VIP Speakers Biographies

Fabrizio Gagliardi

Fabrizio Gagliardi, born in Pisa, Italy, on 14/08/1950, is Europe, Middle East and Africa Director for External Research at Microsoft Research Corporation. He joined Microsoft in November 2005 after a long career at CERN, the world leader laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, Switzerland. There he held several technical and managerial positions since 1975: Director of the EU Grid project EGEE (2004-2005); Director of the EU Data-Grid project (2001-2004); head of mass storage services (1997-2000); Leader of the EU project GPMIMD2 (1993-1996).Fabrizio Gagliardi has worked with four different Nobel Prize winners while at CERN. He has a Doctorate degree in Computer Science, granted by the University of Pisa in 1974. Dr. Gagliardi is co-founder and member of the International Advisory Committee of the Open Grid Forum. Dr. Gagliardi has been consulting on computing and computing policy matters with the Commission of the European Union, several government and international bodies (among them NSF, DoE in the US, CNRS and other research bodies in France, EPSRC in the UK, CNR and INFN in Italy, OECD, UN agencies). Dr. Gagliardi is author and co-author of several publications and articles on real-time and distributed computing.

Victor Richard Benjamins

Dr. V. Richard Benjamins is the director of technological strategy at Telefonica R&D. Before joining Telefonica, he co-founded iSOCO, a Semantic Web solutions company, in June 1999. In September 2005 iSOCO was granted the Spanish National Award for Computer Science. Dr Benjamins has held positions at the Technical University of Madrid, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, the University of Paris-South, France, and the Spanish Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Barcelona. He has published over 100 scientific articles in books, journals and proceedings, covering areas such as knowledge technologies, artificial intelligence, knowledge management, Semantic Web and ontologies. He has been the guest editor of several journal special-issues and co-chair of numerous international workshops and conferences. He now serves on many international program committees. He is a member of the editorial board of IEEE Intelligent Systems, Web Semantics (Elsevier), International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (Idea Group). Richard Benjamins received his Master's Degree (1988) and Ph.D. (1993) in cognitive science from the University of Amsterdam.

Paul Strong

Paul Strong is a distinguished research scientist at eBay Research Labs where he helps drive eBay's long term vision and strategy for infrastructure management. His work is focused on addressing the challenges of managing very large distributed systems including cloud computing infrastructure and enterprise grids. Paul's team is doing research and delivering innovative technology in this space, including: semantic web technology based tool that enables the relationships between infrastructure components to be captured, queried and visualised, thus enabling fault diagnosis, disaster recovery planning, capacity planning and ROI/TCO analysis; a standards based (Open Grid Forum BES HPC Basic Profile) web services interface for Hadoop turning it into Hadoop as a Service. Paul also plays a leadership role in the broader Cloud and Grid computing communities and currently sits on the Open Grid Forum (OGF) board of directors and is co-chair of the OGF Reference Model Working Group. Prior to the formation of the OGF, Paul was chair of the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) technical steering committee. Before joining eBay, Paul was a systems architect at Sun Microsystems where he focused on grid standards and the N1 product set. He was part of the original N1 team, and co-authored the book Building N1 Grid Solutions (Prentice Hall, 2004). The majority of Paul's work before joining Sun was focused on designing and building distributed, real-time, command and control, or communications systems. In his spare time Paul plays unnecessarily complicated and mathematically interesting music in a band called Fractal. He holds a B.Sc. in physics from the University of Manchester, England.