Gabriella Pasi is Full Professor at the Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication (DISCo) of the University of Milano Bicocca, Milano, Italy. Within DISCo she leads the Information Retrieval Lab. Her main research activities are related to Information Retrieval and Information Filtering. In recent years she has addressed the issues of contextual search and user modelling. She is also conducting research activities related to the analysis of user generated content on social media. She has published more than 200 papers on International Journals and Books, and on the Proceedings of International Conferences. She is involved in several activities for the evaluation of research; in particular, she was appointed as an expert of the Computer Science panel for the Starting Grants (till 2011), and Consolidator Grants (2012) of the Programme Ideas at the European Research Council. Since 2013 she is the President of the European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technologies (EUSFLAT). She is a member of the Editorial Board of several international journals, and she has delivered several keynote talks/plenary lectures at international conferences related to her research interests. She has participated to the organization of several International events, in both roles of organization and program chair.
Prof. Oscar Cordón is Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in the University of Granada (UGR) in Spain. He created and headed the Virtual Learning Centre from 2001 to 2005 and he is currently Vice-Rector for Digital University at the UGR. From April 2006 to December 2015, he was also affiliated to the European Centre for Soft Computing, a private international research center, where he first acted as founding Principal Researcher of the Applications of Fuzzy Logic and Evolutionary Algorithms Research Unit until August 2011 and later as Distinguished Affiliated Researcher until December 2015. Prof. Cordón received the UGR Young Researcher Career Award in 2004, the IEEE CIS Outstanding Early Career Award in its 2011 edition, the first such award conferred, the IFSA Award for Outstanding Applications of Fuzzy Technology also in 2011, and the Spanish National Award on Computer Science ARITMEL by the Spanish Computer Science Scientific Society in 2014. He has published more than 330 peer-reviewed scientific publications, including 91 JCR-SCI-indexed journals and a co-authored book published by World Scientific in 2001 with 1141 citations in Google Scholar. He is included among the 1% most cited researchers in the World (source: Thomson’s Web of Knowledge), with 3206 citations from 2032 different citing articles, h index of 28, in the Web of Knowledge, and 10280 citations, h index of 47, in Google Scholar. He has coordinated 26 research projects and contracts with an overall budget of 6,7M€. He is currently or was Associate Editor of 16 journals, 7 of them indexed in the SCI-JCR. He is also inventor of an international patent under exploitation and has advised 16 PhD dissertations, one of them recognized with the EUSFLAT Best Ph.D. Thesis Award in 2011. He is an IEEE member since 2004 (senior member since 2011) and has enjoyed many different representations for reputed international societies such as the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society: founder and chair of the Genetic Fuzzy Systems Task Force (2004-2007); member of the Fuzzy Systems Technical Committee (2004-2013); member of the Graduate Student Research Grants sub-committee (2009-2011); elected member of the Administrative Committee (AdCom); member of the Outstanding Computational Intelligence Early Career Award sub-committee (2011-2015); member of the Outstanding PhD dissertation Award sub-committee (2016); and member of the Award Committee (2014-2015); among many others, as well as for the EUSFLAT Society: Treasurer (2005-2007) and Executive Board member (2005-07, 2009-2013). He has also been involved in the organization of many different conferences: IPC chair of IEEE EFS2006, GEFS2008 and ESTYLF2008; international co-chair of HIS2008; publicity co-chair of IEEE SCCI2009; finance co-chair of IFSA-EUSFLAT 2009; advisory board member of ISDA'09; evolutionary algorithms IPC area chair of IPMU2010; special session co-chair of 2010 IEEE CEC 2010 (WCCI 2010); Fuzzy image, speech, vision and signal processing IPC area chair of Fuzz-IEEE 2011; special session chair of Fuzz-IEEE 2013; program committe co-chair of IFSA2015, program committe co-chair of IEEE CEC 2015, General Chair of Fuzz-IEEE 2016 (WCCI 2016), and program committe co-chair of IEEE CEC 2017. His current main research interests are in the fields of: fuzzy rule-based systems; genetic fuzzy systems; fuzzy and linguistic modeling; evolutionary algorithms, ant colony optimization and other metaheuristics; soft computing applications to different topics (medical image registration, forensic anthropology, assembly line balancing, information retrieval etc.); visual science maps design and mining; multiobjective graph-based data mining; and agent-based modeling, social networks, and their applications in marketing science.
Derek T. Anderson received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from the University of Missouri in 2010. He is an Assistant Professor in ECE at Mississippi State University (MSU). Prof. Anderson also holds an Intermittent Faculty Appointment with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, he is an IEEE Senior Member and Associate Editor for the IEEE Trans. on Fuzzy Systems. His research interests include new frontiers in data/information fusion for pattern recognition and automated decision making in signal/image understanding and computer vision with an emphasis on uncertainty and heterogeneity. Prof. Anderson’s primary research contributions to date include multi-source (meaning sensor, algorithm and human) fusion, Choquet integrals (extensions, embedding’s, learning), signal/image feature learning, multi-kernel learning, cluster validation, hyperspectral image understanding and linguistic summarization of video. He has been funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Camgian, U.S. Army and Night Vision and Electronics Sensors Directorate (NVESD), U.S. Army Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), and DARPA. Prof. Anderson is the also the Co-Director of the Sensor Analysis and Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) in the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS) at MSU, a multi-disciplinary collaborative research laboratory with sensors ranging from hyperspectral in the visible and near, mid and long infrared to radar, lidar, stereoscopic, and light field cameras. SAIL is focused on fusion and scene/environment understanding in the areas of robotics, autonomous systems and ground/aerial vehicles, and remote sensing from UAVs for agriculture and biological earth observations. Derek has published over 90 articles; book chapters, journal manuscripts and conference proceedings. More details can be found at: http://www.derektanderson.com.
Professor Jonathan M. Garibaldi received the B.Sc (Hons) degree in Physics from Bristol University, UK in 1984, and the M.Sc. degree in Intelligent Systems and the Ph.D. degree in Uncertainty Handling in Immediate Neonatal Assessment from the University of Plymouth, UK in 1990 and 1997, respectively. He is Head of School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, UK, leads the Intelligent Modelling and Analysis (IMA) Research Group, and is Director of the Advanced Data Analysis Centre (ADAC). The IMA research group undertakes research into intelligent modelling, utilising data analysis and transformation techniques to enable deeper and clearer understanding of complex problems. His main research interests are modelling uncertainty and variation in human reasoning, and in modelling and interpreting complex data to enable better decision making, particularly in medical domains. He has made many theoretical and practical contributions in fuzzy sets and systems, and in a wide range of generic machine learning techniques in real-world applications. Prof. Garibaldi has published over 200 papers on fuzzy systems and intelligent data analysis, and is taking over as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems from Jan 2017. He has served regularly in the organising committees and programme committees of a range of leading international conferences and workshops, such as FUZZ-IEEE, WCCI, EURO and PPSN.
Dr. Chin-Teng Lin received the B.S. degree from National Chiao-Tung University (NCTU), Taiwan in 1986, and the Master and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University, USA in 1989 and 1992, respectively. He is currently the Distinguished Professor of Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney. Dr. Lin also own Honorary Chair Professorship of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NCTU, International Faculty of University of California at San-Diego (UCSD), and Honorary Professorship of University of Nottingham. Dr. Lin was elevated to be an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to biologically inspired information systems in 2005, and was elevated International Fuzzy Systems Association (IFSA) Fellow in 2012. Dr. Lin received the IEEE Fuzzy Systems Pioneer Award in 2017, Outstanding Achievement Award by Asia Pacific Neural Network Assembly in 2013, Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineer, Purdue University in 2011, and Merit National Science Council Research Fellow Award, Taiwan in 2009. He is elected as the Editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems since 2011. He also served on the Board of Governors at IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society in 2005-2008, IEEE Systems, Man, Cybernetics (SMC) Society in 2003-2005, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) in 2008-2010, and Chair of IEEE Taipei Section in 2009-2010. Dr. Lin is the Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE CAS Society from 2003 to 2005, and CIS Society from 2015-2017. He served as the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-II in 2006-2008. Dr. Lin was the Program Chair of IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics in 2005 and General Chair of 2011 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems. Dr. Lin is the coauthor of Neural Fuzzy Systems (Prentice-Hall), and the author of Neural Fuzzy Control Systems with Structure and Parameter Learning (World Scientific). He has published more than 200 journal papers and 80 patents (H-index: 56) in the areas of computational intelligence, fuzzy neural networks, natural cognition, brain-computer interface, intelligent system, multimedia information processing, machine learning, robotics, and intelligent sensing and control, including approximately 104 IEEE journal papers.
Dr. Kimon P. Valavanis received the Diploma in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (Diplôme Ingénieur, 5 years of study) from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 1981, the M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering and the PhD degree in Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)in 1984 and 1986, respectively. He is currently John Evans Professor and Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Denver, and Director of the DU Unmanned Systems Research Institute.
His research interests focus on the areas of Robotics and Automation and Unmanned Systems. He has authored/co-authored and edited 19 books the most recent being: On Integrating Unmanned Aircraft Systems into the National Airspace System: Issues, Challenges, Operational Restrictions, Certification, and Recommendations (with K. Dalamagkidis and L. A. Piegl), 2nd Edition, Springer 2012; Linear and Nonlinear Control of Small Scale Unmanned Rotorcraft (I. A. Raptis, K. P. Valavanis), Springer, 2012, which has also been translated into Chinese; Handbook of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) (editors, K. P. Valavanis, G. J. Vachtsevanos), Springer, 2015, which is the only handbook published worldwide – a five-Volume Handbook that includes all aspects of UAVs, also translated into Chinese – a 2nd Edition is now in progress, to be published by Springer in 2017; Foundations of Circulation Control Based Small-Scale Unmanned Aircraft: A Comprehensive Methodology from Concept to Design and Experimental Testing (K. Kanistras, K. P. Valavanis, M. J. Rutherford), and, Modeling, Navigation and Control of a Small-Scale Flybarless Unmanned Rotorcraft (J. Alvarenga, K. P. Valavanis, M. J. Rutherford). He has also published more 30 book Chapters, 110 transaction/journal papers and more than 200 referred conference papers.
During his Academic career thus far, Dr. Valavanis has graduated 38 PhD students. He is Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the U.K Institute of Measurement and Control, a senior Member of IEEE and a Fulbright Scholar (Senior Lecturing & Research Award).
