Bernard De Baets, Ghent University (Belgium)
Bernard De Baets was born in 1966. He received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics in 1988 and 1995, respectively, and postgraduated in knowledge technology in 1991, all summa cum laude from Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Since 2008, he has been a Full Professor of applied mathematics with Ghent University, where he leads KERMIT, the Research Unit Knowledge-Based Systems. He has authored or coauthored more than 190 papers published in international journals and nearly 50 book chapters. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of various international journals, in particular, Co-Editor-in-Chief of Fuzzy Sets and Systems.
Prof. De Baets coordinates EUROFUSE, which is the EURO Working Group on Fuzzy Sets, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology, the Technical Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems of the International Association of Science and Technology for Development, and the Administrative Board of the Belgian Operations Research (OR) Society. He was a recipient of the Government of Canada Award in 1988. In 2006, he became Honorary Professor of Budapest Tech, Hungary.
Bart Goethals, University of Antwerp (Belgium)
Bart Goethals is professor at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He leads the Data Mining lab of the Advanced Database Research and Modeling (ADReM) research group, which performs fundamental research on the structures, the basic properties and the power of languages, algorithms and methodologies for processing and analysing large quantities of data.
His primary research interests are the study of data mining techniques to efficiently find interesting patterns and properties in large databases. He received the IEEE ICDM 2001 Best Paper Award and the PKDD 2002 Best Paper Award for his theoretical studies on frequent itemset mining. He was organizer and program chair of ECML PKDD 2008, program chair of SIAM DM 2010, and general chair of IEEE ICDM 2012. He organised and chaired several workshops, such as ICDM FIMI 2003, 2004, PKDD KDID 2004, SIGKDD OSDM 2005, SDM HPDM 2006, and SIGKDD UP 2010 and served on the organizing and program committees of several conferences such as ACM SIGKDD, IEEE ICDM, SIAM DM, and ECML PKDD. He is general chair of the ECML PKDD Steering Committee (2008-2011), associate editor of the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal, the Knowledge and Information Systems journal and Editor-in-Chief of the ACM SIGKDD Explorations newsletter.
Vojislav (Vojo) Kecman, Virginia Commonwealth University (USA)
Vojislav (Vojo) Kecman, Ph.D., M. Sc., Dipl.-Ing. is the tenured associate professor with a Computer Science Department at the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, VA, USA, where he directs the Learning Algorithms and Applications Laboratory (LAAL). He was Fulbright Professor at MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA; DFG Professor at TH Darmstadt; DAAD Konrad Zuse Professor at FH Heilbronn, FHTW Berlin and SWFH Soest; Research Fellow at Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA and at Stuttgart University, as well as the associate professor at both The University of Auckland and Zagreb University.
Dr. Kecman authored several books in the areas of machine learning (data mining) and in the fields of mathematical modeling and simulation of system dynamics. Voyo’s life long commitment is fighting AIDS disease by HIV infection modeling, which is a part of his modeling of biological systems devotion for many years.
Prof. Kecman’s current research interests include: machine learning from experimental data (knowledge discovery, data mining) by support vector machines and neural networks, as well as modeling human knowledge by fuzzy logic systems. Theory, practice, philosophy and versatility of these soft computing tools is used in broad fields of different (nonlinear) regression and pattern recognition (classification, decision making) tasks in – e-commerce, bioinformatics, vision systems, computer graphics, data and signal processing, numerical mathematics, credit assignment problems, (financial) time series analysis, image compression, expert and decision systems and computer intelligence.
Osmar R. Zaïane, University of Alberta (Canada)
Osmar R. Zaïane is a Professor in Computing Science at the University of Alberta, Canada. Dr. Zaiane joined the University of Alberta in July of 1999. He obtained a Master’s degree in Electronics at the University of Paris, France, in 1989 and a Master’s degree in Computer Science at Laval University, Canada, in 1992. He obtained his Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University, Canada, in 1999 under the supervision of Dr. Jiawei Han. His Ph.D. thesis work focused on web mining and multimedia data mining. He has research interests in novel data mining algorithms, web mining, text mining, image mining, and information retrieval. The main projects he is leading are DIVE-ON, an immersed virtual environment for data warehouse and data mining results visualization, MetaWeb, a web-content mining and web-warehousing system, ExaQuest, a data mining toolbox, and a web-usage mining project on web mining for web activity evaluation and intelligent restructuring of web-based learning environments.
He has published more than 100 papers in refereed international conferences and journals, and taught on all six continents. Osmar Zaïane was the co-chair of the ACM SIGKDD International Workshop on Multimedia Data Mining in 2000, 2001 and 2002 as well as co-Chair of the ACM SIGKDD WebKDD workshop in 2002, 2003 and 2005. He was guest-editor of the special issue on multimedia data mining of the journal of Intelligent Information Systems (Kluwer), and wrote multiple book chapters on multimedia mining and web mining. He has been an ACM Member since 1986. Osmar Zaïane is the ACM SIGKDD Explorations Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor of the Knowledge and Information Systems, An International Journal, by Springer, and of the International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions. He is also the Secretary/Treasurer of ACM SIGKDD.
Zhi-Hua Zhou, Nanjing University (China)
Zhi-Hua Zhou is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University, China. His research interests are mainly in machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition and image retrieval. In these areas he has published over 80 papers in leading international journals or conferences, and holds 11 patents. He is an Associate Editor-in-Chief of “Chinese Science Bulletin”, Associate Editor of “IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering” and “ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology”, and on the editorial boards of various other journals. He also serves/served as guest editor for various journals including “Machine Learning”, “IEEE Intelligent Systems”, “Pattern Recognition”, ” Multimedia Systems”, etc.
He is the Founding Steering Committee Co-Chair of ACML, and Steering Committee member of PAKDD and PRICAI. He served as Program Committee Chair/Co-Chair of PAKDD’07, PRICAI’08 and ACML’09, Vice Chair or Area Chair or Senior Program Committee member of many conferences such as KDD’10, ECML PKDD’10, ICPR’10, SDM’09, CIKM’09, ICDM’08, etc. He is the Chair of the Machine Learning Society of the China Association of Artificial Intelligence (CAAI), the Vice Chair of the Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition Society of the China Computer Federation (CCF), and the Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Nanjing Chapter.