DrIvan Herman
Who am I?
I graduated as mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI I joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where I worked for 6 years (and turned into a computer scientist…). I left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry in Munich, Germany, I joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where I have a tenure position since 1988. I received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. I joined the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Team as Head of W3C Offices in January 2001 while maintaining my position at CWI. I served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when I was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position, which is now my principal work at W3C.
Before joining W3C I worked in quite different areas (distributed and dataflow programming, language design, system programming), but I spend most of my research years in computer graphics and information visualization. I also participated in various graphics related ISO standardization activities and software developments. My “professional” home page contains a list of my publications, my public presentations, and details of the various projects I participated in the past. There is also a dblp entry for my publications generated automatically (although I am not sure it is complete…). (B.t.w., based on my publications, my Erdős number is ≤4…)
In my previous life (i.e., before joining W3C…) I was member of the Executive Committee of the Eurographics Association for 15 years, and I was vice-chair of the Association between 2000 and 2002. I was the co-chair of the 9th World Wide Web Conference, in Amsterdam, May 2000; since then, I have also been member of IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), responsible for the World Wide Web Conference series. Since autumn 2007 I am also member of SWSA (Semantic Web Science Association), the committee responsible for the International Semantic Web Conferences series.
Some personal data
- The Hungarian spelling of my full name is Herman Iván. Ie, my name is Ivan (well, spelled properly: Iván) and my surname is Herman (many in the Netherlands and Germany mix it up, and use “Herman” as my name…).
- Gender: male
- Family: I am married and have an adult son, David.
- Date of birth: 24th February, 1955, Budapest, Hungary
- Email addresses: ‘ivan’ on my own ivan-herman.net domain, ‘ivan’ on the w3.org domain, or ‘ivan.herman’ on the cwi.nl domain
- Phone: +31-641044153
- I live in Amstelveen (see also geonames), the Netherlands (lat: 52.302063, long: 4.87397). This is a suburb of Amsterdam. The closest airport is Amsterdam Schiphol
- Some of my upcoming trips are on my home page at W3C
- I am often on freenode, (acc. name IvanHerman; primarily on the #swig channel). I am also the administrator of the Semantic Web Activity Blog at W3C which can either be accessed directly or via its RSS feed.
- Interests: Semantic Web (of course…), but also Scalable Vector Graphics, Internationalization. On a less techie level classical music, literature, history, politics in general, photography, art (painting, sculpture), architecture, …
I can also be identified through the non-information resource URI: http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf#me (when dereferenced, the URI redirects to this page for (X)HTML, and to the generated foaf file otherwise).
This file is in XHTML+RDFa. Running the file through an RDFa processor yields the corresponding foaf file in RDF. I have borrowed and adapted the ‘tranquile’ style of Dave Shea from the CSS Zen Garden site.