Ivan 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 Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where I have a tenure position since 1988. I’ve 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, then as Semantic Web Activity Lead until December 2013. Since June of 2013, I am Publishing@W3C Technical Lead.

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 9^th 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 (recently renamed “The Web Conference”) series.

Some personal data

• Nationalities (for unusual family reasons I have been 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.
• More about the private me
• Gender: male
• Family: I am married and have a son, David.
• City of birth: 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
• (Mobile) Phone: +31-641044153
• Skype ID: ivan_herman
• I have two homes, spending, roughly, 5-6 months in both places in a year:
  • Aix-en-Provence, France
  • Amstelveen, a suburb of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.