László Kovács

Dr. Laszlo Kovacs, technical doctor in computer science is the founder and head of the Department of Distributed Systems (DSD) at MTA SZTAKI, the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 1995. He taught in different foreign universities including the University of Montreal (Canada), the University of Delaware (USA) and the Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan (France). Currently his professional interests include R&D of self-aware self-organizing pervasive computing, CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), distributed groupware applications, social computing, semantic web and web services, distributed digital library and archive systems. Digital art, science philosophy are also included in his professional activities.

Laszlo has over 15 years experience in managing of EU framework programmes for research (20+ projects, e.g. BREIN, ABILITES, GeneSyS, EUTIST-AMI, INFRAWEBS, DELOS, Web4Groups), as well as a number of development projects for large corporations e.g. for RICOH, Nuance, T-Com.

He served as one of the Program Committee Chairs of the 12th International World Wide Web Congress held in Budapest (WWW2003), and was the General Chair of the 11th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL) held in Budapest, in 2007 among numerous other international scientific conferences. He is the member of the Advisory Committee of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and head of the W3C Hungarian Office. He serves in the Steering Committee of ECDL/TPDL conference series and is a member of the editorial board of International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL). He is a recurrent reviewer of EC and NSF.