James Alexander Hendler is an artificial intelligence researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States, and one of the originators of the Semantic Web. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration (United States). Hendler completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree at Brown University in 1986 with a thesis on automated planning and scheduling. He also has an MS (1981) in Cognitive Psychology from Southern Methodist University, a MSc (1983) from Brown University, and a BS (1978) from Yale University.
Jim Hendler is the current president of SWSA.
Natasha Noy is a scientist at Google Research where she works on making structured data universally accessible and useful. She leads the team building Dataset Search, a search engine for all the datasets on the Web. Prior to joining Google, she worked at Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research where she made major contributions in the areas of ontology development and alignment, and collaborative ontology engineering. Natasha is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). She has served as the President of the Semantic Web Science Association from 2011 to 2017.
Rudi Studer is a Retired Full Professor in Applied Informatics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute AIFB. In addition, he was director at the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI) as well as president of the FZI Research Center for Information Technology in Karlsruhe. His research interests include knowledge management, semantic web technologies and applications, data and text mining, and service science.
He obtained a Diploma in Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart in 1975. In 1982 he was awarded a Doctor's degree (Dr.rer.nat.) at the University of Stuttgart, and in 1985 he obtained his Habilitation in Informatics at the University of Stuttgart. From 1985 to 1989 he was project leader and manager at the Scientific Center of IBM Germany. November 1989 he became professor in Karlsruhe. Since then, he led his research group to become one of the leading institutions in semantic web technology.
Rudi Studer was founding president of the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) and former Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web. He is an STI International Fellow.