Wolfgang Wahlster
Director and CEO of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI GmbH

Recent progress in mobile broadband communication and semantic web technology is enabling innovative internet services that provide advanced personalization and localization features. The goal of the SmartWeb project (duration: 2004 - 2007) is to lay the foundations for multimodal user interfaces to distributed and composable semantic Web services on mobile devices. SmartWeb exploits the machine-understandable content of semantic Web pages for intelligent question-answering as a next step beyond today's search engines. Since semantically annotated Web pages are still very rare due to the time-consuming and costly manual markup, SmartWeb is using advanced language technology and information extraction methods for the automatic annotation of traditional web pages encoded in HTML or XML. SmartWeb provides a context-aware user interface, so that it can support the user in different roles, e.g. as a car driver, a motor biker, a pedestrian or a sports spectator. One of the planned demonstrators of SmartWeb is a personal guide for the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany, that provides mobile infotainment services to soccer fans, anywhere and anytime.

Dr. Wolfgang Wahlster is the Director and CEO of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) and a Professor of Computer Science at the University des Saarlandes, Saarbr・ken. In 2000, he was coopted as a Professor of Computational Linguistics at the same university. He has published more than 160 technical papers and 7 books on language technology and intelligent user interfaces. He is an AAAI Fellow, an ECCAI Fellow, and a GI Fellow. In 2001, the President of the Federal Republic of Germany presented the German Future Prize, Germany's highest scientific prize that is awarded each year for outstanding innovations in technology, engineering, or the natural sciences.In 2003, he was the first German computer scientist elected Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm. His current research includes multimodal and perceptive user interfaces, user modeling, embodied conversational agents, smart navigation systems, semantic web services, and resource-adaptive cognitive technologies.

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