People

John Shawe-Taylor has contributed to a number of fields ranging from mathematics of graph theory through cryptography to statistical learning theory and its applications. In graph theory central contributions were to the classification of cubic distance regular graphs, while in cryptography his RSA prime generation algorithm was incorporated into an international standard. However, his main contributions have been in the development of the analysis and subsequent algorithmic definition of principled machine learning algorithms founded in statistical learning theory. This work has helped to drive a fundamental rebirth in the field of machine learning with the introduction of kernel methods and support vector machines. The coordination of projects such as NeuroCOLT projects and later the PASCAL and PASCAL2 networks these has influenced a generation of researchers and promoted the widespread uptake of machine learning in both science and industry that we are currently witnessing.

Yvonne Rogers is internationally renowned for her work in HCI and ubiquitous computing and, in particular, for her pioneering approach to innovation and ubiquitous learning. Professor Yvonne Rogers is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and the ACM’s CHI Academy and with a track record of more than 30 research grants from EPSRC, ESRC, AHRC, EU, NIH and industry totalling over £15M. She was awarded a prestigious EPSRC dream fellowship rethinking the relationship between ageing, computing and creativity and is also the PI at UCL for the Intel Collaborative Research Institute on Sustainable Connected Cities, which was launched in October 2012 as a joint collaboration with Imperial College. Professor Yvonne Rogers directs the UCL Interaction Centre a centre of excellence in HCI research from the UCL Computer Science Department.

Emine Yilmaz is a reader (associate professor) at University College London, Department of Computer Science, where she is a faculty fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. She also works as a research consultant for Microsoft Research Cambridge. She is the recipient of the Karen Sparck Jones 2015 Award for the contributions of her research to the field of information retrieval, and she received the Google Faculty Research Award in 2014/2015. Yilmaz’s current research interests include information retrieval, data mining and applications of information theory, statistics and machine learning. Her research has been widely adopted by the information retrieval community and the sampling methods she has designed for efficient retrieval evaluation have been commonly used and made publicly available by the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). She is an elected member of the executive committee of ACM SIGIR and an elected organizing committee member of the British Computing Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group.

Marko Grobelnik is an expert in the areas of analysis and knowledge discovery in large complex databases. Marko collaborates with major European and US academic institutions and consults industries such as British Telecom, Microsoft Research, Nature, New York Times, Bloomberg, and Accenture. Marko is author of several books in the area of machine learning, data mining, text mining and semantic technologies and authors of many scientific papers. He is also W3C AC representative for IJS, CEO of the company Quintelligence and co-founder of the company Cycorp Europe. Marko served also as a program chair for European Machine Learning conference (ECMLPKDD 2009) and for European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2011). In terms of the past project experience, Marko has been technical coordinator for projects FP6 IST-World and FP7 VIDI and coordinator of FP7 project X-LIKE (Cross-Lingual Knowledge-Extraction); he was a member of project management board in several FP6 and FP7 Projects (SEKT, NEON, ACTIVE, COIN).

Mitja Jermol is the holder of UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for Open Educational Resources and Open Education and a head of the Centre for Knowledge Transfer at Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia.  Center has setup and is being running one of the world’s top open scientific video portal http://videolectures.net. Mitja’s research is focused on using Artificial Intelligence in the context of Business Intelligence, Personalised Learning, Smart Cities and Factories of the Future. Mitja has been active in more than 20 H2020, FP7 and FP6 projects in these areas. Together with his team he has initiated a nation-wide initiative on developing and deploying open education called “Opening Up Slovenia”. He is a member of the European Complex System Society, Open Education Consortium, Opencast and European current research information systems (CRIS) community. Mitja is a co‐founder of the two institute spin‐outs, Quintelligence and Cycorp RER. Mitja was also conference chair for “Open Course Ware Consortium” Global Conference 2014.

Davor Orlic has an MA in Digital Humanities at University College London, and lives in London, has co-founded VideoLectures.Net, created OpeningupSlovenia, established a UNESCO Chair and I’m managing the K4A Foundation. My objective is to work with groups of talented researchers, policy makers, coders and entrepreneurs to innovate and to take technologies to the next level and apply them to large scale complex problems and provide solutions with real-life impact. I have a keen interest in education and a proven track record in leading teams in building, curating, and managing international projects, events, reports and policies.

Dr. Alfons Juan is an associate professor of computer science at the UPV, where he leads the Machine Learning and Language Processing (MLLP) research group. His main area of research is machine learning and its applications, particularly to human language technology. He is co-author of more than 130 research publications and has participated in more than 20 research projects, including 5 European projects. He has been co-advisor of 8 PhD theses. His recent activities have included leading the UPV node of the PASCAL2 European Network of Excellence, and the coordination of the highly successful and recently completed transLectures EU project.

Colin de la Higuera is the author of more than 70 reviewed research papers in the areas of Machine learning, algorithmics and formal language theory, and of a monograph, Grammatical Inference: Learning Automata and Grammars, published in 2010. He has been involved in grammatical inference and machine learning for the past 20 years. He is a trustee of the Knowledge for All foundation, and is involved in the issues of producing open educational resources. In this setting, he acted as chair of the Open Courseware Conference Global held in Ljubljana in 2014. He is also head of the COCO project at University of Nantes. He has been the President of the French Computer Science learned society from 2012 to 2015. In 2015 he launched project Class’Code (http://classcode.fr) whose goal is to teach instructors and educators in France, through OER, to coding and computational thinking.

Dr. Tobias Thelen Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Osnabrück. He is deputy managing director of virtUOS and teaches web technology and eLearning at the computer science department. Thelen is member of the Stud.IP development community for more than 10 years and works on learning management systems and algorithms for automatically analyzing learners’ linguistic skills as a foundation of adaptive eLearning tools. He headed the Osnabrück department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS from 2010 to 2014. Thelen leads the development of the MOOC.IP authoring and presentation tool and plays a central role in the current nationwide discussions and activities concerning the use of copyrighted material in higher education in Germany.

Prof. Dr. Frank Ollermann Ph. D. in Psychology at the University of Osnabrück. He works for virtUOS since 2002 with a focus on researching the impact of digital learning technologies on learning outcomes and acceptance. His current research focus is on motivational aspects of using lecture recordings. He has led several projects at virtUOS dealing with eAssessment, lecture recording and other learning technologies. In addition he is professor for psychology and user experience at the University of Applied Sciences in Osnabrück.

Iztok Renčelj is the Director of the IT Sale and Development Services Division at Pošta Slovenije. He started his professional career as IT operations specialist, continued as Head of information security and later as the corporate security and control Division Deputy Director. Since 2013, he has built and led the company IT Cloud strategy and Cloud is still his main working area. Iztok was involved in development and implementation of IAAS services (virtualised environment, x86 solutions), PAAS services (Microsoft, Linux, Oracle), SAAS services, Storage replication and IT-hosting services.

Uros Krajnc is presently Director of Human Resources and Legal Affairs Division at Post of Slovenia.  He join the company at 2006. The major part of his current career is devoted to the development of HR and training and education of employees and in this context also to the optimization of work organization. He has the overall responsibility of man power planning and recruitments. The practical part of his career is complemented by his scientific research work in the field of optimization of labour costs. In years 2013 to 2015 Uroš was in charge of several internal projects with objective to change the organizational structure of the company. In 2016 Uroš take over the role of project leader of the renewal of Pošta Slovenije Collective Bargaining Agreement, which essentially introduces novelties in the field of training, education and development of employees that include introduction of a competence model, the pool of staff talents, and 180-degree evaluation of new forms and modalities of education.

Borut Čampelj has an Msc. math in education (Faculty of Mathematics and physics, University of Ljubljana) and PhD candidate of computer science (Faculty of Organisational Sciences, University of Maribor). He’s a secretary in The Education Development Office at the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport. His responsible for the development of STEM and ICT in education but also the coordinates all development project co-financed by European Social Fund. He cooperates in international projects (EUfolio – development e-portfolio, ATS2020 – assessment of transversal skills, Youth-start – entrepreneurship). He has been/is a member of different Working group of European Commission of »Education and Training 2010″ and »Education and Training 2020″ activities: “ICT in education”, “Mathematics Science and Technology”, “Transversal skills” and “Digital and on-line learning”. His skills are: supervisory and coaching skills, project leading skills, research (science skills), communication skills and flexibility. He is a team worker and problem solver also.