Thanassis Tiropanis is Professor with the Web and Internet Science group at the University of Southampton - Electronics Computer Science and CEO of WebDrop, a startup based in Southampton. He is also a Board Member of the Digital Enlightenment Forum. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of London and a DipIng in Computer Engineering and Informatics from the University of Patras, Greece.Prior to that he was Assistant Professor at the Athens Information Technology (AIT) centre and a Research Fellow at University College London. He was also visiting associate professor with the National University of Singapore, Department of Computer Science.Thanassis has been involved in a number of European collaborative research projects and nationally funded projects in the areas of data infrastructures, linked data, e-Learning, Grid and semantic Web technologies and has participated as researcher or served as technical coordinator and project manager in a number of projects related to service management, telecommunications network management, e-Commerce and e-Infrastructures.He has also engaged in consulting in the areas of Web technologies, e-Commerce and served as evaluator of research proposals.He is a Fellow and a chartered IT professional with the BCS, a senior member of the IEEE, a fellow of the Higher Education academy in the United Kingdom, and a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece.Specialities: Data infrastructures, Web science, Internet science, social machines, online social networks, linked data, semantic Web, virtual communities, service oriented architecture, web 2.0