Keynote Speaker

Cristiano Paggetti

Prof. of Digital Health at the School of Computing at Ulster University
Belfast
About : More than 25 years of experience in the design and deployment of IT solutions for healthcare, with exceptional work ethic. Recognized as a top performer with proven leadership, solid multidisciplinary expertise and business acumen. Experience in start-up and innovation management. Since completing my Ph.D. in 1997 I have been researching and promoting innovation in the area of Biomedical Engineering. During this period of time I have set-up five successful start-up worldwide leaders in distinguish sectors, hired top level expert to delivery quality products, published over than 30 papers, successfully supervised 21 Master Degree students and 7 Ph.D. students and managed a range of externally funded Projects. European Commission expert and Innovation manager since 1998. In the meanwhile I have strength my expertise in specialties such as: - Translatoin of research results into exploitable components. - Spin-in activity combining advanced high tech business approach into research domain - User and market requirement analysis and new business design and development . - technology transfer processes and innovative product deployment in domains such as eHealth, Ambient Assisted Living and ICT. - impact assessment and scalability analysis of innovative services. - business development in healthcare and life science - fund raising and project planning for innovation related activity Organisational skills and competences: Analysis of clinical requirements and state of the art in eHealth. Design, Development and business deployment of new application for Computer Aided Surgery.

Ferrante Neri

Nottingham University,
UK
About :
EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND :
Aug 2010 DSc (Docent, Habilitation) in Computational Intelligence, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
Nov 2007 PhD in Computational Sciences (Scientific Computing and Optimization) with the Faculty of Information Technology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
Apr 2007 PhD in Electrical Engineering (Computational Electromagnetism) with the Technical University of Bari, Italy.
Nov 2002 Master Degree in Electrical Engineering (Laurea Degree) with the Technical University of Bari, Italy.
SHORT EMPLOYMENT HISTORY :
Apr 19 - today Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
May 13 -Mar 19 Full Professor of Computational Intelligence Optimisation with the Faculty of Computing Engineering and Media, De Montfort University, United Kingdom
Oct 14- Sep 16 Visiting Professor of Computational Intelligence Optimisation, with the Faculty of Information Technology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Mar 12-May 13 Reader in Computational Intelligence with the Centre for Computational Intelligence, Faculty of Technology, De Montfort University, United Kingdom
Sep 09-Aug 14 Academy Research Fellow with Academy of Finland, at the Department of Mathematical Information Technology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
Nov 07-Aug 12 Assistant Professor in Simulation and Optimization, with the Department of Mathematical Information Technology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Harry Agius

Brunel University,
UK
About : Harry has research and teaching expertise in various aspects of digital media, games and creative computing. He was co-editor of the Handbook of Digital Games (IEEE/Wiley, 2014). He has for many years served on the editorial board of the Multimedia Tools and Applications journal (Springer).
Qualifications : BSc in Computing and Information Systems (1994), MSc in Analysis, Design and Management of Information Systems (1995), and PhD in Multimedia Systems (1997) - all from the LSE

Rachel Kent

Kings College London,
UK
About : Dr. Kent is a scholar in the fields of digital health, digital media, and the digital economy. Kent’s academic research is interdisciplinary, examining the intersections of technology and the body, health and surveillance. Specifically, Dr. Kent’s research focuses on how digital technology influences everyday mental and physical health.
Dr. Kent gained her PhD from the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. Kent’s thesis examined the use of self-tracking technologies and social media in self- representations and management of health. Kent has an MA with Distinction in Creative Media (2014), a BA (Hons) with a First Class in Media and Communication Studies (2010) from the University of Brighton. Dr. Kent is currently writing her first book, The Health Self - Digital Performativity and Health Management in Everyday Life. Published by Bristol University Press as part of the Quantified Societies and Selves Series, this book explores the cultural significance and social implications of the pervasive adoption of self-tracking technologies and social media as tools of health performativity and management. In particular, this book examines the wide integration of these technologies in individuals’ everyday lives to track, regulate and perform health practices from the perspective of those working towards specific health goals, like marathon training or dieting, to those suffering from illness and chronic disease, as well as the everyday lay user.

Larisa Soldatova

Goldsmith University of London,
UK
About : Larisa joined Goldsmiths in November 2017 as director of the online Masters in Data Science programme.
Larisa is an internationally recognized expert in AI, particularly in discovery science, reasoning, knowledge representation and semantic technologies. She leads in Goldsmiths the EPSRC-funded project ACTION on cancer aiming to develop an AI system to assist in recommending personalized cancer treatments. The project is in partnership with the University of Manchester and has a funding total of over £1,300,000.
Larisa is also working on the Robot Scientists project, which investigates what processes of scientific discovery can be automated and how robotic and human scientists can work together. The Robot Scientist Adam was the first system that made an autonomous scientific discovery.
Larisa is involved in a number of international projects on the development of semantic standards, e.g. Machine Learning Schema, Robotics Task Ontology Standard, Laboratory Protocols EXACT.

Liz Browne

Oxford Brookes University,
UK
About : Dr Liz Browne is a Professor of Education working in the Centre for Educational Consultancy and Development (CECD) . As an educationalist she has held senior posts in a number of secondary schools and in the Further Education sector. Whilst working at Oxford Brookes University she has managed the quality assurance of a national quality improvement programme for the Further Education sector, working on behalf of the DfE. She was successful in bidding for funding to create a Centre for Excellence in Teacher Training and managed the Centre between 2008 and 2014. Liz is an active researcher having articles published in prestigious journals on issues such as data management, the early years standards, ICT and student voice. Her work is now focused on international partnership, delivering training in China and to visiting academics from China, Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Professor Liz Browne is head of the Centre of Education Consultancy and Development and co-research lead for the Policy, Partnership and Leadership research group. Her research interests are in the area of educational policy and leadership and she has worked on a number of consultancy projects with national organisations working in the Further Education and Skills sector. Recently her interest in leadership and management has involved Liz in working with the Education and Training Foundation to evaluate a range of management projects and to report on the management training requirements for the FE and Skills sector. Liz is experienced in supervising doctoral students and has examined a number of PhDs and Education Doctorates in the UK and abroad. She is currenlty researching the impact of policy change to the introduction of the New Maths Curriculum and investigating the impact of the increase use of data on the experience of Higher Education students. She is also interested in the changing nature of teacher training resultant from government policy adjustment to the way teachers are trained. Professor Browne is a governor of an Ofsted rated 'Outstanding' Primary School

Tony Prescott

University of Sheffield,
UK
About :Tony Prescott is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at the University of Sheffield, UK, and the Director of Sheffield Robotics, a cross-disciplinary research institute with over 200 researchers. He is also the co-creator of the award-winning animal-like robots Scratchbot, Shrewbot and MiRo. His background mixes psychology, philosophy and brain theory with robotics and artificial intelligence, and his research aims at answering questions about the human condition by creating synthetic entities with animal or human-like capacities such as perception, memory, emotion and sense of self. His approach takes a posthuman perspective, examining the ever-deepening relationship between our species and the technologies we create; he also regularly speaks and writes about the societal and cultural impacts of future robotic, AI, virtual reality and telepresence technologies. Tony has published over 200 articles and conference papers at the interface of robotics, AI, psychology, and neuroscience, and is the lead editor of The Scholarpedia of Touch, published by Springer, and of Living Machines: A Handbook of Research in Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems published by Oxford University Press. His journalism includes articles for New Scientist, Newsweek, The Hindu, and The Independent. Tony was the lead author of the 2017 White Paper Robotics in Social Care: A Connected Ecosystem for Independent Living that explored the potential of robotics to help address the current crisis in UK health and social care provision. He also co-founded, and is a current director of, two robotics spin-out companies, Consequential Robotics, developing education and assistive living technologies, and Cyberselves, develop robot interfaces for applications including telepresence. He has given many invited talks including to NewScientist Live, The Tencent Way to Evolve Conference, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and the Stedelijk Museum, he also co-organized a touring robotics exhibition that has featured at multiple science festivals including BlueDot, Cheltenham Science Festival, and FutureFest. Tony’s research is regularly featured in online and print media and has been covered by the BBC One Show, BBC Breakfast, Tomorrow’s World Live and BBC Radio 4 Today, World at One and Material World. International coverage has included the Discovery Channel, Arte Channel, and CNN.

Md. Hossein Zoualfaghari

PhD, MEng, MIET,
Research Manager, IoT Architect & Technical Lead,
Applied Research, BT Technology, UK
About :
• Inventor of Zero Touch Onboarding (ZTO) Technology Suite.
• Architect and head of technical design & delivery for UK’s flagship smart cities pilots, performing end to end design and architecture reviews.
• Extensive academic and work experience in IoT, IoT security, cloud and edge solutions, network, electronic, software, communications and optical communication systems design, modelling and simulations, along with the strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Software and hardware development lead of a successful start-up, Meal2Go Ltd (Just-Eat). • Hands on experience of project management and leading agile dev-ops teams using Scrum model, with a balanced technical/business skills.
• Extensive experience with a wide range of development platforms, programming languages, software and hardware design.
• The registered inventor of many patents, book chapters, white paper, journal and conference papers.

J. Mark Bishop

Scientific Advisor Fact360 and Professor of Cognitive Computing,
Goldsmiths,
University of London, UK
About : Scientific Advisor to FACT360, J. Mark Bishop (recently elected to the international faculty of The Karel Čapek Center Praha, Czech Republic) is Professor of Cognitive Computing (Emeritus) Goldsmiths, University of London, where he led a team that have developed AI & Analytics for fraud detection and B2B e-procurement; research (widely reported at the time) that was deployed by the UK National Audit Office in 2011 to identify £500m potential annual savings in the NHS consumable budget. Fact360 are currently building disruptive AI for HR Analytics, e-Discovery & Insider Threat Detection.
Over his career Mark’s research has spanned the practice and theory of Artificial Intelligence. In this context he has been invited to advise on policy at the UN (Geneva/Turin/Birmingham), the EC (Brussels) and the UK (Westminster/Whitehall). In addition, as an experienced speaker who enjoys discussing AI with both specialist & general audiences, Mark has been honoured with plenary/keynote invitations across a variety of international events.
In 2010 Mark was elected to Chair the AISB (the professional association for 'Artificial Intelligence & Simulation of Behaviour'); the world’s oldest AI society. Mark served a four-year term [2010-14] during which, with a strong International track record as a consultant on AI & Data Ethics, he was co-opted to join the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC).
Having published three academic books, two hundred articles and won £3m of research funding, Mark serves as Associate Editor of nine international journals and is regularly asked to comment on AI, particularly in response to those (e.g. Prof Hawking, Musk, Kurzweil et al) who warn of an 'existential threat'; in this context, an invited piece for the New Scientist became the most downloaded article of the issue. In 2016 Mark was invited to debate AI with Prof Murray Shanahan (Imperial) across an episode of BBC Radio 4’s flagship “Agree to Differ”.

Pietro Oliveto

University of Sheffield,
UK
About : Pietro Oliveto is a Senior Lecturer in the Algorithms group and leader of the 'Rigourous Runtime Analysis of Bio-inspired Computing' project team. He received the Laurea degree and PhD degree in computer science respectively from the University of Catania, Italy in 2005 and from the University of Birmingham, UK in 2009.
From October 2007 to April 2008, he was a visiting researcher of the Efficient Algorithms and Complexity Theory Institute at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Dortmund where he collaborated with Prof. Ingo Wegener's research group.
From 2009 to 2010 he was a Research Fellow at Birmingham funded by EPSRC under the PhD+ funding scheme. From 2010 to 2013 he was an EPSRC funded Postdoctoral Fellow in Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, UK. In October 2013 he moved to Sheffield where he was appointed Vice-Chancellor's Fellow in the department of Computer Science. Since March 2015 he is an EPSRC Early Career Fellow.
Professional activities :
• Member of the Algorithms and Testing research groups
• Steering Committee of the workshop on Theory of Randomized Search Heuristics (ThRaSH)
• Member of the EPSRC Review College
• Member of ACM
• Senior Member of IEEE
• Member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Technical Committee on Evolutionary Computation
• Chair of the IEEE CIS Force on Theory of Bio-inspired Computation

Dr Jian-Guo Zhang

Senior Lecturer, London South Bank University
UK
About : Dr Jian-Guo Zhang has 30 years of active research on optical fibre communications and avionics optical data buses. From 1988 to 1990, he was a research engineer of Avionics Data Bus Group in the Development Division of Chengdu Aircraft Company, China, working on MIL-STD-1773 optical fibre avionics data buses, MIL-STD-1553B avionics data buses, and effect of impulsive noise on the performance of digital communication systems. From 1995 to 1999, he was an Assistant Professor, then an Associate Professor of Telecommunications at the Asian Institute of Technology (an autonomous international postgraduate institute supported by Governments of the industrial world, international organizations (e.g., World Bank and Asian Development Bank), various foundations, other public and private-sector donors). Dr Zhang was an invited Senior Research Scientist of Communications Laboratory at the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) in Finland, before he joined the London South Bank University as a Senior Lecturer of Telecommunications Engineering in January 2001. He has been teaching and conducting research in the areas of optical fibre communications, high-speed communication networks, and microwave photonics, respectively. He has published over 100 international journal papers.
Dr Zhang is a recipient of Young Scientist Award from 1995 URSI/IEEE International Symposium on Signals, Systems and Electronics, 1996 URSI Young Scientist Award from International Union of Radio Science (URSI), Best Paper Award from the Second International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks and Digital Signal Processing; Co-recipient of Third-Prize Paper Award from the China Association for Science and Technology in 2009; Co-recipient (together with Prof. Yiyuan Xie of Southwest University and Dr Guijin Wang of Tsinghua University) of 2017 Third-Prize Natural Science Award from Chongqing Municipality, China. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (IOP) in UK and The Higher Education Academy.
• Overseas member of Editorial Board for Acta Photonica Sinica since 2007.
• Invited PhD advisor for supervision/joint supervision of PhD students at the State Key Laboratory of Transient Optics & Photonics, Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China.
• Member of Viser Academic Committee (10/04/2019 – 09/04/2020), Viser Technology Pte. Ltd. (focusing on publishing scientific and technological journals and books) in Singapore.

Dr. Ranga Rao

He is an associate professor at Embedded Software group of Delft University of Technology since 2013. His research interests are in the area of Tactile Internet, Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), Energy Harvesting and 60 GHz millimeter wave networks. He has supervised 18 PhD students (15 graduated, 3 ongoing) and more than 40 MSc students (36 graduated). He has participated in several European and Dutch national projects in the area of IoTs, 60 GHz communications, Smart-energy systems, Personal networks and Cognitive Radios. He has (co)authored more than 200 publications in the peer-reviewed international transactions/journals and conferences. He was responsible for the signing of a MoU between IISc-TUDelft. In 2015, He received 4TU University Teaching Qualification diploma with distinction. I have served on the editorial board of many international journals and magazines including IEEE Transaction on Green Communication Networks, IEEE JSAC, IEEE Communication Magazine, IEEE Surveys and Tutorials and Elsevier-Communication Networks. He is a regular reviewer for many prestigious journals and conferences and serves as the TPC member for various conferences. He is also contributing to the academic community by leading many IEEE activities, such as memberships of standards boards, leading technical committees, etc. He was nominated as the vice-chair of IEEE Tactile Internet standardization group. For my excellent research contributions, He is selected as the IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer on Internet of Things for the period 2016-2018. From 2005-12 I was a senior researcher and adjunct faculty at TU Delft working on the EU FP7 Magnet (and Beyond) Project and the Dutch project PNP-2008 on Personal Networks (PNs), Future Home Networks, etc. He completed my PhD from IISc, Bangalore, India in 2003. During my PhD research, a scalable VoIP conferencing platform was designed. Many new ideas including a conjecture were formulated and tested by developing an application suite based on his research findings. The work involved an understanding of network protocols, application design and human-computer interface. My thesis work lead to a startup venture, Esqube Communication Solutions. He was leading a team of engineers developing many real- time applications including bridging anonymous VoIP calls called Click-to-Talk for Ebay.com. While at Esqube, eight patent applications and three PCT applications were filed along with his colleagues. Esqube was selected as top 100 IT innovators in India in 2006 by NASSCOM and top 100 in promising companies in Asia by Red Herring in 2008. He is a senior member of IEEE and ACM.
Research Interests
His research interests include
§ Tactile Internet
§ Internet of Things (IoT)
§ Space Internet of Things (Space IoT)
§ Cyber Physical Systems (CPS)
§ Energy Harvesting
§ 5G and 60 GHz millimeter wave networks

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