Amit Sheth is the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar for Advanced Data Management and Analysis, an endowed faculty position funded by LexisNexis and the Ohio Board of Regents at Wright State University. Prof. Sheth was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his work in information integration, workflow management, and semantic interoperability. He was among the first to recognize the strategic importance of database interoperability and the architectural principles of database federation. His insights in the late 80s and early 90s raised issues key to the integration of enterprise and Web data sources for business, scientific, and defense intelligence applications. The cumulative results of his innovative, multidisciplinary research and technology development include significant applications in health care, biomedical research, defense intelligence, financial services, telecommunication, and GIS. Not only he is among the best cited authors in computer science, his research has led to two successful companies, a number of commercial products from large and small companies, and many deployed applications, as well as international and community-accepted standards. He is recognized especially for his achievements in the three research areas discussed below:1

·        Information Integration Prof. Sheth is well known for his research contributions in:

o       Federated and multidatabase architectures for integration and interoperability of heterogeneous databases, organized along the dimensions of distribution, heterogeneity, and autonomy;

o       Schema and view integration, with new and practical integration techniques and tools including the first tool on schema integration (1987) developed in the United States;

o       Quality and integrity of data in multiple databases, defining the concept of polytransaction and multidatabase consistency specification with innovative ticketing method for multidatabase concurrency control.

His 1990 ACM Computing Surveys paper, with over 1925 citations, is the most cited in this area, the second most cited paper in the broader area of distributed database, and the second most cited paper among over 1000 published in that important journal. He offered the first tutorial on heterogeneous database integration at the International Conference on Data Engineering in 1987.

·        Workflow Management and Semantic Web Services In the early 1990s, he initiated research in the formal modeling, scheduling, and correctness of workflows. His METEOR project demonstrated the value of research with real-world applications; its tools were used in graduate courses in several countries, and its technology was licensed to create a commercial product. The follow-on METEOR-S project has been highly influential. He led research (later joined by IBM) that resulted in the W3C submission of WSDL-S, the basis for SAWSDL, developed by a Working Group in which he and his team actively participated and now a W3C recommendation. He currently guides the development of SA-REST, which supports microformat-based annotation of popular RESTful services and WebAPIs. For both SAWSDL and SA-REST, he has provided leadership in the community-based process followed by W3C. He coauthored a 1995 paper in the journal Distributed & Parallel Databases (Springer)that is the most cited paper in the workflow management literature, with more than 1200 citations, as well as the most cited among over 430 papers published in that journal.

 

·        Semantic Interoperability/Integration and Semantic Web Prof. Sheth has investigated, demonstrated, and advocated comprehensive use of metadata. He explored syntactical, structural, and semantic metadata; recently, he has pioneered ontology-driven approaches to metadata extraction and semantic analytics. He was among the first researchers to utilize description logic (DL) based ontologies for schema and information integration (a decade before W3C adopted a DL-based ontology representation standard). His work on multi-ontology query processing includes the most cited paper on the topic (over 485 citations). In 1996, he introduced the powerful concept of Metadata Reference Link (MREF) for associating metadata to hypertext that links documents on the Web, and described an RDF-based realization in 1998, long before RDF was adopted as a W3C recommendation.

Prof. Sheth is among the most highly cited authors in computer science, as supported by the following objective information:

·        His scientific and technical publications have received over 12,000 citations. Several papers are among the top cited in their journals and conferences. As of end of 2007, his papers are the most cited or second most cited, respectively, in ACM Computing Surveys, Distributed and Parallel Databases, Journal of Information Technology and Management, the International Conference on Web Services, and the International Conference on Formal Ontologies in Information Systems. Two papers were awarded best paper of the conference, three were nominated for best paper awards, and several were selected as best paper of the track or session.

·        His h-index is 54 (54 publications with at least 50 citations each), and 24 of his papers have over 100 citations each. He has published over 250 papers and articles.

·        He is among the top one or two researchers in Semantic Web in the US and among the top three in the world, based on the impact of research publication. In the area of workflow, he is among the two most cited authors, and in Semantic Web services he is probably the most cited author.

He has given over 200 invited talks and colloquia, including 30+ keynotes; (co)-organized or chaired 45 international conferences or workshops; and served on 125+ program committees. He is a co-inventor on two international patents in workflow transactions and semantic technology. He is founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS), joint Editor-in-Chief of the Distributed and Parallel Database Journal (DAPD), and editor of two Springer book series: Semantic Web and Beyond (with R. Jain) and Advances in Database Systems (with A. Elmagarmid). He serves on the editorial boards of five journals including IEEE Internet Computing.

Prof. Sheth's students are highly successful. They have been employed in academia (e.g., NCSU), industry (in premier internet and software companies such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, SAP, SAP Research, and IBM as well as in startups), and government research labs (e.g., LBNL). A number are already recognized as leaders in their own right (Vipul Kashyap, George Cardoso, Kunal Verma).

Prof. Sheth uniquely combines outstanding academic research credentials and the practical entrepreneurial ability to produce successful applications to real-world problems from theoretical models. In 1999 he founded (and led as CEO and as CTO) a Semantic Web technology company, licensing his research at the LSDIS lab at the University of Georgia, which he directed. This company (Taalee, later Voquette/Semagix) was the first to commercialize Semantic Search on Web for multimodal (audio, video, and text) data. At its acquisition in 2006, Semagix was a successful company with 35 employees and Fortune 500 customers. Its activities led to over $7 million in payroll in the economy of Athens, Georgia, before the company moved to Atlanta on its merger. Innovations demonstrated by Semagix's products include the ability to create very large ontologies (populated by millions of assertions) and to extract semantic metadata from heterogeneous (unstructured, semistructured, and structured) data. His research and development activities have resulted in several commercial products and many deployed applications in the areas of healthcare, biomedical research, financial services, and defense/intelligence. His leadership resulted in SAWSDL, a W3C recommendation (standard), and Glyde, a standard for data exchange adopted by the international research community in complex carbohydrates.

He received his BE from BITS, Pilani, in 1981 and MS and PhD from Ohio State University in 1983 and 1985, respectively. After an early career in industry R&D (at Bellcore, Unisys, and Honeywell, 1985–2004), he became an academic but took breaks as an entrepreneur to demonstrate the impact of his research through technology transfer and commercialization. He was keynote speaker at the first technical meeting organized on Semantic Web (2000) and has since given many keynote and invited talks on the subject. Several of his 20-plus tutorials have been the best attended at their events, including his tutorials “Real World Applications of Semantic Web” at WWW2007; “Service Oriented Architectures and Semantic Web Processes” at the International Conference on Web Services 2004; “Workflow Automation: Applications, Technology, and Research,” at SIGMOD 1995; and “Federated Databases for Managing Distributed, Heterogeneous, and Autonomous Databases” at VLDB 1992.

He currently directs the Kno.e.sis Center for Knowledge enabled Information & Services Science. The Center and Eminent Scholar's activities are housed on the third floor of the WSU College of Engineering and Computer Science's new $11 million Joshi Research Center, a focal point for statewide research in advanced data management, visualization, bioinformatics, sensor technologies, and more. Prof. Sheth and Kno.e.sis collaborate closely with daytaOhio. With five collaborating faculty members (soon be seven) and 17 PhD students, Kno.e.sis Center is arguably the largest Semantic Web research group in the US and is also one of the most influential in Services Computing. Prof. Sheth has led well over $10 million in research funded by NSF, NIH, NIST, DARPA, ARDA, AFRL, and NRL; his research has won gifts and competitive awards from top companies including IBM (Faculty award, Eclipse Innovation award, UIMA Innovation award), Microsoft Research, HP Research, Boeing, MCC, Bellcore, and LG Electronics. In addition, he has received and managed well over $5 million in funding that has led to various technology development and commercialization efforts.

1Citation data primarily from Google Scholar as of July 08, 2008.