Keynotes Speakers and Tutorial Instructors - ICEDEG 2021

Keynote Speakers

Luciano Floridi is a Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, where he is also the Director of the Digital Ethics Lab of the Oxford Internet Institute. Still, in Oxford, he is a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics of the Faculty of Philosophy, and a Research Associate and Fellow in Information Policy of the Department of Computer Science. Outside Oxford, he is Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute (the national institute for data science) and Chair of its Data Ethics Group; and Adjunct Professor (“Distinguished Scholar in Residence”) of the Department of Economics, American University, Washington D.C.His research concerns primarily Information and Computer Ethics (aka Digital Ethics), The Philosophy of Information, and the Philosophy of Technology. Other research interests include Epistemology, Philosophy of Logic, and the History and Philosophy of Scepticism. He has published over 150 papers in these areas, in many anthologies and peer-reviewed journals. His works have been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. His lifetime project is a tetralogy (not his term) on the foundation of the philosophy of information, called Principia Philosophiae Information is. His most recent books are The Fourth Revolution – How the infosphere is reshaping human reality (Oxford University Press, 2014); The Ethics of Information (Oxford University Press, 2013, volume two of the tetralogy ); The Philosophy of Information (Oxford University Press, 2011, volume one of the tetralogy); Information – A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010). He has edited many volumes, including The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003); The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2010); and The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Information (Routledge, 2016).
Ricardo Baeza-Yates is the Director of Data Science programs at Northeastern University, Silicon Valley campus (part-time). From 2016 to 2020 he was CTO of NTENT, a semantic search technology company located in California as well as CEO of NTENT Hispania, an R+D filial in Barcelona, Spain, since 2017. Until 2016 he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, first in Barcelona, Spain, and then in Sunnyvale, California, where he technically lead projects in web search and mining, web advertising, and data science in general. As a manager, he also oversaw the Haifa lab for 5 years and started the London lab in 2012. He was also on the board of Yahoo Israel and Hungary. Before he was an ICREA research professor at the Dept. of Information and Communication Technologies of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, and Professor and founding director of the Center for Web Research at the Dept. of Computing Science of Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile. He is still a part-time professor at both departments. He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook, published in 1999 by Addison-Wesley with a second enlarged edition in 2011, which won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award. He is also co-author of the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures, Addison-Wesley, 1991; and co-editor of Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Data Structures, Prentice-Hall, 1992, among more than 500 other publications. He received the Organization of American States award for young researchers in exact sciences (1993), the Graham Medal for innovation in computing given by the University of Waterloo to distinguished ex-alumni (2007), the CLEI Latin American distinction for contributions to CS in the region (2009), the National Award of the Chilean Association of Engineers (2010), and a National Research Spanish Award in CS (2018), among other distinctions. Since 2010 he is a founding member of the Chilean Academy of Engineering. In 2009 he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow.
Jeanna Matthews is a full professor of computer science at Clarkson University and an affiliate at Data and Society. She has published work in a broad range of systems topics from virtualization and cloud computing to social media security and distributed file systems. She has been a four-time presenter at DEF CON on topics including security vulnerabilities in virtual environments (2015 and 2016), adversarial testing of criminal justice software (2018), and trolling (2018). She is an ACM Distinguished Speaker, a Fulbright Specialist, founding co-chair of the ACM Technology Policy Subcommittee on Artificial Intelligence and Algorithm Accountability, and a member of the ACM Technology Policy Committee. She has been a member of the ACM Council (2015-present), chair of the ACM Special Interest Group Governing Board ( 2016-2018), and the chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS) from 2011 to 2015. Her current work focuses on securing societal decision-making processes and supporting the rights of individuals in a world of automation. She received a 2018-2019 Brown Institute Magic Grant to research differences in DNA software programs used in the criminal justice system. Jeanna received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999, a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ohio State University in 1994, and a B.A. in Spanish from the State University of New York at Potsdam in 2015.
Patty Kostkova is a Professor in Digital Health and the Director of UCL IRDR Centre for Digital Public Health in Emergencies. She is a world-leading researcher in the novel interdisciplinary domain of digital public health. Her research covers a wide spectrum of digital public health ranging from mobile gamified training apps to combat the zika virus in Brazil, increasing resilience and disaster preparedness in women in Nepal to strengthening antibiotic stewardship using game-based training in Nigeria, and DR-TB management in South Africa. Her team's research into Big Data for public and global health includes one of the first studies exploring the potential of Twitter for early warning of swine flu 2009. She also leads the iNational Resource for Infection Control (iNRIC, www.nric.org.uk), established the ECDC training resource FEM Wiki (www.femwiki.com), and educational games for children edugames4all (www.edugames4all.org). During the COVID-19 emergency, Prof Kostkova has been advising WHO on a digital strategy in the context of COVID-19, while her team rapidly prototyped a gamified app for citizens to monitor compliance with government stay-at-home policy and lifestyle changes to improve wellbeing, and also work with WHO on analyzing social media discourse on Covid-19.
Daniela Paolotti is Research Leader at ISI Foundation, in the Computational Epidemiology and Public Health group. Her research revolves around the field of infectious diseases epidemiology with a special focus on digital epidemiology, participatory surveillance, and mathematical modeling. This field is a high interdisciplinary domain that combines complex system science, computational sciences, complex networks theory, mathematical epidemiology, ICT technologies. She is interested in complex techno-social systems and in studying new data-collection schemes aimed at detecting disease-related information directly from the general population, both with passive and active approaches. She is the coordinator of Influenzanet (www.influenzanet.eu), a Europe-wide network of web-based platforms aimed at monitoring the activity of influenza-like-illness (ILI) with the aid of volunteers via the internet. It is now operational in eleven countries and it has been built mainly thanks to the activity carried out during the European Commission funded Epiwork project (7th Framework Program) coordinated by ISI Foundation. In contrast with the traditional system of sentinel networks of mainly primary care physicians, Influenzanet obtains its data directly from the population, mostly by those individuals who don't visit a doctor when affected by ILI symptoms. This creates a fast and flexible monitoring system whose uniformity allows for direct comparison of ILI rates between countries.

Tutorial and Workshop Instructors

Israel Pineda holds a Master's and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Chonbuk National University, South Korea. Dr. Pineda studies the field of Scientific Computing, where he tries to merge ideas from applied mathematics and computing to solve engineering and scientific challenges. Mainly, he is interested in the intersection of simulation, optimization, and artificial intelligence. He has experience working for important universities and industries in several countries. He is a published author of conference and journal papers.
Daniel Alvarez Torres is an enterprise Solutions IT Architect for the Financial Services Industry for IBM Ecuador. Self-taught and technology enthusiast, in his more than 20 years of experience on the IT sector, Daniel has had different roles at IBM and worked on a diverse project which has allowed him to gain knowledge and practical experience in areas like Cloud Computing, Blockchain, Micro-services architectures, Big Data and Business Analytics.
Juan Zaldumbide is a passionate Data Scientist and full-time Lecturer in the Technologist Training School from National Polytechnic School, also is a part-time lecturer in other Universities in Ecuador and one in Spain. He has been part of Big Data research projects in Ecuador and Australia. He holds an Honours Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Melbourne, a master’s degree in systems management from Army Polytechnic School of Ecuador, and a cum laude minor in Systems Engineering from The National Polytechnic School of Ecuador. Also, he supports s as an independent consultant for some local businesses such as ITDEABS (co-founder), Umayux(co-founder), and Big Data Ecuador (owner and founder)