IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems Panel Session

Journeys to Success within in the Computational Intelligence Industry

12th July at 6pm Luxemburg time, 5pm UK Time and 9am PST

The IEEE Women in Computational Intelligence subcommittee and the IEEE Industrial Liaison committee would like to invite you to a very exciting panel featuring some outstanding women and men who will share their experience on a wide range of topics on the panel theme of Journeys to Success within in the Computational Intelligence Industry.

Agenda

  • Welcome by IEEE Computational Intelligence President, Professor Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier and Professor Sanaz Mostaghim, VP for IEEE CIS Member Activities
  • Introduction to the Panel, Keeley Crockett
  • Our panelists will share their stories, experiences and advice on the panel topic
    • Dr Catherine Huang, Principal Engineering and Senior Staff Data Scientist of McAfee AI Research and Chair of the IEEE CIS Industrial Liaison committee, – My nonlinear journey, reflections, and advice, USA
    • Dr Mona Ghassemian, Senior Research and Innovation Manager, InterDigital Communications, Inc.  – Transitioning from academic to industry, UK
    • Dr Rabia Danishmand, Digital IT Consultancy services, – My journey into UX as a User Researcher, UK
    • Alessandro Liani, Chief Executive Officer, Affiliation: Video Systems Srl – How SME companies can grow thanks to knowledge exchange, Italy
    • Dr Anne Liret, Sustainable, AI and Optimisation Research Manager – Business modelling, Resource management and Operational transformation – Applied Research – Technology, BT, France
  • Questions from the floor
  • Panel Wrap up

Meet the Panel and Speakers

Name: Prof. Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier
Title: President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society
Affiliation: Sorbonne Université – CNRS, Paris, France

Bio: Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier is a director of research emeritus at the National Centre for Scientific Research and Sorbonne University, the former head of the department of Databases and Machine Learning in the LIP6 laboratory. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-based Systems and the Co-executive director of the IPMU International Conference held every other year since 1986. B. Bouchon-Meunier is the (co)-author of five books and the (co)-editor of 30. She has (co)-authored more than 400 papers on the applications of fuzzy logic and machine learning techniques to decision-making and data science.

She was elected President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society for 2020-2021. She is an IEEE Life Fellow, an IFSA Fellow and an Honorary Member of the EUSFLAT Society. She received the 2012 IEEE CIS Meritorious Service Award, the 2017 EUSFLAT Scientific Excellence Award, the 2018 IEEE CIS Fuzzy Systems Pioneer Award and the 2019 Outstanding Volunteer Award of the IEEE France Section.

 Name: Dr Catherine Huang
Title: Principal Engineer and Senior Staff Data Scientist
Affiliation: McAfee LLC, U.S.A.

Bio: Dr. Catherine Huang is a Principal Engineer and Senior Staff Data Scientist at McAfee AI Research. Her research interests are adversarial machine learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence for cybersecurity. She was VIP at Forbes 2021 Roundtable Discussion on Solving for Tech’s Gender Gap. She was a guest speaker of McAfee CTO at MPOWER 2020 Executive Keynotes. Catherine presented her keynote on Adversarial Machine Learning at IEEE SSCI2016. She has 16 patents and 42 papers. Previously, Catherine was a Senior Research Scientist at Security & Privacy Research at Intel Labs in 2011-2017. She directed machine learning research at the Intel Science and Technology Center for Security Computing at University of California Berkeley in 2015-2016. Prior to joining Intel, Catherine was a postdoc researcher at Neurotechnology Lab in Oregon Health & Science University. Catherine received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Oregon Health & Science University in U.S., M.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of New Brunswick in Canada, and B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from South China University of Technology. Catherine was elected member of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Administrative Committee for 2020-2021. She serves as the Workshop co-Chair of IJCNN2021 and Secure Learning Task Force Chair of IEEE Neural Networks Technical Committee. She is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions of AI and a Guest Editor of Springer Complex and Intelligent System Journal. Catherine was the Chair of IEEE Cognitive and Developmental Systems Technical Committee from 2019-2020. She was the chair of IEEE CIS 1st Technical Challenge in 2019. She has served in the organizing committee for many IEEE conferences including WCCI, SSCI, IJCNN, MLSP.

Name: Dr Anne Liret
Title: Sustainable, AI and Optimisation Research Manager – Business modelling, Resource management and Operational transformation – Applied Research – Technology, BT
Affiliation: British Telecom, France

Bio: Dr Anne Liret is currently research manager in Operational Transformation and Artificial Intelligence in BT’s Applied Research. Her research at BT, for more than 21 years, includes problem modelling and solving using AI and Optimisation techniques, with a focus on resource scheduling problems in dynamic and uncertain context, interactive scheduling and planning, derisking-oriented simulation, Inventory Management, context-aware self-learning models for real-time diagnosis. Her models have been widely published and have helped transforming operations in field engineering services, asset maintenance management and service assurance. She has PhD in AI and formal computation, and a strong experience in applying AI, including Fuzzy logic, to transform telecommunications services operations.

Name: Dr Rabia Danishmand
Title: Principal Engineer and Senior Staff Data Scientist
Affiliation: Digital IT Consultancy services, UK

Bio: Rabia is highly skilled and widely experienced User Researcher and Human Factors expert. She gained her PhD from Manchester University in the area of HCI, investigating the affects of Embodied Conversational Agents on Human perception and interactions. She has worked as an Academic in both Manchester University and MMU, as well as working for a short while for a new startup called Wakelet, and working on other UR projects with companies like Thales and Manchester Art Gallery. Rabia then moved to the private sector as working as a UX contractor and currently working as an IT Consultant as a User Researcher for Capgemini.

Name: Alessandro Liani
Title: Chief Executive Officer
Affiliation: Video Systems Srl

Bio: Alessandro is an electrotechnical engineer having obtained the diploma in 1994 at the ITIS A. Malignani technical institute in Udine. In parallel to Video Systems business, he started the master’s degree course in computer science at Università di Udine. His interests are focused in the field of artificial and computational intelligence, on artificial vision and in industrial robitics for quality control. He is currently chair of the Manufacturing working group within AIOTI and Industry Liaison Committee Member, Senior Member of IEEE and Senior member of ACM.

Name: Dr Mona Ghassemian
Title: Senior Research and Innovation Manager
Affiliattion: InterDigital Communications, Inc, UK

Bio: Mona Ghassemian received her PhD in “Mobile and Personal Communications” research from King’s College London with NTT DoCoMo scholarship in 2005. After completion of her PhD she continued at King’s College London as a research associate in E-Sense (a project of the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission) for 2 years. She worked as a lecturer and senior lecturer at King’s College London, Uni of Greenwich and SBU, teaching courses and supervising at BSc, MSc, and PhD levels in 2006-2007, 2007-2012, and 2012-2018, respectively and was a visiting research associate at King’s College London 2008-2018. She visited a number of universities; namely Uni of Toronto, Uni Polytechnic Valencia, and Univ of Sydney, and collaborated with their research groups. She moved to industry to work at BT research lab at Adastral park with a focus on the security of 5G and IoT technologies 2019-2021. She currently works as senior manager at Interdigital Inc. She is also the IEEE UK & Ireland Chair since 2020 and has been active in a number of regional and section level IEEE roles since 2012. Mona is a senior member of IEEE.

Name: Sanaz Mostaghim
Title: Professor of Computer Science, IEEE CIS VP Member Activities 
Affiliation: Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany

Bio: Sanaz is an active member in international communities. She is the vice president of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (starting from 2021) and served as adcom member for two terms (2015-2020). She is a technical committee member at IEEE CIS and since 2012 is serving as an associate editor for IEEE transactions on evolutionary computation and since 2020 as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on AI. She was the chair of task force  Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimization of IEEE-CIS and the founding chair for task force Optimization Methods in Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (OMBB) of IEEE-CIS (chair: 2013-2015).

Name: Keeley Crockett
Title: Professor in Computational Intelligence, Chair IEEE Women in Computational intelligence sub-committee
Affiliation: Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Bio: Keeley currently leads the Computational Intelligence Lab within Centre for Advanced Computational Science at Manchester Metropolitan University, Her main research interests include fuzzy systems, computational approaches to natural language processing, and computational intelligence for psychological profiling (comprehension and deception). She is leading work on Place based practical Artificial Intelligence, facilitating a parliamentary  inquiry conducted in 2020 with Policy Connect and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Data Analytics (APGDA) in June and July 2020 as part of Metropolis funding. She has and is working on numerous projects receiving grants from the European Union H2020 Programme for novel research, the academic co-lead in the ERDF  £6m funded GM Artificial Intelligence Foundry,  to Innovate UK funding where the focus is on knowledge transfer partnerships with business.  Keeley is currently the Chair of the IEEE Women into Computational Intelligence sub-committee, Co-Chair of the IEEE WIE Educational Outreach sub-committee, IEEE UKRI SIGHT Ethics and Wellbeing officer and a member of numerous CIS subcommittees. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Keeley serves as an Associate Editor on the IEEE Trans. Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, IEEE Trans. Artificial intelligence and IEEE Trans on Fuzzy systems. She is the current Chair of the IEEE Task Force on Ethical and Social Implications of Computational Intelligence and will serve as Co-General Chair at IEEE SSCI, Orlando 2021. She is Track Chair AI and Big Data at IEEE ISC2 2021 IEEE International Smart Cities Conference – 2021 and Workshop Chair at 2021 IEEE INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE (IHTC 2021).