AI Mellontology e-Symposium Chair: Prof. Ioannis Pitas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki - AUTH)

(IEEE Fellow, IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, EURASIP fellow) received the Diploma and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering, both from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Since 1994, he has been a Professor at the Department of Informatics of the same University. His current interests are in the areas of image/video processing, machine learning, computer vision, intelligent digital media, human-centered interfaces, affective computing, 3D imaging, and biomedical imaging. He has published over 920 papers, contributed in 45 books in his areas of interest and edited or (co-)authored another 11 books. He has also been member of the program committee of many scientific conferences and workshops. In the past he served as Associate Editor or co-Editor of 9 international journals and General or Technical Chair of 4 international conferences. He participated in 71 R&D projects, primarily funded by the European Union and is/was principal investigator/researcher in 41 such projects. He leads International AI Doctoral Academy (AIDA) and is PI in Horizon2020 EU funded R&D projects AI4Media (1 of the 4 AI flagship projects in Europe) and AerialCore. He has 33300+ citations to his work and h-index 86+.

Dr. Ioannis Kompatsiaris (Centre for Research & Technology Hellas - CERTH)

Dr. Ioannis (Yiannis) Kompatsiaris is a Research Director at CERTH-ITI, the Head of Multimedia Knowledge and Social Media Analytics Laboratory and Deputy Director of the Institute. His research interests include ΑΙ/Machine Learning for multimedia analysis, Semantics (multimedia ontologies and reasoning), Social Media and Big Data Analytics, Multimodal and Sensors Data Analysis and Human-Computer Interfaces. He is the co-author of 178 papers in refereed journals, 63 book chapters, 8 patents and 560 papers in international conferences. Since 2001, Dr. Kompatsiaris has participated in 88 National and European research programs, in 31 of which he has been the Project Coordinator. He has also been the PI in 15 contracts from the industry. He has been the co-chair of various international conferences and workshops including the 13th IEEE Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IVMSP 2018) Workshop and has served as a regular reviewer, associate and guest editor for a number of journals and conferences currently being an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. He is a member of the National Ethics and Technoethics Committee, the Scientific Advisory Board of the CHIST-ERA funding programme and an elected member of the IEEE Image, Video and Multidimensional Signal Processing – Technical Committee (IVMSP – TC). He is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM. Since January 2014, he is a co-founder of the Infalia private company, a high-tech SME focusing on data-intensive web services and applications.

Prof. Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi (University of Milan)

Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Milan, Italy. His main research interests are the design and analysis of machine learning algorithms for statistical and online learning, multi-armed bandit problems, and graph analytics. He is co-author of the monographs "Prediction, Learning, and Games" and "Regret Analysis of Stochastic and Nonstochastic Multi-armed Bandit Problems". He served as President of the Association for Computational Learning and co-chaired the program committees of some of the most important machine learning conferences, including NeurIPS, COLT, and ALT. He is the recipient of a Google Research Award, a Xerox Foundation Award, a Criteo Faculty Award, and a Google Focused Award. He is ELLIS fellow and co-director of the ELLIS program on Interactive Learning and Interventional Representations. He serves on the steering committees of the Italian Laboratory on AI and Intelligent Systems and of the Italian PhD program on AI.