Professor Alsayed Algergawy is the substitute for the Chair of Data and Knowledge Engineering at the University of Passau since April 2023. His work bridges semantic web technologies and machine learning to enable heterogeneous data integration across domains. Current focus areas: schema/ontology alignment, entity resolution, knowledge graph construction Active in DFG Collaborative Research Center AquaDiva (data lifecycle management) Domain applications: biodiversity, agriculture, energy His team develops hybrid strategies combining rule-based systems with ML techniques to extract value from both structured and unstructured data sources.
Dr. Aykut Koç is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and a faculty member of the National Magnetic Resonance Research Center (UMRAM) at Bilkent University, Turkey. He leads the AykutKoc Lab, focusing on interdisciplinary research at the intersection of machine learning, signal processing, natural language processing, and graph signal processing. Education: B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering (2005, Bilkent University); M.S. in Electrical Engineering (2007), M.S. in Management Science and Engineering (2009), and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (2011) under Professor Lambertus Hesselink at Stanford University; LL.B. in Law (Ankara University). His research integrates mathematical signal processing techniques (e.g., fractional Fourier and linear canonical transforms) with modern machine learning architectures like transformers and graph neural networks. Recent work explores semantic communication systems, bias mitigation in legal language models, and cross-modal applications in biomedical imaging and radar technology. Dr. Koç has published extensively in IEEE and Springer journals, with recent articles analyzing Fourier-enhanced transformers, graph-based NLP methods, and time-vertex signal analysis. His work addresses both theoretical innovations and practical applications, including schizophrenia diagnosis, legal outcome prediction, and maritime surveillance. Scientific Awards: Science Academy Young Scientists Award (BAGEP), 2023. He has supervised numerous graduate and undergraduate researchers, many of whom have transitioned to top-tier institutions such as MIT, UCLA, and TU Darmstadt. Dr. Koç actively serves as Associate Editor for multiple IEEE journals and participates in conference program committees, including EMNLP's Natural Legal Language Processing (NLLP) workshop.
Gerry Dozier is the Charles D. McCrary Eminent Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Auburn University's College of Engineering. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, computational intelligence, cybersecurity, identity science, and cyber identity protection. He leads initiatives like the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity Engineering and contributes to Alabama's AI policy through the state commission. Dr. Dozier holds a Ph.D. from North Carolina State University and has pioneered work in adversarial machine learning, biometric security, and low-resource language NLP. Education: Ph.D. Computer Science, North Carolina State University (Raleigh) M.S. Computer Science, North Carolina State University (Raleigh) B.S. Computer Science, Northeastern Illinois University Research Themes: Combines AI with cybersecurity to address modern digital challenges. Specializes in adversarial attacks/defenses, biometric authentication systems, and ethical NLP applications in multilingual contexts. Active in developing tools for sentiment analysis in underrepresented languages and mitigating biases in automated systems. Impact: Spearheaded Auburn's AI@AU initiative with lecture series and forums. Collaborates internationally on facial recognition, malware detection, and medical AI applications like bacterial vaginosis diagnosis. His work bridges theoretical CS advancements with real-world security and ethical considerations. Labs/Teams: Directs Auburn's AI & Cybersecurity Engineering Center and contributes to interdisciplinary groups like the McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security.
Kevin Chenchuan Chang is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), affiliated with the FORWARD Data Lab and the Data and Information Systems Laboratories. His research focuses on bridging structured and unstructured data through natural language processing, data mining, machine learning, and information retrieval, with applications in web search, social media analytics, and knowledge acquisition. He co-founded Cazoodle and developed GrantForward.com, a funding discovery platform used by leading institutions globally. Education: Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University (2001), B.S. from National Taiwan University. Professional roles include service on program committees for SIGMOD, VLDB, KDD, and NeurIPS, as well as editorial roles for PVLDB, TKDE, and the Encyclopedia of Database Systems. His awards include the ICDE 10-Year Test of Time Award (2022), NSF CAREER Award (2002), and multiple UIUC teaching excellence recognitions. He teaches courses such as CS 411 (Database Systems), CS 598 KCC (Understanding LLMs), and CS 511 (Advanced Data Management). Research contributions span graph algorithms (e.g., Geom-GCN, SimRank), social network analysis (ROSE), and NLP (DEER, Open Relation Modeling). The FORWARD Lab emphasizes real-world impact through systems like GrantForward and tools for analyzing large-scale data.
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl is a Professor at the Institute for Data Science within the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Leibniz University Hannover. He serves as Executive Director of the L3S Research Centre and Leibniz Forschungszentrum Inclusive Citizenship. Web Science Information Retrieval Artificial Intelligence Deep Learning His recent research focuses on AI applications in medicine , multimodal data fusion , and ethical AI systems . Projects include CAIMed (AI in Causal Medicine) and DAISEC (AI & Cybersecurity). His publications span conferences like AAMAS, WWW, and SIGIR. Notable awards include membership in the National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) . Former students hold positions at institutions like Stanford, TU Dresden, and ETH Zürich. Current projects involve climate resilience AI , federated learning for healthcare , and quantum-inspired data science .
Sebastijan Dumancic is an Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology, focusing on neuro-symbolic AI through program synthesis and probabilistic programming. He leads the RAIL lab and collaborates with institutions like Harvard, MIT, and CNRS. His research bridges symbolic AI and machine learning, applying program synthesis to scientific discovery, transportation, and robotics. He holds an FWO-funded PhD from KU Leuven and has participated in initiatives like ELLIS and the Symbolic Computation and Machine Learning Initiative. Program synthesis Probabilistic programming Neuro-symbolic AI Constraint-based learning His recent articles highlight advancements in program synthesis, neuro-symbolic integration, and constraint satisfaction. Projects like Find2Fix and Intelligent Greenhouse Horticulture (funded by NWO) demonstrate practical applications. ELLIS Membership University Teaching Qualification He supervises numerous MSc and PhD students in projects involving logic programming, program synthesis, and probabilistic modeling. Active in workshops and symposia, he contributes to neuro-symbolic AI and scientific discovery.
Birgitta König-Ries is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Jena, Germany. She is a leading researcher in semantic technologies, ontology engineering, and knowledge graph management for biodiversity and life sciences. Her work focuses on reproducibility, provenance tracking, and data integration using semantic approaches. Research Interests: Semantic Web, Ontology Engineering, Knowledge Graphs, Biodiversity Informatics, Reproducibility of Scientific Experiments Key Collaborations: Sheeba Samuel, Nora Abdelmageed, Samira Babalou, Alsayed Algergawy, Felicitas Löffler, Vamsi Krishna Kommineni Her recent publications emphasize automated knowledge graph construction, domain-specific language models (e.g., BiodivBERT), benchmarking semantic table interpretation (KG2Tables, BiodivTab), and tools for provenance management (MLProvLab, MLProvCodeGen). She contributes to FAIR data principles and interdisciplinary research, particularly in biodiversity and public administration transparency. Her work bridges theoretical advances with practical implementations, including open-access benchmarks (tFood, tBiodiv, tBiomed) and collaborative platforms like BiodivPortal and fusion-jena. Notable Tools & Benchmarks: BiodivBERT, KG2Tables, BiodivTab, MLProvLab, tBiodiv, tBiomed
Jiaoyan Chen is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Manchester, set to become a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) from July 2025. Previously, she served as a Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford and held postdoctoral roles at Heidelberg University. Her research focuses on neural-symbolic knowledge representation, ontology engineering, and integrating large language models with knowledge graphs. Education: PhD in Knowledge Reasoning and Predictive Analytics (Zhejiang University, 2011-2016) and BEng in Computer Science (Zhejiang University, 2007-2011). She also spent time as a visiting scholar at Zurich University (2014-2015). Research Interests include: Knowledge Graphs, Ontologies, Large Language Models, Retrieval Augmented Generation, and Machine Learning applications in knowledge-aware systems. She leads major grants such as the EPSRC New Investigator Award (EP/Y017706/1) and collaborates internationally through initiatives like the Manchester-Melbourne-Toronto Fund. Teaching: Leads units like 'Data Engineering Technologies' and 'Advanced Topics in Knowledge Representation'. She actively advises PhD students and co-develops tools like OWL2Vec* and DeepOnto. Service roles include Associate Editor of Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge (TGDK), membership in the EPSRC Peer Review College, and leadership in ontology alignment initiatives like OAEI Bio-ML Track.
Dr. Jose Luis SANCHEZ LOPEZ is a Research Scientist at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) of the University of Luxembourg, leading the Aerial Robotics Lab (AeRoLab) within the Automation & Robotics Research Group (ARG). He joined SnT in 2017 as a Postdoc Research Associate, promoted to Research Scientist in 2021. His research focuses on autonomous robotics, particularly aerial systems, emphasizing situational awareness, SLAM, and trajectory planning. Education: Ph.D. in Robotics (2017), M.Sc. in Automation & Robotics (2012), and Engineering degree in Industrial Engineering (2010), all from the Technical University of Madrid. Visiting Research: Arizona State University (2012), LAAS-CNRS (2014–2016). Research Interests: Multi-agent robotic systems, sensor fusion, localization/mapping, computer vision, machine learning, and trajectory control. He has authored over 56 peer-reviewed publications, with an h-index of 18. Projects: Leads projects like DEUS (PI), NEDA, ÄerdFly (PI), and RoboSAUR. Contributions span European, Luxembourg, and Spain-funded initiatives, focusing on autonomous systems, 5G integration, and construction-site robotics. Teaching: Lectured in MICS, BiCS, BING (Uni.lu) and GITI (UPM). Actively involved in academic service as a reviewer, editor, and competition participant (e.g., IMAV, IARC). Outreach: National Coordinator for Luxembourg’s Robotics European Week, promotes robotics education in schools and public events.
Pierre Marion is a Researcher at INRIA Paris, working within the Sierra research team since September 2025. His work focuses on the theoretical foundations of deep learning and he is beginning to explore applications of AI in mathematics. Marion has established collaborations across multiple institutions including EPFL, Sorbonne Université, and Google DeepMind. His educational background includes: Engineering degree from École polytechnique (2015-2018) with specialization in Applied Mathematics Master's degree from Sorbonne Université (2019-2020) PhD from Sorbonne Université (2020-2023) under the supervision of Gérard Biau and Jean-Philippe Vert Postdoctoral research at EPFL (2024) supervised by Lénaïc Chizat Marion's research interests primarily focus on the theory of deep learning, where he investigates the optimization and statistical properties of various neural network architectures. His work spans from shallow networks to complex generative models, with a particular emphasis on understanding the mathematical foundations that govern deep learning performance. Recently, he has begun exploring applications of AI in mathematical research, aiming to bridge the gap between theoretical machine learning and mathematical discovery. His research often combines rigorous theoretical analysis with practical implications for training deep neural networks. Analysis of Marion's recent publications reveals several key trends in his research. He has made significant contributions to understanding the role of large learning rates in optimization dynamics, demonstrating how they can accelerate convergence in logistic regression and prevent memorization in score-based generative models. His work on attention mechanisms has provided theoretical guarantees for their effectiveness in specific tasks like single-location regression and clustering. Additionally, Marion has extensively studied the connections between residual networks and neural ordinary differential equations , establishing generalization bounds and exploring scaling properties in the large-depth regime. His earlier work included contributions to natural language processing and quasi-Monte Carlo methods, reflecting a broad mathematical foundation that informs his current deep learning research. Marion has received several notable scientific awards: Runner-up PhD Award of AFIA (French Association for Artificial Intelligence) in 2024 Google PhD Fellowship in 2022 Ecole polytechnique Grand Prize of Research Internships in 2018 As an advisor, Marion currently supervises PhD student Yu-Han Wu (since 2024), with whom he has co-authored multiple publications on large learning rates and denoising score matching. Previously, he co-supervised several Master's students including Seorim Park, Yerkin Yesbay, and Nathan Doumèche. Marion has been actively involved in the machine learning community through conference organization (NeurIPS@Paris meetups), session chairing (ICSDS 2022), and extensive reviewing activities. He has served as a reviewer for top journals including JASA and Annals of Statistics, and conferences including NeurIPS and ICLR, where he was recognized as a top reviewer at NeurIPS 2023. Marion is a member of the Sierra research team at INRIA Paris, which focuses on machine learning theory and applications. He has also collaborated with researchers at CREST (Center for Research in Economics and Statistics), as evidenced by his participation in seminars organized by Anna Korba and Karim Lounici. His work often bridges theoretical computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of modern machine learning research.
Jay Pujara is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC), affiliated with the Viterbi School of Engineering and the Information Sciences Institute (ISI). He directs the Center on Knowledge Graphs and leads research in artificial intelligence, specializing in knowledge graph construction, scalable machine learning, and probabilistic models. Education : PhD in Computer Science (University of Maryland, 2016), MS and BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (2005 and 2004), with minors in Robotics, Mathematical Sciences, and Logic & Computation. Research Interests : His work focuses on probabilistic models for dynamic data, knowledge graph construction, entity resolution, and applications in NLP and social network analysis. He emphasizes scalable algorithms and real-world impact in domains like finance, climate science, and healthcare. Awards : Includes the SWSA Ten-Year Award (2023), Best Paper Awards at IUI 2019 and ISWC 2013, and grants totaling over $9M from DARPA, NSF, and industry partners. Grants & Mentorship : Principal Investigator on projects like "Artificial Domain-Understanding and Collaborative Agency" (DARPA) and "Explainable and Robust AI Agents" (NSF). Mentored over 50 students in PhD, MS, and undergraduate programs, focusing on knowledge graphs, NLP, and machine learning. Labs & Teams : Leads ISI’s Knowledge Graph and Neurosymbolic AI teams, coordinating the Open Knowledge Network (OKN) and tools like KGTK. Active in academic service, including roles on PhD admissions committees and ISI’s Space Management Committee.
Jiaoyan Chen is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Manchester. She previously held roles as a Lecturer at Manchester, a Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Heidelberg University. Education: PhD and Bachelor's in Computer Science and Technology from Zhejiang University (2016 and 2011), with a visiting PhD stint at Zurich University's Department of Informatics. Research Interests: Integrating knowledge graphs and ontologies with machine learning and large language models (LLMs), focusing on semantic embeddings, knowledge curation, and explainable AI systems. Publication Trends show emphasis on ontology embeddings (e.g., OWL2Vec*), LLM evaluation with knowledge graphs, and hybrid neural-symbolic reasoning. Her work bridges structured knowledge and modern AI through projects like OntoEm and ConCur . Current Research Team includes postdoctoral researchers, PhD students, and externally co-supervised associates. She actively recruits PhD candidates in areas like Retrieval-Augmented Generation and LLM Explainability , with projects funded by EPSRC and international consortia. Grants & Leadership: EPSRC New Investigator Award (2023-2026) Manchester-Melbourne-Toronto Research Fund (2024-2026) EPSRC ConCur Project (2021-2025) Professional Service: Associate Editor, Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge EPSRC Peer Review College member OAEI Track Co-organizer at ISWC
Prof. Dr. Heiko Paulheim is a Professor of Data Science and currently serves as University Vice President at the University of Mannheim. He leads the Data and Web Science Group (DWS), which focuses on Web Data Mining, Knowledge Graphs, and Semantic Web technologies. His research group contributes to open source knowledge graphs like DBpedia and develops new knowledge graphs such as WebIsALOD and DBkWik. As of October 1, 2024, he has limited teaching capacity due to his vice presidential duties. Prof. Paulheim's research interests span Knowledge Graphs, Semantic Web, Web Data Mining, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing. His work particularly focuses on knowledge graph refinement, embedding techniques (notably RDF2vec), and applications in various domains including news recommendation, biomedical informatics, and environmental monitoring. His group develops practical tools like the RapidMiner Linked Open Data Extension and RDF2vec for knowledge graph applications. His recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on knowledge graph embeddings, with particular attention to RDF2vec variants, applications in news recommendation systems, biomedical data integration, and spatio-temporal knowledge graphs for environmental monitoring. His work bridges theoretical advances in knowledge representation with practical applications across multiple domains. Among his notable achievements are a nomination for the Best Paper Award at CAiSE 2025 and securing an Open Science Grant for the SpatialBenchRAG project. His research has significant impact in both academic and industrial contexts, with multiple papers accepted at top conferences like ISWC and ESWC. Prof. Paulheim has supervised numerous PhD students including Alexander Brinkmann and Michael Schlechtinger, and has led several research projects including the DFG Project Mine@LOD, State of BW Project SyKoW², and BMBF Project DS4DM. His group maintains strong industry connections with partners like SAP AG, Daimler AG, and IDS.
Hao Liu is a researcher affiliated with institutions like Chinese Academy of Sciences , Beihang University , and Stanford University . His work spans Computer Science , Artificial Intelligence , and Robotics . Key affiliations: National Space Science Center (Beijing), School of Astronautics (Beihang), Key Laboratory of Pervasive Computing (Tsinghua) Research interests include Machine Learning , Image Processing , Graph Neural Networks , and Wireless Communication Optimization His recent publications focus on: Advanced control systems for fuzzy models Medical imaging via hyperspectral analysis Transformer-based approaches in NLP and vision Quantum-safe and edge computing protocols
Emanuel Sallinger is a Full Professor at TU Wien's Databases and Artificial Intelligence Group and Vice Dean of Academic Affairs for Business Informatics and Data Science. He leads the Knowledge Graph Lab, focusing on scalable knowledge-based systems, reasoning in knowledge graphs, and AI integration. His research spans computational logic, database theory, and blockchain applications. Education: PhD in Computer Science (awarded 'sub auspiciis praesidentis rei publicae'), Master's degrees in Computational Intelligence and Informatics Management, and a Bachelor's in Software and Information Engineering. Research Interests: Knowledge graphs (construction, reasoning, scalability), logic-based systems, AI/ML integration with databases, enterprise architecture modeling, and financial knowledge systems. His work emphasizes practical applications like enterprise modeling, sustainable waste management, and regulatory compliance. Grants & Projects: Lead Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF)-funded Knowledge Graph Lab. Involved in projects like 'Knowledge Graph-driven Tour Management' (sustainability), 'SustainGraph' (waste processing), and 'Enterprise Architecture Knowledge Graphs'. Teaching: Offers courses on Knowledge Graphs, Generative AI, Database Systems, and research methodology. Supervises doctoral and master's students in AI, databases, and knowledge representation. Labs/Teams: Knowledge Graph Lab at TU Wien, collaborating with industry on blockchain-based systems, financial AI, and enterprise architecture frameworks.
