Balisage 2015 Biographies

Mark Baker
Mark Baker, Principal Architect at Zepheira, is a specialist in Web architecture and the REST architectural style, an entrepreneur, and a pioneer of the mobile Web.

Jeff Beck
Jeff Beck is a Technical information Specialist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine. He has been involved in the PubMed Central project since it began in 2000. He has been working in print and then electronic journal publishing since the early 1990s. Currently he is co-chair of the NISO Z39.96 JATSStanding Committee and is a BELS-certified Editor in the Life Sciences.

David J. Birnbaum
David J. Birnbaum is Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. He has been involved in the study of electronic text technology since the mid-1980s, has delivered presentations at a variety of electronic text technology conferences, and has served on the board of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the editorial board of Markup Languages: Theory and Practice, and the Text Encoding Initiative Council. Much of his electronic text work intersects with his research in medieval Slavic manuscript studies, but he also often writes about issues in the philosophy of markup.

Hugh Cayless
Hugh Cayless (http://philomousos.com) has been doing DH markup and programming with a focus on Ancient Studies for over 15 years. He is the senior DH developer at the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing (DC3) and has published and presented on various topics relating to DH, Markup, and cultural heritage. Hugh is one of the founding members of the EpiDoc collaborative (http://epidoc.sf.net), which publishes standards for representing ancient texts in TEI XML. He has been a member of the TEI Technical Council since 2013, and was recently elected Council Chair.

Autumn Cuellar
Autumn Cuellar has had a long and happy history with mathematics and XML. Her first degree is in Biomedical Engineering, the obtainment of which involved a love/hate relationship with Calculus. This degree led to a role as a researcher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. There Autumn co-wrote a metadata specification, explored the use of ontologies for advancing biological research, and developed CellML, an XML language for describing biological models. Since leaving the academic world, Autumn has been delighted to share her enthusiasm for XML in technical applications. At Design Science she works with publishers, engineers, educators, and programmers to implement MathML in XML publishing workflows.

Patrick Durusau
Patrick Durusau is a standards editor, data skeptic, and topic map advocate. His blog is Another Word for It.

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 academic 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, an irregular contributor to conferences and journals in electronic publishing and Humanities computing, and a regular speaker and chair at the XML SummerSchool in Oxford. He recently completed a PhD in User Interfaces to Structured Documents with the Human Factors Research Group in UCC. He maintains a technical blog at http://blogs.silmaril.ie/peter

Nathan P. Gibson
Nathan P. Gibson is a researcher specializing in medieval Arabic and Syriac and is one of the editors of the forthcoming Syriac Biographical Dictionary, a born-digital reference publication produced by Syriaca.org that will be an authority record for names and biographic data of persons relevant to Syriac studies.

Fabrizio Gotti
Fabrizio Gotti is a researcher at the Laboratory for Applied Research in Computational Linguistics (RALI) at the Université de Montréal.

Mark Gross
Mark Gross, CEO & founder of Data Conversion Laboratory, is a recognized authority and speaker on XML implementation and document conversion. Prior to founding DCL in 1981, he was with the consulting practice of Arthur Young & Co. Mark has a BS in Engineering from Columbia University and an MBA from New York University, and has taught at the New York University Graduate School of Business, the New School, and Pace University.

Kevin Heffner
Kevin Heffner is president and CEO of Pegasus Research & Technologies, a Montreal-based company specialized in flight simulation and training, constructive simulations, unmanned/autonomous systems and command & control.

Tomos Hillman
Tomos Hillman is Senior Content Architect at Oxford University Press. At OUP, Tom is responsible for designing and maintaining custom data models for books, reference works and legal materials, as well as advising on digital workflows, internal training, and infrastructure for the XML team. He has also presented at XML London, and teaches at the XML Summer School in Oxford.

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
Claus Huitfeldt is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Bergen, Norway. 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).

Sam Hunting
Sam Hunting is a long-time contributor to the topic map standards process and topic maps fan.

Joel Kalvesmaki
Joel Kalvesmaki (PhD, early Christian studies, Catholic University of America, 2006) is Editor in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. His research centers on Greek theological and philosophical texts from late antiquity. Editor of the digital-only scholarly reference work Guide to Evagrius Ponticus (http://evagriusponticus.net), Joel also serves broadly as an advisor on the digital humanities. In 2015 he began the Text Alignment Network, a suite of TEI-friendly XML formats intended to facilitate the interoperable exchange of textual alignments.

Jean Kaplansky
Jean Kaplansky is an experienced technology trainer, developer, and solutions architect with a multi-industry background in omni-channel publishing. At Aptara, Jean ensures that the technological and GUI enhancements made to digital and interactive products work logically, effectively, technologically, and that the user experience is a positive one. Her publishing production past includes work as an XML architect for Cengage Learning, a systems analyst for Pfizer Global Research and Development, and an XML consultant at Arbortext. She is a member of the International Digital Publishing Forum Indexing and EDUPUB working groups, as well as the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) Content Structure Committee. Jean lives in the Adirondack woods with her husband and a menagerie of cats and dogs.

Amit Khare
Amit Khare is a strategic IT Leader with an exceptional history of leading the turnaround of underperforming IT projects and strategies. Strong background in enterprise architecture. Over fifteen years of success in meeting critical software engineering challenges.

Amit oversees the CGI's Software development, delivery engineering teams. His teams are responsible for delivering the innovative software solutions including the user experience, custom applications development and software maintenance at USPTO.

Amit holds a Master degree in computer management from University of Pune, India.

Eliot Kimber
Eliot Kimber has been working with and thinking about hyperdocuments for a very long time, first in his role as a technical writer and writing tool implementor at IBM and then as an SGML and XML consultant. Eliot was a co-editor, with Dr. Charles Goldfarb and Steven Newcomb, of HyTime 2nd Edition (ISO/IEC 10744-1996), a founding member of the W3C XML Working Group, and a founding and current member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. Eliot lives and works in Austin, Texas.

Robin La Fontaine
Robin La Fontaine is the founder and CEO of DeltaXML. He holds an Engineering Science degree from Oxford University and an MSc in Computer Science. His background includes computer aided design software and he has been addressing the challenges and opportunities associated with information change for many years.

Guy Lapalme
Guy Lapalme is Professor of Computer Science at the Université de Montréal (Laboratory for Applied Research in Computational Linguistics), where he has been a faculty member since 1980. He is a leading expert in the computer processing of human language. He has published on many aspects of the subject including spelling correction, dictionary editing, text generation, automatic summarization, information extraction, opinion mining and machine translation tools. His career combines innovative research and outreach to the practical world through long-term collaboration with partners from both the academic and industrial worlds. Recently, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Université de Neuchâtel (Switzerland) and Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association.

Alexei Lavrentiev
Alexei Lavrentiev is a specialist in French diachronical linguistics, digital philology and text corpus design and analysis. His PhD thesis (École normale supérieure de Lyon, France, 2009) was dedicated to the study of medieval French punctuation and was based on a corpus of multi-layer TEI-XML transcriptions of manuscripts and incunabula. Since 2004 he has been working on the BFM Old French Corpus and on various related research and publication projects. He is a co-editor (with Christiane Marchello-Nizia) of the Queste del Saint Graal online edition. Since 2009, he has been a member of the TXM software development team. TXM is a free and open-source cross-platform Unicode and XML based text/corpus analysis environment and graphical client, supporting Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

David A. 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 Enterprise NoSQL Database server.

Yann Leydier
Yann Leydier is a document image researcher specialised in ancient documents. His PhD thesis in computer science (INSA de Lyon, 2006) dealt with the colour analysis of medieval manuscripts and word-spotting (retrieving all occurrences of a word on images). His following works included Chinese and Arabic documents as well as ancient printed books.

Joshua Lubell
Joshua Lubell is a computer scientist in the NIST Engineering Laboratory's Systems Integration Division. His interests include model-based engineering, cybersecurity, cyber-physical systems, long-term preservation of digital data, information modeling, and XML and other markup technologies. He received the United States Department of Commerce Silver Medal for his leadership in developing ISO 10303-203, a standard for representation and exchange of computer-aided designs. He is also a Balisage local, residing in suburban Maryland midway between North Bethesda and NIST's Gaithersburg campus.

John Lumley
A Cambridge engineer by background, John Lumley created the AI group at Cambridge Consultants in the early 1980s and then joined HPLabs Bristol as one of its founding members. He worked there for 25 years, managing and contributing in a variety of software/systems fields, latterly specialising in XSLT-based document engineering, in which he subsequently gained a PhD. He is currently helping develop the Saxon XSLT processor for Saxonica.

Pietro Maria Liuzzo
A Research Associate in Digital Epigraphy and Networking Coordinator of the EAGLE project, Pietro Liuzzo has a PhD in Ancient History and has worked on Greek Historiography, Epigraphy and Ancient Greek History. Since 2009 he is involved in the EpiDoc community. He has recently curated the proceedings of the EAGLE international conference Information Technologies for Epigraphy and Cultural Heritage. He is an active Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons user and works on translations of inscriptions and new complex information workflows for ancient world data.

Chris Maloney
Chris Maloney is a web developer working for NCBI's PMC and Bookshelf resources. He has worked with XML technologies for over ten years.

Yves Marcoux
Yves Marcoux has been a faculty member at EBSI, University of Montréal, since 1991. He is mainly involved in teaching, research, standardization, and international cooperation activities in the field of document informatics. Prior to his appointment at EBSI, Dr. Marcoux 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 Université de Montréal in 1991. His main research interests are intertextual semantics, the design of communication, markup languages and digital humanities.

James D. Mason
James D. Mason, originally trained as a mediaevalist and linguist, has been a writer, systems developer, and manufacturing engineer at U.S. Department of Energy facilities in Oak Ridge since the late 1970s. In 1981, he joined the ISO's work on standards for document management and interchange. He chaired ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34, which is responsible for SGML, DSSSL, Topic Maps, and related standards, for more than 20 years. Dr. Mason has been a frequent writer and speaker on standards and their applications. For his work on SGML, Dr. Mason has received the Gutenberg Award from Printing Industries of America and the Tekkie Award from GCA. He is currently working on information systems to support manufacturing and documentation at DOE's Y-12 National Security Complex (Y-12) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Wolfgang Meier
Wolfgang Meier founded the eXist-db Open Source XML Database project in 2001 and has been working on it ever since. In 2010 the core developers of eXist-db created a company, eXistSolutions, to better support the growing user community. He is the director of eXistSolutions.

David A. Michelson
David A. Michelson is Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity and affiliate faculty in the Department of Classical Studies and the program in Islamic Studies at Vanderbilt University. He serves as General Editor of Syriaca.org.

Terrel Morris
Terrel Morris graduated from the University of Tennessee with a bachelor of science in Chemistry in 1990. He has worked for the United Stated Patent and Trademark Office for 25 years, 18 of which were examining patent applications in the material science technology or supervising those who examine patent applications. He now works for the Office of Patent Information Management and is charged with defining and running the program that transforms incoming patent application documents to XML for use by various patent systems.

Shinyu Murakami
Shinyu Murakami is the founder of Vivliostyle Inc. Previously, he was the lead developer of the Antenna House Formatter. He started the Vivliostyle project with the economic support of Antenna House.

Ari Nordström
Ari Nordström is a freelance markup geek, based in Göteborg, Sweden, but offering his services across a number of borders. His information structures and solutions are used by Volvo Cars, Ericsson, and many others. His favourite XML specification remains XLink so quite a few of his frequent talks and presentations on XML focus on or at least touch on various aspects of linking.

Ari is the proud owner and head projectionist of Western Sweden's last functioning 35/70mm cinema, situated in his garage, which should explain why he once wrote a paper on automating commercial cinemas using XML. He now realises it's too late, however.

Uche Ogbuji
Uche Ogbuji is a pioneer in the integration of Web architecture with traditional enterprise data technology. An Electrical/Computer Engineer by education, Uche has written over 300 articles on XML, RDF, Web services and related topics, having pioneered open source and commercial software development in those areas. Uche was a lead architect, working with the US Library of Congress, on the Bibliographic Framework BIBFRAME as well as Zepheira's BIBFRAME tools, products and services.

Liam R. E. Quin
Liam Quin is currently the XML Activity lead at the World Wide Web Consortium, publishers of the XML specification. He has a background in computer science, digital typography, markup, and computer representation of text going back to the 1980s, worked at SoftQuad Inc. in the SGML days, was part of the development of XML, and today is also involved in the W3C Digital Publishing Activity and in the CSS Working Group, helping CSS to mature enough to take on more of the work of XSL-FO. Liam also does some part-time consulting, mostly in XML and information related areas, from his home in rural South-East Ontario in Canada.

Laura Randall
Laura Randall has been working with markup languages longer than she cares to admit and currently works for the PubMed Central project at the National Library of Medicine.

Winona Salesky
Winona Salesky is an independent digital library consultant with 10 years' experience building digital collections with XML technologies, including XQuery, XSLT, and native XML databases. She is the Senior Programmer on the Syriaca.org project and is working with the Library of Congress on their BIBFRAME initiative. She was previously the Digital Initiatives Librarian at the University of Vermont where she developed and deployed The Center for Digital Initiatives, an entirely XML based digital library project run on eXistdb.

Marouane Sayih
Marouane Sayih is a PhD student and a research assistant at Technische Universität München (TUM), Germany. He studied computer science at TU München. Currently he is pursuing his PhD in applied computer science focusing on XML-based Web Engineering. Since June 2011 he has managed the faculty graduate center of the Faculty of Informatics, CeDoSIA (www.in.tum.de/cedosia).

Josh Sosin
Josh Sosin is director of the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing, a digital classics R&D unit within Duke University Libraries, Associate Professor in Classical Studies and History at Duke University, co-director of the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, Associate Editor of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, and a bicycling nut. He splits his scholarly activities between (1) the intersection of Greco-Roman law, religion, and economics, and (2) the creation of open, version-controlled, peer-reviewed, multi-author, text curation environments for ancient Greek and Latin texts.

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.

Dominique Stutzmann
Dominique Stutzmann is an historian and palaeographer, specialist of the history of Latin scripts and their social and cultural connotations. His PhD thesis (Université Paris Panthéon Sorbonne) was dedicated to the scribal practices of the Cistercians (Burgundy, 12th-13th c.). He is leading several research projects dedicated to palaeography and manuscript studies ANR Oriflamms, FAMA Succès des textes latins (Latin Medieval best-sellers), Saint-Bertin, Cultural Centre from the 7th to 18th Centuries. He is also working on the implications of cross-disciplinary projects in Digital Humanities.

Elise Thorsen
Elise Thorsen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. She has been developing XML-based tools for the computationally assisted analysis of Russian-language verse, which she has presented at a number of conference panels dedicated to developing digital humanities research agenda in Slavic Languages and Literatures.

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

Raffaele Viglianti
Raffaele Viglianti is a Research Programmer at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. Raffaele's research revolves around digital editions and textual scholarship. He is currently an elected member of the Text Encoding Initiative technical council and an active member of the Music Encoding Initiative, which produces guidelines for the digital representation of music notation with a focus on scholarly requirements.

Priscilla Walmsley
Priscilla Walmsley is a senior consultant and managing director at Datypic, specializing in electronic publishing, data architecture and information exchange. Priscilla is the author of Definitive XML Schema (Prentice Hall PTR, 2012), and XQuery (O'Reilly Media, 2007). In addition, she co-authored Web Service Contract Design and Versioning for SOA (Prentice Hall 2008).

Robert Walpole
While working as an IT analyst at British Telecom at the turn of the millenium, Robert Walpole rediscovered a childhood passion for programming and elected to study part-time for an HNC in Computing at the Univeristy of Plymouth which he completed in 2004. Following this, he became a full time software engineer, initially in local government and later for the UK national weather service (the Met Office) and then at The National Archives (UK). He is currently working as a content architect for a major publishing company and lives in London, England.

Norman Walsh
Norman Walsh is a Lead Engineer at MarkLogic Corporation where he helps to develop APIs and tools for the world's leading enterprise NoSQL database. Norm is also an active participant in a number of standards efforts worldwide: he is chair of the XML Processing Model Working Group at the W3C where he is also co-chair of the XML Core Working Group. At OASIS, he is chair of the DocBook Technical Committee.

Dave White
Dave White has been with Quark Software Inc. for 7 years and is currently CTO. Dave has been in the XML (and SGML) authoring and publishing software business since 1994, including 13 years at Arbortext in a variety of sales, product management, and business development roles.

Joseph Wicentowski
Joseph C. Wicentowski is Digital History Advisor in the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State, where he leads initiatives to digitize and publish historical publications and datasets. He has been using XML since 2007, when he began work on history.state.gov, a largely TEI- and XQuery-based site powered by eXist-db. He holds a Ph.D. in modern East Asian history from Harvard University.

Karen M. Wickett
Karen M. Wickett is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research is on the conceptual and logical foundations of information organization systems and artifacts. She is interested in the analysis of common concepts in information systems, such as documents, datasets, digital objects, metadata records, and collections.

Johannes Wilm
Johannes Wilm has developed Pagination.js and simplePagination.js and is now working with Vivliostyle. He has been working on a range of LaTeX and HTML-based text layout and editing solutions for academic texts in the social sciences and humanities since the early 2000s. Wilm holds a PhD in anthropology from Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Amir Zeldes
Amir Zeldes is a computational linguist specializing in corpus linguistics. His main area of interest is the syntax-semantics interface, where meaning and knowledge about the world are mapped onto lexical choice and syntactic structure in language-specific ways. He is also involved in the development of tools for corpus search, annotation and visualization, and has worked on the development of standards for the representation of textual data in Linguistics and the Digital Humanities.