Who's Who at the World Wide Web Consortium...

Steve joined the World Wide Web Consortium in January 2002, serving first as COO and now CEO. He has primary responsibility for worldwide operations and outreach, including overall management of Member relations, the W3C Process, the Team, strategic planning, budget, legal matters, external liaisons and major events.

Steve is also leading the launch of the new World Wide Web Foundation. He will transition from W3C CEO to CEO of the Web Foundation in early 2009.

Prior to joining the W3C, Steve held leadership and research positions within industry and government, and served on scientific and arms control delegations. In 1997, he was named Coordinator of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty International Data Centre in Vienna, Austria. There he was responsible for establishing the data center, global communications infrastructure, and standards for data exchange between more than 300 world-wide sensors and 170 nations. From 1984 to 1997, Steve led research initiatives -- first at Science Applications International Corporation and then as a program manager at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- to develop advanced concepts for real-time sensor monitoring, intelligent analysis and international data communications. Since 1993, Web technologies have played the central role in support of the sharing of data, information and knowledge within the complex systems that he has designed and deployed.

Steve received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his B.S. from the Pennsylvania State University.

Tim invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. He wrote the first WWW client (a browser-editor running under NeXTStep) and the first WWW server along with most of the communications software, defining URLs, HTTP and HTML. Prior to his work at CERN, Tim was a founding director of Image Computer Systems, a consultant in hardware and software system design, real-time communications graphics and text processing, and a principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications in Poole, England. He is a graduate of Oxford University. More...

Tim is now the overall Director of the W3C. He is a Senior Research Scientist and the 3COM Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT's CSAIL.

Judy Brewer joined W3C in September 1997 as Director of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) International Program Office. She is Domain Leader for WAI, and coordinates five areas of work with respect to Web accessibility: ensuring that W3C technologies support accessibility; developing guidelines for Web content, browsers, and authoring tools; improving tools for evaluation and repair of Web sites; conducting education and outeach; and coordinating with research and development that can affect future Web accessibility.

Judy is W3C's chief liaison on accessibility policy and standardization internationally, promoting awareness and implementation of Web accessibility, and ensuring effective dialog among industry, the disability community, accessibility researchers, and government on the development of consensus-based accessibility solutions.

Prior to joining W3C, Judy was Project Director for the Massachusetts Assistive Technology Partnership, a U.S. federally-funded project promoting access to assistive technology for people with disabilities. She worked on several national initiatives to increase access to mainstream technology for people with disabilities and to improve dialog between industry and the disability community. Judy has a background in applied linguistics, education, technical writing, management and disability advocacy.

Jérôme joined the W3C Team in June 2006. Prior to that, Jérôme worked as a researcher and research director at INRIA, France, in the areas of automatic VLSI design, software engineering, and knowledge-based systems. Jérôme was the main inventor and developer of the programming language Le-Lisp. Jérôme co-founded ILOG in 1987, taking on the roles of Chief Scientific Officer and Director. Up till 2000, he was a member of the French Co-ordination Committee for Science and Information Technology and Communication of the National Ministry for Education, Research and Technology. Starting in 1995, he was Chief Information Officer of the genomics company GENSET.

On May 2005, ERCIM's Board of Directors has nominated Jérôme as Manager of ERCIM.

Daniel Dardailler joined the W3C team in July 1996 and is now Associate Chair for Europe and Director of International Relations and Offices.

Prior to that, he was acting as a Software Architect for the X Window System Consortium, responsible for the Motif toolkit and others CDE (Unix Desktop) components.

Daniel holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Nice/Sophia-Antipolis (89).

Ted joined the W3C in January of 2000. He comes to the Consortium from the corporate IT community having worked for a mortgage and investment company, a power utility, an internet service provider, and a marketing and communications company. He earned a bachelors in Russian from Hobart College. He also spent some time as an English as a Second Language and Mathematics instructor.

Tatsuya joined W3C at Keio-SFC in September 1997 as Deputy Director for Asian operations. He is Professor of the Faculty of Environmental Information at Keio University.

His current areas of interests are System Software and Web Technology. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh.

Philipp Hoschka is a Deputy Director of the W3C. His main interest is bringing the benefits of Web technology to mobile and other non-PC devices. Since 2006, he is leading W3C's Ubiquitous Web Domain which includes W3C's Mobile Web Initiativecreated by Philipp in 2005. In the past, he pioneered work on integrating audio and video into the Web. Philipp founded, chaired and served as editor for the Working Group that developed the W3C Standard SMIL which today is an integral part of mobile phone MMS messaging. Philipp also lead W3C's "Television and the Web" Activity. He previously directed W3C's Architecture Domain, which issues all core XML specifications from the W3C. Philipp chaired numerous W3C workshops that explored new Web developments, such as Workshops on the Mobile Web Initiative, Web Services, Television and the Web, Push Technology and Real-Time Multimedia and the Web. Philipp holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, and a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.

In September 2004, Ian became Head of W3C Communications. He manages the Consortium's Comm activities, including press, publications, branding, marketing, and some member relations.

Ian began at W3C in 1997. Since then he has co-edited a number of specifications, including HTML 4.0, CSS2, DOM Level 1, three WAI Guidelines (Web Content, User Agent, Authoring Tool), the TAG's Architecture of the World Wide Web, and the W3C Process Document.

Ian Jacobs studied computer science in France after college (Yale), and worked at INRIA for five years on a system called "Centaur". After spending more than six years in France and six months in Italy working with the University of Bologna Computer Science Department, he moved back to New York City in 1994 to do some creative writing. He currently lives in Chicago, IL (USA).

Philippe joined W3C at INRIA in January 1999 to test a set of W3C Recommendations (especially CSS2). Philippe heads the W3C Interaction Domain, which produces technologies several areas including HTML and CSS. Until July 2008, Philippe lead the W3C Architecture Domain, which produced the W3C Core technologies in the area of XML, Web Services, and Internationalization. Philippe is currently the Chair of the Web Services Coordination Group. He is a former Chair of the Document Object Model (DOM) Working Group and co-editor of two DOM specifications. He was the co-Chair of the W3C Workshop on Video on the Web, focusing on making video a first class Web citizen, including making it easy to create, link to and from, describe, and search.

Prior to joining W3C, Philippe promoted the use of XML inside Bull in 1998, also focusing on the interaction between XML and object structures. He wrote the first version of the CSS validator in 1997.

Philippe holds a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Nice (France).

Mauro joined the Consortium in October 2006 as North American Business Manager, and serves as W3C Business Manager since March 2008. His primary goal is to foster a business and operating environment that is cost-effective, productive and positive, across all W3C operating locations. He coordinates financial matters across the Consortium, prepares budget plans and reports, monitors budget execution, coordinates legal matters, and supports Membership development. Mauro participates actively in the Offices Program, overseeing W3C Offices in the Americas, Asia, and Oceania. He is also Incubator Activity Lead and coordinates the Invited Expert Program.

A Fulbright Scholar, Mauro holds a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration from Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso and a Master's degree in Business Administration from Suffolk University.

Nobuo is directing the W3C team at Keio University, where he established the third Consortium host in September 1996. And he also serves at the Consortium's Associate Chair for Asia.

As Emeritus Professor of Keio University and Dean of Faculty of Global Media Studies, Komazawa University, Nobuo's areas of expertise are in Operating Systems, Parallel Processing, Distributed Processing Environments, Document Processing, Software Engineering, Software Development and Digital Media Environments.

Nobuo received his PhD in Engineering from the Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo. Before becoming a Vice President of Keio University, he was Dean of the Faculty of Environmental Information.

Susan Hardy joined the W3C in September 1995. She is the head of the Administrative staff at MIT and primary organizer of W3C workshops, US Advisory Committee meetings and working group meetings. Previously, Susan worked with Bob Scheifler and the MIT X Consortium for three years, and has been a part of the Laboratory for Computer Science for nearly ten years.

Alexandra joined the team in September 2002 as a replacement for Caroline Baron and dealt with accountancy.

She joined the Communications team in February 2003 as W3C Europe Communications assistant. She handled quicktips shipments for Europe, Africa and Australia, she edited press-clippings on "W3C in the Press", processed membership contracts for Europe and handled their queries.

She joined the Administrative Support in September 2003 and assists the Sophia and Europe team.

Amy van der Hiel is the assistant to Tim Berners-Lee, a meeting planner and part of the administrative team.

Before joining the W3C, Amy was the Assistant to the Director and Curatorial Associate at the Exhibitions Department of the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. She has her Bachelors in Art History from Bard College, NY and her Masters in Art Education from Mansfield University, PA.

In September 2004, Ian became Head of W3C Communications. He manages the Consortium's Comm activities, including press, publications, branding, marketing, and some member relations.

Ian began at W3C in 1997. Since then he has co-edited a number of specifications, including HTML 4.0, CSS2, DOM Level 1, three WAI Guidelines (Web Content, User Agent, Authoring Tool), the TAG's Architecture of the World Wide Web, and the W3C Process Document.

Ian Jacobs studied computer science in France after college (Yale), and worked at INRIA for five years on a system called "Centaur". After spending more than six years in France and six months in Italy working with the University of Bologna Computer Science Department, he moved back to New York City in 1994 to do some creative writing. He currently lives in Chicago, IL (USA).

Klaus, based in Germany, graduated as mathematician at the University of Bonn in 1974. He joined the German research institute in computer science (GMD) where he worked since then in several areas. After a few years of research on software technology he was appointed head of GMD's computer center Bonn in 1980. He gave lectures on computerscience at the University of Cologne and the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg. He acted as head of the network engineering group and the competence center "Computer Networks and Society" in GMD and later in Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communication.

Klaus has a strong computer networks background. Among other roles he was founding member of the European Academic Research Network (EARN) and deputy director of EARN Germany, member of the operational committee of the German Research Network (DFN), member of the EASInet steering committee and chairman of the German Chapter of the Internet Society.

Before joining the W3C team Klaus worked for W3C as head of the German/Austrian Office, AB member, and AC rep of GMD/Fraunhofer. After leaving Fraunhofer he launched his own company from where he works for W3C. As team member - on a part time basis - Klaus works offices coordinator in the W3C offices team.

Marie-Claire Forgue joined W3C at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis in January 2001, as Head of W3C European Communications.
Marie-Claire received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Nice and INRIA, France. After a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Dynamic Graphics Project Lab at the University of Toronto, Canada, she worked in NTT's Human Interface Lab, Japan, for two years. Her research interests were focused on illumination algorithms and scene modeling.

After that, she studied filmmaking in Vancouver, Canada. She has directed several short films and documentaries, and got interested in interactive multimedia back in 1993.

Coralie is in the W3C Communications Team. Her duties include large meetings (AC Meetings, Technical Plenary) preparation. She is also in charge of the Advisory Board scribe duties and meetings planning, and handles W3C press clippings. As well as monitoring translators' list, contact person for official translations. She joined the team in January 1999.

Philippe joined W3C at INRIA in January 1999 to test a set of W3C Recommendations (especially CSS2). Philippe heads the W3C Interaction Domain, which produces technologies several areas including HTML and CSS. Until July 2008, Philippe lead the W3C Architecture Domain, which produced the W3C Core technologies in the area of XML, Web Services, and Internationalization. Philippe is currently the Chair of the Web Services Coordination Group. He is a former Chair of the Document Object Model (DOM) Working Group and co-editor of two DOM specifications. He was the co-Chair of the W3C Workshop on Video on the Web, focusing on making video a first class Web citizen, including making it easy to create, link to and from, describe, and search.

Prior to joining W3C, Philippe promoted the use of XML inside Bull in 1998, also focusing on the interaction between XML and object structures. He wrote the first version of the CSS validator in 1997.

Philippe holds a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Nice (France).

Bert Bos completed his Ph.D. in Groningen, The Netherlands, on a protoyping language for graphical user interfaces. He then went on to develop a browser targeted at humanities scholars, before joining the W3C at INRIA/Sophia-Antipolis in October 1995. He is co-inventor of CSS and created & led W3C's Internationalization activity. After working on HTML and XML, he is now leading the CSS and Mathematics activities.

Dan Connolly is a research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in the Decentralized Information Group (DIG) and a member of the technical staff of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). His research interest is investigating the value of formal descriptions of complex systems like the Web, especially in the consensus-building process.

Dan received bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990. He moved to the Dallas area to join Convex Computer Corporation as a software engineer in 1991. From there, he began collaborating across the Internet with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web project. He moved back to Austin to work at Atrium, a start-up software company, in 1993. He joined HAL Computer Systems in 1994.

In 1995, Dan moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to join the W3C staff at MIT. From 1995 to 1997, during the intense struggle between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, Dan chaired the working group that preserved HTML as an open standard.

Since 1997, Dan has worked for MIT from his home, first in Austin, Texas and later in the Kansas City area.

Richard joined the W3C team in July 2002 to expand the work of the Internationalization Activity. He is attached to ERCIM in France, but based in the UK.

He is Internationalization Activity Lead and staff contact of the Internationalization Core Working Group.

Richard has a background in translation and interpreting, computational linguistics, software engineering, and translation tools. Prior to joining the W3C, he was an internationalization consultant, evangelizing and educating people with regard to the international design and localizability of user interfaces and documents.

Thierry joined W3C at INRIA in August 1998 as leader of the ECommerce/Micropayment Activity.

Then he has lead the XForms Activity.

Currently he leads the Synchronized Multimedia Activity (SYMM WG and Timed Text WG).

Thierry holds a Diplome d'Etudes Approfondies (D.E.A) in Genetics - Statistics and Information Technology (University Paris VII).

At the end of the 80's, Steven with a group of colleagues built a browser with extensible markup, a DOM, stylesheets, client-side scripting, etc. Following from this work, he organised two workshops at the first WWW conference in 1994 on client-side computation and electronic publishing.

He chaired the first-ever W3C event, the workshop on style sheets, the first W3C internationalisation workshop, and was a long-time member of the CSS and HTML working groups. He now chairs the HTML and Forms working groups.

He is editor-in-chief of ACM/interactions.

He is based at the CWI, Amsterdam. For more information: www.cwi.nl/~steven.

Michael(tm) Smith joined the W3C in January 2007 and worked within the W3C's Mobile Web Initiative until November 2007, when he became the W3C team contact for the HTML working group chartered to produce HTML5. Mike has been based in Tokyo for more than six years, and prior to joining the W3C, worked for Opera Software and Openwave Systems (and was for most of that time involved with design, development, testing, and deployment of software for mobile operators in Japan).

Dan Connolly is a research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in the Decentralized Information Group (DIG) and a member of the technical staff of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). His research interest is investigating the value of formal descriptions of complex systems like the Web, especially in the consensus-building process.

Dan received bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990. He moved to the Dallas area to join Convex Computer Corporation as a software engineer in 1991. From there, he began collaborating across the Internet with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web project. He moved back to Austin to work at Atrium, a start-up software company, in 1993. He joined HAL Computer Systems in 1994.

In 1995, Dan moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to join the W3C staff at MIT. From 1995 to 1997, during the intense struggle between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, Dan chaired the working group that preserved HTML as an open standard.

Since 1997, Dan has worked for MIT from his home, first in Austin, Texas and later in the Kansas City area.

Ted joined the W3C in January of 2000. He comes to the Consortium from the corporate IT community having worked for a mortgage and investment company, a power utility, an internet service provider, and a marketing and communications company. He earned a bachelors in Russian from Hobart College. He also spent some time as an English as a Second Language and Mathematics instructor.

Laurent joined the W3C team at Inria-Grenoble in September 2000 to participate in the development of Amaya. Before joining the W3C, he worked as an engineer in the OPERA project at Inria-Grenoble.

Laurent hold an enineering degree in computer science from the CNAM Grenoble (Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers) in 1997.

Dominique is the Activity Lead of the Mobile Web Initiative, co-chairs the Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group, and develops tools and applications as part of the W3C Systems Team.

He joined intially W3C's Communication and Systems Team as a member of the Webmaster Team in October 2000; after having joined then lead the QA Activity until September 2005, Dom took part to the Mobile Web Initiative as Staff Contact for the Best Practices Working Group.

Dominique holds an engineering degree from the "Grande Ecole" Ecole Centrale Paris.

Fumihiro joined the W3C in April 2006 as a system administrator at Keio University SFC. His interests were in Web Technology, Semantic Web and Mobile Computing. He holds Master's and Bachelor's degrees from Keio University.

Fumihiro left W3C in December 2008.

Vivien joined W3C in May 2003 as the W3C Webmaster at the MIT/CSAIL host site in Cambridge, MA USA.

Since September 2004 Vivien is working as a Systems & Network Engineer for W3C Europe at the ERCIM host site in Sophia-Antipolis, France.

Vivien graduated in September 2003 from the Ecole Supérieure en Sciences Informatiques in Sophia-Antipolis, France.
He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science, specializing in Networks. In June 2000, he received a two year degree in Computer Programming at the University of Lyon, France.

Gerald joined W3C in September 1997 as a member of the Systems Team. He helps maintain W3C's system infrastructure including the web and mail servers, mailing lists and publishing tools. He created W3C's HTML Validation Service based on an earlier validation service he began as a student.

Prior to joining W3C, Gerald worked at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. He has also worked as a Web consultant for various companies in the Edmonton area, and as a technical writer for IBM Canada in Toronto.

In his free time Gerald enjoys travel, photography, and writing software.

Gerald has a Bachelor of Science with specialization in Computing Science from the University of Alberta.

Jean-Guilhem joined the W3C Systems Team in August 2006 as the W3C Webmaster at the MIT/CSAIL host site in Cambridge, MA USA.

He graduated in October 2006 from Polytech'Nice-Sophia Computer Science Department (formerly known as ESSI: Ecole Supérieure en Sciences Informatiques) specialized in Networks.

In September 2003 he received a two year degree in Mathematics and Computer Science (DEUG MIAS) at the University Jean-François Champollion in Albi, France.

olivier coordinates the Open Source development of QA Tools and works on Education and Outreach. He also builds and maintains internal tools and services for the W3C Systems team.

Olivier joined W3C at Keio University in October 2000.

José came to W3C as a W3C Fellow in January 2007 working in the Technology and Society Domain. José is employed by Fundación CTIC who sponsor his W3C fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to understand specific government and citizens' needs related to eGovernment services, identify eGovernment aspects that put Web interoperability at risk, to suggest how governments can deliver better and more efficient services through computer technologies, and to coordinate discussions and actions for possible future efforts of the Consortium in eGovernment.

Prior to joining W3C, José was the manager of the W3C Spain Office for three years and also served as the Advisory Committee Representative for CTIC.

José received Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Masters degree in Enterprise Application Integration, both from the University of Oviedo, where he also worked at its Research and Innovation departments as a researcher, developer and teacher. He also worked previously as consultant and even founded his own Web company back in 1997.

Carine joined the Sophia Antipolis W3C team in December 2001 as XML engineer, in the Jigsaw activity. She holds an engineer degree and a PhD in Computer Science. Her research area was distributed artificial intelligence and multiagent systems.

Before joining W3C in December 2000, Sandro worked on knowledge-based interoperability and decentralized system design at The Information Roads Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. He remains as Executive Director on a volunteer basis. He has a BS in Interdisciplinary Science/Computer Science from Rensselaer.

Sandro holds a Research Scientist appointment at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science.

Ivan graduated as mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI he joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked for 6 years. He left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry, he joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where he has held a tenure position since 1988. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the Leiden University, in the Netherlands. Ivan joined the W3C team as Head of Offices in January 2001 while maintaining his position at CWI. He served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when he was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position.

Before joining W3C Ivan worked in quite different areas (distributed and dataflow programming, language design, system programming), but he spend most of his research years in computer graphics and visualization. He also participated in various graphics related ISO standardization activities and software developments. He was member of the Executive Committee of the Eurographics Association for 15 years, and vice-chair of Association between 2000 and 2002. He was the co-chair of the 9th World Wide Web Conference, in Amsterdam, May 2000. He is also member of IW3C2, the committee responsible for the World Wide Web Conference series.

His home page at CWI contains a list of his publications and details of the various projects he participated in. You can also look at his home page or his personal blog.

Yves Lafon studied Mathematics and computer science at ENSEEIHT in Toulouse, France, and at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal in Montreal, Canada. His field of study was signal recognition and processing. He discovered Internet Relay Chat and the Web in Montreal in 1993 and has been making robots and games for both. He joined the W3C in October 1995 to work on W3C's experimental browser, Arena. Then he worked on Jigsaw, W3C's Java-based server, on HTTP/1.1 and started the work on SOAP 1.2.

Yves is now the Web Services Activity leader.

Eric joined W3C again in February 1998 to provide system support and manage tool programming. He currently works on RDF and XML protocols.His primary goal is to see that information be easily and logically accessible.

Prior to joining W3C full-time, Eric worked as a contract programmer for various organizations, including W3C, where he worked on libwww and the client applications, a PEP model library, and several system-related projects.

Eric has a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and is still baffled by the futility of a college education in determining one's fate.

Dave is a W3C Fellow sponsored by JustSystems. He has been closely involved with the development of Web standards since 1992, contributing to work on HTML, HTTP, MathML, XForms, voice and multimodal interaction, and more recently Ubiquitous Web Applications. Dave is now focused on realizing the potential of the Semantic Web for exploring and analyzing financial data (especially XBRL). He also chairs the Model-Based User Interface Incubator Group, and is a Staff Contact in the Ubiquitous Web Applications WG. He was educated in England and obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford. For more information see Dave's home page.

Thomas Roessler joined the W3C Team in November 2004 to work on security, privacy, and European policy issues. He currently serves as Security Activity Lead, and Team Contact of the Web Security Context Working Group and XML Security Specifications Maintenance Working Group, and also spends time on the PRIME and PrimeLife projects.

Prior to joining W3C, Thomas worked at the University of Bonn on numerics of partial differential equations, and collected programming, systems administration and computer forensics experience. He served as the lead maintainer of the free software mail user agent mutt, and was involved with ICANN for several years. Thomas has published and given talks on topics including anonymization services, legal questions of digital signatures, and online privacy. He holds a degree in mathematics.

Daniel Weitzner is the World Wide Web Consortium's Technology and Society Policy Director. As such, he leads W3C's efforts to develop and implement responses to key social concerns on the Web including privacy, security, intellectual property, trust, and the free flow of information. The focus of this work is on areas in which technical standardization and best practices can contribute to larger social policy efforts. He is also Co-Chair of the Patent and Standards Interest Group and is the W3C's chief liaison to public policy communities around the world.

Mr. Weitzner holds an appointment as Principal Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, co-directs MIT's Decentralized Information Group with Tim Berners-Lee, and teaches Internet public policy at MIT.

As one of the leading figures in Internet public policy community, he was the first to advocate the use of user control technologies such as content filtering and rating as a means to protect children and avoid government censorship of Intenet content. He successfully advocated for adoption of amendments to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act creating new privacy protections for online transactional information such as Web site access logs.

Before joining the W3C, Mr. Weitzner was co-founder and Deputy Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet civil liberties organization in Washington, DC. He was also Deputy Policy Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Mr. Weitzner has a degree in law from Buffalo Law School, and a B.A. in Philosophy from Swarthmore College. His publications on communications policy have appeared in the Yale Law Review, Global Networks, MIT Press, Computerworld, Wired Magazine, Social Research, Electronic Networking: Research, Applications & Policy, and The Whole Earth Review. He is also a commentator for NPR's Marketplace Radio.

See also Weitzner's blog: Open Internet Policy.

Philipp Hoschka is a Deputy Director of the W3C. His main interest is bringing the benefits of Web technology to mobile and other non-PC devices. Since 2006, he is leading W3C's Ubiquitous Web Domain which includes W3C's Mobile Web Initiativecreated by Philipp in 2005. In the past, he pioneered work on integrating audio and video into the Web. Philipp founded, chaired and served as editor for the Working Group that developed the W3C Standard SMIL which today is an integral part of mobile phone MMS messaging. Philipp also lead W3C's "Television and the Web" Activity. He previously directed W3C's Architecture Domain, which issues all core XML specifications from the W3C. Philipp chaired numerous W3C workshops that explored new Web developments, such as Workshops on the Mobile Web Initiative, Web Services, Television and the Web, Push Technology and Real-Time Multimedia and the Web. Philipp holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, and a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.

Stéphane is W3C Staff since 1995. Leading the W3C Device Independence Working Group since 2001, he has been a key participant in the development and launch of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, managing the Device Description Working Group till the end of 2005. At the same time, Stéphane took also part in the management of the Voice and Multimodal Activities. Since 2006, he is now leading the W3C work on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries.

Before joining W3C, Stéphane studied network and telecommunications at ESSTIN, an engineering school in Sophia-Antipolis, France. From 1991 to 1995, he worked on Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge modeling at INRIA.

Before December 2007, François helped develop an on-portal mobile search engine called MotionBridge from its first minimalist draft within a small French start-up to a full-featured version within Microsoft. This kept him busy for more than seven years.

Then he joined the W3C, where he now serves as Staff Contact for the Best Practices Working Group in the Mobile Web Initiative.

François holds an engineering degree from the Ecole Centrale Paris.

Dominique is the Activity Lead of the Mobile Web Initiative, co-chairs the Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group, and develops tools and applications as part of the W3C Systems Team.

He joined intially W3C's Communication and Systems Team as a member of the Webmaster Team in October 2000; after having joined then lead the QA Activity until September 2005, Dom took part to the Mobile Web Initiative as Staff Contact for the Best Practices Working Group.

Dominique holds an engineering degree from the "Grande Ecole" Ecole Centrale Paris.

Liam joined the W3C in 2000; he's been working with text-based markup and digital typography since nroff days (1981) and with SGML since 1987. He worked for Yuri Rubinsky at SoftQuad Inc. in Toronto, where he was involved in the development of SoftQuad's HoTMetaL, the first commercial HTML editor for the Web, and also with SoftQuad Panorama, a browser plugin to display SGML; this in turn demonstrated a need to standardise the use of SGML on the Web, and Liam was involved in the development of the XML specification.

Liam has been involved in free software since 1983, including lq-text, a text retrieval package for Unix, the GNOME project, a collection of royalty-free pictures from old books, and uses and contributes to Mandriva Linux, and many other open source and free projects.

At the W3C today, Liam is XML Activity Lead and W3C technical participant for the XML Query and XSL (XSL-FO) Working Groups, and alternate contact for the Efficient XML Interchange Working Group.

Liam's personal home page

Dave is a W3C Fellow sponsored by JustSystems. He has been closely involved with the development of Web standards since 1992, contributing to work on HTML, HTTP, MathML, XForms, voice and multimodal interaction, and more recently Ubiquitous Web Applications. Dave is now focused on realizing the potential of the Semantic Web for exploring and analyzing financial data (especially XBRL). He also chairs the Model-Based User Interface Incubator Group, and is a Staff Contact in the Ubiquitous Web Applications WG. He was educated in England and obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford. For more information see Dave's home page.

Michael Sperberg-McQueen serves as staff contact of the XML Schema Working Group, the XSL Working Group, and the SML Working Group, and as alternate staff contact for the XML Query and XML Processing Model Working Groups; all are part of the W3C XML Activity. He also serves as chair of the XML Coordination Group. Earlier, he served as co-editor (with Tim Bray and Jean Paoli) of the first edition of the W3C Recommendation XML 1.0. He works full-time for W3C from his home in Española, New Mexico (twenty miles north of Santa Fe, on the road to Taos).

Michael blogs about XML, markup theory, and other topics in his blog, Messages in a Bottle.

From 1988 to 2001, Michael served as editor in chief of the Text Encoding Initiative, an international cooperative project to develop and disseminate guidelines for the encoding and interchange of electronic texts for research purposes. He also serves as co-coordinator of the Model Editions Partnership, a project to apply the TEI guidelines to the creation of electronic historical documentary editions. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University.

Henry S. Thompson divides his time between the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where he is Reader in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, based in the Language Technology Group of the Human Communication Research Centre, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), where he works in the XML Activity.

He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980. His university education was divided between Linguistics and Computer Science, in which he holds an M.Sc. While still at Berkeley he was affiliated with the Natural Language Research Group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he participated in the GUS and KRL projects. He research interests have ranged widely, including natural language parsing, speech recognition, machine translation evaluation, modelling human lexical access mechanisms, the fine structure of human-human dialogue, language resource creation and architectures for linguistic annotation. His current research is focussed on articulating and extending the architectures of XML.

He was a member of the SGML Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium which designed XML, is the author of the XED, the first free XML instance editor and co-author of the LT XML toolkit and is currently a member of the XML Core and XML Schema Working Groups of the W3C. He is lead editor of the Structures part of the XML Schema W3C Recommendation, for which he co-wrote the first publicly available implementation, XSV. He has presented many papers and tutorials on SGML, DSSSL, XML, XSL and XML Schemas in both industrial and public settings over the last eight years.

He is also interested in the philosophical foundations of computer science and AI, and is actively involved in promoting awareness of the moral and social implications of AI research.

Before joining the W3C in April 2007, Matt worked on mobile Web applications and standards at the research and development branch of a large European mobile operator.

Prior to that Matt worked at a number of Boston area startup companies in the areas of speech recognition, VoIP, and the Web on mobile devices.

Judy Brewer joined W3C in September 1997 as Director of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) International Program Office. She is Domain Leader for WAI, and coordinates five areas of work with respect to Web accessibility: ensuring that W3C technologies support accessibility; developing guidelines for Web content, browsers, and authoring tools; improving tools for evaluation and repair of Web sites; conducting education and outeach; and coordinating with research and development that can affect future Web accessibility.

Judy is W3C's chief liaison on accessibility policy and standardization internationally, promoting awareness and implementation of Web accessibility, and ensuring effective dialog among industry, the disability community, accessibility researchers, and government on the development of consensus-based accessibility solutions.

Prior to joining W3C, Judy was Project Director for the Massachusetts Assistive Technology Partnership, a U.S. federally-funded project promoting access to assistive technology for people with disabilities. She worked on several national initiatives to increase access to mainstream technology for people with disabilities and to improve dialog between industry and the disability community. Judy has a background in applied linguistics, education, technical writing, management and disability advocacy.

Shadi Abou-Zahra joined the W3C in 2003 and coordinates WAI outreach in Europe, and accessibility evaluation techniques. He is the Activity Lead of the WAI International Program Office, which includes groups that are responsible for education and outreach, coordination with research, general discussion on Web accessibility, coordination with the WAI Technical Activity, and WAI liaisons with other organizations including standards organizations. Shadi chairs the W3C Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group (ERT WG), is a staff person of the WAI Ageing Education and Harmonisation (WAI-AGE) project, and is a participant in good standing of the W3C Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG).

Prior to joining W3C, Shadi was a lead Web developer and managed the design and implementation of Web productions, online community platforms, and online games. Shadi also worked as a Web Consultant for the International Data Centre (IDC) of the United Nations Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), as well as for other international organizations. During his computer science studies, Shadi actively participated in the Austrian national student council at the Technical University of Vienna as a representative for students with disabilities, where he advocated for equal opportunities in education and employment.

Andrew joined W3C in November 2007 as the Web Accessibility and Ageing Specialist to work on the European Commission funded WAI-AGE project. The objectives of this project are to increase the accessibility of the Web for those with accessibility needs related to ageing within European Union Member States and around the world. This project will coordinate closely with the WAI Education and Outreach working group.

Prior to joining W3C, Andrew worked at Vision Australia for seven years leading a team that provided consulting, reviewing and training services around Web accessibility. He was heavily involved with W3C WAI during this time.

Shawn Henry joined W3C in February 2003 as Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Outreach Coordinator to coordinate W3C's worldwide education and outreach activities promoting Web accessibility for people with disabilities. Within W3C, Shawn is Chair of the WAI Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG), helps coordinate the WAI Interest Group (WAI IG), and works with the WAI Steering Council.

Prior to joining W3C, Shawn worked as a consultant with international standards bodies, research centers, government agencies, non-profit organizations, education providers, and Fortune 500 companies to develop and implement strategies to optimize design for usability and accessibility.

Jeanne Spellman joined the W3C in 2008 as Web Accessibility Engineer. She is the team contact for the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group and the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group. Jeanne also contributes to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group.

Prior to joining W3C, Jeanne has worked as an independent web developer and accessibility consultant. Jeanne has developed accessible web sites and has evaluated web pages for accessibility in a variety of technologies including HTML, CSS, Flash, Flex, PDF and AJAX. Jeanne has worked with major corporations to develop and train designers, developers, quality assurance engineers and project managers in accessibility techniques.