Keynote Speakers

``The Age of Content and Knowledge Processing'', Makoto Nagao (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan)

Dr. Makoto Nagao is a pioneer in machine translation, natural language processing and image processing. He had conducted many large projects and led them to success. In addition to his distinguished achievements in those research areas, he is the most prominent leader of digital libraries research in Japan. Dr. Nagao developed a prototype digital library system, "Ariadne", based on his rich experiences in natural language processing and artificial intelligence. He conducted digital library development at Kyoto University Library which was one of the first large digital library services in Japanese university libraries.

Dr. Makoto Nagao is the President of National Institute of Information and Communication Technology. He was the President (1997-2003), Dean of Faculty of Engineering (1997), and Director of University Library (1995-1997) of Kyoto University. He has served as a president of various major academic institutions and societies in Japan, including Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (1998-1999) and Information Processing Society of Japan (1999-2000). He has been the President of Japan Library Association since 2002. He has received many awards including Purple Ribbon Medal by the Japanese government (1997), NHK Broadcast Cultural Award (1998), Lifetime Achievement Award from Association for Computational Linguistics (2003), Japan Prize from the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan (2005).

``Indexing all the worlds books: Future directions and challenges for Google Book Search'', Daniel Clancy (Google, USA)

abstract: Google Book Search is an ambitious project started by Google to realize a dream that the founders of Google have had since they were students at Stanford. This dream is to make all the worlds information fully searchable to create a universal digital library. There are of course numerous technical challenges that must be addressed to accomplish this goal. The first one is the ability to scan the books in a scalable manner. Once the books have become available, however, there is a rich set of research challenges that must be addressed to organize this information. In this talk, I will talk about some of the challenges already addressed and will discuss future directions for Google Book search and the research challenges that exist for the field of Digital Libraries.

Dr. Daniel J. Clancy, PhD, is the Engineering Director for Google Book Search. The goal of the Google Book Search project is to digitize the world's books and make them searchable online. Google is working with both publishers and libraries as part of this project. Prior to coming to Google in January 2005, Dr. Clancy was the Director of the Exploration Technologies Directorate at NASA Ames Research Center. The Directorate supports over 700 people performing both basic and applied research in a diverse range of technology areas intended to enable both robotic and human exploration missions. Technology areas include Intelligent Systems, High-end Computing, Human-Centered Systems, Bio/Nanotechnology, Entry Systems and others. In this role, Dr. Clancy played numerous roles at the agency level including participating in the team that developed the agency's plan to return men to the Moon and eventually Mars. Dr. Clancy received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in artificial intelligence. While in school, Dr. Clancy also worked at Trilogy Corporation, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Xerox Webster Research center. Dr. Clancy received a Bachelor of Arts from Duke University in 1985 in computer science and theatre.