 | Prof. Krisztian Balog is a full professor at the University of Stavanger, leading the Information Access & Artificial Intelligence (IAI) research group, an adjunct professor in AI/NLP at NTNU, and a former Staff Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google. His general research interests lie in the use and development of information retrieval, natural language processing, and machine learning techniques for intelligent information access tasks. More specifically, his research concerns semantic search and novel evaluation methodologies, and, more recently, conversational and explainable AI. With an h-index of 40 he has published over 175 papers, including an (open access) book on Entity-Oriented Search (Springer, 2018), serves as senior programme committee member at SIGIR, WSDM, WWW, CIKM, and ECIR, is former Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems and coordinator of IR benchmarking efforts at TREC and CLEF. He serves as short paper co-chair for CIKM'21 and as general co-chair of ECIR'22 (to be held in Stavanger, Norway). Balog is the recipient of the 2018 Karen Spärck Jones Award, and is an elected member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences. Title of Speech: Toward More Natural Interactions with Conversational AI Systems |
 | Prof. Chunming Rong is the chair of IEEE CS STC on Blockchain, and served as co-chair of IEEE Blockchain in 2018. He is also chair of IEEE Cloud Computing. He works as the head of the Center for IP-based Service Innovation (CIPSI) at the University of Stavanger (UiS) and also as adjunct Senior Scientist leading Big-Data Initiative at NORCE. He is also co-founder and CTO of two start-ups bitYoga and Dataunitor in Norway, both received EU Seal of Excellence Award in 2018. He was the vice president of CSA Norway Chapter (2016-2017). His research work focuses on data science, cloud computing, security and privacy. He is an IEEE senior member and is honoured as member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences (NTVA) since 2011. He has extensive contact network and projects in both the industry and academic. He is also founder and Steering Chair of IEEE CloudCom conference and workshop series. He is the steering chair and associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (TCC), and co-Editors-in-Chief of the Journal of Cloud Computing (ISSN: 2192-113X) by Springer. Prof. Rong has extensive experience in managing large-scale R&D projects funded by both industry and funding agencies, both in Norway and EU. Title of Speech: A Secure Blockchain Ecosystem – The Network is my Computer |
 | Dr. Febe de Wet is an associate professor at the North-West University's Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering. She also has an affiliation with the Digital Signal Processing group at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Before joining Stellenbosch University she was a Principal Researcher at the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) where she led various projects on the development of speech technology and resources for South Africa's indigenous languages. Her research interests include statistical pattern recognition and automatic speech recognition. She is especially interested in developing speech recognition systems for children and in educational applications of speech technology. Febe holds a PhD degree from Radboud University in the Netherlands. Title of Speech: Speech Technology in African Languages |
 | Dr. Wasswa William is a Biomedical engineer, a researcher, senior lecturer and the Head of the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Engineering at Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Uganda. He is a CEO and co-founder of Global Auto Systems LTD Uganda; an IoT & AI SaaS based Research and Development Company. He has expertise knowledge in Artificial Intelligence, Medical Imaging and Robotics, and is a technical member of the African Union High level panel on Artificial Intelligence for Africa. He is much interested in health innovations that provide universal health coverage, especially reaching the unreached. His research is published in a number of leading journals and has a significant focus on enhancing cancer screening and diagnosis with AI. In 2020, he was a finalist for the UK Royal Academy of Engineering Africa Prize for Innovation. Title of Speech: PapsAI: Leveraging AI to Improve Diagnosis and Classification of Cervical Cancer from Pap-smears. |
 | Dr. Dane Brown holds a PhD graduate in Computer Science from Rhodes University, South Africa. His PhD research involved the development of a multimodal biometrics system, which leveraged comprehensive theory and application of various image processing and machine learning techniques. He also holds a Masters degree in Computer Science within the scope of South African Sign language recognition. His current interests are ongoing but not limited to the biometrics field, and these interests include face recognition and network security using deep learning. Workshop: Application of deep learning on the automatic classification of images. Participants will learn the basics of Keras with Python for the implementation of Convolutional Neural Networks. |
 | Mr. Bipul Shahi is an AI & ML Technical Consultant & Corporate Trainer. He has 7 years of experience in Artificial Intelligence Application, Data Science technologies, IoT and Robotics. He is a technical expert and a passionate trainer. He has delivered a large number of training on AI, ML & IoT for IITs, NiTs and other colleges. As a technical consultant, he has the ability to use appropriate tools to complete the consultancy within specified deadlines. He has a BTech and an MTech from the Uttar Pradesh Technical University, India. Workshop: Introduction to Machine Learning with Python. Participants will learn how to use classifiers to perform predictions on a dataset. |
