Keynote I: Semantic Web Services: A New Revolution for e-Commerce?
Katia Sycara

Abstract
The Web, as we know it, is a collection of human readable pages that are virtually unintelligible to computer programs. While the Web emerged as a World Wide repository of digitized information, by and large, the very same information is not available for automatic computation. In recent years two parallel efforts emerged that have the potential of bringing the Web to its true potential: the first effort is the Semantic Web which provides the tools for the explicit markup of the content of Web pages; the second effort is the development of Web Services which results in a Web where programs act as independent agents to become the producers and consumers of information and enable automation of business transactions. In this talk, I will focus on research that attempts to bridge the gap between the Web as we know it, the Semantic Web and Web services. I propose the vision of Web services as autonomous goal-directed agents which select other agents to interact with, and flexibly negotiate their interaction model, acting at times in client server mode, or at other times in peer to peer mode. The resulting Web services, that I call Autonomous Semantic Web services, utilize ontologies and semantically annotated Web pages to automate the fulfillment of tasks and transactions with other Web agents. In particular, Autonomous Semantic Web services use the Semantic Web to support capability based discovery and interoperation at run time. Such functionality, provided in a reliable and low cost way, has the potential to revolutionize e-commerce. A first step towards this vision is the development of formal languages and inference mechanisms for representing and reasoning with core concepts of Web services. OWL-S (based on the W3C standard Ontology Web Language (OWL) is the first attempt to define such a language. I will give a brief overview of OWL-S and its relations with the Semantic Web and Web services. In addition, I will provide concrete examples of computational models of how OWL-S can be viewed as the first step in bridging the gap between the Semantic Web and current proposed industry standards for Web services. I will provide concrete examples of OWL-S in action, and present Semantic Web Services tools that my research group has developed.

Biography
Professor Katia Sycara is a Research Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also the Director of the Laboratory for Semantic Web and Agents Technology. She holds a B.S in Applied Mathematics from Brown University, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin and PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. She has given numerous invited talks, and has authored or co-authored more than 200 technical papers dealing with Multiagent Systems, Software Agents, Agent Teams, Web Services, the Semantic Web, Human-Agent Interaction, Negotiation, Case-Based Reasoning and the application of these techniques to e-commerce, crisis action planning, scheduling, manufacturing and financial planning. In addition, Prof. Sycara is one of the contributors to the development of DAML-S/OWL-S, the DAML language for services, as well as matchmaking and brokering software for agent discovery, service integration and semantic interoperation. From 2001-2003 she served as Invited Expert of the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) Working Group on Web Services Architecture. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of France Telecom, 2003-2006. Professor Sycara is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the recipient of the 2002 ACM/SIGART Agents Research Award. She has served as the Program Chair of the Second International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2003), as General Chair of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 98), as the Chair of the Steering Committee of the Agents Conference (1999-2001), as the Scholarship chair of AAAI (1993-1999) and as a member of the AAAI Executive Council (1996-99). She is a founding member and member of the Board of Directors of the International Foundation of Multiagent Systems (IFMAS). She is a founding member of the Semantic Web Science Association, and the US co-chair of the Semantic Web Services Initiative. She is a founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal "Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems"; an Editor-in-Chief of the Springer Series on Agents; on the Editorial Board of the Kluwer book series on "Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies and Simulated Organizations"; the Area Editor for AI and Management Science of the journal "Group Decision and Negotiation". She also serves on the editorial board of the journal "Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications". She has served on the editorial board of the "ETAI journal on the Semantic Web" (1998-2001), on the Editorial Board of "IEEE Intelligent Systems and their Applications" (1992-1996), and "AI in Engineering" (1990-1996). She is a member of AAAI, the ACM, and Senior Member of IEEE.

Keynote II: Minimalistic Internetworking - Meeting the Needs of Tomorrow
Gong Li

Abstract
The internet conceptually includes everything with a digital heartbeat, and increasingly anything that matters in our lives does have a digital heartbeat, from office equipments, to everyday electronics, to medical devices, to RFID tags, and much beyond. As millions of such devices of a huge variety pour into the world, it is desirable to keep them interconnected, because connectedness is the primary value of the Internet. However, two major factors work against this already daunting challenge -- our technology legacy that pushes things into more complex forms and the business tendancy to fragment the Internet. This talk borrows ideas of how the human world stays connected, draws from past experience in designing P2P networks, and outlines a small number of basic components that would be sufficient to form a minimalistic network that can connect everything yet maintain its simplicity in the face of continued technology innovation.

Biography
Li Gong is the founding General Manager of Sun China Engineering and Research Institute in Beijing. Previously at Sun, he was a Distinguished Engineer and engineering head of JXTA, Java Embedded Server, and Java security and networking. Out of these work he received six US patents and wrote three books. Prior to Sun, he was with Stanford Research Institute (SRI) International. He did extensive research in distributed systems, and served as Program and General Chair for IEEE S&P, ACM CCS, and IEEE CSFW. He received BS and MS degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, England, all in Computer Science. He is Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Internet Computing, and Guest Chair Professor at Tsinghua University and Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications. He was named one of the 2003 China New Economy People by China Internet Weekly and Sina, and received the China Open Source Movement Leadership Award in 2003 given by CCID and the China Software Industry Association.