Ivan Herman
Who am I?
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 until my retirement), 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. If you want more details on my professional life, you can look at my “professional” CV.
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. (B.t.w., just for the fun, 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, between 2007 and 2014, also member of SWSA (Semantic Web Science Association), the committee responsible for the International Semantic Web Conferences (better known as “ISWC”) series. I was one of the founders of Force11, an organization looking at the future of research communication and e-scholarship, and I was on its Board of Directors between 2011 and 2015. I was the co-chair of the 9th World Wide Web Conference, in Amsterdam, May 2000; between then and 2021, I was also member of IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), responsible for the World Wide Web Conference (recently renamed “The Web Conference”) series. (Note that IW3C2 has recently “morphed” into the WWW Conference committee of the ACM SIGWEB).
Some personal data
- Nationalities (for unusual family reasons I was born with two of them…): French and Hungarian
- The Hungarian spelling of my full name is Herman Iván, whereas my French spelling is, simply, Ivan Herman.
- Gender: male
- Family: I am married and have a son, David.
- City of birth: Budapest, Hungary.
- Private Email addresses: ‘ivan’ on my own ‘ivan-herman.net’ domain or, alternatively, ‘ivan.herman’ on the ‘me.com’ domain. Professional Email address: ‘ivan’ on the ‘w3.org‘ domain
- GnuPG public key: copy paste it from the text file
- I live in Aix-en-Provence, France.
- More about the private me, as well as a set of links to most of my photos.