Kim H. Veltman (1948-)

Kim H. Veltman is Scientific Director of VMMI (Virtual Maastricht McLuhan Institute); author and consultant re: implications of new media for scholarship, culture and society. He has taught at the universities of Gottingen, Rome, Carleton; was Director of the Perspective Unit, McLuhan Program, Toronto (1990-1996), and Director of the Maastricht McLuhan Institute (1998-2005). He has worked as a consultant in new media to the CEO of Bell Media Linx (1996-1998), and done research on new media and standards for Northern Telecom, now Nortel Networks (1995-1998). He is a permanent consultant to the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. He is on the Board of the Special Interest Group for the Semantic Web and Information Systems (SIGSEMIS), is on a number of scientific committees and is a member of the International Who's Who of Professionals.

Trained in history and philosophy of science, culture and art, he has spent twenty years as a post-doctoral fellow with support from the Canada Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Wellcome Trust, the Volkswagen, Alexander von Humboldt, Thyssen and Gerda Henkel Foundations, and the Getty Trust. His research began with two historical topics: the history of perspective, and Leonardo da Vinci. Confronted with the limitations of print media in presenting the results of his research, he began writing on new media with respect to scholarship and culture and on new means of access to knowledge. During the 1980s he began studying new models of culture which go beyond the limits of euro-centric and asian-centric approaches.

He is the author of 4 published books; 7 books available electronically; 80 articles in books; 18 articles in refereed journals; 20 articles available electronically and a number of vision statements. For the past 30 years he has lectured in five languages on the five continents on possibilities and dangers of new media with respect to cultural and historical dimensions of knowledge organization, semantics and multiple models of culture.

His initial prototoype of a System for Universal Media Searching (SUMS) represented Canada at the G7 exhibitions in Brussels and Halifax (1995). In 1996, SUMS was chosen as part of G8 pilot project 5: Multimedia Access to World Cultural Heritage and represented Canada at the G8 Information Society and Developing Countries (ISAD) Conference in Midrand. He advised and helped the EC on their MOU for Culture and their MEDICI programme, joined the EC's delegations to Japan, Egypt and China and continues as an informal advisor. He founded and directed E-Culture Net as a Thematic Network. He has been invited to become a founding member of the proposed new European University of Culture (Paris, Berlin, Bologna and Madrid). In 1996, he was awarded the International Capire Prize for a Creative Future in the area of science and art integration.

A short cv and a comprehensive curriculum vitae are available.