Keynote Speakers

Prof. Peter Cochrane

A seasoned professional with decades of industrial and institutional hands on management, technology and operational experience augmented by a career as a Business Angel, Venture Capitalist and Entrepreneur with an extensive start up portfolio.

During his time with BT he progressed from linesman to Head of Research and CTO at BT. His 1000 strong team engaged in studies spanning optical fibre, fixed and mobile networks, complex systems, AI, AL, future products, human behaviour and interfaces. On leaving BT in 2000 he formed his own consultancy company and an investment career involving eBookers and Shazam Entertainment along with a raft of smaller starts in the UK and USA.

As a consultant Peter has also been employed by numerous fortune 500 companies spanning the defence, logistics, travel, retail, energy, healthcare, transport and Pharma sectors. As an advisor he has been engaged by UK, USA and Singapore government departments; he has also advised The MoD, DoD, HP, CSC, NetApp, Motorola, 3M, Dupont, Ford, Jaguar, Sun, Apple, Cisco, Shell, Rolls Royce, BMW, BP, HSBC, Mahindra, PWC, EY, Pirelli et al.

Peter currently advises FaceBook and the Qatar Foundation, and in 2017 he was appointed as a visiting Professor of Sentient Systems to the University of Suffolk UK where his mission is to change the way we teach science and technology, and to bring the PhD degree and associated research process into the 21C.

As the UK’s first Prof for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology @ Bristol in 1998; Peter also received the Queen’s Award for Innovation & Export in 1990; numerous Honorary Doctorates; and an OBE (1999). He has published over 1000 articles and papers, a number of books and book chapters, appeared on national and international radio and TV and given 1000s of talks and lectures.

Prof. Dr. Takayuki Ito

Takayuki ITO is Professor of Kyoto University. He received the B.E., M.E, and Doctor of Engineering from the Nagoya Institute of Technology in 1995, 1997, and 2000, respectively. From 1999 to 2001, he was a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). From 2000 to 2001, he was a visiting researcher at USC/ISI (University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute). From April 2001 to March 2003, he was an associate professor of Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST). From April 2004 to March 2013, he was an associate professor of Nagoya Institute of Technology. From April 2014 to September 2020, he was a professor of Nagoya Institute of Technology. From October 2020, he is a professor of Kyoto University. From 2005 to 2006, he is a visiting researcher at Division of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University and a visiting researcher at the Center for Coordination Science, MIT Sloan School of Management. From 2008 to 2010, he was a visiting researcher at the Center for Collective Intelligence, MIT Sloan School of Management. From 2017 to 2018, he is a invited researcher of Artificial Intelligence Center of AIST, JAPAN. From March 5, 2019, he is the CTO of AgreeBit, inc. as an entrepreneur

He is a board member of IFAAMAS, Executive Committee Member of IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Intelligent Informatics, the PC-chair of AAMAS2013, PRIMA2009, General-Chair of PRIMA2014, and was a SPC/PC member in many top-level conferences (IJCAI, AAMAS, ECAI, AAAI, etc). He received the JSPS Prize, 2014, the Prize for Science and Technology (Research Category), The Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, 2013, the Young Scientists’ Prize, The Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, 2007, the Nagao Special Research Award of the Information Processing Society of Japan, 2007, the Best Paper Award of AAMAS2006, the 2005 Best Paper Award from Japan Society for Software Science and Technology, the Best Paper Award in the 66th annual conference of 66th Information Processing Society of Japan, and the Super Creator Award of 2004 IPA Exploratory Software Creation Projects. He is Principle Investigator of the Japan Cabinet Funding Program for Next Generation World-Leading Researchers (NEXT Program). Further, he has several companies, which are handling web-based systems and enterprise distributed systems. His main research interests include multi-agent systems, intelligent agents, group decision support systems, agent-mediated electronic commerce, and software engineering on offshoring.

His main research interests include Multi-Agent Systems, Group Decision Support Systems, Collective Intelligence, Crowd Intelligence, Consensus, Autoamted Negotiation, Computational Mechanism Design, Game Theory, Auction Theory, Intelligent Agents, Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce, Information Economics, and Reasoning under Uncertainty.

Dr. Vung Pham

Dr. Pham is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Sam Houston State University. His areas of expertise centered around data analytics, data visualizations, machine learning, and deep learning. He received his Bachelor’s from President University and Master’s from Politecnico di Milano, both with full scholarships. He then became a lecturer at FPT University for eight years before joining the Department of Computer Science from Texas Tech University under the President’s strategic growth initiative in Data Science (3-year fellowship) for his Ph.D. As a Research Assistant. He published one patent, various peer-reviewed journals, and conference papers. Dr. Pham also wrote an NSF I-Corps proposal and executed it as an Entrepreneur Lead. As part of his research development, he won one best paper award, an award in VAST 2018 Mini-Challenge 2, honorable prizes in KDD 2020 Cup and BigData 2020 Cup challenges and achieved Spirits of NSF I-Corps award.

Dr. Pham’s areas of expertise centered around data visualizations, data analytics, machine learning, and deep learning. His skill set holds a unique place in computer science because he has worked with different stages in a production pipeline of a complete machine learning solution for various problem domains. They are 1) data exploration, 2) building machine learning/deep learning models, 3) interpreting/explaining the learned models, 4) reporting results to the public. He is currently working on projects related to analyzing information about climate change. For instance, there are projects that use data visualizations/data analytics to analyze data collected from soil profiles. There are also projects that use machine learning/deep learning to predict soil properties (e.g., pHs or carbon storage) from visible and near-infrared (Vis-NIR) spectra acquired from soil profiles. He is also working on projects that use deep neural networks (e.g., YOLO, R-CNN) to solve computer vision tasks (e.g., road damage detection).