Speakers

Confirmed Speakers:

Prof. Graham Cormode - University of Warwick, UK

Graham Cormode is a Professor in Computer Science at the University of Warwick in the UK, where he works on research topics in data management, privacy and big data analysis. Previously, he was a principal member of technical staff at AT&T Labs-Research. His work has attracted over 12,000 citations in the literature and has appeared in over 100 conference papers, 40 journal papers, and been awarded 30 US Patents.

Cormode is the co-recipient of the 2017 Adams Prize for Mathematics for his work on Statistical Analysis of Big Data. He has also edited two books on applications of algorithms to different areas, and co-authored a third. More information can be found at http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/~graham/.

Prof. Bettina Berendt - University of Leuven, Belgium

Bettina Berendt is a professor in the Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning and Data Mining group at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Leuven. Her research interests are data and text mining and in particular the interactions with how people make decisions faced with the artificial and human intelligence they find online. This means investigating how mining affects and interacts with privacy and data protection, how it can liberate and increase diversity – or discriminate, and what ethical choices people face when dealing with data and data science. Within this range of topics and methods, Bettina has concentrated on combining methods from data mining, HCI, and behavioural economics, and investigated questions arising for data subjects, researchers, institutional decision-makers, teachers, and regulators.

Before coming to Leuven, Bettina was a professor in the Information Systems Institute of Humboldt University Berlin. She studied Business, Economics, and Artificial Intelligence in Berlin/Germany, Cambridge/UK and Edinburgh/UK. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Hamburg University/Germany and her Habilitation in Information Systems from Humboldt University Berlin. More information can be found at https://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~bettina.berendt.

Prof. Toon Calders - University of Antwerp, Belgium

Toon Calders became full professor at the University of Antwerp in 2016. Before that, he worked as an assistant professor at the TU Eindhoven from 2006 till 2012, and as an associate professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles from 2012 till 2016. His main research interests are Data Mining and Machine Learning. Toon Calders is area editor of the Springer Data Mining journal, and was program chair of ECMLPKDD 2014 and Discovery Science 2016.

Toon Calders was among the first researchers working on fairness in data mining and machine learning, being one of the principal investigators of the NWO-sponsored project “Discrimination-aware datamining” (2008-2011), which resulted in the publication of the book "Discrimination and privacy in the information society" that was published in 2012 by Springer. He gave a keynote on "Fairness-Aware Data Mining" at EGC 2016, and published several papers on fairness in high-level data mining venues (DMKD, KDD, ICDM, SDM, ECML/PKDD). In the near future, Toon Calders will lead a Joint Research Initiative "Measuring Fairness of Predictive Models", sponsored by AXA. More information can be found at https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/toon-calders/.

Prof. Paul Quinn - Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) - Law, Science, Technology, and Society (LSTS), Belgium

Paul is active in pursuing a number of his research interests as a research professor at LSTS. This includes in areas such as data protection, privacy issues and problems related to stigmatization and discrimination. He is part of the Health and Aging Unit at LSTS where he co-ordinates research on such issues. Paul has developed considerable experience in privacy and data protection issues in the area of health care delivery and scientific research. He has been successful in securing participation for LSTS and the VUB in a large number of research projects as an expert on legal and ethical issues related to privacy and data protection issues. Paul is also a member of the University's Ethics Board for Research in the Social Sciences.Paul has also been active in research into issues associated with stigmatization and anti-discrimination approaches. He has been particularly active in developing a normative argument concerning the threats posed by stigmatizing expressions and language when used by the state. His PhD thesis was entitled "Stigmatizing State Expressions and the law". He has published a monograph on these issues with Routledge in 2015.

Before joining the LSTS team Paul worked in the legal industry in the UK. He trained as a Barrister (Bar of England and Wales) and is a member of Greys Inn. He holds degrees in European and International Law (LLM, Institute of European Studies, Brussels), Law (MA, University Sheffield) and Biochemistry, (University of Sheffield).

Dr. Maryam Fanaeepour - Ghent University, Dept. of Electronics and Information Systems, Belgium

Maryam Fanaeepour is currently a postdoctoral researcher at IDLab, Ghent University since Dec 2018. Previously, she was a postdoctoral associate researcher at Duke University, Computer Science Department working on Data Privacy. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science, working on private spatial data analytics, from the University of Melbourne, School of Computing and Information systems, in 2017. She has been also a member of Advanced Data Analytics in Transport Research Group in the Cyber-Physical Systems research capability, Data61, CSIRO. Maryam has worked at IBM Research Australia as a research intern. Her research interests include data management and mining, privacy and fairness.

Hanne Elsen, Ghent University (UGent) – Data Protection Officer, Belgium

Hanne Elsen is the Data Protection Officer of Ghent University. She graduated Master in Laws in Antwerp and Master in Notary in Ghent. Since 2016 she has been appointed as an independent Ethics Expert to the European Commission. She is also a member of several working groups around privacy and ethics.