Keynote I: The Impact of Services on Electronic Commerce
Stuart Feldman

Abstract
There are significant shifts, both at business and technology levels, toward services. Companies are deconstructing their functions and requirements in terms of explicit services, and then managing their value nets accordingly. Service--oriented architectures, supported by web service standards and technologies, are rapidly becoming a standard approach for enterprise IT systems. The many functions needed to support real commerce (pricing, fulfillment, marketing, supply chain, customer relationship, etc.) will be formulated in terms of web services. The talk will discuss the implications for performance, control, and interactions among actors and activities.

Biography
Stuart Feldman is responsible for the overall strategy and execution of the business-oriented parts of the software and services strategy: industry knowledge and solutions, business collaboration, optimization, and process transformation as well as digital media and electronic commerce. Before that, as Vice President for Internet Technology in the Systems and Technology Group, he was responsible for overall strategies relating to the future of the Internet and providing thought leadership for IBM’s Systems and Technology Group. His department created experimental Internet-based applications, drove a number of key Internet standards and policies, and ran the Extreme Blue program. Before that, he was Head of Computer Science in the Research division, responsible for growth and focus of the computer science research effort across the IBM Research Division. He was also the director of the IBM Institute for Advanced Commerce. Stuart Feldman received an A.B. in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University and a Ph.D in Applied Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keynote II: Enterprise Services Architecture & Semantic Web Services
Lutz Heuser

Abstract
As 'traditional' Web Service technologies are making their way into the mainstream distributed computing, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) gain more and more momentum in current and future IT infrastructures. In this talk, we give a motivation for doing such a transition from a market area point of view and present SAP's answer on the raising demand: The SAP Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA). The Enterprise Services Architecture comprises five key elements. Two of them are directly related with research topics in the area of Semantic Web Services. The second part of the talk gives an insight in current SAP Research activities and how they address challenges in Web Services.

Biography
Professor Lutz Heuser, Vice-President, is Head of SAP Research and Chief Development Architect at SAP AG. He is responsible for all strategic research programs and the global innovation transfer into the product portfolio of SAP. His main areas of expertise include eLearning, pervasive computing, Internet services, and business processes technology. Prior to joining SAP, Lutz Heuser was managing director of the European Research Organization of Digital Equipment Corporation and member of the extended board of the German subsidiary of Digital. He was co-founder of the renowned research centre CEC Karlsruhe, as well as three joint venture research centres with Universities of Karlsruhe, Darmstadt, and Dresden. Lutz received his doctoral degree in Informatics from the University of Karlsruhe and his diploma in Informatics from the University of Darmstadt. Lutz holds a professor visitante at the National University of Paraguay in Asuncion at the Faculty for Economical Sciences and provides lectures in Collaborative Business Processes Research. Furthermore, in June 2004 he was appointed as a honorary professor of the University of Darmstadt. Lutz Heuser has been author and co-author of two books and more than 25 research papers.

Keynote III: E-commerce and Decision technologies: Research Opportunities and Challenges
Ramayya Krishnan

Abstract
In this talk, I will motivate the important role that decision technologies play in Electronic Commerce. Decision technologies - algorithmic and model-based methods to assist decision making -are a contribution of scholars in the Operations Research and Management Science (OR/MS) communities. In conjunction with Information technologies, they power many electronic commerce applications. To provide context and to motivate key research themes addressed in this literature, I will draw on my own work and a recent set of special issues on electronic commerce of the Management Science journal that I co-edited. In particular, I propose to highlight work in a set of diverse e-commerce topics such as shopbot design, evaluation of information revelation policies and incremental bidding mechanisms in e-markets, peer to peer infrastructure design for digital goods and privacy. In each of these illustrative example, I will sketch methodological approaches (e.g., markov decision processes, game theory, mathematical programming, statistical analysis) underlying the decision technologies and discuss opportunities for further work. The objective is to engender further interest in research opportunities at the intersection of computer science and OR/MS.

Biography
Ramayya Krishnan is the W. W. Cooper and Ruth F. Cooper Professor of Information Systems at Carnegie Mellon University. He has a B. Tech in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, a M.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and a PhD in Management Science and Information Systems from the University of Texas at Austin. He is faculty chair of the university's Masters of Information Systems Management (www.mism.cmu.edu) program. Professor Krishnan's research interests lie in problems that arise at the interface of technology, business and policy aspects of internet-enabled systems. His current research projects investigate the emergence of virtual communities in peer-to-peer networks, study intermediation in e-markets and the design of policies that take into account the competing needs of promoting data access and protecting privacy. His research on these topics is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, ARPA, and other private foundations.

Keynote IV: Recommenders for Commerce, Content, and Community
John Riedl

Abstract
Recommender systems are ubiquitous on the Internet for helping sell products -- everything from automobiles to zebras (stuffed, anyway).Novel applications are emerging that use recommenders for non-Internet applications, and that apply them to the problems of distributing content on the Internet and to developing online communities. Community-building is proving one of the most successful ways to create "stickiness" among customers. A vibrant community of practice around a company's products creates a powerful barrier to competition, and enables consumers to help sell and support your products. We will briefly survey Eight Principles of Recommender Systems, illuminated by examples from research and commerce. We will use the Principles to investigate the algorithms that underlie recommender systems, the interfaces for presenting the recommendations, the best practices for deploying them -- and the easiest ways to get a recommender system badly wrong. Along the way we will consider issues of how to build a recommender community from scratch, group recommendations, and consumer privacy. We will conclude with a look at some of the most important active research areas in recommender systems.

Biography
John Riedl has been a member of the faculty of the computer science department of the University of Minnesota since March 1990. In 1992 he co-founded the GroupLens Research project on collaborative information filtering, and has been co-directing it since. In 1996 he co-founded Net Perceptions to commercialize GroupLens. Net Perceptions was the leading recommender systems company during the Internet boom. In 1999, John and other Net Perceptions' co-founders shared the MIT Sloan School's award for E-Commerce Technology. They also shared the World Technology Award for being judged among the individual leaders worldwide who most contributed to the advance of emerging technologies for the benefit of business and society. John received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame in 1983. He earned a master's degree in omputer science in 1985 and a doctorate in computer science in 1990 from Purdue University. He is presently Professor at the University of Minnesota.

Keynote V: The Power of Business Processes in E-Commerce
August-Wilhelm Scheer

Abstract
New trends are characterising the E-Commerce environment: The market is consolidating and good business concepts no longer suffice for sustainable success. Instead, maxims of the old economy like cost-efficiency, turn-over and profit maximisation using known assets like business process management, innovation and collaborations are being focused. E-Commerce requires a good management of business processes since crucial processes are in direct interaction with customers. Innovation can be achieved through novel retail process-chains that are shorter and thus more efficient than those of conventional commerce. Furthermore, collaboration based on aligned business processes enables integrated products and services with a single interface to consumers. The competition is rising along with the market consolidation and causes shrinking margins. For the profit and turn-over maximisation it is therefore necessary to raise the amount of transactions and to achieve business process efficiency. The trend of individualisation calls for offer customisation to consumers and composes together with the amount of transactions the need of mass customisation. This challenge can be coped through the factory-like organisation of the old economy for the E-Commerce of tomorrow.

Biography
Prof. August-Wilhelm Scheer is director of the Institute for Information Systems (IWi) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). He is consulting professor at Tongji-University Shanghai as well as at the Chinese Academy of Science. His research focusses on information and process management in industry, services and administration. Prof. Scheer is the founder and chairman of the supervisory board of IDS Scheer AG as well as of imc, information multimedia ommunica-tion AG, both based in Saarbrücken. He is the editor of various serial books and journals and organizes the conference "Saarbrücker Arbeitstagung" once a year. He has written more than 300 essays and more than 10 books. Among them are the standards "Business Process Engineering", "ARIS: Business Process Frameworks" and "ARIS: Business Process Modeling". These books have been translated into English, French, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Czech and Polish.