Program

Steven Pemberton is a researcher affiliated with the CWI. Amongst other technologies, he co-designed ABC, the programming language that Python was based on, and web technologies such as CSS, HTML, XHTML, and XForms. He was chair of the W3C HTML working group for a decade, and still chairs the XForms working group.

O’Neil Delpratt joined Saxonica from a research project at the University of Leicester in 2010. He is a co-developer of the Saxon product, with specific responsibility for Saxon on .NET and Saxon/C for C/C++/PHP/Python languages. Before joining Saxonica, he completed his post-graduate studies at the University of Leicester. His thesis title was “In-memory Representations of XML documents”, which coincided with a C++ software development of a memory efficient DOM implementation, called Succinct DOM.

Debbie Lockett joined the Saxonica development team in 2014 following post-doctoral research in Mathematics at the University of Leeds. Debbie has worked on performance benchmarking, the implementation of XQuery 3.1 features, and on developing the tools for creating Saxonica’s product documentation. She is now the lead developer for Saxon-JS.

Adam Retter has been a core contributor to the Open Source eXist-db Native XML Database for 14 years, he was also an invited expert to the W3C XQuery Working Group and helped standardise XQuery 1.0, 3.0, and 3.1. Adam founded the EXQuery project, and developed the RESTXQ framework for XQuery. Recently, Adam has been developing FusionDB a new multi-model NoSQL database which also supports XML natively.

Dr. John Chelsom has worked for over 30 years in the field of Health Informatics. He qualified with a degree in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford and a PhD from City University, London, where he studied the application of artificial intelligence in medicine. In 2010, he started the Open Health Informatics research programme at City University, London, looking to address the causes of failure of the National Programme for IT. This research led to the development of the open source cityEHR – an ontology-based health records system, based on open standard, interfaces and development practices. cityEHR is now deployed as an operational EHR in several hospitals in England and is used for teaching students in health informatics.

Lambert Meertens became fascinated with computers at the age of 15, when he realized that there was no limit to the possibilities of computers but for the limitations of human imagination. This fascination has lasted to today. Enabling the general public to use computing technology productively and creatively has been a major motivation of his research.