Behind the curtain

Here are the people who are making this conference possible:

Filip Borloo has been active in the internet industry since the mid nineties.

During the dot com boom he was working for one of the earliest entrants in the content management market, Mediasurface. Filip was one of the first non-technical employees and was involved in all aspects of growing the business. As International Business Development Manager he was responsible for setting up offices in San Francisco, New York, Munich, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm and Amsterdam for Mediasurface.In 2002 Filip returned to Belgium and worked as an Information Architect and Strategy Consultant for large government projects. He also helps start ups bringing products to the European markets.

Reinoud Bosman has been working as an IA since 1999 going from e-education to e-government to e-commerce. Projects he worked on include the UK online Tax Return while working at EzGov and applications for the mobile internet at his current employer MediaCatalyst. He discovered he was doing Information Architecture while working in Sydney where he heard of the term first and now tries to negotiate puzzled faces of family, friends and recruiters by helping to organise a conference on the topic. He holds a degree in Biology which only adds to the confusion.

Ariel has been working in de User Experience field since 1996, first in The Netherlands and since 2002 in Spain, where he was a partner of two of the best known user experience firms of Spain.

He currently leads the Interaction and Graphic Design Department at ELISAVA University of Design in Barcelona, where he also teaches courses for graduate and pregraduate students. He lectures at other universities in Spain, such as ESADE Business School and University of Barcelona.
He is also the director of the Design Obervatory, a public and private funded research platform.

Ariel still works every now and then as an independent user experience consultant, he also has a blog: interacciones.org and still finds lots of time to be with his two daughters. Does he ever sleep? He does.

He holds a degree in information and media management.

Margaret Hanley has worked as an Information Architect for more than 10 years on three continents. Margaret is currently the Executive Producer of Core Products for bbc.co.uk, managing a set of IA related products like search, homepage and Programme Information Pages. While working as an IA at the BBC, she developed content models and controlled vocabularies to describe everything from "Composer of the Week" to traffic updates on the Nottingham WIL site. Prior to joining the BBC, she served as Senior Information Architect at Ingenta in Oxford. In the United States, Margaret was a project manager for Argus Associates, concentrating on the development of deep information architecture for corporate web sites. Clients included Microsoft, IBM, Square D and LookSmart.

Richard Hill has been working with ASIS&T since 1989, having previously run a private recruiting firm for three years and managed a trade association for three years. He has been membership development director, director of communications, and director of government affairs. Dick has a masters degree in Comparative Literature from Occidental College and taught high school for 6 years.

Theba Islam has been a practising Information Architect for eight years.
She leads the IA/User experience initiatives for a European Investment Bank, where she focuses on improving the online experience of its corporate clients, investors & fund managers.
Projects span from establishing navigation schemes, standards & patterns across Global Markets portal to designing market analytic tools allowing traders to graph rates & prices from 1000s of instruments & markets.

Prior to this she worked at LexisNexis, where her specialisation was on drawing on user research to inform taxonomy design & creating user-focused search features to help news & business and legal users find research quickly & easily.

In her spare time she runs a free, weekly internet literacy workshop for disadvantaged adults in her local community.

James Kalbach holds a degree in library and information science from Rutgers University, as well as a master’s in music theory and composition. He is currently a Human Factors Engineer with LexisNexis and previously served as head of information architecture with Razorfish Germany. James is an active speaker and author on information architecture and usability in Germany, where he has cofounded an IA community.

James is the author of Designing Web Navigation (O'Reilly, 2007) and he blogs at www.experiencinginformation.com.

Judit is a User Experience Specialist, she has been working at CompLex Publisher, a Wolters Kluwer company, for 6 years. She is involved in software development and web projects, taking care of the user interface and dealing with concept development, usability as well as branding issues.

Judit holds a master’s degree in chemistry education, but chose to test users and analyse content structure instead of chemicals, while creating her thesis on educational hypermedia. Later she trained as a multimedia developer and a technical manager with a focus on marketing. She gave multimedia development courses and designed e-learning materials for post-secondary education, e.g. at the Budapest Polytechnic.

Eric Reiss has been actively involved in the creation of menu-based programs, hypertext games, multimedia, and web projects for almost 30 years. In 2006, he co-founded FatDUX, a user-experience design company headquartered in Copenhagen with subsidiaries in Germany, Italy, and the United States.

In November, 2000, his book, Practical Information Architecture was published by Addison-Wesley. In 2002, it became available in Japanese and Korean. He is also the author of Web Dogma, co-instigator of the IA Slam, and a frequent speaker at conferences and educational institutions throughout Europe and North America.

Eric is currently completing his second term as president of the Information Architecture Institute, afterwhich he will be lecturing at Instituto de Empresa Business School in Madrid, Spain as Associate Professor of Usability and Design -- in addition to his ongoing duties as Senior Content Strategist at FatDUX Copenhagen and CEO of the FatDUX Group.

Luca is a free lance Information Architect and assistant professor in Informatics for Humanistic Science (i.e. Information Architecture and Human Computer Interaction) at University for Foreigners of Perugia (Università per Stranieri di Perugia), in Italy. Luca is co-author of the book "Organizing Knowledge: From Lybraries to Information Architecture for the Web" (Milan, 2006) and author of the book "Information Architecture: From Everyday things to the Web" (Milan, 2007). He supports a holistic approach to IA, and the application of IA to everyday environments. His website is http://lucarosati.it.