Visiting Research Associate

Margaret Warren is a research scientist focused on the intersection of semantics, metadata, knowledge representation and information science. She is deeply interested in how people describe what they experience visually and how to capture and formalize this knowledge into machine readable structures.

Warren works at the intersection of embedded metadata, knowledge graphs, and data-centric AI from a distinctly human-centered perspective.

Warren currently serves as CEO and CTO of Metadata Authoring Systems LLC, a technology consultancy that helps businesses and organizations increase the value and impact of their vast arrays of digital imagery. She also serves as a Technical Advisor for the Foto App, a social media app for photographers and image makers, where she provides technical strategies and subject matter expertise to their team.

Warren is the creator of ImageSnippets™, a metadata management and information publishing system. Originally created to support Warren’s image annotation research, it has grown into a fully operational web application that empowers users to annotate and publish images on the web with industry standard structured linked data. The platform also functions as an ontology engineering system with visual prompts for subject matter experts. Its pioneering approach uses a human-in-the-loop interface with AI-augmented image labeling to construct knowledge graphs and can be highly useful for training AI models in scene graph prediction. The system has been the subject of invited talks at Google, the Internet Archive, CEPIC, IPTC Photo-Metadata conferences, Florida Institute of Technology and IHMC.

Warren started her career by serving in the United States Coast Guard as a Cryptographic Technician. She studied computer science at Florida State University then held successive positions in multimedia, technology, software programming, and network system administration. She formed her own company to provide networking, hardware, and software services across the Gulf Coast, and successfully managed it for over 15 years. In July 2019, Warren served as part of a small team that built an experimental, functional mesh network for the Decentralized Web Camp, Pescasdero, California, which was sponsored by the Internet Archive.

Warren earned a bachelor’s degree in information technology from the University of West Florida. She is a member of the International Press and Telecommunications Council (IPTC) photo-metadata working group, which is responsible for developing standards for image metadata in digital media resources. She is also a member of the C2PA and the Content Authenticity Initiative, which promote the adoption of open industry standards for content authenticity and provenance and develop technical standards to certify source and history of media content. Warren is a member of the DBpedia Association, a large-scale public knowledge graph that sits at the heart of linked data on the web, and she also participates in World FAIR – a consortium defining the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) standards for data.

Warren is considered a subject matter expert in her field. She has contributed to published papers and a chapter devoted to images and their role in knowledge graphs in the book Personal Knowledge Graphs: Connected thinking to boost productivity, creativity and discovery. She holds a patent for her work in semantic annotations (Device for construction of computable linked semantic annotations – U.S. Patent No. 9,720,895) and frequently speaks at conferences.

Besides semantics, metadata, and information science, Warren enjoys yoga, meditation, working in pit crews at Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) racing events, long road trips, hiking, and Formula 1 racing. Warren is also an award winning visual artist.