Dr Vu Minh Hieu Phan is a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning , University of Adelaide. His work focuses on foundational models, multimodal learning, and medical image analysis, leveraging deep learning and large language models. Research Interests : Medical Image Analysis, Vision-Language Models, Generative AI, Semantic Segmentation, Continual Learning, Knowledge Distillation. Key Venues : CVPR, ACL, EMNLP, IJCAI, MICCAI, NeurIPS, TPAMI, and IJCV. Notable Contributions include advancements in multimodal learning for medical imaging, explainable AI frameworks, and efficient knowledge distillation techniques. He serves as a reviewer for top-tier journals and conferences. Email : vu.minhhieu.phan@adelaide.edu.au
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
Mirella Lapata is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh , affiliated with the School of Informatics and the EdinburghNLP group. Her research focuses on developing AI systems that reason, generalize, and handle long contexts, with specific interests in compositional generalization, cross-lingual transfer, and verifiable generation. She leads projects funded by UKRI and ERC , including the UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Responsible NLP and Turing AI Fellowship for human-like reasoning in models. Research Emphasis : Coarse-to-fine decoding in semantic parsing, parameter-efficient LLMs, collaborative writing frameworks, and multimodal summarization. Advising : Supervises current PhD students and has mentored 23 PhD graduates since 2007, including notable alumni like Li Dong and Siva Reddy. Labs & Teams : Co-leads the Generative AI Laboratory (GAIL) and contributes to the Edinburgh Laboratory for Integrated Artificial Intelligence (ELIAI). Her recent work addresses hallucinations in generative models, cross-lingual semantic parsing, and structured reasoning in text-to-SQL tasks. She has co-authored 15+ publications in 2024 alone, spanning journals like TACL , NeurIPS , and ACL .
Diego Calvanese is a Full Professor in Computer Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. He serves as Spokesperson of the Institute of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and Director of the Smart Data Factory technology transfer lab at NOI Techpark. As Coordinator of the Intelligent Integration and Access to Data (In2Data) research group, part of the Research Centre for Knowledge and Data (KRDB), he leads significant research initiatives in knowledge representation and data management. Calvanese's research focuses on virtual knowledge graphs for data access and integration, ontology-based data access, description logics, semantic web technologies, graph data management, and verification of data-aware processes. His work bridges theoretical foundations with practical applications through the Ontop framework, which enables SPARQL query answering over OWL 2 QL ontologies connected to external data sources. His research has substantial practical impact, powering the South Tyrol Open Data Hub Knowledge Graph and supporting numerous European and national research projects. With more than 400 refereed publications and over 39,000 citations (h-index 80), Calvanese's recent work demonstrates continued leadership in virtual knowledge graphs, ontology-based data federation, explainable AI through knowledge representation, and integration of complex data types including 3D city models and raster data. His publications show a clear trajectory from theoretical foundations toward increasingly practical and applied research addressing real-world data integration challenges across multiple domains. ACM Fellow (2019) EurAI Fellow (2015) AAIA Fellow Program Chair of PODS 2015 and KR 2020 General Chair of ESSLLI 2016 Calvanese has secured significant research funding through numerous competitive projects including EU H2020 INFRAEOS Project (INODE), Italian PRIN Project (HOPE), FESR Project (IDEE), and EU FP7 IP Project (Optique), totaling close to 6.4M Euro. As an originator and co-founder of Ontopic, the first spin-off of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, he has successfully translated research into commercial applications. He serves as Associate Editor of Artificial Intelligence (AIJ) and has participated in over 200 program committee roles for international conferences. As Director of the Smart Data Factory technology transfer lab and coordinator of the In2Data research group, Calvanese bridges academic research with industry applications, focusing on practical implementations of knowledge graph technologies. His work with the KRDB Research Center has established Bozen-Bolzano as a significant hub for knowledge representation and data management research in Europe.
Professor Yun-Nung Chen works at the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering , National Taiwan University , focusing on Natural Language Processing and Dialogue Systems . With a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University , their research bridges Machine Learning and Language Understanding in conversational AI. Education Ph.D. in Language Technologies, Carnegie Mellon University (2015) M.S. in Computer Science, National Taiwan University (2011) B.S. in Computer Science, National Taiwan University (2009) Research Trends Recent work emphasizes Retrieval-Augmented Generation , Knowledge Editing in LLMs , and Temporal Modeling for dialogue systems. Key themes include cross-modal understanding , semantics-driven dialogue , and robust language modeling across domains. Scientific Recognition Best Student Paper, IEEE ASRU 2013 Best Student Paper, IEEE SLT 2010 Distinguished Master Thesis, ACLCLP 2011 Best Paper Finalist, ISCA INTERSPEECH 2012 Current projects involve StreamBench for continuous agent improvement and Taiwan LLM for culturally aligned language models.
Anthony TUNG Kum Hoe is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he has established himself as a leading researcher in database systems and data mining. He is also affiliated with the NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering and serves as a SINGA supervisor. His educational background includes a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University (2001), an M.Sc. in Information Systems & Computer Science from NUS (1998), and a B.Sc. with 2nd Class Upper Honours in Information Systems & Computer Science from NUS (1997). Professor Tung's research spans several interconnected areas within database systems and data mining. His primary focus is on developing efficient methods for indexing and searching complex data structures including time series, trajectories, trees, graphs, and high-dimensional objects. He has pioneered work in visual query processing, keyword search, and ranking systems. His GENIE (Generic Inverted Index) and LAMP (semi-Lazy Mining Paradigm) projects represent significant contributions to big data analytics, particularly in handling the 'variety' aspect of big data by providing unified frameworks for processing diverse data structures while preserving semantic meaning. His research bridges theoretical database concepts with practical applications in visual data mining, collaborative analytics, and just-in-time model construction. His recent publications reveal a clear evolution from traditional database research toward more complex analytics on diverse data types. While maintaining his core expertise in database indexing and query processing, his work has expanded to incorporate machine learning techniques, particularly in areas like nearest neighbor search, anomaly detection, and predictive analytics. There's a noticeable trend toward interdisciplinary applications, with publications spanning computer vision, natural language processing, transportation systems, and social computing. His research group consistently publishes in top-tier venues including SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, and KDD, demonstrating both theoretical rigor and practical relevance. 2005 Best Paper Award for 'Indexing DNA Sequences Using q-grams' 2007 Invited panel speaker on 'Advice for a successful database researcher career in Asia' at SIGMOD 2010 Guest Lecturer for VLDB Database School 2012 VLDB 2012 Research PC Co-chairs 2015 10 Years Best Paper Award, DASFAA 2015 Invited to SIGMOD 2008 and SIGKDD 2008 Program Committees Professor Tung has supervised numerous PhD students and research associates throughout his career, including notable researchers like Zhang Zhenjie (recipient of the 2007 President Graduate Fellowship) and Wang Nan (published in SIGMOD'08). His research group has been consistently productive, with students publishing in top conferences including SIGMOD, ICDE, and VLDB. His professional service is extensive, having served as PC Chair for COMAD'06, Research PC Co-chair for VLDB 2012, and on program committees for virtually all major database and data mining conferences over the past two decades. His research has been supported by various grants that have enabled significant contributions to database technology. His GENIE and LAMP projects represent a cohesive research direction focused on developing systematic approaches to big data analytics. GENIE provides a unified platform for storage and retrieval of big data with various structures, while LAMP introduces a novel paradigm for predictive analytics that combines the strengths of lazy and eager learning approaches. These projects have evolved to incorporate GPU acceleration and parallel processing capabilities, reflecting his commitment to addressing real-world scalability challenges in data-intensive applications.
Dr. Chenhao Ma is an Assistant Professor at the School of Data Science , The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen , where he works on large-scale data management and data mining. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Hong Kong (2021–2022) and earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Hong Kong (2021) and B.Eng. from Shandong University (2017). Current research focuses on graph computing (dense subgraph discovery, motif analysis, graph learning), AI+DB (Text-to-SQL, vector search), and traffic data mining (trajectory analysis, outlier detection). He has published over 40 papers in top venues including SIGMOD, PVLDB, KDD and received the ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award 2021 and Best of SIGMOD 2020 (4/458). Scientific Awards : ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award 2021 Best of SIGMOD 2020 (4/458) Presidential Young Fellow at CUHK-Shenzhen (2023) Hong Kong and China Gas Scholarship (2019-2020) Reaching Out Award (2019) HKU Postgraduate Scholarship (2017-2021) ACM-ICPC Gold Medal (2015) National Scholarship (2014, 2015) Advising and Research Team : He leads a team including Postdoc Dr. Yuanyuan Zeng, PhD students Lujie Ban, Yuwei Xu, and MPhil students Yi Yang, Yuyang Liang. Former mentees like Yichen Xu (PhD at Berkeley) and Jiayang Pang (Master at UC San Diego) have achieved academic placements. Professional Service : He has served as PC member/reviewer for VLDB, KDD, ICDE, WWW, NeurIPS, TKDE , and guest editor for Applied Sciences and Frontiers in Big Data . He chairs sessions at ICDE and VLDB.
Min Peng is a Professor at Wuhan University's School of Computer Science. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and knowledge graphs. He has collaborated extensively with institutions like Hefei University of Technology and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. His work bridges theoretical advancements in AI with practical applications in finance, social media analysis, and network optimization. Recent contributions include neural-symbolic reasoning frameworks, contrastive learning for knowledge graphs, and financial benchmarking with large language models. Research interests emphasize scalable machine learning models for complex reasoning tasks, explainable AI, and domain-specific applications in finance and social networks. Over 100 publications span venues like WWW, ACL, and NeurIPS, highlighting interdisciplinary impact. Notable projects include SymAgent (neural-symbolic agent frameworks), PIXIU (financial LLM benchmark), and DTC (commonsense machine comprehension). Key technical trends include integrating large language models with structured data, temporal knowledge graph reasoning, and transfer learning across domains. His work often addresses real-world challenges in data efficiency, interpretability, and cross-domain scalability. Current efforts explore financial LLMs, agent-based reasoning systems, and multimodal applications. While no specific grants or awards are listed in the provided data, his prolific publication record indicates sustained research excellence. Collaboration networks include teams in computer science, electrical engineering, and finance disciplines.
Nazli Goharian is a Clinical Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University and Associate Director of the Information Retrieval Lab. She holds a PhD from Florida Institute of Technology and joined Georgetown in 2010 after industry experience and previous academic positions at Illinois Institute of Technology. Education: PhD Computer Science, Florida Institute of Technology (2001) MSc Computer Science, George Mason University (1995) BSc Computer Science, Dortmund University (1992) Her research spans information retrieval, text mining, and natural language processing with applications in health/medical domains. She focuses on developing computational methods for medical search, mental health analysis from social media, clinical text summarization, and adverse drug reaction detection. Her recent publications (2020-2016) predominantly focus on neural ranking models, transformer architectures for document retrieval, and clinical NLP applications. Notable trends include work on BERT-based re-ranking, zero-shot multilingual retrieval, and ontology-aware medical summarization. Awards & Honors: EMNLP 2017 Best Long Paper Award COLING 2018 Honorable Mention & Area Chair Favorite Julia Beveridge Award for Faculty (IIT, 2009) Multiple Teaching Excellence Awards (2002-2007) Research Leadership: She has supervised 6 PhD students to completion with placements at leading institutions. Secured over $500,000 in research funding from NSF, Adobe, and international partners. Founded the Semi-Annual Graduate Research Presentation Days at Georgetown and served as Program Chair for ECIR 2024. She leads the Information Retrieval Lab which focuses on developing novel algorithms for efficient document retrieval, cross-lingual search, and specialized applications in healthcare text analysis.
Grant Weddell is an Associate Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on database technology for real-time applications, including large-scale schema management, information clustering, dependency theory, and query optimization for heterogeneous data sources. He teaches courses such as CS338 (Introductory Databases), CS348 (Advanced Databases), CS446 (Software Engineering), and CS848 (Advanced Database Systems). His research interests emphasize the interplay between description logics and database systems, particularly in optimizing query processing and managing complex schemas. Recent work explores path agreements, functional dependencies, and ontology-mediated querying to enhance data integration and schema management efficiency. Teaching responsibilities include foundational database courses (CS338/348), software engineering (CS446), and advanced topics in information integration (CS848). No scientific awards are explicitly listed, though his contributions to database theory and optimization are extensive.
Naren Ramakrishnan is the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, where he directs the Sanghani Center for AI and Data Analytics. He also serves as AI and Machine Learning Lead for the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus. His research spans data science, machine learning, urban analytics, forecasting, and computational epidemiology. Recent publications (2024-2025) focus on language model optimization, AI applications in government and environmental conservation, and spatiotemporal data analysis. Work demonstrates strong emphasis on real-world AI deployments in regulatory compliance, supply chain verification, and network optimization. Methodological innovations include prompt engineering techniques, world models for reinforcement learning, and specialized embedding methods. Dr. Ramakrishnan has received prestigious fellowships from ACM, AAAS, and IEEE. His research has been supported by numerous agencies including DARPA, NSF, NIH, and industry partners like Amazon and Boeing, with 36 PhD students mentored to completion.
Fabrizio Riguzzi is a Full Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Ferrara, Italy. His academic career spans over two decades at the same institution, having served as Associate Professor (2014-2020) and Assistant Professor/Ricercatore (1999-2014). He is an active researcher in the fields of Logic Programming and Statistical Relational Artificial Intelligence with numerous publications and leadership roles in international conferences. His educational background includes: PhD in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the University of Bologna (1999) Laurea in Computer Engineering from the University of Bologna (1995) Riguzzi's research focuses on probabilistic approaches to artificial intelligence, particularly probabilistic logic programming and statistical relational AI. His work bridges symbolic reasoning with probabilistic methods, developing frameworks for uncertain knowledge representation and reasoning. He has made significant contributions to probabilistic answer set programming, neuro-symbolic integration, and applications in areas like network intrusion detection and knowledge graph completion. His research demonstrates how logical formalisms can be enhanced with probabilistic reasoning to tackle real-world problems with uncertainty. An analysis of his recent publications reveals a strong trend toward integrating neural and symbolic approaches in AI, with significant work on probabilistic answer set programming frameworks. His research spans theoretical foundations of probabilistic logic programming, practical implementations, and applications in cybersecurity, knowledge graphs, and decision-making under uncertainty. The interdisciplinary nature of his work connects computer science theory with practical AI applications. His notable awards include: Alain Colmerauer 10-Year Test-of-Time Award at ICLP 2021 Best Paper Award for "BUNDLE: A Reasoner for Probabilistic Ontologies" at RR-2013 Highly Commended Paper Award for "Probabilistic declarative process mining" at KSEM 2010 Riguzzi has supervised several PhD students to completion, including Elena Bellodi, Riccardo Zese, and Giuseppe Cota, who have gone on to win prestigious awards for their theses. He has served in numerous editorial roles, including Associate Editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and Editor in Chief of Intelligenza Artificiale. His leadership extends to organizing major conferences like ILP 2018 and serving on program committees for top AI venues including IJCAI, AAAI, and ECAI. He is a member of the ML@unife research group and has developed several online systems including cplint, TRILL, and an Online AUC calculator. His work has fostered collaborations across the AI research community, particularly in the areas of probabilistic logic programming and neuro-symbolic AI.
Egor Kostylev serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics within the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on the theoretical foundations connecting symbolic and sub-symbolic artificial intelligence, particularly examining relationships between formal logic systems and machine learning approaches. His educational background includes an MSc (Specialist, 2005) and PhD (Candidate, 2009) from Lomonosov Moscow State University under Prof. Vladimir A. Zakharov. He subsequently held research positions at the University of Edinburgh (2010-2013) and the University of Oxford (2013-2020) before joining the University of Oslo in 2020. Kostylev's research interests center on bridging symbolic AI formalisms with sub-symbolic approaches. He investigates connections between various logics (Description Logics, Temporal Logics, Datalog), query languages (SPARQL, Regular Path Queries, OTTR), and machine learning formalisms (Graph Neural Networks, Markov Logic Networks). His work addresses critical challenges in Explainable, Trustworthy, and Green AI through theoretical foundations that connect different AI paradigms. His publication record demonstrates consistent high-impact contributions in theoretical computer science and AI, with numerous publications in top venues including AAAI, LICS, Journal of the ACM, and ICLR. His recent work shows a clear trajectory toward unifying logical reasoning with neural network approaches, particularly through graph neural networks and their connections to logical formalisms. The research spans theoretical foundations of knowledge representation, temporal reasoning in knowledge bases, and the logical expressiveness of modern neural architectures. As a research leader, Kostylev supervises multiple PhD students including Shuwen (Aurora) Liu, Maximilian Pflüger, Roxana Pop, Dongzhuoran Zhou, and Erik Snilsberg. He serves as a Research Theme Leader for the Integreat SFF: Norwegian Centre for Knowledge-driven Machine Learning. His teaching responsibilities include IN3020/4020 Database Systems courses. He leads the Data and Knowledge Management (DKM) research group at the University of Oslo, which focuses on foundational aspects of knowledge representation, database theory, and the intersection with modern machine learning techniques. The group actively collaborates with international researchers and contributes to advancing theoretical understanding of how symbolic and neural approaches to AI can complement each other.
Prof. Dan Olteanu is a full professor at the Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, leading the Data Systems and Theory (DaST) group. He holds visiting professorships at the University of Oxford and is an emeritus fellow of St Cross College. His academic journey includes a PhD from Ludwig Maximilian University (2005), postdoctoral roles at Saarland University and Cornell University, and prior faculty positions at Oxford (2007–2020). He has also worked in industry with companies like LogicBlox and RelationalAI, focusing on database systems and AI. Education: Bachelor’s in Computer Science, Politehnica University of Bucharest (2000) PhD in Computer Science, Ludwig Maximilian University (2005) Professional Roles: Full Professor, University of Zurich (since 2020) Visiting Professor, University of Oxford Emeritus Fellow, St Cross College Editorial Roles: ACM TODS, VLDBJ, SIGMOD Conference Chair: ICDT Council (since 2022) His research focuses on data systems theory, including query optimization, probabilistic databases, factorized databases, and in-database machine learning. He co-authored the seminal book Probabilistic Databases (2011) and has pioneered algorithms for efficient machine learning over relational data and incremental maintenance of analytical workloads. His work emphasizes scalable, theoretically grounded solutions for real-world data challenges. Awards: ICDT 2019 Best Paper Award ACM SIGMOD 2018 Distinguished PC Member Award ERC Consolidator Grant (2016) Oxford Outstanding Teaching Award (2009) Grants & Funding: Supported by Google, Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, EPSRC, and the European Commission. His research bridges academia and industry, with contributions to commercial systems like LogicBlox and RelationalAI. Labs & Teams: Heads the DaST group at Zurich, focusing on data systems theory and applications. Collaborates widely in the database and AI communities.
Nofar Carmeli is a researcher at Inria , affiliated with the Boreal joint project-team (LIRMM, Inria, University of Montpellier, CNRS) in Montpellier, France. Her work focuses on theoretical aspects of database query optimization, particularly through the lenses of fine-grained complexity and enumeration complexity. PhD from Technion (2015-2020), advised by Prof. Benny Kimelfeld Postdoctoral Researcher at ENS Paris (2021-2022) and Inria's Valda project-team Holds the Schmidt Postdoctoral Award (2021-2022) Her research explores optimal algorithms for database query answering, including direct access to ranked answers, quantile computation, and handling of conjunctive queries with self-joins or negation. She investigates how structural properties of queries and data constraints like functional dependencies affect computational complexity. Key contributions include: Establishing tractability boundaries for direct access to conjunctive queries Developing efficient algorithms for minimal triangulation enumeration Advancing probabilistic database representations for infinite domains Creating explainable opinion graph frameworks for review summarization Scientific awards: Google PhD Fellowship (2019) Schmidt Postdoctoral Award (2021-2022) PODS Best Student Paper (2019) She has served on program committees for STACS (2025), PODS (2023-2025), and ICDT (2022-2024), and contributed to open-access research dissemination through Arxiv and dblp.
