Invited Speakers

1. Prof. Marc Riedel (University of Minnesota, USA)
   
   Marc Riedel is Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota. From 2006 to 2011 he was Assistant Professor. He is also a member of the Graduate Faculty in Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology. From 2004 to 2005, he was a lecturer in Computation and Neural Systems at Caltech. He has held positions at Marconi Canada, CAE Electronics, Toshiba, and Fujitsu Research Labs. He received his Ph.D. and his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at Caltech and his B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering with a Minor in Mathematics at McGill University. His Ph.D. dissertation titled "Cyclic Combinational Circuits" received the Charles H. Wilts Prize for the best doctoral research in Electrical Engineering at Caltech. His paper "The Synthesis of Cyclic Combinational Circuits" received the Best Paper Award at the Design Automation Conference. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award.


2. Prof. Pauli Miettinen (University of Eastern Finland, Finland)
   
   Pauli Miettinen is a professor of data science at the University of Eastern Finland. Previously he was a senior researcher and head of the area Data Mining at the Databases and Information Systems department of the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany. He is also an Adjunct Professor (docent) of computer science at the University of Helsinki, Finland, where he previously worked in Prof. Heikki Mannila's group, and received his PhD in 2009. His main research interest is in Algorithmic Data Analysis. In particular, he has been working on matrix and tensor decompositions over non-standard algebras, such as Boolean or subtropical algebra, and their applications to data mining, both as a tool for knowledge discovery, and also as a unifying language for many data analysis problems. His research has resulted in numerous publications in top data mining venues, three best paper prices (PKDD'06 Best paper; PKDD'08 & ECML PKDD'16 Best student paper), and an honorary mention at 2010 ACM SIGKDD Doctoral dissertation awards.


3. Dr. Andrew Cross (IBM, USA)
   
   Dr. Andrew Cross is a Research Staff Member and Manager of the Theory of Quantum Computing and Information group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He received an S.M. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008; before that, he graduated with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, and minors in Mathematics, Physics, and Music, from Case Western Reserve University. His research interests include quantum computing, quantum error correction, fault tolerance, validation techniques, and control of superconducting qubits. Dr. Cross has been recognized by IBM for his outstanding contributions to the development of the IBM Q Experience and Qiskit open-source software for quantum computing.