Dr. Barry Smith contributes to both theoretical and applied research in ontology. He is Distinguished Julian Park Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science and Engineering, and Neurology in the University at Buffalo. He is also Director of the National Center for Ontological Research.

His work led to the formation of the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry, a set of resources designed to support information-driven research in biology and biomedicine. He also contributes to ontology projects in the military and security domains and is one of the founders of the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) initiative, whose goal is to advance interoperability of information systems in the industrial domain.

Dr. Smith has authored over 700 publications with more than 40,000 citations and an h-index of 98. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the US, Swiss and Austrian National Science Foundations, the US Department of Defense, the Humboldt and Volkswagen Foundations, and the European Union. M.S., Oxford and Ph.D. Manchester.

Dr. Charles W. Clark is a NIST Fellow and past Chief, Electron and Optical Physics Division (Senior Executive Service), National Institute of Standards and Technology and JQI Fellow and past Co-Director, Joint Quantum Institute, NIST and the University of Maryland. Program Manager for Atomic, Molecular and Quantum Physics, Office of Naval Research, United States Navy 2003-2014. One of four founding Editors of NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions. Elected Chair: Physics Section, American Association for the Advancement of Science 2010; Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, American Physical Society 2005. Bronze, Silver and Gold Medals, U.S. Department of Commerce; Distinguished Presidential Rank Award, SES 2007.  Fellow of AAAS, APS, Optica, Institute of Physics, Washington Academy of Sciences, Bangladesh Physical Society. Visiting Fellow/Scholar at Christ Church and Merton Colleges, (University of Oxford), Australian National University, National University of Singapore, University of Malaya. Ph.D. Physics, University of Chicago, 1979; B.A. (Honors), Western Washington State College, 1974.

Jobst Landgrebe is a scientist and entrepreneur. He began his career as Fellow in the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, focusing on neurobiology of stress, anxiety and depression[3], and then as Senior Research Fellow at the University of Göttingen, working in cell biology and biomathematics. During this time (2002-06), he designed and established the University of Göttingen Transcriptome and Genome Analysis Laboratory and created open-source software for the analysis of gene expression profiles. From 2006 to 2014 he worked in medical informatics and life science consulting, working as a Senior Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton focusing on semantic interoperability in health care and drug development in the pharmaceutical industry, with the Basel-based health informatics company Clinerion, where he worked on semantic interoperability and symbolic AI. He then worked as Head of AI and Analytics for the Allianz health insurance company. He has lectured in Quantum Physics and Mathematics at the University at Buffalo, State University New York (SUNY), and is developing ontologies for physics, mathematics, and the Quantum Ontology being developed by this initiative.

In April 2013 he founded Cognotekt, an AI based language technology company whose software captures the meaning of text in a way that makes the text content available as formalized data for business process automation. He has published articles about the mathematical limits of AI and the book Why Machines Will Never Rule the World (Routledge), co-authored with Barry Smith. Currently he is working in the area of research in mathematics and physics ontology, with a special focus on the quantum physics domain.

Dr. Joanna Ptasinski serves as the head of the Cryogenic Electronics and Quantum Research Branch at the Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific where she also leads the NIWC Pacific Quantum Information Technology (QIT) Community of Interest (COI). She has been with NIWC Pacific for 19 years, joining the Center as a junior engineer with four years of college. Her career at NIWC Pacific enabled her to pursue a MSEE degree from San Diego State University, and with the help of the SMART Program, a PhD degree from the University of California San Diego with an emphasis in Photonics. Her research interests include QIT, Quantum Optics, Nanophotonics, and Plasmonics. Her recent work concentrates on understanding and exploiting quantum phenomena present in biological systems for computing applications, as well as Naval applications of quantum sensing, quantum machine learning and quantum enhanced optimization. Her basic research and development background allows her to mentor scientists and engineers within NIWC Pacific, in addition to budding researchers under the SMART Program.

She stood up several QIT focused training series for NIWC Pacific personnel aimed at expanding the Center’s role in this fast growing field. Additionally, Dr. Ptasinski serves as a liaison to IARPA, where she is seeking to expand NIWC PACIFIC’s role in test and evaluation (T&E) of IARPA products, as well as transition of those products into the Fleet. Dr. Ptasinski holds 31 US Patents, and she has authored over 25 publications, presentations or technical reports including two book chapters.

Dr. Terry L. Janssen is an information technologist focused on information systems, AI machine learning, and quantum information science (quantum mechanics on quantum hardware). He has consulted in and/or advanced information technology for most of the DOD/IC agencies. He began his career as Principal System Engineer at Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), which evolved into leading the AI and machine learning team at CSC. Five years later he was recruited as Sr. Scientist for the Decision Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory, where he worked on advanced information technology for six years (ANL is the nation’s leader in quantum physics, computing, communications, and quantum material science; it is a DOE laboratory that is managed by the University of Chicago). U. Chicago patented his work, with him as sole inventor. The U.S. Patent was used by U. Chicago to initiate Expert Decision System, Inc., a company for R&D for DOD/IC, for over five years. In 2003 he joined Lockheed Martin as Principal Systems Engineer and Chief Scientist for Knowledge Management, as related to AI machine learning. Dr. Janssen conducted R&D using machine reasoning (formal logic) on ontology for data integration and inference. He and co-authors (Dr. Barry Smith et al) were perhaps the first to suggest that ontology is the key to knowledge integration for the Intelligence Community in papers/chapters they published around 2010 [e.g., ref].  Dr. Janssen demonstrated the concepts in a prototype software system, which has been adopted by others. He and Dr. Barry Smith initiated the Semantic Technologies for Intelligence, Defense and Security during the same time-period, an international symposium hosted by George Mason University over the span of 10 years. A classified subgroup hosts meetings at TS/SCI. Dr. Janssen later developed a software prototype, DiscoveryAid™, in his company Janssen LLC, to facilitate the full lifecycle of AI machine learning and applications for augmenting humans. Dr. Janssen is a fluent coder (computer programming) and has done extensive software engineering and rapid prototyping of innovative systems over his long career; he has developed a large library of reusable (plug-and-play) software modules (Janssen LLC). In 2009 Lockheed Martin asked him to be the lead for their Cyber Offense contract at the U.S. European Command. After two years, in 2011, he was recruited by SAIC to be Chief Scientist for Cybersecurity (primary IC customer in Columbia, MD). In 2014 he accepted a lead role in cybersecurity design, architecture and authorization at NJVC, which included work on the FEMA security operations center (SOC). FEMA licensed and used the product, SecurityDART™, that Dr. Janssen had previously developed at his company Janssen.LLC. Dr. Janssen was a consultant to DISA, NGA, NRO and several other DOD/IC agencies. For the last three years Dr. Janssen has been Data Scientist (AI machine learning) for Invictus International Consulting. He has been providing AI machine learning, engineering and quantum technology support within a DOD/IC agency for the past three years. He has a Certificate in Quantum Computing from the University of Maryland, a. Ph.D., Information Technology, from the Volgenau School of Engineering at George Mason University, and M.S., Computer Science, from Boston University.