Keynote Speakers
Prof Jürgen Schmidhuber
Director, AI Initiative, KAUST
Thoughts about Machine Learning
Speaker’s Bio
The New York Times headlined: “When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber ‘Dad’.” Since age 15, his main goal has been to build a self-improving A.I. smarter than himself, then retire. His lab’s deep learning artificial neural networks based on ideas published in the “Annus Mirabilis” 1990-1991 have revolutionised machine learning and A.I. By 2017, they were on over 3 billion smartphones, and used billions of times per day, for Facebook’s automatic translation, Google’s speech recognition, Google Translate, Apple’s Siri & QuickType, Amazon’s Alexa, etc. He pioneered generative adversarial networks (1990, now widely used), artificial curiosity, Transformers with linearized self-attention (1991 – Transformers are the basis of the famous ChatGPT), and meta-learning machines that learn to learn (since 1987). Today, the most cited neural networks all build on work done in his labs. Elon Musk tweeted: “Schmidhuber invented everything.” He is recipient of numerous awards, Director of the AI Initiative at KAUST in KSA, Scientific Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, Adj. Prof. of A.I. at Univ. Lugano, and Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of the company NNAISENSE. He is a frequent keynote speaker at major events, and advising various governments on A.I. strategies.
Dr Maria Kamilaki
Acting Director General D.G. for e-Administration, Library & Publications
Hellenic Parliament
Sharing the past, preparing the future. The digital transformation of the Hellenic Parliament Library.
Speaker’s Bio
Dr Maria Kamilaki is Acting Director-General of e-Administration, Library & Publications of the Hellenic Parliament. She holds a PhD in Sociolinguistics (University of Athens), a MSc in Applied Linguistics & English Language Teaching (University of Edinburgh) and a MSc in Cultural Management (Panteion University of Social & Political Sciences). She teaches at the Hellenic Open University postgraduate course Current trends in Linguistics for Teachers, and works as a Training Program Developer at the National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government. She is co-author of the book Pepper in the mouth! Aspects of taboo words in Standard Modern Greek and author of ‘Words that smile, words that hurt’: Verbal bullying in the school environment. A teacher’s Guide. She has also published a long series of papers in the field of Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching. Her research interests currently lie in parliamentary discourse analysis, carrying out a postdoctoral research, entitled From language attitudes to language policies: Aspects of the Greek Language Question in parliamentary discourse (University of the Aegean). She has a long-standing experience in designing educational programs and outreach activities at the Hellenic Parliament, such as Glossopolis: A multimodal exhibition on Modern Greek linguistic variety.
Prof Cheng-Lin Liu
Director State Kay Laboratory of Multimodal
Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA)
Towards Explainable Document Recognition
Speaker’s Bio
Cheng-Lin Liu is a Professor at the State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is a vice president of the Institute of Automation, a vice dean of the School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received the PhD degree in pattern recognition and intelligent control from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, in 1995. He was a postdoctoral fellow in Korea and Japan from March 1996 to March 1999. From 1999 to 2004, he was a researcher at the Central Research Laboratory, Hitachi, Ltd., Tokyo, Japan. His research interests include pattern recognition, machine learning and document image analysis. He has published over 400 technical papers in journals and conferences. He is an Associate Editor-in-Chief of Pattern Recognition Journal and Acta Automatica Sinica, an Associate Editor of International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, Cognitive Computation, IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica, Machine Intelligence Research, CAAI Trans. Intelligence Technology, CAAI Artificial Intelligence Research and Chinese Journal of Image and Graphics. He is a Fellow of the CAA, CAAI, the IAPR and the IEEE.
