Dr. Yesha Sivan

Dr. Yesha Sivan is the head of the Information Systems Program at the Tel Aviv-Yaffo Academic College School of Management and Economics. He is also the founder of Metaverse Labs (MVL) - a leading think tank focusing on connecting virtual and real worlds. Dr. Sivan is a pioneer and leader of technologies for knowledge infrastructures. His professional experience in the development of innovative workplaces for corporate, hi-tech, government, military and defense environments (see for example: the Harvard 9-Keys for Knowledge Infrastructure). Dr. Sivan received his doctorate from Harvard University, and is a research affiliate in Harvard's Program on Information Resources Policy; he was the entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) in JVP Venture Fund Studio. He is teaching Metaverse related courses in Afeka College of engineering, Tel Aviv University School of Computer Sciences, and Bar-Ilan University Executive MBA Program. His alter person is Dera Kit, and his blog is http://www.dryesha.com. He published numerous papers in the areas of knowledge, virtual worlds, and standards. His latest book about Virtual Worlds is called “Your Next World: Second Life as an introduction to the Metaverse.”




Jean H.A. Gelissen

Jean Gelissen studied at the Poly Technical School in Venlo, the Netherlands (graduated in Electronics, specialization Computer Technology, in 1977) and did a Post Graduate Course in Utrecht, The Netherlands (graduated in Informatics, 1986). His training was extended with a large number of technical and management courses from 1977 on during his professional career at Philips (Research Laboratories).
His professional career started in 1977 at Philips Research in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. He started in digital signal processing, both in software and hardware development, and gained large experience in computer networks, formal specification methods, multimedia as well as multimedia processing architectures and embedded software domain with a focus on architectures and methodology. He has been Department Head of the IPA (Information Processing Architectures) department (research group) in the Lifestyle program of Philips Research and has been appointed to Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships for the Lifestyle program that at Philips Research in 2006.
During his professional career Jean Gelissen has had a significant number of contributions to international conferences, journals and a number of books. He also has some 10+ patent applications on his name, some related to system architectures however most related to multimedia formats and services. He also has been involved in a large number of European project initiatives, as member, initiator as well as project leader in the IST (initiated and lead the OZONE and AMIGO projects) and ITEA (initiated and lead the EUROPA, Robocop, Space4U, Trust4All and Metaverse1 projects) programs.
He has been involved in the ISO/IEC MPEG standards body for some 12 years, also as the head of Dutch delegation, and has contributed to MPEG-4, MPEG-21 and has initiated and completed the MPEG-E 'Multimedia Middleware' standard ISO/IEC 23004. Recently he has initiated a new ISO work item that has already resulted in the first version of the MPEG-V 'Media context and control' standard ISO/IEC 23005.  Since the beginning of 2011 he has been appointed (part-time) as the Action Line Leader of the action line Health and Wellbeing of the EIT ICTLabs.