Programme Co-chairs

Panos Alexopoulos is a data and AI practitioner, author, and educator with over 20 years of experience working on data- and AI-driven systems across domains such as finance, healthcare, HR, and public administration. He currently works as Lead Data and AI Products at Triply BV, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, helping large organizations design, develop and deploy data management and AI solutions. He is also the author of an O’Reilly book on semantic data modeling and he is currently writing a new practitioner-focused book on AI evaluation, to be published by Manning in early 2027. Also, the CfP looks great, I have no particular comments.

Kurt Cagle is the publisher of The Cagle Report on LinkedIn, The Ontologist, and The Inference Engineer newsletters. Kurt is a published author with more than twenty books to his credit, and has been working as a technology editor for years, writing for Forbes, O'Reilly Media, IDC and others. He has also been a consulting information architect and ontologist with more than twenty years experience working with Fortune 100 companies and US and European agencies, and is a frequent speaker at conferences on data technologies.

Paulo brings over 17 years of experience in data analytics to the CDL26 Programme Committee, having delivered high-impact AI solutions across banking, healthcare, insurance, and retail.

Operating at the intersection of hands-on engineering and AI strategy, Paulo’s expertise spans Data Science, Causal AI, and Graph Databases. With over five years at the forefront of the LLM era, he focuses on bridging the gap between technical frameworks and business objectives. At CDL26, he is keen to see submissions that solve real-world challenges through trusted, transparent, and scalable AI architectures.

Giuseppe is Research Scientist and Knowledge Graphs Engineer with multidisciplinary experience focused on research, development and communication. He loves to explore new technologies to incorporate human knowledge into intelligent systems. Currently working as a Freelance Consultant and a Fellow of the Nexa Center for Internet & Society, he was previously Senior Data Scientist for GraphAware

Veronica is Knowledge Graph Lead at Capgemini, working on turning unstructured and chaotic data into a wonder of semantic knowledge graphs. Veronica is a public speaker on topics as Semantic Technologies, Knowledge Graphs, Natural Language Processing amongst others. Guest lecturer at the University of Oslo.

​Amy E. Hodler is graph advisor and consultant. With decades of commercial experience, including Neo4j and RelationalAI, she promotes graph technology in various industries and has founded the GraphGeeks community to foster cross-discipline interaction. Amy is highlighted as a distinguished speaker by G-Research and has authored/contributed to several books including Graph Algorithms (O’Reilly).

Maya Natarajan applies advanced technologies to complex, interdisciplinary problems, focusing on graph-based systems. She has 15 years of experience in graph technology and has contributed to advancing and positioning emerging fields such as blockchain, machine learning, and deep learning across industries. In 2020, she founded node2node to support graph companies like Neo4j and others in taking their products to market. Maya has a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Rice University and holds five patents.

​As founder, of Ontology Pipeline, Jessica Talisman has dedicated her 25 year career to exploring the dynamics of information and knowledge, and how information flows across systems.

Sergey Vasiliev is a data and technology professional at Wolters Kluwer, focused on connected data, semantic technologies, knowledge graphs and practical enterprise AI applications. He is interested in turning complex information into trusted, reusable knowledge assets and collaborating with communities that advance data interoperability, governance and real-world innovation at scale.

Ivo Velitchkov, an independent consultant, has worked for over 30 years with large public and private organizations, helping them with their strategy, structures and information. He’s the author of the book Essential Balances, the https://www.linkandth.ink newsletter, a couple of semantic technology wikis, and co-author of the book Personal Knowledge Graphs. He has a PhD in Computer Science. Ivo has trained hundreds of people on semantic technologies and has helped large organizations unify their data in enterprise knowledge graphs..

Prof. Dr. (Univ. Simón Bolívar) Maria-Esther Vidal leads the Scientific Data Management (SDM) group at TIB and the Leibniz joint-lab with the L3S Research Centre, and she is a full professor (on-leave) at Universidad Simón Bolívar (USB), Venezuela. She has made significant contributions to data management, semantic data integration, and machine learning over knowledge graphs. She is a co-author of over 150 peer-reviewed articles in Semantic Web, Databases, Bioinformatics, and Artificial Intelligence. She is also actively shaping her research communities, as an editorial board member of renowned journals, as well as general chair, co-chair, senior reviewer of major scientific events. 

Andrea Volpini, CEO of WordLift and co-founder of Insideout10, is a visionary entrepreneur with 25 years of expertise in semantic web, SEO, and AI, speaking at global events and contributing to publications like the Web Almanac, while initiating RedLink GmbH in 2013 to specialize in semantic content enrichment and natural language processing.