Yigal Arens - DGRC Co-Director
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Yigal Arens is the Director of the Intelligent Systems Division at the Information Sciences Institute, one of the largest artificial intelligence research labs in the U.S. He is also Director of ISI's new Center for Research on Unexpected Events (CRUE), which was established to investigate the policies, infrastructure and support needed to improve responses to low-probability, high-impact events -- natural or man-made -- within dynamic human environments. His research interests are in the areas of Digital Government, intelligent access to multiple heterogeneous information sources, human-computer interfaces, multimedia interfaces, natural language understanding and generation, representation of information. His work in DGRC has focused on the integration of data distributed over multiple statistical databases, an extension of his earlier SIMS research at USC/ISI. For the past 3 years he has been the chair of the NSF-sponsored National Conference for Digital Government Research.


David L. Waltz - DGRC Co-Director
Columbia University

David Waltz is of the Center for Computational Learning Systems (CLASS) at Columbia University. CLASS aims to be a world leader in learning and data mining research and the application of this research to natural language understanding, the World Wide Web, bioinformatics, systems security and other emerging areas.


José Luis Ambite
USC/Information Sciences Institute

José Luis Ambite's research interests are on information integration, planning, databases, and knowledge representation. Within the SIMS and Ariadne projects, he developed efficient query planning techniques for mediators as an instantiation of a general approach to efficient high-quality planning called Planning by Rewriting. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from USC in 1998.


Steven Feiner
Columbia University

Steven Feiner is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, where he directs the Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Laboratory.

He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University in 1987. His research interests include virtual environments and augmented reality, knowledge-based design of graphics and multimedia, information visualization, wearable computing, and hypermedia.

Prof. Feiner is coauthor of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice (Addison-Wesley, 1990) and of Introduction to Computer Graphics (Addison-Wesley, 1993). He is an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Graphics, has served on the executive boards of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization and Graphics, and the IEEE Computer Society Task Force on Human-Centered Information Systems, and is a member of the steering committees for the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, the IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems. Feiner is program co-chair for the 2003 IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, and, over the past year, has been general chair of IEEE Information Visualization 2001, symposium co-chair of the 2001 IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Augmented Reality, and program co-chair of the 2001 International Symposium on Mixed Reality 2001. In 1991 he received an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award.


Eduard Hovy
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Eduard Hovy is a Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Intelligent Systems Division at USC's Information Sciences Institute. His research focuses on automated text summarization, question answering, text planning and generation, the semi-automated construction of large lexicons and terminology banks, and machine translation; the Natural Language Group at ISI currently has projects in most of these areas. With regard to DGRC, Dr. Hovy's work focuses on ontology construction, by combining techniques in semi-automated cross-ontology merging, information extraction from the web, and harvesting of ontological information from dictionaries. All this work proceeds in the context of SENSUS, the 100,000-node ontology built from Wordnet and used at ISI to support machine translation, text summarization, and information retrieval. For the past 3 years he has been Program Chair of the NSF-sponsored national conferences for Digital Government Research.


Andrew Philpot
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Andrew Philpot is a research scientist working on the SIMS and Ariadne projects. His research interest are in artificial intelligence, information source integration and planning. He received an M.S. in Computer Science: Artificial Inteligence from Stanford University in 1990.


Mack Reed
USC/ISI

Mack Reed is a senior computer consultant and communications specialist at ISI. He was an award-winning journalist for newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and Philadelphia Inquirer and a Web content manager for Cox Interactive Media. He oversees communications entities and strategies for the NSF's Digital Government program and the National Conference on Digital Government Research and for DGRC itself. He publishes the monthly dgOnline newsletter on digital government research.


Ken Ross
Columbia University

Professor Ross is an associate Professor in the computer Science Department at Columbia University. The focus of his research is database systems. Within that area, his main research topics are currently:

1. Processing and optimizing complex queris for decision support applications
2. View materialization and maintenance, and
3. Declarative database systems their theory.

Salvatore J. Stolfo
Columbia University

Salvatore J. Stolfo is Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from NYU Courant Institute in 1979 and has been on the faculty of Columbia ever since.

He served as the Chairman of the Computer Science Department and the Director of the Center for Advanced Technology at Columbia University.

He has published well over a hundred scientific publications in the areas of parallel computing, AI Knowledge-based systems, and most recently Data Mining, and Intrusion Detection systems. Dr. Stolfo co-developed the first Expert Database System in the early 1980's that was widely distributed to a large number of telephone wire centers around the nation. He has led a project that developed the 1023-processor DADO parallel computer designed to accelerate knowledge-based and pattern directed inference systems.

His most recent research has been devoted to distributed data mining systems with applications to fraud and intrusion detection in network information systems. He recently co-chaired several workshops in the area of data mining, intrusion detection and the Digital Government and co-chaired the PC of the SIGKDD 2000 Conference.

Recently, he was a member the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee, and Visa 3D Secure Authenticated Internet Payments Vendor Program, and was an expert witness in the DOJ versus Microsoft "browser war" litigation. He is presently the Chief Science Advisor to System Detection Inc, a recently established start-up he co-founded to commercialize his DARPA-sponsored research in Data mining-based Fraud and Intrusion detection. He has been awarded numerous patents in the areas of parallel computing and database inference, and a number of patents are pending in the area of internet privacy and security.