Speakers

Martin Belam is Lead User Experience & Information Architect at Guardian News & Media, working across the award winning Guardian.co.uk website and mobile platforms. He has spent over a decade building digital media products for global brands like the BBC, Sony and Vodafone, including a three year spell working independently as a consultant based on the island of Crete. He is a contributing editor to FUMSI magazine, and helps run London IA, a community for IA and UX professionals. Martin blogs about user experience, journalism and digital media at www.currybet.net, and can be found on Twitter as @currybet

Manuel Brunner is a specialist in search and retrieval technologies. He supports numerous customer projects in project management, conception and planning activities. Manuel Brunner is an IPMA certified project manager (class C and D) and has comprehensive project experience since 1997.

He regularly contributes to the German Enterprise Search Blog.

The IntraFind Software AG specialises in software solutions for enterprise search, information retrieval and text mining in unstructured and structured company data.

Mike is a senior analyst with Ovum covering the breadth of Information Management technologies, but with a focus on Business Intelligence and particularly its overlap with search and content management technologies.

Since joining Ovum in 2006, Mike has established himself as a key influencer and commentator in the areas of healthcare technologies, information access and content management through reports, speaking and consultancy. Mike’s analysis and strategic advice is highly respected in both blue chip businesses and large public sector organisations across Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Mike regularly presents at Ovum events and major conferences, and is a frequent commentator in the press and on channels such as CNBC.

Prior to joining Ovum, Mike spent six years as an analyst at Butler Group, following an18-year career running information and IT systems in the UK health service.  This was interspersed with short periods as a management consultant, working as IT manager for a chartered institute, and two years managing healthcare workers and clinics in one of England’s most deprived housing estates. Mike was awarded his MBA in 1998.

Originally from a development background and now consulting and project managing various initiatives for the 3i group. I’ve been involved with search for the last eight years, seeing our choice of search change and grow across three different technologies.

David Gaulin, with over 10 years of experience as an IT specialist, is Vice-President Professional Services at Norconex Inc., a successful consulting firm specializing in Enterprise Search and E-Discovery projects. David is leading a team of highly qualified experts that helps companies, law firms and government agency to select, architect and implement Enterprise Search solutions tailored to their needs to empower the knowledge workers and customers. Mr Gaulin is managing projects across North America, integrating the different silos of content within the enterprise into centralized and scalable search solutions.

David Hawking is Chief Scientist at the internet and enterprise search company Funnelback (funnelback.com), a CSIRO spinoff based in Canberra, Australia. Funnelback search technology has won a number of awards and now supports hundreds of customers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK, mostly in government, education, and finance. David is also an adjunct professor at the Australian National University where he supervises a number of PhD students. He has authored around a hundred publications in the Information Retrieval area (see david-hawking.net) and twice served as SIGIR program chair. Hew was Web Track coordinator at TREC from 1997-2004. In this role he was responsible for the creation and distribution of text retrieval benchmark collections still in widespread use. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) and the Chris Wallace award (Australasia) for computer science research.

 

Thierry has over 20 years experience in Knowledge Management, Collaboration Technologies and online Social Networks. Thierry possesses a vision that leverages chaos theory principles to create a new generation of information consumption tools. While working for Price Waterhouse, Lotus Development Corporation and IBM, he helped create and pioneer some of the first recognized collaborative solutions. In his role as Director of Research and Development with Lotus/IBM, he developed a passion for solving the complexity of on-line community dynamics and exploring the economic value of information sharing. Subsequently, the Web 2.0 and information overload has lead him to embrace the chaos theory as a foundation for accelerating awareness, discovery and serendipity as an alternative to semantic engines and process-driven portals. Thierry's technical and managerial experiences extend from positions held at fortune 500 companies throughout North America and Europe, as well as entrepreneurship leading to acquisitions and the building-blocks of his vision.

Helge Legernes is CTO, consultant, partner, and co-founder of Findwise. He is an entrepreneur and business developer working at the intersection of business and technology. Legernes has authored articles on how companies should use enterprise search strategically. With extensive experience in enterprise search as a CEO and a vast career at different consultancy companies as well as at FAST Search and Transfer, he has focused on enterprise search for more than 6 years and is considered an authority within
this industry in the Scandinavian region.

Ville Nahkuri is heading the Enterprise Search competence team at Tieto Oyj. Before joining Tieto in 2008 he has had over 10 years of experience with enterprise search, content management, GIS, consultancy and sales. Ville Nahkuri holds a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Helsinki University of Technology.

Tieto is the leading IT service company in Northern Europe providing IT and product engineering services.

Dr Stavri Nikolov is currently a Senior Scientist at the European Commission's Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu/), where he is doing research in the areas of mobile and enterprise search, digital identity, eID technologies, eID architectures. He is Co-Founder and Principal Technology Adviser of Imagga Ltd (www.imagga.com), a start-up company specialising in visual (similarity) image search and online image processing, and of Attentive Displays Ltd (www.attentivedisplays.com), a start-up company specialising in designing and developing attentive and interactive information displays for public spaces. From 1998 until 2007, Dr Nikolov was a Research Fellow/Senior Research Fellow in Image Processing at the University of Bristol (UK). His research interests over the years have spanned several areas including image analysis, image search, image fusion, video surveillance, HCI, gaze tracking, new methods for data visualisation and navigation, and the construction of attentive and interactive information displays. He has published more than 70 refereed or invited papers, including eight invited book chapters and also numerous technical reports in these areas. Dr Nikolov is the Founding Director of the Digital Spaces Living Lab (www.digitalspaces.info) in Sofia, Bulgaria, which is focussed on developing and integrating novel digital media technologies.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe is a Principal with The Real Story Group, covering and advising on ECM technologies and practices. He focuses his own research in the areas of document management, enterprise collaboration, SharePoint, and e-mail archiving.

A native of the UK but a citizen of the world, Alan is a sought-after keynote speaker, and has delivered dozens of keynotes on six continents over the past decade. In addition to his "big picture" insight, his 20+ years in the document management industry and career start as a document manager himself enable him to incorporate both first-hand insight and seasoned experience into his research, consulting, and presentations.

Prior to joining The Real Story Group in 2006, Alan was a Strategist at Wipro and VP North America for the Industry Analyst firm Ovum. He has recently advised clients such as The US Federal Reserve, Chemical Abstract Service and Nokia on their change management and document management challenges.

Richard Pinder is co-Founder and SVP responsible for Europe, Middle East and Africa. Richard has 20 years' experience in the knowledge and information management industry and has worked for a range of organizations, including Eastman Kodak, Microbank (now Sungard), and SilverStream Software (since bought by Novell).

Richard has a deep knowledge of the technologies that surrounds Smartlogic's solution: Content Management Solutions, such as SharePoint and enterprise search engines such as Google and FAST. He also has experience in information and knowledge management consultancy, having run TFPL, a leading UK Information Management consultancy practice.

Specializing on subjects such as 'findability', and applying taxonomies and ontologies into real life business applications, Richard helps clients build business cases and strategic road-maps to sell the business value inside the organization. Richard is very well placed to help teams at the tipping point of business change.

Valentin Richter is managing director and founder of Raytion, an internationally operating consultancy for information management and corporate communications focused on enterprise search. Prior to consulting Global 100 companies he worked for Trinkaus & Burkhardt, a private bank which is now owned by HSBC. Mr. Richter has studied mathematics and information sciences.

I am currently director of UXLabs, a UX research and design consultancy specialising in complex search and information access applications. Before founding UXLabs I was Manager of User Experience at Endeca and editor of the Endeca UI Design Pattern Library, an online resource dedicated to best practice in the design of search and discovery experiences. Prior to this I was technical lead at Reuters, specialising in advanced user interfaces for information access and search. And before Reuters I was R&D group manager at Canon Research Centre Europe, where I led a team developing next generation information access products and services. Earlier professional experience includes a Royal Academy of Engineering fellowship at HP Labs and a Short-term Research Fellowship at BT Labs.

My academic qualifications include a PhD in human-computer interaction, an MSc in cognitive psychology and a first degree in engineering, majoring in human factors. I also hold the position of Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Interactive Systems Research, City University, London.  I am currently vice-chair of the BCS Information Retrieval group and chair of the IEHF Human-Computer Interaction group.

André Schaefer is project lead at Raytion, an internationally operating consultancy for information management and corporate communications focused on enterprise search. He has developed enterprise search solutions for leading global players in the areas of manufacturing, retail and health care. André Schaefer has studied information sciences and computational linguistics, has over 15 years of experience in the computer sciences area and has got a Ph.D. on "The ergonomic design of direct manipulation versus delegation in agent based information systems".

 

 

Tyler Tate is co-founder and designer at TwigKit where he has helped blue-chip and government organizations build superb search-based applications. Tyler is co-author of Designing the Search Experience (due to be published by Morgan Kauffman later this year) and organizes the Enterprise Search London meetup. Before focusing on search, Tyler designed web applications including a CMS and the Nutshell CRM.

Martin White is managing director of Intranet Focus, Ltd., based in Horsham, U.K. An information scientist by profession, White consults on intranet strategy, technology and governance issues and on the specification and selection of content management and search software. White has been involved in the information retrieval business for over 30 years. He is the co-author with Stephen Arnold of Successful Enterprise Search Management (2009), and author of The Intranet Management Handbook (2011) and has just completed a study of the enterprise search market in Europe for the European Commission. Earlier this year he wrote a report on Enterprise Information Mobility for the Intranet Benchmarking Forum and continues to track enterprise mobile developments.  He has been visiting professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield since 2002 and has business experience in over 30 countries.

A 20-year I.S. veteran with particular experience in software development and Internet, database and search technologies, Laura has written extensively on the role of search and search-based applications within numerous IT domains and industry sectors. She is the author of the recent Exalead whitepaper A Practical Guide to Big Data: Opportunities, Challenges & Tools and co-author with Gregory Grefenstette of the book Search-Based Applications: At the Confluence of Search and Database Technologies (2011, Morgan & Claypool Publishers).