Ora Lassila
Research Manager Agent Technology
Nokia Research Center / Boston
We are experiencing a paradigm shift in personal computing, from desk-bound devices to mobile, wireless gadgets, and from dedicated computing machinery to embedded, ubiquitous computing. This change will also alter the nature of the Internet and how we use it. At the same time, the so-called "Semantic Web", or the emergence of machine-understandable information on the WWW will change the way we can utilize this medium. I propose that these trends will actually work together: our computing machinery (or the "services" this machinery offers us) can be described in terms of formal semantics, paving the way for smart environments and smart communities of devices.
Ora Lassila is a Research Fellow of the Nokia Research Center, and the founder of the Center's Agent Technology group. His former positions include Visiting Scientist at MIT/LCS, Project Manager at CMU/RI, and Researcher at the Helsinki University of Technology. He is the author of several journal and conference articles on AI-based planning and scheduling, knowledge representation, object-oriented programming, and WWW technologies. He has been involved in the development of the Semantic Web concept from its beginning, and is the editor of the World Wide Web Consortium's RDF metadata standard.