Event Chairs

Joaquim Filipe Polytechnic Institute of Setubal / INSTICC Portugal

Brief Bio
Joaquim B L Filipe is currently a Coordinator Professor of the School of Technology of the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal (EST-Setúbal), Portugal. He got his PhD at the School of Computing of Staffordshire University, U.K, in 2000.
His main areas of research involve Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent System theory and applications to different domains, with an emphasis on social issues in activity coordination, especially in organizational modelling and simulation, where he has been actively involved in several R&D projects, including national and international programs. He represented EST-Setúbal in several European projects.
He has over 200 publications, including papers in conferences and journals, edited books, and conference proceedings. He started several conference series, sponsored by INSTICC and technically co-sponsored or in cooperation with major International Associations.
He took part in over 100 conference and workshop program committees and he is on the editorial board of a Springer book series. ... More >>

Kevin Warwick (honorary) University of Reading and Coventry University United Kingdom http://www.kevinwarwick.com/

Brief Bio
Kevin Warwick is Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England, where he carries out research in artificial intelligence, control, robotics and biomedical engineering. He took his first degree at Aston University, followed by a PhD and research post at Imperial College London. He subsequently held positions at Oxford, Newcastle and Warwick Universities before being offered the Chair at Reading. He is a Chartered Engineer (CEng.) and is a Fellow of The Institution of Engineering & Technology (FIET). Kevin Warwick is the youngest person ever to become a Fellow of the City & Guilds of London Institu te (FCGI). He is the author or co-author of more than 500 research papers and has written or edited 27 books (three for general readership), as well as numerous magazine and newspaper articles on scientific and general subjects.
Kevin has been awarded higher doctorates (DSc) both by Imperial College and the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague and has received Honorary Doctorates from 6 Universities. He has appeared in the Guiness Book of Records for his research on several occasions and is perhaps best known for his implant self-experimentation, linking his own nervous system with a computer network.
The Institute of Physics selected Kevin as one of only 7 eminent scientists to illustrate the ethical impact their scientific work can have: the others being Galileo, Einstein, Curie, Nobel, Oppenheimer and Rotblat. ... More >>

Janusz Kacprzyk (honorary) Systems Research Institute - Polish Academy of Sciences Poland www.ibspan.waw.pl/~kacprzyk

Brief Bio
Janusz Kacprzyk graduated from Warsaw University of Technology, with M.Sc. in automatic control and CS, in 1977 Ph.D. in systems analysis, in 1991 D.Sc. in computer science. Professor of Computer Science at the Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, and Professor of Automatic Control at PIAP – Industrial Institute of Automation and Measurements; Honorary Professor of Mathematics, Yli Normal University, Xinjiang, China. Full Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Member of Academia Europaea and European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Foreign Member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Economic and Fi nancial Sciences (RACEF), Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters. Fellow of IEEE, IET, IFSA, EurAI, and SMIA. Doctor honoris causa of 4 universities. Frequent visiting professor in the USA, Italy, UK, Mexico, China, and Austria.  Main research interests: computation intelligence, notably fuzzy logic, decisions, optimization, control, data analysis and data mining, IT/ICT, mobile robotics, systems modeling etc.Main awards: 2006 IEEE CIS Pioneer Award in Fuzzy Systems for fuzzy dynamic programming, 2006 Sixth Kaufmann Prize and Gold Medal for pioneering works on soft computing in economics and management, 2007 Pioneer Award of the Silicon Valley Section of IEEE CIS for granular computing and computing in words, IFSA 2013 Award for lifetime achievements in fuzzy systems and service to the fuzzy community, 2014 World Automation Congress Lifetime Award for contributions to soft computing. President of the Polish Operational and Systems Research Society and Past President of International Fuzzy Systems Association. Long time member of IEEE CIS Adcom, notably 2016 Chair of its Award Committee. ... More >>

Thomas Bäck Leiden University Netherlands

Brief Bio
Thomas Bäck is professor of Computer Science at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Netherlands, since 2002.

He received his PhD in Computer Science from Dortmund University, Germany, in 1994, and was leader of the Center for Applied Systems Analysis at the Informatik Centrum Dortmund until 2000.

Thomas received the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award for his contributions in synthesizing evolutionary computation (2015), was elected as a fellow of the International Society of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation ( ISGEC) for fundamental contributions to the field (2003), and received the best dissertation award from the "Gesellschaft für Informatik" in 1995.

Thomas has more than 300 publications, as well as two books on evolutionary algorithms: Evolutionary Algorithms in Theory and Practice (1996), Contemporary Evolution Strategies (2013). He is co-editor of the Handbook of Evolutionary Computation and the Handbook of Natural Computing. Thomas is also Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Natural Computing Series (Springer) and the journal Theoretical Computer Science C (Elsevier), and editorial board member of various journals.

Thomas’ research interests are in foundations and applications of evolutionary computation, efficient global optimization, and multiple objective optimization. Much of his recent research also addresses optimization methods in machine learning, e.g., for hyperparameter optimization, as well as supervised and unsupervised machine learning for smart industry applications. ... More >>

Niki van Stein Leiden University Netherlands

Brief Bio
Niki van Stein is a researcher in the Natural Computing Group of LIACS and manager of the applied data science lab. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Leiden University in 2018. Niki her research interests are in explainable AI, automated design of algorithms, global (Bayesian) optimization and neural architecture search.