Keynote Speaker Biographies
M. S. Vijay Kumar is Senior Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education and Director of the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, DUE at MIT. In this capacity he provides leadership for sustainable technology-enabled educational innovation at MIT. In his prior roles at MIT as Assistant Provost and Director of Academic Computing, as well at other institutions, Vijay provided leadership for units engaged in delivering infrastructure and services for the effective integration of information technology and media services in education.
Vijay was the Principal Investigator of O.K.I (Open Knowledge Initiative), an MIT-led collaborative project to develop an open architecture for enterprise educational applications.
Vijay is a member of the Advisory Committee of MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) and a member of the steering committee for I-Campus, the MIT-Microsoft Alliance initiative for educational technology. He is the Executive officer for MIT's Council on Educational Technology. Vijay also served on the Applications Strategy Council for Internet2 and as trustee of the Corporation for Research and Education.
Vijay is an honorary advisor to India's National Knowledge Commission and advisor to the Open University of Catalonia.
Joshua Ferraro, CEO of LibLime, currently serves as the official Koha Project Release Manager. He has been promoting open source in libraries since 2001, when he oversaw implementation of the Koha open-source library automation system at the Athens County Public Library System in Ohio. Athens County was the first library system in the US to adopt an open-source integrated library system.
Ferraro has been a featured speaker at several library conferences including Access 2007, OLC Annual and TheRightClick 1.0. At the 2005 OLC Annual Conference, Ferraro spearheaded the Linux Installfest and Kohafest: hands-on events designed to give library staff practical experience with open source and Koha. There, he also served on a migration panel. When asked why they were not using open source, several library directors in the audience replied that a lack of commercial support made open source a difficult choice. In response to this need, Ferraro co-founded LibLime in 2005 with the aim of providing support for open-source library solutions.
Dr. Rob Abel, Ed.D. is the Chief Executive Officer of IMS Global Learning Consortium, the world’s leading nonprofit member consortium developing, supporting, and advocating learning technology standards and best practices. Under Rob’s leadership IMS Global has introduced the Learning Impact program, which is setting new benchmarks for high impact applications of technology in support of learning worldwide. Rob is a recognized expert on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) for learning, as well as an education industry researcher focused on the impact of education in society.
As Senior Vice President at Collegis (now SunGard Higher Education), the leading provider of ICT services to U.S. higher education, he was responsible for online and academic services provided to over 60 U.S. institutions. As Senior Director at Oracle Education he was a leader and innovator in the development of online learning architectures and related standards, including the Reusable Content Object (RCO) strategy. Rob is a member of the IEEE, ACM, ASTD, ISTE, and American Educational Research Association.
Rob holds a Doctorate in Educational Leadership and Change from Fielding Graduate University, a Masters degree in Management from Stanford, a Masters degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California, and a Baccalaureate degree in Computational Physics from Carnegie Mellon University. His articles, commentary, and research have been featured by Educause Review, Educause Quarterly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Greentree Gazette, Campus Technology, The League for Innovation, University Business, and eSchoolNews.
Llorenç Valverde is the Vice-rector of Technology at the Open University of Catalunya (UOC), a fully online university with more than 40.000 students, several undergraduate and graduate degrees and a PhD program on Information and Knowledge Society (IKS). He is also a tenured Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence full professor at the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) since 1989.
Professor Valverde has conducted extensive research in Artificial Intelligence, some of it during his stays at the University of California at Berkeley and some other other universities and research centers. He is a member of the Editorial Committee of several scientific publications in the field.
More recently, his focus has been in the IKS area, assessing companies and institutions such as the Government of the Balearic Islands and the Council of Mallorca, and helping them define and develop strategies for IKS.
Professor Valverde has been the Head of the Computer Science Department at the UIB from 1995 to 2004. He has also been the technical director of the digital edition of the journal Diari de Balears (1998) and, during 2005, he was the executive director of FOBSIC, a Foundation dedicated to the Obervation and monitoring the IKS in Catalunya. He actively collaborates with several media, has a weekly column on technology issues on a newspaper and has published two books on the subject.
At the Open University of Catalunya (UOC), he leads several teams in the design and development of e-learning technologies as well as being responsible for setting the direction and leading all technology resources at the University.
Fabrizio Cardinali is the CEO of Giunti Labs (www.giuntilabs.com), a leading Learning and Mobile Content Management solutions provider which now includes the Australian HarvestRoad Hive Digital marketplace technology brand, recently acquired by Giunti Labs.
Fabrizio is one of Europe’s leading e-learning experts and author of numerous papers in international journals and conference proceedings. In addition, he serves as Chair, of the European eLearning Industry Group, encompassing all major EU stakeholders in the learning industry innovation cycle (www.elig.org). He is also Global Strategy Advisor, to MIT’s Open Knowledge Initiative; a Member of the European Commission Experts Group on eContent; and a Member of several EU Study groups on the future of learning resources digital marketplaces. He has given invited speeches at the Italian, Polish and Hungarian Ministries of Education and the Russian State Duma Group on eLearning.
Fabrizio is one of Europe’s leading e-learning experts and author of numerous papers in international journals and conference proceedings. In addition, he serves as Chair, of the European eLearning Industry Group, encompassing all major EU stakeholders in the learning industry innovation cycle (www.elig.org). He is also Global Strategy Advisor, to MIT’s Open Knowledge Initiative; a Member of the European Commission Experts Group on eContent; and a Member of several EU Study groups on the future of learning resources digital marketplaces. He has given invited speeches at the Italian, Polish and Hungarian Ministries of Education and the Russian State Duma Group on eLearning.
Chargé de mission au Ministère de la Jeunesse, de l’Education Nationale et de la Recherche pour la gestion du projet UNIVERSITE NUMERIQUE FRANCOPHONE à l’origine de la création du programme national des UNT (Universités numériques thématiques nationales et francophones)
Directeur du programme « Université Numérique Thématique Nationale pour la médecine : UMVF » auprès de la Direction de la technologie
Directeur élu par les présidents d’Université du Groupement d’intérêt Public Fédération Interuniversitaire pour l’Université Médicale Virtuelle Francophone (2003/2004/2005/2006)
Rapports Officiels:
1/Mission nationale «Universités Numériques francophones» 2003/2007/ Luc FERRY, Claudie HAIGNERE
2/Mission «Gérontologie numérique», fin 2003/2005. A la Documentation française / Hubert FALCO
3/Mission «Validation des acquis de l’expérience»/ Rapport national / juin 2005/ François FILLON
4/ Octobre 2005/ Mission nationale pour la mise en œuvre d’un Colloque international, interministériel sur « l’Université à l’ère du Numérique » : le CIUEN Mai 2006 Paris /Gilles DE ROBIEN
5/ Décembre 2006 / Mission du Ministre de la Santé et des Solidarités sur le Dossier Médical Personnel/ Xavier BERTRAND
OpeniWorld:Europe2008
Federating Resources Through Open Interoperability