ICWE 2008 - Invited Keynote Speaker: Jürg von Känel
Jürg von Känel
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne
Sr Mgr Human Centric Tools; Relationship Manager for Financial Services Sector
Short Bio
Dr. Jürg von Känel from the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York, is the senior manager
of the Human Centric Tools group and also manages the relationship for IBM Research to the banking industry.
He studied math and computer science at ETHZ (Swiss Federal Polytechnicum, in Zürich) and holds a Masters
in Mathematics (1986) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science (1991) from ETHZ. He joined IBM in 1985 in Zärich
Switzerland, and has worked in application development and computer science research. In 1991 he moved to
the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in the US, where he took on the development of a multimedia messaging
system and contributed to the MIME and IMAP mail standards. In 1998 he took over the management of several
Internet multimedia projects around the topic of 'media enabling e-business' and helped advancing the state
of the art in the MPEG-4 and SMILE composite media standards arena. In 2000, he has taken on the management
of the next web interfaces area focused on Experience Services and Interaction Patterns. Since 2004 he is
leading the Human Centric Tools group focused on "Tools for the rest of us" – empowering
business users through social computing, collaboration, end-user programming, business rules and policy
authoring and decision making.
Since 2001 he is also the relationship manager for the IBM Research division to the banking industry,
and since 2006 to all of Financial Services. In this capacity he is driving IBM Research's thought
leadership on how technology impacts the financial services industries and vice-versa drives the research
agenda to address issues of importance to the banking sector. As part of his line management
responsibility he is driving issues around multi-channel customer interactions, customer modeling and
conversational marketing, as well as collaborative technologies for mobile workforces and customers.
Recently he has initiated an Enterprise Risk & Compliance Framework research effort focused primarily
on the banking industry and is leading this project across all of IBM Research. This ERM Framework led to
the Treasury and Risk magazine naming Juerg as one of the 100 most influential people in finance (see
http://www.treasuryandrisk.com/issues/2006_06/careers/536-1.html).
In his scarce spare time he and his wife are inventors, designers and makers of wooden, mechanical puzzles
(http://www.woodpuzzles.com, http://www.research.ibm.com/BurrPuzzles).
Other hobbies include photography, hiking, skiing and swimming.
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