Thu, 09 November, 16:00-17:30

How Models and Modeling Bring Value to Industry?

At the Industrial Panel of ER 2024, invited industry experts will discuss how models and modeling can bring real value to businesses. The panel will have the participation of Magda Cocco (VdA, Portugal), Mike Bennett (OMG and Hypercube, UK), Walid Saba (Institute for Experiential AI, USA), and Jan Voskuil (Taxonic, The Netherlands) with moderation of Pedro Sousa (Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal).

Magda Cocco

(Vieira de Almeida – VdA, Portugal)

Magda is Head of the Information, Communication and Technology practice at VdA and also head of the firm’s aerospace sector. She has led multidisciplinary teams in different ICT projects and assisted Governments and Regulatory Entities in connection with the definition of regulatory policies and legislative drafting, having also advised various international organizations such as International Telecommunications Union, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank. She also advises clients on Data Protection & Cybersecurity in relation to governance, data related strategies, GDPR compliance, Cybersecurity threats, etc.. She has penned or co-authored several articles published in national and international specialized publications, was a featured speaker at various ICT conferences, and has been a visiting professor in national and international universities in her fields of expertise.

Mike Bennett

(OMG and Hypercube, UK)

Mike Bennett is the Technical Director of the Object Management Group (OMG) and the Director of Hypercube Limited, a consultancy delivering ontologies and vocabularies for data governance, integration and knowledge graph development. Coming from a background of industrial software, he has over 20 years of financial industry experience and has delivered ontology solutions to major banks and industry bodies and to the legal services profession. Mike is the originator of the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO), a standard repository for financial industry concepts and definitions from the EDM Council and the Object Management Group (OMG). As the Technical Director of the OMG, he is responsible for overseeing the processes for technology adoption and ensuring that these reflect the needs of the OMG community. Mike is active in the ontology community, where he has presented papers and published articles on ontology modeling, sits on the Board of Trustees of the Ontolog forum and heads up a think tank on ontology best practice.

Walid Saba

(Institute for Experiential AI, USA)

Walid Saba is a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University. Prior to joining the institute in 2023, he worked at two Silicon Valley startups, focusing on conversational AI. This work included high-level roles as the principal AI scientist for telecommunications company Astound and CTO of software company Klangoo, where he helped develop its state-of-the-art digital content semantic engine (Magnet). Saba’s career to date has seen him hold various positions in both the private sector and academia. His resume includes entities such as the American Institutes for Research, AT&T Bell Labs, IBM and Cognos, while he has also spent a cumulative seven years teaching computer science at the University of Ottawa, the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), the University of Windsor (a public research university in Ontario, Canada), and the American University of Beirut (AUB).

Jan Voskuil

(Taxonic, The Netherlands)

After his PhD in general linguistics in 1996, Jan Voskuil worked as a software engineer specializing in algorithmics and language processing. Later in his career, he worked at large consultancies, focusing on architecture, design, and modeling. He co-founded Taxonic in 2012 and started to work almost exclusively on semantic technologies and Linked Data. UFO and OntoUML are core aspects of many of the projects he is currently involved in. He is also involved in teaching and popularizing this methodology.