Team

Prof. Marios Polycarpou

University of Cyprus and KIOS Research and Innovation Centre of Excellence

Marios Polycarpou is is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Director of the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence at the University of Cyprus. He received the B.A degree in Computer Science and the B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, both from Rice University, USA in 1987, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, in 1989 and 1992 respectively.

His teaching and research interests are in intelligent systems and networks, adaptive and cooperative control systems, computational intelligence, fault diagnosis and distributed agents.

• Dr. Polycarpou has published more than 300 articles in refereed journals, edited books and refereed conference proceedings, and co-authored 7 books.
• He is also the holder of 6 patents.
• Prof. Polycarpou is a Fellow of IEEE and IFAC.
• He is the recipient of the 2016 IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award.
• He received with his co-authors the 2014 Best Paper Award for the journal Building and Environment (Elsevier).
• Prof. Polycarpou served as the President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (2012-2013), and as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (2004-2010).
• He is currently the President of the European Control Association (EUCA).
• Prof. Polycarpou has participated in more than 60 research projects/grants, funded by several agencies and industry in Europe and the United States, including the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant.

Dragan Savić

KWR Water Research Institute and University of Exeter

Dragan Savić is Chief Executive Officer at KWR Water Research Institute based in the Netherlands and Professor of Hydroinformatics at the University of Exeter in the UK. He obtained his PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Manitoba, Canada, in 1990, and then held a number of academic, consultancy and project management positions in Canada and his native Serbia, before relocating to the United Kingdom, where he co-founded the University of Exeter Centre for Water Systems in 1998.

• In 2001 he became the UK’s first Professor of Hydroinformatics, holding this post until 2018 at the University of Exeter, where he was also the head of the Engineering faculty between 2010 and 2014.
• In 2013 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), the highest honour for a UK engineer.
• He is also a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers (UK), a Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (UK), and a Fellow of the International Water Association (IWA).

His research interests cover the interdisciplinary field of Hydroinformatics, which transcends traditional boundaries of water/environmental science and engineering, informatics/computer science (including Artificial Intelligence, data mining and optimisation techniques) and environmental engineering.

Barbara Hammer

Bielefeld University

Barbara Hammer is a full Professor for Machine Learning at the CITEC Cluster at Bielefeld University, Germany. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1999 and her venia legendi (permission to teach) in 2003, both from the University of Osnabrueck, Germany, where she chaired a junior research group on 'Learning with Neural Methods on Structured Data'.

In 2004, she became Professor for Theoretical Computer Science at Clausthal University of Technology, Germany, before moving to Bielefeld as chair of the Machine Learning group in 2010. Several research stays took her to University Paris I, University of Padova, Birmingham University, and CAIR Bangalore.

Barbara's research interests cover theory and algorithms in machine learning and neural networks and their application for technical systems and the life sciences, including explainability, learning with drift, nonlinear dimensionality reduction, recursive models, and learning with non-standard data.

Phoebe Koundouri

Athens University of Economics and Business, ReSEES Laboratory on Socio-Economic and Environmental Sustainability

Phoebe Koundouri, is a world-renowned environmental economics professor and global leader in sustainable development. She is widely recognized as a pioneer in innovative, human-centric, interdisciplinary systems for the sustainable interaction between nature, society, and the economy.

• She is listed in the most-cited women economists in the world, with 15 published books and more than 450 published peer reviewed scientific papers, book chapters and reports.
• She is elected member of the World Academy of Art & Science, President-elect of the European Association of Environmental and Natural Resource Economists and she has received numerous international awards for academic excellence, including the prestigious European Research Council Synergy Grant (2020).
• With 100 European/Global research projects/initiatives and a team of 150 researchers, her work defines policies and supports human well-being across the globe.
• She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and has been affiliated as researcher and lecturer with Cambridge, UCL, LSE, University of Reading.
• Since 2006 she is professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), founding director of ReSEES Research Laboratory (AUEB), the Sustainable Development Unit (ATHENA Informatics Research and Innovation Center) and the EIT Climate-KIC HUB Greece of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, the latter focusing on innovation acceleration and research commercialization.
• She chairs the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network - Europe, the International Center for Research ICRE8 and the Scientific Advisory Board of European Forest Institute.
• She is Commissioner and the “Green Recovery” Task Force Leader of the global COVID-19 Lancet Commission, member of the Pissarides Committee (10 year Greek Development Plan) chaired by Nobelist Prof. C. Pissarides, member of the National Climate Change Committee of Greece, and an advisor to the EU, the World Bank, the UN, NATO, the WHO and other international organizations and governments worldwide.