Keynote Speakers

Kay Uwe Römer,
Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Inform. Dr.sc.ETH, Institute of Technical Informatics, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

Abstract.
Wireless networked embedded systems are increasingly used for safety-critical applications, where even under harsh environmental conditions dependability requirements must be met. In this talk we introduce the Dependable Things research center at TU Graz and present recent results on improving the dependability of wireless communication and localization, embedded computing, and networked control for the Internet of Things.

Kay Römer is professor at and director of the Institute for Technical Informatics at Graz University of Technology, Austria. He obtained his Doctorate in computer science from ETH Zurich in 2005 with a thesis on Wireless Sensor Networks. As a senior researcher, he led the sensor network-related research activities of the Distributed Systems Group at ETH Zurich between 2005 and 2009. From 2009 to 2013 he held a professorship at University of Lübeck in Germany.
Kay Römer is an internationally recognized expert on networked embedded systems. He has published numerous often-cited results at and regularly serves on the program committees of the leading conferences in his field. He delivered invited keynote talks at international conferences, served as program co-chair for conferences such as ACM SenSys 2011 and ACM/IEEE IPSN 2013, and co-directed five international summer schools.
Kay Römer served as an associate editor for leading journals such as IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and IEEE Transactions on Computers. Kay Römer's research interests encompass wireless networking, fundamental services, operating systems, programming models, dependability, and deployment methodology of networked embedded systems, in particular Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, and Sensor Networks. His research has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, by the European Commission, through industry partners, by the German Science Foundation, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research, and Economy. He was the scientific coordinator of the EU FP7 FIRE project RELYonIT on dependable networking in the Internet of Things. He is currently the coordinator of the TU Graz Excellence Project "Dependable Internet of Things".

Dan Cristea,
Professor, "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iasi, Iasi, Romania

Abstract.
In my talk I will describe a mobile application offered to school children, which extends their school manuals in the Web and the world around them. Intended to revive the interest for reading of youngsters (too much corrupted these days by electronic gadgets), the MappingBooks project (reaching its end this year) uses natural language processing techniques to annotate the content of a school manual on several linguistic levels (words, their lemmas and part-of-speeches in context, entity names and chain of coreferences). Identified and classified entities are then searched in online repositories of cultural and geographical knowledge, such as Wikipedia and Geonames, from where additional information is extracted. Toponyms found in the book, localised on maps, are displayed, together with the instantaneous position of the reader, which, as such, becomes directly linked to the book content."

Dan Cristea holds a position of full professor at the "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iași (UAIC), Faculty of Computer Science, and a part-time position as principal researcher in the Computer Science Institute of the Iasi branch of the Romanian Academy. Back in the years '80s he has initiated a line of research in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing in UAIC. He is known mainly for his work on discourse related topics (such as veins theory, anaphora resolution, summarisation), hierarchical description of linguistic metadata and multilingual linguistic workflows, computational lexicography and linked resources for humanities.