George Vouros
Professor, Department of Digital Systems
University of Piraeus
www.ds.unipi.gr/en/faculty/georgev-en
Short bio
George Vouros is a Professor in the Department of Digital Systems in the University of Piraeus, Greece. His published work and scientific interests are in the areas of Expert Systems (has developed 4 successful systems in critical and complex domains – planning the loading of chemical carriers, ore detection/prediction, diagnosis for activated sludge plant, buffer allocation in production lines- during 1990-1997), Knowledge Engineering, Management, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning with ontologies (engineering, alignment of, learning and population with data from disparate sources, extracting modules from, decentralized reasoning with, semantic data integration), Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (focusing on agent organizations and adaptation, information sharing), Reinforcement and Imitation Learning in single and multiagent complex settings, reinforcement learning explainability and human-centric AI (safe RL with respect to human preferences and constraints, calibration of LLMs for human-agent collaboration, beneficial AI). He has served and serves as program chair, chair and member of organizing or program committees of national and international conferences consistently (AAMAS, ECAI, IJCAI, AAAI, WI, SETN) and as member of steering committees and boards of conferences (EUMASS/EURAMAS, SETN) and workshops (COIN). He is/was senior researcher in more than 25 EU-funded and National research projects. Teaches AI topics since 1998, introducing advanced courses regarding knowledge representation and reasoning, knowledge engineering, agents and multiagent systems and reinforcement learning, at pre and at post graduate levels. He has supervised 13 PhD students on learning and aligning ontologies, reasoning with ontologies, in agents and multiagent systems, reinforcement learning and imitation learning, and also contributed to the supervision of PhDs in machine learning topics. He currently supervises 5 PhD students in the areas of machine learning (online/offline reinforcement learning, imitation learning, time series classification, anomaly detection), knowledge representation and reasoning with ontologies, and ontology alignment. George Vouros has served 4 times from 2008 to 2024 as chair of the Hellenic A.I. Society (EETN, member of EurAI) board. During these times he contributed with the establishment of HAISS (Hellenic AI Summer School), steering (2006-2018) and co-chairing (2004, 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2024) of SETN bi-annual Hellenic AI Conferences with International Participation (proceedings published by Springer Lecture Notes and ACM), enlargement of SETN set of members (mostly with PhD students via grants for conferences/school participation). During the last years (2023-2024) he led the statement of the Hellenic AI Society positions towards a Hellenic Strategy for AI. Serves (2025-) as member of the Hellenic Scientific Section Board on AI (under the auspices of the Hellenic Ministry of Development). He is the founder and director of the inter-institutional MSc on AI between University of Piraeus and NCSR “Demokritos” (2019-today), has founded and heads the AI Lab at the Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus (2016-today).
Talk Title: TBA