Denny Vrandečić

Denny Vrandečić is Head of Special Projects at the Wikimedia Foundation. He is the lead of Abstract Wikipedia, which aims to give many more people the ability to contribute to, collaborate on, and read knowledge in their own language. Vrandečić is also Visiting Professor at King’s College London. Previously, he was an ontologist for the Google Knowledge Graph and researcher in Google AI. He is the founder of Wikidata, the collaboratively edited knowledge base behind Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects; founding administrator of the Croatian Wikipedia; co-creator of the widely used Semantic MediaWiki software; and a former member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. Vrandečić received a PhD from KIT on the topic of ontology evaluation. He is the recipient of the Knowledge Graph Conference Lifetime Achievement Award and the Computer Research Association’s Blue Sky Award. He has lived and worked in Karlsruhe, Rome, Los Angeles, Berlin, San Francisco, and now Stuttgart.