Sheila McIlraith (Knowledge Systems Lab, Stanford Univ., USA)
The Web is evolving from a repository for text and images to a provider of services - both information-providing services, and services that have some effect on the world. Today's Web was designed primarily for human use. To enable reliable, large-scale automated interoperation of services by computer programs or agents, the properties, capabilities, interfaces and effects of Web services must be understandable to computers. In this talk we report on ongoing work to develop markup for Web services in the DAML family of semantic Web markup languages. Our markup of Web services enables a wide variety of agent technologies for automated Web service discovery, execution, composition and interoperation. We present one logic-based agent technology we have developed for service composition, predicated on the use of reusable, task-specific, high-level generic procedures and user-specific customizing constraints. Joint work with Tran Cao Son and Honglei Zeng.
Dr. Sheila McIlraith is a Research Scientist in the Knowledge Systems Lab (KSL), Department of Computer Science, Stanford University. Dr. McIlraith received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1997. Prior to joining Stanford, she spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow jointly at Xerox PARC and Stanford University. Dr. McIlraith's research is in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning. Her current research spans three areas: knowledge representation and reasoning for Web services on the Semantic Web; automated diagnosis of hybrid (discrete and continuous) systems; and exploiting structure in logical reasoning.
Dr. McIlraith has 10 years of industrial R&D experience developing artificial intelligence applications, predominantly in the oil and gas sector. She has published over 40 refereed papers in the areas of knowledge representation, diagnosis, and related fields. Dr. McIlraith is co-chair of the Third International Cognitive Robotics Workshop and the CAISE'02 workshop on E-Services and the Semantic Web. She is also past co-chair of the Twelfth International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis, and the 1999 AAAI Spring Symposium on Hybrid Systems and AI. Dr. McIlraith is technical lead on KSL's DARPA-funded project on DAML-enabled Web Services and a founding member of the DAML Web Service Coalition, which developed DAML-S, a DAM+OIL ontology for Web Services. She also leads KSL's research initiatives on Partition-Based Logical Reasoning and Diagnosis of Hybrid Systems.