Keynote speakers

Professor Victor Callaghan

Victor Callaghan is an emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Essex (UK), visiting professor at Canterbury Christ Church University (UK), current president of the Association for the Advancement of Intelligent Environmentsand CEO of the Creative Science Foundation. He holds a BEng in Electronic Engineering and a PhD in Computing from the University of Sheffield. Down the years his research has covered areas which include intelligent environments, embedded agents, adjustable autonomy, end-user programming, affective computing, fuzzy logic control, quantum computing, mixed reality (including VR & AR) plus methods for ensuring stability of distributed coordinating intelligent-agent systems. In relation to these topics he has acted as principal investigator on numerous research projects, attracting over 6 million pounds sterling (UK) in funding, which have involved international collaborations with researchers in numerous countries. This research has enabled him to author over 300 papers in international journals and conferences. He is a founder of the international annual IEEE sponsored conference, ‘Intelligent Environments’ now in its 16th year (being program chair for 10 of those years) and past program chair for various earlier conferences such as ‘Active Media Technology’, ‘Pervasive Computing & Applications’ and ‘Ubiquitous Intelligence & Computing’. He is an editorial board member of Springer’s ‘Reliable Intelligent Environments journal, IOS’s ‘Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments’ journal and Springer’s book series ‘Science & Fiction”. Previously he was a member of the editorial teams for ‘Pervasive Computing & Communications’, ‘Ambient and Intelligence and Smart Environments’ and ‘Intelligent Buildings International’ and author/editor of various books, the most recent being Springer’s ‘The Technological Singularity; Managing The Journey’. More details are available at http://victor.callaghan.info/


Dr. Faiyaz Doctor

Dr Faiyaz Doctor is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) with the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Essex, U. K where he is head of the Intelligent Connected Societies Group and member of the Centre for Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Embedded Systems and Environments Group. He is also CTO at Interactive Coventry Ltd and a member of the Creative Science Foundation. Dr Doctor graduated with an honour’s degree in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Birmingham and obtained an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and Agents and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Essex. Over the course of his career he has worked in both industrial and academia where his work has been in involved in developing and applying nature inspired computational intelligence approaches for human centred systems related to various real-world problems such as smart environments, elderly care, energy optimization, industrial automation, information analysis, decision-making and simulation and affective computing. He is particularly interested in the design and application of fuzzy logic systems for modelling data uncertainties to provide explainable reasoning solutions and their combination with other computational intelligence-based machine learning and optimization techniques for hybrid systems and intelligent agents. Dr Doctor has led and co-led several projects funded through Innovate UK, Harvard University and the Newton Fund. He is currently co-leading a project funded by the Royal Academy of Engineers on capacity building in sub Saharan Africa using creative science technologies and supervising several KTP projects with leading UK businesses. He has published extensively with over 75 papers in peer-reviewed international journals, conferences, workshops and books. He is associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems and has guest edited several journal special issues most notably in the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments and the IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence. He is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy and member of the IEEE and IEEE Computational Intelligence Society’s Emergent Technologies Technical Committee. More details are available at https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/docto78602/faiyaz-doctor