrastructure provide the algorithmic and conceptual foundations for the Web as well as the necessary infrastructures to ubiquitously access information everywhere and at all times, and to connect the Web with the real world. Web Information Management and Web Search play a central role for how to access information on the Web, in the context of Digital Libraries and the Deep Web, as well as for accessing all kinds of unstructured, semi-structured and multimedia-information on the Web. Last, but not least, service computing as well as advanced security and privacy mechanisms provide important Software Technologies for Web Applications, for example in E-Science and E-Learning.

L3S budget in 2009 is 6 Million Euro, with a third party funding rate of about 75%. About half of the third party funding comes from the European Union, the other half from other national funding sources and industry. A more in-depth description of research areas, projects and research results can be found in the L3S Annual Report 2008, http://www.l3s.de/ar/L3S_AnnualReport2008.pdf, and the latest L3S @ Work Magazine, http://www.l3s.de/L3S_at_work/L3S@work_Ausgabe6_8-2009.pdf.