Event Chairs

Francesco Marcelloni University of Pisa Italy

Short Bio
Francesco Marcelloni is full professor of Data Mining and Machine Learning at the University of Pisa. He is the Director of the Knowledge Hub on AI of the European Alliance Circle U., and coordinator of the multidisciplinary Good AI Lab and the public–private IT2PAO Lab at the University of Pisa. His main research interests include explainable artificial intelligence, federated learning, data mining for big data and streaming data, sentiment analysis and opinion mining, genetic fuzzy systems, and fuzzy clustering algorithms. He has co-edited four volumes, four journal special issues, and is (co-)author of a book and of more than 300 papers in international journals, books and conference proceedings. Recently, he has received the 2021 IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems Outstanding Paper award and the 2022 IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine Outstanding Paper award. He serves as associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems (IEEE), Information Sciences (Elsevier) and Evolving Systems (Springer). ... More >>

Niki van Stein LIACS, Leiden University Netherlands

Short Bio
Niki van Stein is Associate Professor of Explainable AI at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University, where she leads the XAI research group. Her research sits at the intersection of explainable AI, automated algorithm design and metaheuristic optimization, with a particular focus on using large language models to automatically discover and improve optimization algorithms.
She is the lead developer of LLaMEA, an award-winning framework for LLM-driven algorithm evolution, and has broad experience applying these methods to real-world problems in engineering, predictive mainte nance, and scientific design.
Alongside her research, she is active in the international evolutionary computation and AutoML communities as a conference organizer, program committee member and editorial board member. She holds a PhD from Leiden University and previously co-founded and led a software company as CTO, giving her a strong background in bridging academic research and industrial practice. ... More >>

Maïssa Abdallah ESEO France

Short Bio
Maissa Abdallah is an associate professor at ESEO in Angers, France, a graduate engineering school specializing in electronics, computer science, networking, and telecommunications. She holds an engineering degree in Computer Science from the University of Technology of Compiegne (France) and earned her PhD in Real-Time Systems from the University of Nantes in 2014.Since 2024, her research has focused on biomedical applications, with a particular interest in classification methods and feature selection
techniques aimed at improving the predictive performance and interpretability of models applied to healthc are data. ... More >>

Daniela Barreiro Claro Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) Brazil http://formas.ufba.br/dclaro

Short Bio
Daniela B. Claro is a Full Professor at the Federal University of Bahia (Brazil). She earned a degree in Computer Science from Salvador University (1998) and obtained her Master's degree in Computer Science from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (2000) and her
Ph.D. in Computer Science - Université d'Angers - ESEO / France (2006). In 2009, she founded the FORMAS - Research Center on Data and Natural Language at CNPQ and she was its leader during the last 15 years, promoting research on Data Intelligence and Natural
Language Processing covering Semantic and Pragmatic approaches from Texts, Cloud s, and Devices. Her main research areas are Semantic and Pragmatic Data Interoperability challenges, particularly Open Information Extraction, working with single and multilingual
solutions. ... More >>