Dougal Watt

Graph Research Labs

“Dougal is the Co-founder of Graph Research Labs, a semantics based consultancy and software provider providing semantic software and consulting solutions, and the founder of watt.consulting, providing C Level & board Level Advisory and Consulting.

Previously Dougal was Chief Technologist of IBM NZ, with deep International technology consulting experience. He is an expert in Data, Ontology and Semantics and an international keynote speaker.

Dougal is certified as an Open Group Distinguished Chief Architect, IBM Certified Enterprise Architect and IBM Executive Certified Information Architect. Dougal holds a Masters degree in Psychology and Bachelor degrees in Chemistry and Psychology.

Dougal chairs both government, industry and academic groups and has been a guest lecturer of computer science at Auckland University for many years.”

Steve Hedden

TopQuadrant

Steve Hedden is Senior Product Manager at TopQuadrant, where he leads the development of knowledge graph and semantic technology solutions for organizing and connecting enterprise data. He focuses on helping organizations structure information, improve search, and support AI applications with well-governed data. With a background in philosophy, mathematics, and international development, he brings a unique perspective to solving complex data challenges. Steve is particularly interested in how semantics can make AI more accurate, reliable, and context-aware.

Tom Reamy

KAPS Group

Tom Reamy is currently the CEO and founder of KAPS Group, a group of text analytics, and taxonomy consultants and has 20+ years of experience in information projects of various kinds. He has published a number of articles in a variety of journals, and is a frequent speaker at knowledge management, taxonomy, and text analytics conferences (See the KAPS web site for details). He is also the author of the only comprehensive book on text analytics, Deep Text.

For the last 12 years, his primary focus has been on text analytics, helping clients select the best text analytics software for their needs as well as doing text analytics development projects that include applications such as call support and customer experience, enterprise search and enterprise content management, business intelligence, voice of the customer, and customer behaviour prediction. He is currently doing research in using text analytics for expertise analysis and other cognitive science inspired projects.

Tom’s academic background includes History of Ideas, artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and philosophy, particularly epistemology.

When not writing or developing text analytics projects, he can usually be found at the bottom of the ocean in Carmel, photographing strange critters.

Paco Nathan

Senzing

Paco Nathan leads DevRel for the Entity Resolved Knowledge Graph practice area at Senzing and is a computer scientist with +40 years of tech industry experience and core expertise in data science, natural language, graph technologies, and cloud computing. He’s the author of numerous books, videos, and tutorials about these topics. He also hosts the monthly “Graph Power Hour!” webinar.

Ora Lassila

Amazon Neptune

Dr. Ora Lassila is a Principal Technologist in the Amazon Neptune graph database team. He is also the co-chair of the current W3C RDF-star working group. In the late 1990s he started the work on RDF and subsequently served as the editor of the first RDF specification. in 2001 he published what is now considered the seminal article on the Semantic Web.

Jans Aasman

Franz Inc.

Jans Aasman is a Ph.D. psychologist and expert in Cognitive Science – as well as CEO of Franz Inc., an early innovator in Artificial Intelligence and provider of Knowledge Graph Solutions based on AllegroGraph. As both a scientist and CEO, Dr. Aasman continues to break ground in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Graphs, and Data Fabrics as he works hand-in-hand with numerous Fortune 500 organizations as well as government entities worldwide.

Pete Rivett

Enterprise Knowledge Graph Foundation

Pete Rivett has been heavily involved in many ontology and knowledge graph efforts, both enterprise-specific and industry-wide including the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) LEI and Data Products Ontology (DPROD). He was founding director of Enterprise Knowledge Graph Foundation (EKGF), member of the Architecture Board of Object Management Group (OMG), and a co-founder of the Dataworthy Collective. He is now a consultant applying knowledge graphs in a variety of projects from blockchain-based auditing to augmented reality for industrial applications.