Balisage 2012 Author/Speaker Biographies

Agnes Bai
Agnes Bai is a System and Web Development Analyst at OCUL Scholars Portal. She has been working on the project for eight years on varies tasks including ILL system, Reports, eJournals and eBooks. Agnes Bai holds a Master's degree in Computer Science and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Western Ontario.

Jeff Beck
Jeff Beck is a Technical Information Specialist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine. He has been involved in the PubMed Central project since it began in 2000. He has been working in print and then electronic journal publishing since the early 1990s. Currently he is co-chair of the NISO Z39-96, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite Working Group. He is a BELS-certified Editor in the Life Sciences and a poor golfer.

Sushil Bhattarai
Sushil Bhattarai is a Data Software Developer at ITHAKA.

Mario Blažević
Mario Blažević has a Master’s degree in Computer Science from University of Novi Sad, Yugoslavia. Since moving to Canada in 2000, he has been working for OmniMark Technologies, later acquired by Stilo International plc., mostly in the area of markup processing and on development of the OmniMark programming language.

Kurt Cagle
Kurt Cagle is a writer, information architect and developer specializing in XML and Web Technologies. He has authored more than fifteen books and hundreds of articles on XML based technologies such as XSLT, SVG, XUL, XForms, computer ethics and more, and writes the blog UnderstandingXML.com. He has most recently been working with the Firefox browser and Mozilla technologies, as well as XML based languages such as XBL, trying to push what he sees as the re-emergence of client-based programming. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and daughters, where he can usually be found staring out the window at the falling rain while drinking coffee at local coffeehouses.

Jayanthy Chengan
Jayanthy Chengan holds an engineering degree in Electronics & Communication and Diploma in Computer Science. She has more than 12 years of experience in Software Development. As a Senior Software Developer at OCUL Scholars Portal, she is responsible for loading XML Journal content from different publisher into MarkLogic server and working in Trusted Digital Repository project.

Ashley Clark
Ashley Clark recently received her M.S. from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she specialized in data curation and worked as a research assistant and hourly academic. Her interests include data curation and data provenance in the humanities.

John Cowan
John Cowan works for LexisNexis, which he calls "$EMPLOYER". On his 2011 tax returns, he listed his occupation as "ontologist" . He pushed both XML 1.1 and XML 1.0 Fifth Edition through the W3C XML Core Working Group, of which he somehow remains a member (likewise of the Unicode Consortium). He also hangs out on numerous mailing lists and blogs, masquerading on the A forum as the expert on B and and on the B forum as the expert on A. His friends say that he knows at least something about almost everything; his enemies, that he knows far too much about far too much.

Steven J. DeRose
Steve DeRose has been working with electronic document systems since joining Andries van Dam’s FRESS project in 1979. He holds degrees in Computer Science and in Linguistics and a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Brown University. His development of fast, accurate part-of-speech tagging methods for English and Greek corpora helped touch off the shift from heuristic to statistical methods in computational linguistics.

He co-founded Electronic Book Technologies to build the first SGML browser and retrieval system, "DynaText", and has been deeply involved in document standards including XML, TEI, HyTime, HTML 4, XPath, XPointer, EAD, Open eBook, OSIS, NLM and others. He has served as Chief Scientist of Brown University’s Scholarly Technology Group and Adjunct Associate Professor of Computer Science. He has written many papers, two books, and eleven patents. Most recently he joined OpenAmplify, a text analytics company that does very high-volume analysis of texts, mostly from social media.

Micah Dubinko
Micah Dubinko has worked on diverse projects, from portable heart monitors to mobile applications to search engines. He is currently Lead Engineer in the Applications group at MarkLogic.

Mark D. Flood
Mark D. Flood (Mark.Flood@treasury.gov) did his undergraduate work at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he majored in finance (B.S., 1982), and German and economics (B.A., 1983). In 1990, he earned his Ph.D. in finance from the Graduate School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has taught finance and business at universities in the U.S. and Canada, and worked as an Economist and Financial Economist on issues of regulatory policy and risk management at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Federal Housing Finance Board, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency. He was a founding member of the Committee to Establish a National Institute of Finance. He is currently a Senior Policy Advisor in the U.S. Treasury, working for the Office of Financial Research. His research has appeared in a number of journals, including the Review of Financial Studies, Quantitative Finance, the Journal of International Money and Finance, and the St. Louis Fed’s Review.

Betty Harvey
As President of Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. since 1995, Betty Harvey has led many federal government and commercial enterprises in planning and executing their migration to the use of structured information for their critical functions. Over the past 14 years she has helped develop strategic XML solutions for her clients. Ms. Harvey has been instrumental in developing industry XML standards. Ms. Harvey is a member of OASIS Open and is currently an active participant in the Universal Business Language initiative. Previously she was a member of the Core Components subcommittee of the ebXML initiative. She is the co-author of Professional ebXML Foundations published by Wrox. Ms. Harvey founded the Washington, DC Area SGML/XML Users Group in 1995. She still coordinates the users group which is the longest standing XML users group. Ms. Harvey is also a member of “The XML Guild” and recently coauthored the book Advanced XML Applications From the Experts at The XML Guild published by Thomson. Currently, Ms. Harvey is working with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on developing future system evolution for the Electronic Records Archive (ERA) system.

Mary Holstege
Mary Holstege is Principal Engineer at MarkLogic Corporation. She has worked as a software engineer in and around markup technologies for over 20 years. She is a member of the W3C XML Schema and XML Query working groups, and an editor of the W3C XML Schema Component Designators and the XML Query Full Text specifications. Mary Holstege holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Computer Science, for a thesis on document representation.

Claus Huitfeldt
Mag.art. Claus Huitfeldt has been Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Bergen, Norway since 1994.

He was founding Director (1990-2000) of the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, for which he developed the text encoding system MECS as well as the editorial methods for the publication of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass — The Bergen Electronic Edition (Oxford University Press, 2000).

He was Research Director (2000-2002) of Aksis (Section for Culture, Language and Information Technology at the Bergen University Research Foundation). In 2003 he returned to his position at the Department of Philosophy, where he teaches modern philosophy and philosophy of language, and also gives frequent courses in text technology at the The Department of Humanistic Informatics.

He has been active in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) since 1991, and was centrally involved in the foundation of the TEI Consortium in 2001. The consortium now counts more than 90 member institutions.

Claus’ research interests are within philosophy of language, philosophy of technology, text theory, editorial philology and markup theory. He is currently leader of the project Markup Languages for Complex Documents (MLCD).

Gautham Kalwala
Gautham Kalwala is a member of the ITHAKA data team.

Sachin Kurdikar
Sachin Kurdikar is a Data Software Developer at ITHAKA.

David Lee
David Lee has over 30 years experience in the software industry responsible for many major projects in small and large companies including Sun Microsystems, IBM, Centura Software (formerly Gupta.), Premenos, Epiphany (formerly RightPoint), WebGain, Nexstra, Epocrates, MarkLogic. As Lead Engineer at MarkLogic, Inc., Mr Lee is responsible for maintaining and enhancing the core XML Database server.

Key career contributions include Real-time AIX OS extensions for optimizing transmission of real-time streaming video (IBM), secure encrypted EDI over internet email (Premenos), porting the Centura Team Desktop system to Solaris (Gupta, Centura), optimizations of large Enterprise CRM systems (Epiphany), author of xmlsh (http://www.xmlsh.org) an open source scripting language for XML.

Jie Ling
Jie Ling is a Data Software Developer at ITHAKA.

Jakub Malý
Jakub Malý is a Ph.D. student at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. His research areas involve conceptual modeling of XML data, integrity constraints, evolution and adaptation of XML applications.

Yves Marcoux
Yves Marcoux has been a faculty member at EBSI, University of Montréal, since 1991. He is mainly involved in teaching and research activities in the field of document informatics. Prior to his appointment at EBSI, he worked for 10 years in systems maintenance and development, in Canada, the U.S., and Europe. He obtained his Ph.D. in theoretical computer science from University of Montréal in 1991. His main research interests are document semantics, structured document implementation methodologies, and information retrieval in structured documents. Through GRDS, his research group at EBSI, he has been principal architect for the Governmental Framework for Integrated Document Management, a project funded by the National Archives of Québec and by the Québec Treasury Board.

John Meyer
John Meyer is Director of Data Technology at ITHAKA.

Sheila M. Morressey
Sheila Morrissey is Senior Research Developer at ITHAKA.

Martin Nečaský
Martin Nečaský is an assistant professor at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. His research areas involve XML data design, integration, evolution and linked open data.

Ari Nordström
Ari Nordström is the resident XML guy at Condesign AB in Gˆteborg, Sweden. His information structures and solutions are used by Volvo Cars, Ericsson, and many others, with more added every year. His favourite XML specification remains XLink so quite a few of his frequent talks and presentations on XML focus on linking.

Ari spends some of his spare time projecting films at the Draken Cinema in Gˆteborg, which should explain why he wants to automate cinemas using XML. He now realises it’s too late, however.

Steven Pemberton
Steven Pemberton is a researcher at the CWI, the Dutch national research centre for mathematics and computer science, chair of the Forms Working Group at W3C, and a member of the OASIS ODF technical committee. He has been involved with the web from the beginning, organising two workshops at the first web conference in 1994, and chairing the first W3C Style Sheets workshop in 1995. He chaired the HTML Working Group for a decade. He is co-author of amongst others HTML 4, CSS, XHTML, XForms and RDFa. For more information see www.cwi.nl/~steven

Silvio Peroni
Silvio Peroni holds a degree in Computer Science at the University of Bologna. The main research interests in his current Ph.D. career include Semantic Web technologies, markup languages for complex documents, design patterns for digital documents and automatic processes of analysis and segmentation. He has published 9 scientific papers about these subjects.

Wendell Piez
Wendell Piez has been attending Balisage and its antecedent conferences since the early days of XML. Among his contributions has been, with Jeni Tennison, the original LMNL proposal (2002).

Hans-Jürgen Rennau
Hans-Jürgen Rennau is a Senior Java developer for Traveltainment GmbH. He takes a keen interest in the integration of object-oriented and “item-oriented” (XML) components of behavior and components of information. Hans-Jürgen’s background as a biologist partly accounts for his belief that the naturalness of a thought is important to its potential. A natural integration of two natural approaches — OO and XML — is what he strives for in theory and practice.

Keith Rose
Keith Rose is a Lead Programmer Analyst at the American Chemical Society, with over 25 years of IT experience. He has spent the last five years in the ACS Publications division working on XML-related projects for both journals and books. Keith resides in Hilliard, OH.

Hervé Ruellan
Hervé Ruellan holds an engineering degree from the Êcole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures (1993) and a Ph.D. in computer science from Université Paris XI (1998). Since 2000, he has been working at Canon Research Centre France first in the domain of Web Services, then in the domain of XML technologies.

Oliver Schonefeld
Oliver Schonefeld works at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Institute for the German Language) in Mannheim and is involved in the projects CLARIN and TextGrid. He studied computer science with specialization in text technology at Bielefeld University until 2005. After graduating he worked as a researcher at Bielefeld University and later at Tübingen University’s collaborative research center Linguistic Data Structures. His major research interests are the limitations of markup languages (especially overlapping markup) and the use of markup languages in linguistic description of language data.

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen is the founder of Black Mesa Technologies LLC, a consultancy specializing in the use of descriptive markup to help memory institutions preserve cultural heritage information for the long haul. He has served as co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification, the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, and the XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 specification. He holds a doctorate in comparative literature.

Matt Stoeffler
Matt Stoeffler is a Data Software Developer at ITHAKA.

Tamara Stoker
Tami Stoker has served as the Vendor Relations Manager at the American Chemical Society for the past four years. She became a Certified Quality Analyst early in her career and worked in the quality management area for many years, specializing in business process improvement. Tami resides in Worthington, OH.

Maik Stührenberg
Maik Stührenberg received his Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics and Text Technology from Bielefeld University in 2012. After graduating in 2001, he worked four years as research assistant at Giessen University in different text-technological projects together with Henning Lobin and Georg Rehm. Afterwards, he worked together with Andreas Witt, Dieter Metzing, Daniela Goecke, and Daniel Jettka in the Sekimo project of the Research Group 437 Text-technological Modelling of Information funded by the German Research Foundation. During 2011 and 2012, he was employed at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS, Institute for the German Language) in Mannheim as member of the CLARIN-D project group and is currently employed as research assistant at Bielefeld University.

His main research interests include specifications for structuring multiple annotated data, query languages, and query processing.

Umadevi Thanneeru
Umadevi Thanneeru is a Data Software Developer at ITHAKA.

B. Tommie Usdin
B. Tommie Usdin is President of Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consultancy specializing in XML and SGML. Ms. Usdin has been working with SGML since 1985 and has been a supporter of XML since 1996. She chairs the Balisage conference. Ms. Usdin has developed DTDs, Schemas, and XML/SGML application frameworks for applications in government and industry. Projects include reference materials in medicine, science, engineering, and law; semiconductor documentation; historical and archival materials. Distribution formats have included print books, magazines, and journals, and both web- and media-based electronic publications. She is co-chair of the NISO Z39-96, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite Working Group. You can read more about her at http://www.mulberrytech.com/people/usdin/index.html

Eric van der Vlist
Eric van der Vlist is an independent consultant and trainer. His domain of expertise includes Web development and XML technologies.

He is the creator and main editor of XMLfr.org, the main site dedicated to XML technologies in French, the author of the O’Reilly animal books on XML Schema and RELAX NG and a member of the ISO DSDL (http://dsdl.org) working group focused on XML schema languages.

He is based in Paris and you can reach him by mail (vdv@dyomedea.com) or meet him in one of the many conferences where he presents his projects.

Fabio Vitali
Fabio Vitali is Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Bologna, where he teaches Web Technologies and Human-Computer Interaction. His interests lie in models and languages for document management and hypertext support, and has published more than 60 papers in national and international venues. He is member of the W3C Working Group on XML Schema, and member of the scientific committee of several conferences and journals in Web engineering and technologies. He is author of important standards in the legislative XML Domain, and work on issues related to digital publishing, Web technologies and Semantic Web technologies.

Dale Waldt
Dale Waldt’s nearly 30 years of working with structured content, has focused primarily on leading the development of XML and Web systems that meet business and accuracy goals. Dale currently manages a large team of schema developers working on building semantically-rich XML content to support robust online delivery of more than 100 TB of legal information. Content Architecture has 20+ schema developers working closely with repository and delivery application development groups. Dale works closely with all stakeholders and developers to create processes and schedules that meet the business, technical, and quality requirements for all uses of the content. Before that, for 2 years, Dale was a Senior Analyst at the Gilbane Group writing and consulting on XML and DITA systems. Previously Dale spent 10 years consulting to state legislatures, federal agencies and complex/regulated content applications in pharmaceutical, legal, and technical documentation vertical markets helping them adopt XML publishing systems. Previously Dale was VP Product Systems Development for RIA, the legal and tax division of Thomson-Reuters. Dale has also worked for the US IRS, standards organizations (OASIS, ISO, CSA and others) and has taught, written and spoken widely on XML and related technologies around the world.

Norman Walsh
Norman Walsh is a Lead Engineer at MarkLogic Corporation where he works with the Application Services team. Norm is also an active participant in a number of standards efforts worldwide: he is chair of the XML Processing Model Working Group at the W3C where he is also co-chair of the XML Core Working Group. At OASIS, he is chair of the DocBook Technical Committee.

With more than a decade of industry experience, Norm is well known for his work on DocBook and a wide range of open source projects. He is the author of DocBook: The Definitive Guide.

Sam Wilmott
Sam Wilmott started using markup languages in the late ’60s. Since then he has led the development of typesetting/text-formatting systems for the Canadian Government Printing Office and for a major real-estate company, implemented one of the first SGML parsers (which was also the first pull-model markup parser), and is the originator of the OmniMark Developer Resources programming language, with its strong support of SGML, XML, and text transformation.

More recently Sam has been working the XSLT world: he has recently contributed to the implementation of an XSLT compiler and currently works as an XSLT programmer and analyst. As a side project, he is working on new programming language ideas for markup language processing.

Andreas Witt
Witt received his Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics and Text Technology from the Bielefeld University in 2002 (dissertation title: “Multiple Informationsstrukturierung mit Auszeichnungssprachen. XML-basierte Methoden und deren Nutzen für die Sprachtechnologie”). After graduating in 1996, he started as a researcher and instructor in Computational Linguistics and Text Technology. He was heavily involved in the establishment of the minor subject Text Technology in Bielefeld University’s Magister and B.A. program in 1999 and 2002 respectively. After his Ph.D. in 2002 he became an assistant lecturer, still at the Text Technology group in Bielefeld. In 2006 he moved to Tübingen University, where he was involved in a project on “Sustainability of Linguistic Resources” and in projects on the interoperability of language data. Since 2009 he is senior researcher at Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Institute for the German Language) in Mannheim. Witt is and was a member of several research organizations, amongst them the TEI Special Interest Group on overlapping markup, for which he was involved in the writing of the latest version of the chapter “Multiple Hierarchies”, which is included in TEI-Guidelines P5.

Wei Zhao
Wei Zhao has been working for OCUL Scholars Portal since 2004. As a Metadata Librarian, She is responsible for ensuring the integrity and accuracy of Scholars Portal E-journal archive. She also involves in other projects such as SFX, ebook, and Trusted Digital Repository. Wei Zhao holds a MLIS degree from Peking University and the University of Western Ontario.