L3S research focuses on three key enablers for the European Information Society, namely Knowledge, Information and Learning, and combines this with a strong commitment to service to its affiliated universities in the field of eLearning. The first part of the talk will review the L3S project background in this context and highlight some of the projects currently running at L3S.

The second part focuses on "Personal Information Management" as guiding theme for several of these projects. Personal information management infrastructures provide advanced functionalities for accessing information from institutional repositories / digital libraries as well as personal collections, and facilitate knowledge sharing and exchange in work and learning contexts. Federated and peer-to-peer infrastructures, integrated search on metadata and full-text collections, and advanced personalization and ranking algorithms play an important role in this context.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl (born 1960) has been full professor of computer science at the University of Hannover since 1995. He received his M.Sc. (1984) and Ph.D. degree (1988) at the Technical University of Vienna, was assistant professor in Vienna from 1988 to 1992, and associate professor at the RWTH Aachen from 1992 to 1995. He worked as visiting researcher / professor at Xerox PARC, Stanford University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and EPFL Lausanne.

Prof. Nejdl heads the Distributed Systems Institute / Knowledge Based Systems (http://www.kbs.uni-hannover.de/) as well as the L3S Research Center (http://www.l3s.de/), and does research in the areas of semantic web technologies, peer-to-peer information systems, adaptive hypermedia systems and artificial intelligence. In the L3S he coordinates the Network of Excellence PROLEARN, as part of the 6th EU research program on technology enhanced learning, and participates as core partner in the KnowledgeWeb and REWERSE Networks of Excellence focusing on Semantic Web Technologies. Three additional new EU/IST Integrated Projects in these areas (NEPOMUK, PROLIX, TENCompetence) and one EU/IST STREP Project (COOPER) have started in 2006 at L3S.

Wolfgang Nejdl published more than 200 scientific articles and has been programm committee and editorial board member of numerous international conferences and journals, see also http://www.kbs.uni-hannover.de/~nejdl/