Balisage 2013 Author/Speaker Biographies

Alan Bilansky
Alan Bilansky earned a PhD in Rhetoric and Democracy before recently completing an MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois, where he also teaches informatics and consults with faculty as they work with technology.

George Bina
George Bina is one of the founders of Syncro Soft, the company that develops oXygen XML Editor. He has more than 12 years experience in working with XML and related technologies including XML-related projects, oXygen XML Editor and participation in open source projects, the most notable being DITA-NG — a Relax NG implementation of DITA — and oNVDL — an open source implementation of the NVDL standard, project that is now merged into Jing.

Jonathan Blumtritt
Jonathan Blumtritt is a software developer at the Cologne Center for eHumanities.

Peter Bouda
Peter Bouda is general linguist and currently researcher at the Centro Interdisciplinar de Documentação Linguística e Social and in the project Quantitative Historical Linguistics at the University of Munich.

Rob Cameron
Dr. Rob Cameron is Professor of Computing Science and Associate Dean of Applied Sciences at Simon Fraser University. His research interests include programming language and software system technology, with a specific focus on high performance text processing using SIMD and multicore parallelism. He is the developer of the REX XML shallow parser as well as the parallel bit stream (Parabix) framework for SIMD text processing.

Franck Cotton
Franck Cotton is a technology evangelist in INSEE, after being successively business statistician, metadata project manager and responsible for IT infrastructure and IT security. He focuses on web standards, especially XML and RDF. He helped organize the uptake of XML development in INSEE and currently spends most of his time promoting the use of metadata standards and linked data technologies in the statistical community.

Alain Couthures
Alain Couthures is the project leader for XSLTForms which is a client-side XForms implementation based on XSLT and Javascript. He is an Invited Expert in the W3C Forms Working Group.

Nils Diewald
Nils Diewald received a B.A. in German philology and Text Technology and an M.A. in Linguistics (with a focus on Computational Linguistics) from Bielefeld University. Currently he is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science. His Doctorate Studies focus on communication in social networks, originating from his work as a Research Assistant in the Linguistic Networks project of the BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research). Before that, he was a Research and Graduate Assistant in the Sekimo project, part of the DFG Research Group on Text-Technological Modelling of Information.

Peter Flynn
Peter Flynn runs the Electronic Publishing Group in IT Services at University College Cork. He is a graduate of the London College of Printing and the University of Westminster. He worked for the Printing and Publishing Industry Training Board and for United Information Services as IT consultant before joining UCC as Project Manager for academic and research computing. In 1990 he installed Ireland’s first Web server and since then has been concentrating on electronic publishing support. He was Secretary of the TeX Users Group, and a member of the IETF Working Group on HTML and the W3C XML SIG, and he has published books on HTML, SGML/XML, and LaTeX. Peter is editor of the XML FAQ and an irregular contributor to conferences and journals in electronic publishing and Humanities computing. He is currently completing a part-time PhD in user interfaces with the Human Factors Research Group in UCC. He maintains a technical blog at http://blogs.silmaril.ie/peter

Antony Gnanapiragasam
Antony Gnanapiragasam has masters degrees in computer science and public administration and works as a system architect.

Tony Graham
Tony Graham is the chair of the Print and Page Layout Community Group at the W3C.

Michael Hepp
Mike Hepp has a bachelor’s degree in printing management and sciences and is the project leader for ProofExpress.

Kenneth Herdy
Ken Herdy completed an Advanced Diploma of Technology in Geographical Information Systems at the British Columbia Institute of Technology in 2003 and earned a Bachelor of Science in Computing Science with a Certificate in Spatial Information Systems at Simon Fraser University in 2005.

Ken is currently pursuing PhD studies in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University with industrial scholarship support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems NCE, and the BC Innovation Council. His research focus is an analysis of the principal techniques that may be used to improve XML processing performance in the context of the Geography Markup Language (GML).

Mary Holstege
Mary Holstege is Principal Engineer at MarkLogic Corporation. She has over 20 years experience as a software engineer in and around markup technologies and information extraction. She 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).

Michael Kay
Michael Kay has been developing the Saxon product since 1998, initially as a spare-time activity at ICL and then Software AG, but since 2004 within the Saxonica company which he founded. He holds a Ph.D from the University of Cambridge where he studied databases under the late Maurice Wilkes, and spent 24 years with ICL, mainly working on the development of database software. He is the editor of the W3C XSLT specification. The FtanML project is totally separate from any W3C or Saxonica activities.

Dianne Kennedy
Dianne Kennedy is the Vice President of Media and Emerging Technologies for IDEAlliance. Ms. Kennedy oversees and guides the development of emerging technology specifications and best practices to support platform agnostic, cross-media publishing. Her nextPub publishing industry technology incubator fosters the development of next-generation publishing tools that can make multi-channel publishing simple and efficient. Ms. Kennedy serves as technical editor for PRISM 3.0 Specifications, PRISM Source Vocabulary Specifications, MailXML Specification and the ADAM Specification.

Johannes Kepper
Dr. Johannes Kepper is Musicologist at the University of Paderborn. He works in the Freischütz Digital project and participates strongly in the development of MEI.

Johannes holds a Magister Artium in Musicology and a Diploma in Media Informatics from the University of Paderborn. He finished his dissertation in 2009 on the topic of “Music editions in the era of new media”.

Sanders Kleinfeld
Sanders Kleinfeld has been employed at O’Reilly Media since 2004 and has held a variety of positions, including roles on O’Reilly’s Production, Editorial, and Tools teams. Currently, he works as Publishing Technology Engineer, maintaining O’Reilly’s toolchain for generating digital formats of both frontlist and backlist titles. He also helps coordinate O’Reilly’s digital distribution efforts to electronic sales channels, and is currently assisting in R&D efforts surrounding HTML5 and EPUB 3, helping to develop next-generation workflows and ebook content for O’Reilly and its publishing partners. Sanders is the author of HTML5 for Publishers (O’Reilly, 2011).

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.

Dan Lin
Dan Lin is a Ph.D student at Simon Fraser University. She earned a Master of Science in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University in 2010. Her research focus on on high performance algorithms that exploit parallelization strategies on various multicore platforms.

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.

Jerome McDonough
Jerome McDonough is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Library & Information Science at the University of Illinois. His research focuses on socio-technical aspects of digital libraries, with a particular focus on issues of metadata and description as well as digital preservation of complex media and software. Prior to joining the faculty at GSLIS, Prof. McDonough served as the head of the Digital Library Development Team for New York University.

Nigel Medforth
Nigel Medforth is a M.Sc. student at Simon Fraser University and the lead developer of icXML. He earned a Bachelor of Technology in Information Technology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in 2009 and was awarded the Dean’s Medal for Outstanding Achievement.

Nigel is currently researching ways to leverage both the Parabix framework and stream-processing models to further accelerate XML parsing within icXML.

Brent Nordin
Brent Nordin has been playing with markup off and on since about 1990. He served as a Canadian rep to JTC1/SC18/WG8 during the SGML revision days, developed an SGML DTD Viewer product (released about two months before Near and Far, which ended his hopes for early retirement), and has worked on markup projects for companies like Frame, Adobe, Boeing, Embraer, National Research Council of Canada, and Schlumberger.

When he is not playing in markup-land, he works on data-centric security, with as much of an XML twist as he can manage.

Ari Nordström
Ari Nordström is the resident XML guy at Condesign AB in Göteborg, 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 Göteborg, which should explain why he wants to automate cinemas using XML. He now realises it’s too late, however.

Charles O’Connor
Charles O’Connor has a degree in biology and had previous lives as an indexer, copyeditor, and video store clerk before getting involved in this XML thing.

Matt Patterson
Matt Patterson is a web developer who has worked with HTML and XML for over 10 years. He lives in Berlin, Germany.

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

Felix Rau
Felix Rau is a PhD student at the University of Cologne.

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.

Perry Roland
Perry Roland is Music Metadata Librarian at the University of Virginia Music Library where he participates in the creation of new digital resources and their metadata.

Perry holds a Bachelor of Science in Music Education from Concord College, Athens, West Virginia; a Master of Arts in Music Composition from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; and a Master of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Daniel Röwenstrunk
Daniel Röwenstrunk is Computer Scientist and the project director of Freischütz Digital at the University of Paderborn.

Daniel holds a Diploma in Business Computing with focus on Decision Support and Operations Research from the University of Paderborn. He works in humanities projects since 2006 and has strong interest in digital editions and modeling of music.

Simon St. Laurent
A troublemaker, Simon St. Laurent has been working with XML since the early drafts of the specification. His first book on XML, XML: A Primer, went through three editions, each time teaching a new group of developers a variety of bad ideas. Apparently the example using XML to manage lighting inspired several protocols for excessively complicated control systems. His book Cookies may be partially responsible for the erosion of privacy. His other books have done less damage because they haven’t sold as well, but he fears that Introducing Erlang may prove to be a contributing factor in the development of Skynet.

His more positive contributions include a partially-completed book on handtool woodworking, various writings on Quakerism, and two adorable children. He has lately become obsessed with hospitality and craft, leading to binges of repentance for past (and current) work.

Éric Sigaud
Éric Sigaud is a project manager at INSEE. He is leading the technical part of the Coltrane project which intends to implement a web collect infrastructure based upon XML technologies and XRX architectures.

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.

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 in different text-technological projects at Gießen University, Bielefeld University and the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS, Institute for the German Language) in Mannheim. He is currently employed as research assistant at Bielefeld University.

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

Romain Tailhurat
As a member of INSEE’s IT architecture division, Romain Tailhurat’s job is to support the developers work by providing technical and methodological guidance and tools to enforce the related choices. Romain is also implied in the setting of the new XML development toolkit. And from time to time, he takes pleasure in coding real applications!

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.