Ivan Her­man

Orig­i­nally, I am a math­e­mati­cian (grad­u­ated at the Eötvös Loránd Uni­ver­sity of Bu­dapest, Hun­gary, in 1979), but I turned into a com­puter sci­en­tist after my grad­u­a­tion. I joined the Com­put­ing and Au­toma­tion In­sti­tute (SZ­TAKI) of Bu­dapest in 1979. I then left Hun­gary in 1986; after hav­ing spent 3 years in a soft­ware house called “In­sotech Con­sult GmbH” (which, un­for­tu­nately, went down the drain since…) in Mu­nich, Ger­many, I joined the Cen­trum Wis­kun­de and In­for­ma­ti­ca (Cen­tre for Math­e­mat­ics and Com­puter Sci­ences, CWI) in Am­s­ter­dam, the Nether­lands, in 1988 as a se­nior re­searcher. I stayed at CWI until my re­tire­ment in 2021.

I’ve re­ceived a PhD de­gree in Com­puter Sci­ence in 1990 at the Uni­ver­sity of Lei­den, in the Nether­lands. All in all, I spent 21 years as a “tra­di­tional” com­puter sci­ence re­searcher, work­ing mainly in com­puter graph­ics and in­for­ma­tion vi­su­al­iza­tion. I then joined the staff of the World Wide Web Con­sor­tium (while main­tain­ing my po­si­tion at CWI), in Jan­u­ary 2001, where I served as Head of Of­fices until June 2006. Be­tween June 2006 and Sep­tem­ber 2013 I was Se­man­tic Web Ac­tiv­ity Lead, and I am cur­rently the tech­ni­cal lead of the Pub­lish­ing@W3C Ini­tia­tive. I've been con­tin­u­ing, al­beit with re­duced hours, my ac­tiv­i­ties at the W3C after my re­tire­ment from CWI. If you want more de­tails on my pro­fes­sional life, you can look at my “pro­fes­sional” CV.

I live in Aix-en-Provence, France.

I am mar­ried, and have a grown-up son, David. My wife, Éva, is a his­to­rian. She re­ceived the de­gree of Doc­tor Ha­bil­i­tata (Dr. Habil) by the Uni­ver­sity of Pécs (Hun­gary) in 2007. She gave a num­ber of courses at the Corv­i­nus Uni­ver­sity of Bu­dapest, as well as at the Fac­ulty of Law of the Eötvös Loránd Uni­ver­sity of Bu­dapest. David has fin­ished his Mas­ter’s stud­ies at the Con­ser­va­tory of Am­s­ter­dam as a clas­si­cal pi­anist, an MBA in Cul­ture Man­age­ment from the Uni­ver­sity of Antwer­pen, and also a Mas­ter’s de­gree in Eu­ro­pean Union Stud­ies from the Centre inter­na­tio­nal de for­ma­tion euro­péenne.

You may won­der about my na­tion­al­ity: well, I was born in Hun­gary and lived there until 1986 but, due to a com­pli­cated fam­ily back­ground, I am a mix­ture of French and Hun­gar­ian. I hold both pass­ports, my bed­time sto­ries were in French, I made all my stud­ies in Hun­gar­ian, I have fam­ily in both places… As you may imag­ine, this was still a bit of a touchy sit­u­a­tion until the end of the 80’s but, thanks to the changes in the 90's, today it is merely a cu­rios­ity. It is dif­fi­cult to say which coun­try I re­ally “be­long” to, ob­vi­ously. Al­though I am prob­a­bly a bit more Hun­gar­ian than French, I am emo­tion­ally more bound to Aix-en-Provence these days. As for my age: well, I am re­tired, let us leave it at that…

In my free time I love read­ing lit­er­a­ture of all kinds. I also love lis­ten­ing to music. I’m pri­mar­ily a clas­si­cal music fan (al­though, I must admit, my taste seems to be in­com­pat­i­ble with most of con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal music). But not only; I like jazz, blues, and I still love to lis­ten to some of the jazz-rock music of my youth. I’ve also dis­cov­ered tra­di­tional In­dian music, which is in­deed fan­tas­tic to lis­ten to. I am very in­ter­ested in his­tory and in pol­i­tics; wher­ever I am, I try to keep up with the news, I also try to un­der­stand local his­tory, cul­tural back­grounds, etc. I must say that one of the many ex­cit­ing as­pects of my cur­rent job is to work with an in­cred­i­ble wide range of peo­ple. (W3C has of­fices more than 17 dif­fer­ent coun­tries from Aus­tralia to the United King­dom, and from Mo­rocco to Korea; there are also around 10-15 dif­fer­ent na­tion­al­i­ties rep­re­sented in the W3C staff to which I be­long! I am proud to have friends in such dif­fer­ent places as the USA, France, China, or Japan…).

Art in gen­eral, pri­mar­ily lit­er­a­ture, ar­chi­tec­ture, clas­si­cal paint­ing, or sculp­tures, are among my fa­vorite pass time. I am blessed to be­long to cities that have won­der­ful, though dif­fer­ent, ar­chi­tec­tures; and I try never to miss the op­por­tu­nity to visit ar­chi­tec­tural land­marks or major musea when I travel. I also dis­cov­ered Asian art (mainly Chi­nese, Ko­rean, or Japan­ese paint­ing, but also In­dian and In­done­sian sculp­tures, for ex­am­ple) a few years ago al­though I am very, very far from being a con­nois­seur. The clas­si­cal Book of the Tea by Kakuzo Okakura was prob­a­bly one of the read­ings which made me dis­cover that world, and my nu­mer­ous trips to East Asia since have en­riched me tremen­dously. I be­lieve there are lots of things we in the West ought to learn from there. (I even got in­spired by it in my pro­fes­sional life: some times ago I pub­lished a paper with a col­league on what we called “Min­i­mal Graph­ics” in an IEEE jour­nal. Orig­i­nally, we wanted to start a Eu­ro­pean Union re­search pro­ject on this, but it was turned down as in­dus­tri­ally ir­rel­e­vant…). I am also quite fond of the Aus­tralian Abo­rig­i­nal Art al­though, again, I am re­ally only a naïve am­a­teur. But what I saw when I was lucky enough to go to Aus­tralia is breath­tak­ing.

I like trav­el­ing which was, luck­ily, also part of my job. I also like pho­tog­ra­phy, so when­ever I can, I “steal” some time on my trips to take some pic­tures. I have put most of my pho­tos on line, and a small sub­set is also on flickr: