The core of any object or system (such as information system, transportation system, etc.) is its conceptual model. In the past, the conceptual modeling methodologies concentrate on modeling the "static" views (i.e., the snapshots) of the object or system. The Entity-Relationship (ER) modeling methodology proposed by the speaker has been adopted and practiced by millions of systems professionals and developers all over the world in the past three decades. The original ER model provides a static view. It is time to make two serious major extensions to the original ER model. One such a major extension is to add the "ACTIVE" components to the conventional ER model in order to handle a new set of user needs and applications. Another important extension is to make the conceptual model EXECUTABLE. In the past three decades, there have been proposals to extend the ER model in these two major directions. However, those proposed extensions were not widely adopted. We think now the time is right to make the extensions successful. In this talk, we will discuss several challenging research problems in making the extensions, which might be the reaons why past extensions were not successful. We believe that these challenging problems will provide an exciting frontier for research and applications in the next decade.

Dr. Peter Chen, is Distinguished Chair Professor of Computer Science and Adjunct Professor in the Business School at Louisiana State University (LSU). He is also the Director of specail projects, in the National Center for Security Research and Training (NCSRT) at LSU, a U.S. $50 million per year training organization for emergency workers (such as firemen, policemen, etc.). Many of the emergency workers during and after 9-11 terriorist attack in the World Trade buildings in NYC were trained by NCSRT.

Dr. Chen is internationally known for his development of the Entity-Relationship (ER) Model, the foundation of many systems analysis and design methodologies, computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools, and repository systems including IBM' s Repository Manager/MVS. The ER model was adopted as the U.S. ANSI standards for Information Resource Directory System (IRDS) and has been ranked as the top methodology for database design. It is used widely around the world. His original ER model paper was chosen as one of 38 most influential papers in Computer Science by a survey of over 1,000 computer science professors. The ER model is a fundamental topic in the ACM/IEEE recommended curriculum and serves as the foundation of the recent work on Object-Oriented (OO) techniques, UML, and Semantic Web.

After receiving a Ph.D. degree from Harvard, he has held faculty positions at MIT, UCLA, and Harvard besides LSU. Dr. Chen is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and AAAS. He received many top awards including ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award, IEEE Harry Goode Award, DAMA International Achievement Award, Stevens Software Method Innovation Award, and Pan Wen-Yuan Outstanding Research Award. He was inducted into the "Data Management Hall of Fame" and recognized as one of the 16 "software pioneers" in the world. Dr. Chen has served as an invited expert of the World Wide Web Consortium for 6 years. He was a member of the U.S. NSF/CISE Advisory Committee. From 2005 to 2009, he was a member of the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board recommending advanced technologies for reducing global threats. In addition to serving as a keynote/plenary speaker for more than 30 international conferences, Dr. Chen is one of 80 famous people listed in the The Free Online Dictionary of Computing . He is listed in Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World.