The activities of the project will be followed and evaluated by an Expert Advisory Board with experts in a variety of areas that are of importance for the project. This page provides an overview of MAMMOth Expert Advisory Board members in alphabetic order.
Samuel C. Hoffman
Mr. Hoffman received a B.S. degree in computer science and mechanical engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, in 2017. After graduation, he has been working as a Research Software Engineer with IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA. His research interests include deep learning, generative modeling, and algorithmic fairness (AIF360, AIX360, etc.).
Georgia Koutrika
Georgia Koutrika is Research Director at Athena Research Center in Greece, where she leads the DARELab. She has more than 15 years of experience in multiple roles at HP Labs, IBM Almaden, and Stanford. She has received a PhD and a diploma in Computer Science from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Athens in Greece. Her work focuses on natural language data interfaces, data exploration, recommendations, and data analytics, and has been incorporated in commercial products, described in 14 granted patents and 26 patent applications in the US and worldwide, and published in more than 100 papers in top-tier conferences and journals.
She is member of the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees, co-EiC for VLDB Journal, PC co-chair for VLDB 2023, co-EiC of Proceedings of the VLDB (PVLDB). In the past, she has served or serves as associate editor for top conferences (such as ACM SIGMOD and VLDB) and journals (TKDE, VLDB Journal), as well as in various organization roles, including EDBT 2023 and ICDE 2021 sponsorship chair, and general chair for ACM SIGMOD 2016. Georgia is chair of the ACM working Group on Seasonal Schools, and member of the ACM-RAISE Working Group. She is ACM Senior Member, IEEE Senior Member, and ACM Distinguished Speaker.
Ute Schmid
Ute Schmid is head of the chair for cognitive systems at University of Bamberg. She holds a diploma in psychology and a diploma in computer science, both from Technical University Berlin (TUB), Germany. She received her doctoral degree (Dr. rer.nat.) in computer science from TUB in 1994 and her habilitation in computer science in 2002. From 1994 to 2001 she was assistant professor (wissenschaftliche Assistentin) at the Methods of AI/Machine Learning group, Department of Computer Science, TUB. Afterwards she worked as lecturer (akademische Rätin) for Intelligent Systems at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at University Osnabrück and was member of the Cognitive Science Institute. In 2004 she became professor of Applied Computer Science/Cognitive Systems at the University of Bamberg. In 2022 Ute Schmid was elected as EurAI fellow. She is a fortiss research fellow and member of the Steering Committee of the IBM fortiss Center for AI. Since 2020 she is member of the board of directors of the Bavarian Insistute of Digital Transformation (bidt). Ute Schmid is also a member of the Bavarian AI Council (Bayerischer KI-Rat). Furthermore, since 2020 Ute Schmid is head of the Fraunhofer IIS project group Comprehensible AI (CAI). Ute Schmid dedicates a significant amount of her time to measures supporting women in computer science and to promote computer science as a topic in elementary, primary, and secondary education. She won the Minerva Gender Equality Award of Informatics Europe 2018 for her university. Since many years, Ute Schmid is engaged in educating the public about artificial intelligence in general and machine learning and she gives workshops for teachers as well as high-school students about AI and machine learning (see Talks). For her outreach activities she has been awarded with the Rainer-Markgraf-Preis 2020.
Salvatore Ruggieri
Salvatore Ruggieri is Full Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa, where he teaches at the Master Programme in Data Science and Business Informatics. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science (1999), whose thesis has been awarded by the Italian Chapter of EATCS as the best Ph.D. thesis in Theoretical Computer Science. He is a member of the KDD LAB, with research interests focused in the data mining and knowledge discovery area, including: discrimination discovery and prevention, privacy and fairness, languages and systems for modelling the process of knowledge discovery; sequential and parallel classification algorithms; web mining; and applications. He was the coordinator of Enforce, a national FIRB (Italian Fund for Basic Research) young researcher project on Computer science and legal methods for enforcing the personal rights of non-discrimination and privacy in ICT systems (2010-2014, enforce.di.unipi.it). He was the program chair of the XIII Italian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Pisa 10-12 December 2014.
Helga Nowotny
Professor em. Dr. Helga Nowotny, Ph.D. Helga Nowotny is Professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich, and a founding member of the European Research Council. In 2007 she was elected ERC Vice President and from March 2010 until December 2013 President of the ERC. Currently she is member of the Austrian Council, Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, member of the Board of Trustees of the Falling Walls Foundation, Berlin, Member of the Council of Adminstration at the IEA de Paris and Vice-President of the Council for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, NY. and a doctorate in jurisprudence from the University of Vienna. She has held teaching and research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Vienna; Kings College, Cambridge; University of Bielefeld; Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; Ecole des Hautes Etudes an Sciences Sociales, Paris; Science Center for Social Sciences, Berlin; Collegium Budapest; Budapest. Before joining ETH Zurich, Professor Nowotny was Professor for Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. Among other, Helga Nowotny is Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and continues to serve on many international advisory boards in Austria and throughout Europe. Helga Nowotny has published widely in Science and Technology Studies, STS, and on social time. Throughout her professional career Helga Nowotny has been engaged in science and innovation policy matters and continues to serve as advisor at national and EU level. From 2001 till 2005 she was Chair of the European Research Advisory Board, EURAB, advising the European Commission. Helga Nowotny has published more than 300 articles in scientific journals. In 2021 her book In AI we Trust. Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms was released. Her latest book (in German) is Eigenzeit Revisited in Zeit der Algorithmen. Her previous books include The Cunning of Uncertainty, that was featured by the Financial Times on the list of the best books 2015; Naked Genes, Reinventing the human in the molecular age, (with Giuseppe Testa), MIT Press, 2011, Insatiable Curiosity, Innovation in a Fragile Future, MIT Press, 2008, and Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation (ed.), New York and London, 2006.
Rania Wazir
Rania Wazir is co-founder and CTO of leiwand.ai – a startup dedicated to supporting companies and organisations with the development and deployment of trustworthy AI. Rania is a mathematician, with degrees from Stanford (B.Sc.) and Brown University (Ph.D.). For the past 6 years, she has worked as a freelance data scientist, specialising in Trustworthy AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Social Media Monitoring. As consortium lead, she recently concluded an investigation of bias in algorithms for the EU Fundamental Rights Agency. Currently, Rania is tech lead in an ongoing three-year project to create a fair by design AI development process funded by the Austrian Research Agency. With leiwand.ai, she is involved in several new research and development projects revolving around trustworthy AI, with a particular focus on the detection and mitigation of bias and discrimination in AI. Rania is Austrian delegate to CEN/CLC JTC21 on “Artificial Intelligence”, and to the ISO/IEC working group on Trustworthy AI, where she is actively engaged in the development of new AI standards, including as Project Editor of the ISO/IEC Transparency taxonomy of AI systems standardization project. She is coordinator of the VDSG’s data4good Initiative, and has been conducting social media monitoring for Amnesty International Italy, investigating human rights impacts of Twitter and Facebook, since 2018.
