Dan Nicolae
Professor, PhD
Dan Nicolae is the Elaine M. and Samuel D. Kersten, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Statistics at University of Chicago where he has served as chair of the Department of Statistics from 2016-2022, section chief for the Section of Genetic Medicine from 2015-2016, and is currently founding co-Director of the Data Science Institute. Originally from Craiova, Dan Nicolae graduated from “Facultatea de Matematica” of University of Bucharest in 1995, and has obtained his PhD in Statistics from University of Chicago in 1999. His research seeks to understand the role of genetic, genomic and environmental factors, and their interactions, in the development of common/complex diseases. A statistical geneticist and a mathematical statistician, he specializes in developing methodological advances for large data problems in biology and medicine. Particular interests include functional genomics, microbiome, integration of omics data, networks, and systems biology. The statistical and computational methods developed by his group are based on foundations in high-dimensional statistical inference, machine learning and data science.
Cornelia Caragea
Cornelia Caragea is a Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Information Retrieval Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). Caragea currently serves as Program Director at the National Science Foundation. Her research interests are in natural language processing, artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, and information retrieval. Caragea’s work has been recognized with several National Science Foundation (NSF) research awards, including the prestigious NSF CAREER award. She has published many research papers in top venues such as ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, ICML, AAAI, and IJCAI and was a program committee member for many such conferences. She reviewed for many journals including Nature, ACM TIST, JAIR, and TACL, served on many NSF review panels, and organized several workshops on scholarly big data. In 2020-21, she received the College of Engineering (COE) Research Award, which is awarded to faculty in the College of Engineering at UIC for excellent research contributions. Caragea was included on an Elsevier list of the top 2% of scientists in their fields for her single-year impact in 2020.
Radu Prodan
Professor, PhD
Radu Prodan is a professor in distributed systems at the Institute of Software Technology, University of Klagenfurt. He received his PhD in 2004 from the Vienna University of Technology and was Associate Professor until 2018 at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. His research interests include performance, optimization, and resource management tools for distributed and parallel systems. He participated in numerous national and European projects. Presently he coordinates the Horizon 2020 project ARTICONF that researches a decentralized platform and ecosystem for next-generation social media applications. He authored over 200 publications and received two IEEE best paper awards.
Anna Fensel
the Netherlands
Professor, PhD
Prof. Dr. Anna Fensel is a Full Professor of AI and Data Science at Wageningen University & Research, Netherlands. She was previously an Associate Professor at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and a Senior Researcher at FTW Vienna. She earned her habilitation (2018) and PhD (2006) in Computer Science from the University of Innsbruck, and a Master's equivalent diploma in Mathematics and Computer Science from Novosibirsk State University, Russia (2003). Anna has led or contributed to numerous European and national projects related to semantic technologies, linked data, and knowledge graphs. She has held key roles in projects like EURegio REEeT, H2020 OntoCommons, and many more. She has also co-organized or served on committees for over 100 scientific events, including top conferences such as RuleML+RR, SEMANTiCS, and ESWC. As a reviewer, editor, and project evaluator for agencies like EU H2020, she has co-authored around 150 refereed publications.
Ioan Toma
Chief AI Officer, PhD
Ioan Toma is the Chief AI Officer and co-founder of ONLIM GmbH, an Austrian startup focusing on Chatbots and Intelligent Assistants, being responsible for the research activities of the company. Ioan’s current research areas include Conversational AI and Knowledge Graphs. Ioan received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Innsbruck, Austria and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Ioan has been involved in numerous research projects at national and European levels. He authored over 85 articles as book chapters, conference papers, workshops papers and journal articles.
Dumitru Roman
Senior Research Scientist / Professor, PhD
Dumitru Roman works as a Senior Research Scientist at SINTEF AS (Norway) and Professor at OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University (Norway). He has wide experience with initiating, leading, and carrying out data-driven and research-intensive projects, participating in dozens of large international projects during the past two decades in which he has collaborated with large numbers of private companies, public sector organizations, universities, and research institutes. He is currently active in the data management, data science and AI fields, focusing on innovation projects enabling data-driven business products and services.
Jože Rožanec
Researcher/Machine Learning Engineer
Jože is a Researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Jožef Stefan Institute), and a machine learning engineer. He collaborates with the American Slovenian Education Foundation, where he leads multiple activities for Fellows and Alumni. Over more than ten years, he worked in software engineering and machine learning-related roles for several companies (e.g., Mercado Libre, Navent, Globant). His research interests include machine learning methods for recommendations, fraud detection, demand forecasting, active learning, and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI).
Wiktor Sowinski-Mydlarz
GATE Institute, Bulgaria
Lecturer in Computer Science and Applied Computing/Senior Research Scientist, PhD
Dr. Viktor Sowinski-Mydlarz is a senior researcher at GATE and post-doctoral researcher at the Cyber Security Research Centre of London Metropolitan University. His PhD is the area of hybrid frameworks for data processing, which combine logical and machine learning methods for data analysis. He is highly experienced in software integration, particularly in containerization, orchestration and monitoring of data analytics engines on the cloud. Dr. Sowinski-Mydlarz has been working with Prof. Vassilev over the last 5 years on a number of projects, funded by Lloyds Banking Group and Innovate UK. He is currently working on the visualization of air quality in Sofia, Bulgaria on Cesium Ion and integration with GATE Data Platform. He also lectures in Cloud Computing and Internet of Things and teaches Cyber Security Fundamentals and Ethical Hacking.
Roberto Avogadro
Research Scientist, PhD
Roberto Avogadro is a Researcher at SINTEF Digital in the Smart Data group. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Milano-Bicocca. His research within the Smart Data Group is centered on the data linking problem, exploring how AI-based solutions can be applied to this area. Roberto has recently joined SINTEF, bringing his academic expertise into the practical realm of smart data challenges.
Nikolay Nikolov
Research Scientist
Nikolay Nikolov is a Research Scientist at SINTEF Digital Smart Data group. His current research is focused around novel methods to support the lifecycle of Big Data pipelines processing, enabling their definition, model-based analysis and optimization, simulation, and deployment on top of decentralized heterogeneous infrastructures. Nikolay has been doing applied research related to data management, data integration, data enrichment, big data, and the semantic web since 2014 as part of SINTEF Digital. During the recent years, he has been involved in research, implementation and technical coordination in the context of several national and international research projects in the area of data-driven innovation. Nikolay holds a joint Erasmus Mundus M.Sc. degree in Service Engineering from Stuttgart University, University of Crete and Tilburg University. Nikolay's main interest and focus is on approaches for supporting the lifecycle of Big Data pipelines on the Computing Continuum.
Hui Son
Senior Research Scientist
Hui Song is a senior research scientist with SINTEF Digital, Norway. His research interest includes software and AI engineering, with a particular focus on the DevOps of software and AI applications on the cloud-edge computing continuum. He has a long experience in EU- and Norway-funded research and innovation projects, and is currently coordinating the Horizon Europe project INTEND.
Gabriel Terejanu
Associate Professor, PhD
Gabriel Terejanu is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, with prior academic roles at the University of South Carolina and a fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin. His industry background includes positions as a software engineer and quantitative researcher in IT and financial services. Dr. Terejanu's research focuses on causal modeling, uncertainty quantification, machine learning, and integrating physics-based models with data-driven approaches. His interdisciplinary endeavors have propelled advancements across sectors ranging from agriculture to aerospace and from materials discovery to understanding polarization on social media. He has received funding for his work from the Army Research Office, Toyota Research and Development, Lowe's Innovation Fund, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and the National Science Foundation. Webpage
Daniel Thilo Schroeder
Research Scientist / Associate Professor, PhD
Dr. Daniel Thilo Schroeder, residing in Oslo, is a Research Scientist and Associate Professor specializing in big data analytics, complex networks and digital communication. He is a member of the Smart Data group at SINTEF, contributing to the development of sustainable platforms for processing extreme data and building high-quality, FAIR-compliant datasets that fortify the effectiveness of AI applications. In his position as Associate Professor at Oslo Metropolitan University, Dr. Schroeder explores the influence of digital communication on conflict development and mediation in sub-Saharan Africa. During his postdoc at the Simula Research Laboratory, he engaged in pivotal work to expand the application of deep learning to unstructured data through the development of computational frameworks. Earning his PhD from the Technical University of Berlin, Dr. Schroeder has been involved in multiple projects centered around understanding and mitigating the rapid spread of online misinformation.