Professor Joseph Hardin

The Director of the Collaborative Technologies Laboratory in the Duderstadt Center, and a Clinical Assistant Professor in the School of Information, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he is leading the CompreHensive collaborativE Framework (CHEF) project that is developing an open source framework and tools for course management systems, workgroup support, and support of online research, with support from NSF, NIH and U Michigan. He is also the Chairman of the Board for the Sakai Project, where the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) are joining forces to integrate and synchronize their considerable educational software into a modular, pre-integrated collection of open source tools. He has managed development of online collaboration systems for a good while, including when he was Associate Director of Software Development at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois-UC, from the early to the late 90ˆs. He is also a founder and board member of the International World Wide Web Conference Committee, (see http://www2004.org) and is teaching a graduate course on the Semantic Web for this winter.