Professor Steve Benford

Professor of Collaborative Computing, University of Nottingham

Steve Benford is the Professor of Collaborative Computing and a founder of the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham. His research explores the creation of new interactive technologies to support future cultural and creative experiences, with a particular emphasis on mixed reality and ubiquitous computing. He was an investigator on EPSRCs Equator project between 2000 and 2007 and is currently Directing Nottinghams Doctoral Training Centre in Ubiquitous Computing for the Digital Economy, also funded by EPSRC.

He has published widely, including a series of studies and theories concerning interactive artistic experiences at the ACMs annual CHI conference. His artistic collaborations have led to the award of the 2003 Prix Ars Electronica for Interactive Art, the Nokia 2007 Mindtrek award for innovative applications of ubiquitous computing, four BAFTA nominations, and a best paper award at CHI 2005.

Dr Andrew Green

Librarian of The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

Andrew Green has been Librarian of the National Library of Wales (http://www.llgc.org.uk) at Aberystwyth since October 1998. The National Library is a legal deposit library and is the de facto central archive repository for Wales.  It also holds important collections of manuscripts, maps, pictures and photographs, and houses the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales. Up to 1998 his entire career was spent in British university libraries: University College of Wales Aberystwyth (1973-74), University College Cardiff (1975-89), University of Sheffield (1989-92), University of Wales Swansea (1992-98) - the last as Director of Library and Information Services, responsible for IT services and networking.

Andrew is an officer or member of numerous bodies in the area of library and information work, including the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) (Chair 2002-2004), the Legal Deposit Advisory Panel, the Legal Deposit Libraries Committee (Chair, Implementation Group), the Research Information Network Funders’ Group, the CyMAL Advisory Council, the JISC Digitisation Working Group, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) Wales (President), the Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum (WHELF) (Chair) and the Welsh Committee of the British Council.  He was a member of the steering bodies of the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) and the Research Support Libraries Group (RSLG).

Andrew was instrumental in establishing ‘Gathering the Jewels’ a pioneering, all-Wales cultural digitisation project, and its successor body, Culturenet Cymru. His connections with higher education remain strong.  He is a member of the Council of the University of Wales Aberystwyth, of the Courts of several universities in Wales, and holds Honorary Fellowships in the University of Wales Swansea, Glyndwr University and the University of Wales Lampeter.  He chaired a Steering Group of the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales responsible for developing a Wales-wide strategy on Welsh medium higher education.

His professional interests include the application of information and communications technologies to library and information services, online developments in cultural bodies, staff training and development, and strategic planning.  General interests include running (and other futile sports), improving his Welsh, archaeological history, music and art.

Andrew Green would describe himself as that unusual creature, a Briton.  He is half-English and half-Scots, was born in Lincolnshire, brought up in Yorkshire, and has spent almost all of his adult life in Wales.

Professor Jane Ohlmeyer

Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History, Trinity College, Dublin

Jane Ohlmeyer is Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History at Trinity College, Dublin.  She is an expert on the New British and Atlantic Histories and has published widely on a number of themes in early modern Irish and British history. Her books include 'Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms' (Cambridge, 1993); 'Ireland: from Independence to Occupation, 1641-1660' (editor, Cambridge, 1995); and 'Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland' (editor, Cambridge, 2000).  She is currently writing a book on the Irish peerage in the seventeenth century for Yale University Press.  

Professor Ohlmeyer has considerable expertise in overseeing major editorial projects and helped to secure funding for the digitization and online publication of the ‘1641 Depositions’. She is also the Principal Investigator for the Trinity College Dublin element of ‘Humanities Serving Irish Society which was awarded €10.78M as part of the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions (PRTLI 4). She chairs the Irish Manuscripts Commission’s Digitization Taskforce and the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences-Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities [DARIAH] committee.  She is the Irish representative on DARIAH, the European Digital Libraries and on the European Strategic Framework for Research Infrastructures, Humanities and Social Sciences working group.

Ms Marie Wallace

R&D Manager, IBM LanguageWare

Marie Wallace is Senior Research & Development Manager at IBM. Following 10 years of experience leading innovative projects across Siemens, Motorola, Informix and Oracle, Marie joined IBM in 2001 to execute a global vision for the implementation and integration of a next generation natural language processing technology (NLP) across IBM's product portfolio. IBM LanguageWare is the result and incorporates hundreds of person years of research from across IBM. In recent years, Marie's primary interest has been in the business process transformations required to enable IBM customers fully exploit the valuable insights that are hidden inside their unstructured information. The area of digital humanities presents an exciting opportunity to apply these sophisticated NLP techniques to historical material in order to provide humanities researchers with a powerful new discovery environment to potentially change the face of humanities research.