Dan Nicolae
Dan Nicolae is Professor of Statistics at University of Chicago where he is also faculty 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. He has held visiting positions at deCode Genetics in Iceland, University of Oxford and UCLA. His research focus is on developing statistical and computational methods for understanding the human genetic variation and its influence on the risk for complex traits, with an emphasis on asthma related phenotypes. The methodology developed in his group is based on foundations in high-dimensional inference, machine learning and data science. The current focus in his statistical genetics research is centered on data integration and system-level approaches using large datasets that include clinical and environmental data as well as various genetics/genomics data types: DNA variation, gene expression (RNA-seq), methylation and microbiome. Dan Nicolae has advised more than 50 researchers at all levels (Master, PhD and Post-Doctoral) and has published more than 130 articles in scientific journals. He has been member of numerous Advisory and Editorial Boards and has served on panels in United States, Canada, UK and European Union.
Razvan Bunescu
Razvan C. Bunescu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UNC Charlotte. Previously, he was a Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Ohio University. He received the PhD degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007, with a dissertation on machine learning methods for information extraction. His research interests lie in the general area of machine learning, with a focus on applications in natural language processing, music information retrieval, biomedical informatics, computer architecture, and more recently computational creativity. His work has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Webpage: https://webpages.charlotte.edu/rbunescu.
Anna Fensel
Prof. Dr. Anna Fensel (former name: Anna V. Zhdanova) is a Full Professor in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, the Netherlands. Previously, she was an Associate Professor and Senior Assistant Professor at STI Innsbruck, Department of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Austria, and prior to this worked as a Senior Researcher at FTW – Telecommunications Research Center Vienna, Austria, and a Research Fellow at the University of Surrey, UK, and as a project employee at DERI Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck, Austria. Anna has earned both her habilitation (2018) and her doctoral degree (2006) in Computer Science at the University of Innsbruck. Prior to that, she has received a diploma in Mathematics and Computer Science equivalent to the Master degree in 2003 from Novosibirsk State University, Russia. Anna has been extensively involved in European and national projects related to Semantic technologies, e.g. as a consortium coordinator (EURegio project REEeT, FFG projects TourPack, SESAME-S and SESAME, ÖAD project RESIDE), a partner project manager (H2020 OntoCommons, H2020 smashHit, Eurostars WordLiftNG, Interreg KI-Net, BMWi-FFG CampaNeo, H2020 ENTROPY, FFG DALICC, FFG OpenFridge, FP7 CSA BYTE, FP7 CA BIG, FP7 CA PRELIDA, FP7 STREP m:Ciudad, FP7 NoE PlanetData, AAL PeerAssist, FP6 IST IP SPICE, FP5 IST project Esperonto) as well as a technical contributor in other numerous projects. She has been a co-organizer or a Program Committee member of more than 100 scientific events including being in chair roles at top events such as SEMANTiCS and ESWC, a reviewer for numerous journals and a project proposals evaluator for funding agencies (EU H2020 and FP6, Eureka-Eurostars, national funding). She is a (co-)author of ca. 140 refereed publications. Webpage: https://sites.google.com/site/annafensel.
Radu Prodan
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.
Ioan Toma
Dr. Ioan Toma is the COO and co-founder of ONLIM GmbH, an Austrian startup focusing on Chatbots and Intelligent Assistants, being responsible for the research activities of the company. In the past 8 years, he was a senior researcher at Semantic Technology Institute (STI) Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck, Austria. Ioan’s current research areas include Semantics, Knowledge Graphs, Chatbots and Intelligent Assistants. Ioan received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, with a thesis on Modelling and Ranking Semantic Web services based on Non-functional properties and a Diploma of Engineering and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Ioan has been involved in a number of research projects at national and European levels (e.g., ASG, DIP, eFreight, ENVISION, EuTravel, FITMAN, Grisino, LarKC, LDBC, LDCT, MSEE, OntoHealth, RENDER, ServiceWeb3.0, SEALS, SESA, and SOA4All). He has published around 85 articles as book chapters, conference papers, workshops papers and journal articles. Ioan has also co-organised multiple workshops and has been a member of many conference and workshop program committees.
Dumitru Roman
Dumitru Roman works as a Senior Research Scientist at SINTEF AS (Norway) – the largest independent research organization in Scandinavia. 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 14 years 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 field, focusing on innovation projects enabling data-driven business products and services. He holds an adjunct associate professorship at the University of Oslo, Norway.
Pawel Gasiorowski
Dr. Pawel Gasiorowski is a Senior Research Fellow at the Cyber Security Research Centre of London Metropolitan University and Senior Researcher at GATE. Over the years he developed a particular interest in Computer Graphics, Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence. His PhD is in the area of modelling, capturing and visual analysis of individual and group dynamic behaviours in bound spaces. He works with Prof. Vassilev direct supervision on a wide range of projects related to cyber security. He leads research and development of a software prototype for real-time cyber-attack detection and anticipation. His major research is about visual segmentation and analysis of human actions and events observed in physical indoor and outdoor spaces. In addition, Pawel is an Associate Lecturer contributing to teaching on software engineering practices at London Metropolitan University.
Jože Rožanec
Jože is a Researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Jožef Stefan Institute), and a machine learning engineer at Qlector d.o.o. (developing intelligent solutions for smart factories). 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).
Nikolay Nikolov
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.
Wiktor Sowinski-Mydlarz
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.
Brian Elvesæter
Brian Elvesæter is a senior scientist at the department for Sustainable Communication Technologies at SINTEF Digital. He holds a Cand. Scient. degree in computer science from the University of Oslo in 2000. He has been doing research and development on model-driven software engineering, software development methods, service-oriented and component-based software architectures, enterprise interoperability and data management since 2000. His current research focuses on data-and-platform-as-a-service, data management, linked data, big data and data pipelines, knowledge graphs and semantic technologies, and graph analytics in combination with AI and Machine Learning. He has experience as technical manager and work package leader from a number of European projects in FP5, FP6, FP7 and H2020.