The ENNS General Assembly took place on September 8th, 4pm CEST in Bristol, UK, during ICANN 2022.
The members voted the candidates for the post ENNS President and for the Executive Committee for the term 2023-2025. The elected members are:
ENNS President 2023-2025
Stefan Wermter, Germany
Bio: Stefan Wermter is Full Professor at the University of Hamburg and Director of Knowledge Technology in the Department of Computer Science. He holds an MSc from the University of Massachusetts in Computer Science, and a Doctorate and Habilitation in Computer Science from the University of Hamburg. He has been a research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley before leading the Chair in Intelligent Systems at the University of Sunderland. His main research interests are in the fields of neural networks, hybrid neuro-symbolic systems, neuroscience-inspired computing, neurocognitive robotics and crossmodal learning. He has been the general chair for the International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks 2014 and on the board of the European Neural Network Society for many years. He has been an associate editor of the journals “Transactions of Neural Networks and Learning Systems” and “Neural Networks”. Currently, he serves as an associate editor for “Connection Science”, “International Journal for Hybrid Intelligent Systems” and he has been and is on the editorial board of the journals “Cognitive Systems Research”, “Cognitive Computation” and “Journal of Computational Intelligence and Applications”. He is co-coordinator of the International Collaborative Research Centre on “Crossmodal Learning” and coordinator of the European Training Networks SECURE and TRAIL on explainable neural networks and artificial intelligence for cognitive robots.
ENNS Executive Committee 2023-2025
Angelo Cangelosi, UK
Bio: Angelo Cangelosi is Professor of Machine Learning and Robotics at the University of Manchester (UK) and co-director of the Manchester Centre for Robotics and AI. He also is Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute London, Visiting Professor at Hohai University, and Visiting Distinguished Fellow at AIST-AIRC Tokyo. His research interests are in cognitive and developmental robotics, neural networks, language grounding, human robot-interaction and trust, and robot companions for health and social care. Overall, he has secured over £35m of research grants as coordinator/PI. Cangelosi has produced more than 300 scientific publications. Cangelosi is Editor-in-Chief of the journals Interaction Studies and IET Cognitive Computation and Systems, and in 2015 was Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Development. He has chaired numerous international conferences, including recently ICANN2022 Bristol, and ICDL2021 Beijing. His book “Developmental Robotics: From Babies to Robots” (MIT Press) was published in January 2015, and recently translated in Chinese and Japanese. His latest book “Cognitive Robotics” (MIT Press), coedited with Minoru Asada, was recently published in 2022.
Igor Farkaš, Slovakia
Bio: Igor Farkaš holds a PhD degree in applied informatics and MSc degree in technical cybernetics, both from the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava. In 2000-2003 he worked as a research fellow (postdoc) at the Department of Psychology, University of Richmond, VA. Since 2003 he has been affiliated with the Department of Applied Informatics of the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, Comenius University in Bratislava (since 2014 as a full professor and the head of department) where he also leads the Cognition and Neural Computation research group, and coordinates the Centre for Cognitive Science (http://cogsci.fmph.uniba.sk). Igor Farkaš received Fulbright scholarship (Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas in Austin), and Humboldt scholarship (Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics, Saarland University, Germany). He has conducted research in artificial neural network modeling with the focus on cognitive robotics and language learning, but also computational analyses of neural network models (deep networks, echo state networks), and reinforcement learning. In the field of education, he coordinates the Middle European interdisciplinary master program in Cognitive Science and serves as the local manager within the consortium of universities (http://meicogsci.eu). He has supervised 9 doctoral, 47 master and 11 bachelor theses.
Chrisina Jayne, UK
Bio: Professor Chrisina Jayne is the Dean of the School of Computing & Digital Technologies. She has more than 25 years’ experience in academia, teaching, designing and leading new programmes in the areas of computing, information systems and mathematics. Her research is the areas of developing and applying novel methods for artificial neural networks, machine learning and artificial intelligence. She authored over 80 peer reviewed papers in international journals and at leading conferences. Chrisina served on the editorial board of the Springer journal “Neural Computing and Applications” and associate editor for “IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and Senior Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. She chaired the Engineering Applications of Neural Network Conference in 2012, 2014 and 2016 and she has been involved in numerous program committees of neural network related conferences. She served as the Program Chair of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) in 2017, General Co-Chair for IJCNN 2019, Technical Chair WCCI 2020. Chrisina organised the “Meet the Experts” networking event for students as part of the Educational Activities of the INNS during the WCCI 2018 in Rio De Janeiro and IJCNN 2019 in Budapest. https://research.tees.ac.uk/en/persons/chrisina-jayne
Matthias Kerzel, Germany
Bio: Matthias Kerzel received his MSc and PhD in computer science from the Universität Hamburg, Germany. He is currently a postdoctoral research and teaching associate at the Knowledge Technology Group of Prof. Stefan Wermter at the University of Hamburg. He has given lectures on Knowledge Processing in Intelligent Systems, Neural Networks and Bio-inspired Artificial Intellience. He is currently the Secretary of the ENNS and worked in the organizing committee of the ICANN conferences. His research interests are in developmental neurorobotics, hybrid neurosymbolic architectures, explainable AI and human-robot interaction. He is currently involved in the international SFB/TRR-169 large-scale project on crossmodal learning.
Alessandra Lintas, Switzerland
Bio: Alessandra Lintas received the M.S. degree in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Technology from the University of Sassari, Italy, in 2004, and the Ph.D. degree by the University of Cagliari in 2007, with a dissertation on reward systems and dynamics. She was awarded postdoctoral fellowships with the Geneva University Neurocenter, Switzerland, the Schulich School of Medicine at Western University, Canada and the Department of Medicine at the University of Fribourg. She is currently a Principal Investigator at the NeuroHeuristic Research Group, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her main research activity is focused on studying the brain networks involved in decision-making processes in experimental and simulated models. She served as secretary of ENNS for two years (2018-2019) and as deputy Treasurer of ENNS for the term 2017-2019.
Kristína Malinovská (Rebrová), Slovakia
Bio: Kristína Malinovská is an assistant professor at the Comenius University in Bratislava. She acquired her Ph.D. in computer science in 2014 at the CU and did her postdoc at CTU in Prague. Her research interests are generally in artificial neural networks, cognitive robotics, and computational neuroscience. She teaches programming, computational intelligence and computational neuroscience in the MEi:CogSci master program in cognitive science in Bratislava. Kristína was involved in the organization of the ICANN conference in 2020 (postponed) and 2021. the head of the local organizing committee of ICANN 2021 which was held fully online and hosted more than 300 attendees. She is also helping in ENNS communication duties such as online content management.
Alessio Micheli, Italy
Bio: Prof. Dr. Alessio Micheli received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 2003. Currently, he is Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Pisa, where he is the head and scientific coordinator of the Computational Intelligence & Machine Learning Group (CIML), part of the CLAIRE-AI.org Research Network. He is the national coordinator of the “Italian Working group on Machine Learning and Data Mining” (with around 50 participating groups) of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence and co-chair of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Reservoir Computing. He is an elected member of the Executive committee of the European Neural Network Society – ENNS. The main teaching activities include courses of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Computational Neuroscience. He has been involved in several national and European projects in the fields of computational intelligence (with an emphasis on novel approaches for learning on sequences, trees and graphs), robotics and bio-cheminformatics and healthcare. In these research areas, he has authored over 180 articles in international refereed journals and conferences, with 4669 citations and H-index of 35 (Google Scholar, at Sept. 2022). He currently serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. on Neural Networks and Learning Systems.
Sebastian Otte, Germany
Bio: Sebastian Otte is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 2017. Afterward, he joined the Neuro-Cognitive Modeling group also in Tübingen. Recently, Sebastian became a Feodor Lynen fellow and is visiting the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam for the next six months for a research stay. His current research focuses on recurrent (spiking) neural networks, adaptive temporal prediction models, and efficient online learning. Since 2019, Sebastian has been ENNS executive board member and was part of the organization team of the virtual ICANN 2021.
Jaakko Peltonen, Finland
Bio: Jaakko Peltonen, professor of statistics (data analysis), Tampere University, and visiting associate professor, Aalto University, Finland. Editor-in-chief of Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, associate editor of Neural Processing Letters, Transactions on Machine Learning Research, and Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, and editorial advisory board member of Heliyon. Program committee member of 103 conferences including ten ICANNs and several years each of NeurIPS, AISTATS, ICML, AAAI, ECMLPKDD, IJCAI, ESANN, ISNN, WSOM, and MLSP. Organizing committee member of 16 conferences/workshops including two ICANNs. Reviewer for 24 journals and 129 conferences. 130 publications, 2535 citations, h-index 25. Interests include statistical machine learning, exploratory data analysis, visualization and learning from multiple sources.
Brigitte Quenet, France
Bio: Brigitte QUENET is an Associate Professor at Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle ESPCI Paris PSL. She received her Master in Physics from the Swiss Federal Institue of Technology-EPFL, as well as her PhD in Solid State Physics. Member of an INSERM research team in Pitié-Salpétrière Hospital in Paris, her research interests focus on the interface between formal Neural Networks and biological networks involved in physiological functions. She also develops signal processing tools dedicated to cardiac and respiratory signals.
Ausra Saudargiene, Lithuania
Bio: Ausra Saudargiene is Professor at Neuroscience Institute, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, Lithuania, and Professor at the Department of Informatics, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. She received PhD in artificial neural networks from the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Vilnius University, Lithuania, and later got extensive training in neuroinformatics and neuroscience in Europe, Israel, Japan, USA and Canada. Her research interests are deep learning in neuroscience and medicine, brain-inspired artificial intelligence algorithms, and she leads international scientific projects on computational models of learning and memory in the brain. She is a member of the International Neuroinformatics Facility (INCF) Training and Education Committee since 2016. She has a long-lasting experience in organizing scientific events in Europe, and initiated and organized a series of Baltic-Nordic Schools on Neuroinformatics and Neuroscience BNNI 2013-2022 in Lithuania, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Germany promoting multidisciplinary research in neuroscience.
Roseli Wedemann, Brazil
Bio: Roseli S. Wedemann has accomplished undergraduate and masters studies in physics and doctoral research in computer science (area of distributed algorithms), at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is currently a professor of the Institute of Mathematics of the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Her research and publications have recently focused on theoretical and computational models of complex systems, with emphasis on computational neuroscience and artificial neural networks, applying theoretical tools from statistical mechanics. She teaches undergraduate courses and participates in the Computational Science post-graduate program of her university, where she teaches and supervises young researchers. She coordinated the development of the project for the creation of this Computational Science program and has headed the program from 2014 to 2017. Roseli has participated regularly in the ICANN conferences, frequently as a member of the program committee, and has organized a workshop entitled “Workshop on Conscious and Unconscious Mental Functions” at ICANN 2012. She served as guest editor of the Special Issue “Selected Papers from the 26th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks – ICANN 2017”, MDPI Publishers – Journal Entropy, 2018. She is currently an elected member of the Executive Committee of the European Neural Network Society (ENNS). She is also a reviewer for various renowned scientific journals, for various Brazilian science funding agencies, and participated in the program committee of various conferences.
