Guest Speakers

• Michael Thelwall, University of Wolverhampton

  Professor of Data Science, leads the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton in the UK, which he joined in 1989. His PhD was in Pure Mathematics from the University of Lancaster, UK. His research involves identifying and analysing social and general web phenomena using quantitative-led research methods, including text analysis, link analysis and sentiment analysis. Mike’s 600+ publications include 345 refereed journal articles, 32 book chapters and three books. He is an associate editor of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and sits on four other editorial boards.

• Curtis Atkisson, University of California at Davis

  Started out in history until he learned that he could use evolutionary theory and mathematical and computational modeling to understand and predict human behavior. Since then he has built models to predict behavior in certain contexts and used methods from social science to propose changes to models. His dissertation work modernized an old idea in the social sciences using computational and network science methods. His current research interests are in modeling how multiplex structure limits the ability of optimal networks to form and applying these ideas to human social networks in the real world. He was recently awarded a Young Researchers Bridge Grant from the Complex Systems Society to study these ideas.

• Julian Sienkiewicz, Warsaw University of Technology

  Assistant Professor at Faculty of Physics, Warsaw University of technology. He got Ph.D. in physics (2010) working on topological properties of complex networks and processes taking place on them. Between 2014 and 2016 he was a postdoctoral researcher in Max-Planck-Institute for Physics of Complex Systems approaching problems of proxies for the popularity of scientific papers. His current interests are scientometrics, multiplex networks as well as data and text mining.

• Aljoša Rehar, Slovenian Press Agency

  Aljoša Rehar is the head of the STA’s R&D unit, which is in charge for exploring, developing and implementing new solutions and products in cooperation with IT, marketing department, and academic partners. He has deep knowledge about media trends, broad experience in devising innovative business solutions, and long as well as deep experience in collaboration within EU projects, including research-specific projects such as Xlike and Renoir as well as more media-specific projects developed in-house for the European Parliament and the national Research Agency.

• Sebastijan R. Maček, Slovenian Press Agency

  Sebastijan Razboršek Maček is the editor of the STA English Service and member of the R&D unit. He joined the STA fresh out of university as a translator and gradually took on more reporting tasks before he was appointed editor in 2017. In recent years he has increasingly gravitated towards the R&D department to live out his long-standing interest in technology and has collaborated in the design, development, testing and company-wide implementation of several technological solutions.

• Stanisław Saganowski, Wrocław University of Science and Technology

  Postdoc, received his PhD from Wroclaw University of Technology (Poland). In 2015 he spent two months at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford within the TOP 500 Innovators Program organized by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Over the last year Stanisław was enhancing his Data Science skills at UC Davis (USA), University of Technology Sydney (Australia), and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore).
  His research area is social network analysis with focus on the group evolution discovery and group evolution prediction. He is also interested in problems related to the temporal network’s time window – its type, size and impact on the network structure. In addition to the academic interests Stanisław is engaged in the Android development and currently participates in several projects in that field.

• Polyvios Pratikakis, University of Crete and Institute of Computer Science (ICS), Foundation of Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)
• Christos Kozanitis ,Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)

  A research collaborator at FORTH-ICS. He received his M.S. and Ph.D in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, San Diego in 2009 and 2013 respectively. Parts of his phd work influenced products from companies such as Cisco and Illumina. He also held a two-year postdoctoral appointment at the AMP Lab of the University of California, Berkeley, where he used and adapted state of the art big data technologies, such as Apache Spark SQL, Apache Parquet and Apache Avro to process large amounts of DNA sequencing data. His current research interests involve the improvement in software, storage and hardware level of modern datacenters in order to speed up the processing of big data workloads.

• Evangelia Kalligiannaki, Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)
• Ioannis Pantazis, Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)

Conference program

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