Workshop Committees

Prof. Giovanni Acampora is Associate Professor in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Naples Federico II. Previously, he was Reader in Computational Intelligence (Sept 2012-Jun 2016) at the School of Science and Technology, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, U.K. From July 2011 to August 2012, he was in a Hoofddocent Tenure Track in Process Intelligence with the School of Industrial Engineering, Information Systems, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, the Netherlands. He designed and developed the fuzzy markup language, an XML-based environment for modeling fuzzy systems in human-readable and hardware independent way. His main research interests include computational intelligence, fuzzy modeling, evolutionary computation, and ambient intelligence. Dr. Acampora was a Secretary and Treasurer of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE CIS) Italian Chapter (2010–2012). He chaired the IEEE CIS Standards Committee (2011–2013, 2014-Present). He is the Chair of IEEE-SA 1855WG, the working group that has published the first IEEE standard in the area of fuzzy logic. As a result of this activity, he got a prestigious IEEE-SA Emerging Technology Award. He serves as an Associate Editor of Springer Soft Computing and an Editorial Board Member of Springer Memetic Computing, and Elsevier Heliyon and Inderscience International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communication Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems.

Prof. Bruno Siciliano was born in Naples, Italy, in 1959. He received the Laurea and Research Doctorate degrees in electronic engineering from the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Naples, in 1982 and 1987, respectively. He is currently a Professor of Control and Robotics, and the Director of the PRISMA Laboratory with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. He has co-authored 13 books, 80 journal papers, 240 conference papers, and book chapters. He has delivered 110 invited lectures and seminars at institutions worldwide. His current research interests include force and visual control, human–robot interaction, and aerial service robotics. Prof. Siciliano is a fellow of IEEE, ASME and IFAC. He has been the recipient of several awards. He has served on the Editorial Boards of several peer-reviewed journals and has been the Chair of the Program and Organizing Committees of several international conferences. He is a Co-Editor of the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics and the Springer Handbook of Robotics, which received the PROSE Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences and Mathematics, and was the winner in the category Engineering and Technology. His group has been granted 14 European projects, including the Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. He was the President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

Prof. Hani Hagras is a Professor of Computational Intelligence, Director of the Computational Intelligence Centre, Head of the Fuzzy Systems Research Group and Head of the Intelligent Environments Research Group in the University of Essex, UK. He is a Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and he is also a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). His major research interests are in computational intelligence, notably type-2 fuzzy systems, fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and evolutionary computation. His research interests also include ambient intelligence, pervasive computing and intelligent buildings. He is also interested in embedded agents, robotics and intelligent control. He has authored more than 250 papers in international journals, conferences and books. His work has received funding of about 4 Million in the last five years from the European Union, the UK Technology Strategy Board (TSB), the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the UK Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC) as well as several industrial companies including. He has also three industrial patents in the field of computational intelligence and intelligent control. His research has won numerous prestigious international awards where most recently he was awarded by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS), the 2013 Outstanding Paper Award in the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems and also he has won the 2004 Outstanding Paper Award in the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems. He was also the Chair of the IEEE CIS Chapter that won the 2011 IEEE CIS Outstanding Chapter award. His work with IP4 Ltd has won the 2009 Lord Stafford Award for Achievement in Innovation for East of England. His work has also won the 2011 Best Knowledge Transfer Partnership Project for London and the Eastern Region. His work has also won best paper awards in several conferences including the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and the 2012 UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence. He served as the Chair of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Senior Members Sub-Committee. He served also as the chair of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Intelligent Agents. He is currently the Chair of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Extensions to Type-1 Fuzzy Sets. He is also a Vice Chair of the IEEE CIS Technical Committee on Emergent Technologies. He is a member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Fuzzy Systems Technical Committee.He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems. He is also an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Robotics and Automation. Prof. Hagras has chaired several international conferences where most recently he served as the Co-Chair of the 2013, 2011 and 2009 IEEE Symposium on Intelligent Agents, and the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Advances to Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Systems. He was also the General Co-Chair of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy systems London.

Prof. Francisco Herrera (SM'15) received his M.Sc. in Mathematics in 1988 and Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1991, both from the University of Granada, Spain. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Granada. He has been the supervisor of 38 Ph.D. students. He has published more than 300 journal papers that have received more than 46000 citations (Scholar Google, H-index 109). He is co-author of the books "Genetic Fuzzy Systems" (World Scientific, 2001) and "Data Preprocessing in Data Mining" (Springer, 2015), "The 2-tuple Linguistic Model. Computing with Words in Decision Making" (Springer, 2015), "Multilabel Classification. Problem analysis, metrics and techniques" (Springer, 2016). He currently acts as Editor in Chief of the international journals "Information Fusion" (Elsevier) and “Progress in Artificial Intelligence (Springer). He acts as an editorial member of a dozen of journals. He received the following honors and awards: ECCAI Fellow 2009, IFSA Fellow 2013, 2010 Spanish National Award on Computer Science ARITMEL to the "Spanish Engineer on Computer Science", International Cajastur "Mamdani" Prize for Soft Computing (Fourth Edition, 2010), IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy System Outstanding 2008 and 2012 Paper Award (bestowed in 2011 and 2015 respectively), 2011 Lotfi A. Zadeh Prize Best paper Award of the International Fuzzy Systems Association, 2013 AEPIA Award to a scientific career in Artificial Intelligence (September 2013), and 2014 XV Andalucía Research Prize Maimónides (by the regional government of Andalucía). His current research interests include among others, soft computing (including fuzzy modeling and evolutionary algorithms), information fusion, decision making, bibliometrics, biometric, data preprocessing, data science and big data.

Prof. Hisao Ishibuchi received the BS and MS degrees from Kyoto University in 1985 and 1987, respectively. In 1992, he received the Ph. D. degree from Osaka Prefecture University where he has been a full professor since 1999. He received a Best Paper Award from GECCO 2004, HIS-NCEI 2006, FUZZ-IEEE 2009, WAC 2010, SCIS & ISIS 2010, FUZZ-IEEE 2011 and ACIIDS 2015. He also received a 2007 JSPS Prize from Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences. He was the Chair of the IEEE CIS Fuzzy Systems Technical Committee (2008-2009), the IEEE CIS Vice-President for Technical Activities (2010-2013), the General Chair of ICMLA 2011, the Program Chair of IEEE CEC 2010 and IES 2014, and a Program/Technical Co-Chair of FUZZ-IEEE 2006, 2011-2013, 2015 and IEEE CEC 2013-2014. Currently, he is an IEEE CIS AdCom member (2014-2016), an IEEE CIS Distinguished Lecturer (2015-2017), and the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine (2014-2017). He is also an Associate Editor of IEEE TEVC (2007-2016), IEEE Access (2013-2016) and IEEE TCyb (2013-2016). He is an IEEE Fellow. His research interests include fuzz rule-based classifier design, evolutionary multiobjective and many-objective optimization, memetic algorithm and evolutionary games. According to Google Scholar, the total number of citations of his publications is about 18,000 and his h-index is 59 (April 2916).

Autilia Vitiello took the master degree cum laude in Computer Science at the University of Salerno (Italy) in July 2009, defending a thesis in Time Sensitive Fuzzy Agents: formal model and implementation. From November 2009 to October 2012 she attended Ph.D. Program at Department of Computer Science of the University of Salerno. From September to December 2012, she was a visiting student at the School of Industrial Engineering, Information Systems, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. She got Ph.D. in Computer Science on April 15th, 2013, defending a thesis titled Memetic Algorithms for Ontology Alignment. From July 2013, she is research fellow at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Salerno. She is also Member of the IEEE CIS Standards Committee and Chair of the Task Force named Datasets for Computational Intelligence. She is part of the IEEE Standard Association 1855 Working Group for Fuzzy Markup Language Standardization where she also serves as Secretary. Her main research area is Computational Intelligence, and in particular, Fuzzy Logic and Evolutionary Algorithms. Her recent interests include the integration between Computational Intelligence and Computer Vision to address Bloodstain Pattern Analysis and the integration between Evolutionary Algorithms and Machine Learning techniques to tackle Big Data Challenges.

Uzay Kaymak is professor of information systems at the Information Systems (IS) Group of the School of Industrial Engineering of Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. His research interests include intelligent decision support systems, fuzzy decision making, fuzzy modelling and computational intelligence. He has worked on the development of computational intelligence methods for decision models in which linguistic information, represented either as declarative linguistic rules derived from experts or obtained through natural language processing, is combined with numerical information that is extracted from data by computational methods. Currently, he applies these approaches for clinical decision support and healthcare process improve¬ment. Prof. Kaymak is a visiting professor at the Zhejiang University in China. In the past, he has chaired the Fuzzy Systems Technical Committee and the Computational Finance and Economics Technical Committee of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He has more than 200 scientific publications and has been a board member or associate editor of multiple fuzzy systems journals.

Professor Jie Lu is the Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology (FEIT) at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Her main research interests lie in the area of decision support systems, recommender systems, prediction and warning systems, fuzzy information processing and e-Service intelligence. She has published 6 research books and 350 papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings. She has won many Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project and other research grants. She received the first UTS Research Excellence Medal for Teaching and Research Integration in 2010. She serves as Editor-In-Chief for Knowledge-Based Systems (Elsevier), Editor-In-Chief for International Journal on Computational Intelligence Systems (Atlantis), Associate Editor for IEEE Trans on Fuzzy Systems, and has chaired and delivered many keynote speeches at international conferences.

Marek Reformat received his M.Sc. degree (with honors) from Technical University of Poznan, Poland, and his Ph.D. from University of Manitoba, Canada. Presently, he is a professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta. The goal of his research activities is to develop methods and techniques for intelligent data modeling and analysis leading to translation of data into knowledge, as well as to design systems that possess abilities to imitate different aspects of human behavior. In this context, he recognizes the concepts of Computational Intelligence – with fuzzy computing and possibility theory in particular – are key elements necessary for capturing relationships between pieces of data and knowledge, and for mimicking human ways of reasoning about opinions and facts. Dr. Reformat also works on Computational Intelligence based approaches for dealing with information stored on the web. He applies elements of fuzzy sets to social networks, Linked Open Data, and Semantic Web in order to handle inherently imprecise information, and provide users with unique facts retrieved from the data. He is interested in mathematical theories, in particular, the category theory and type theory, which can be applied for representing and reasoning about knowledge. All his activities focus on introduction of human aspects to web and software systems what will lead to more human-aware and human-like systems. Dr. Reformat is a past president of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society, and a past vice president of the International Fuzzy Systems Association. He has published over 90 peer-reviewed papers. He has been a member of program committees of numerous international conferences related to Computational Intelligence and Software Engineering.

Alessandro Di Nuovo received the Laurea (cum laude) and Ph.D. degrees in informatics engineering from the University of Catania, Italy, in 2005 and 2009, respectively. Currently he is with Sheffield Robotics at Sheffield Hallam University (UK) and with the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture of the University of Enna ‘Kore’ (Italy). Previously, he was with Plymouth University (2011-2015). His current research activities are devoted to cognitive robotics and its applications; in particular, current work is focused on multi-modal interfaces for efficient human-robot interaction and on building artificial models of mental imagery for autonomous humanoid robots. He is author of over 70 articles. He is the coordinator of the H2020 MSCA-IF CARER-AID (Controlled Autonomous Robot for Early detection and Rehabilitation of Autism and Intellectual Disability), and he was involved many research projects (e.g. FP7 ITALK, ROBOTDOC ITN, FP7 ROBOT-ERA) on the HRI multimodal interfaces. He has been involved in several Conference Committees, among them HM 2016 (General Chair), FUZZ-IEEE 2017 (Publication Chair). He was lead guest editor of special issues in renowned journals: Adaptive Behaviour, Int. J. of Social Robotics. He was the main organizer of the Special Session on Cognition and Development at IJCNN 2015 and 2017.