Scope and Motivation:
Environmental sustainability has become a topic of particular interest - and concern in - in the last 20 years. Environmental sustainability is focused upon responsible decision-making and action-taking for the protection of the environment, thus boosting the ability of the environment to continue to support life. At the same time, environmental sustainability tackles the issue of developing optimal practices that will reduce - and eventually minimise - the negative impact on the environment. Further to pollution, waste, and energy reduction, environmental sustainability aims at developing processes that will help human societies to become completely sustainable in the future. The use of non-parametric, noise-resistant, and learn-by-example approaches is pertinent to this end, and constitutes the focus of this WCCI’16 Special Session, a sequel to the IJCNN'15 Special Session under the same name.
Topics:
- Environmental sustainability
- Sustainable development
- Decision making
- Action taking
- Optimisation
- Long-, medium- and long-term impact assessment
- Human activity and the environment
- Product life-cycle
Relevance to WCCI'16
Artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, and fuzzy expert systems have demonstrated their superiority over other traditional approaches when applied to inexact, ill- or partially-defined, time-varying problems. In that sense, WCCI’16 and - in particular - the “Special Session on Computational Intelligence Applications to Environmental Sustainability and Sustainable Development: Theory and Applications” shall prove to be a focus of attention of leaders in/researchers of environmental sustainability and sustainable development.
Short Resumes of Organisers:
Tatiana Tambouratzis: Associate professor at the Department of Industrial Management & Technology, University of Piraeus, Greece; held positions at the Institutes of Informatics and Nuclear Technology & Radiation Protection, NCSR "Demokritos", and at the Department of Nuclear Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Goteborg, Sweden; a Greek State Scholarship Foundation National Research Institute (Greece), Royal Society and SERC (U.K.), and Fulbright (U.S.A.) scholar; Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (FIMA); evaluator of national and EU-funded projects; advisory and/or editorial board member, reviewer of peer-reviewed international scientific journals and conferences; organiser of international scientific conferences and special sessions; supervisor, internal examiner and member of the Examination Board of PhD theses, as well as M.Sc. and B.Sc. dissertations (Greece, Italy, Sweden); author or co-author of 43 publications in peer-reviewed international scientific journals, 54 international scientific conference proceedings, five books and five technical reports; invited speaker at various universities in Greece, Europe and the United States, as well as at international scientific conferences; main research interests in artificial and computational intelligence, brain function, natural and artificial vision, psychophysics and cognitive psychology, optimisation, monitoring and prediction, wavelets, signal processing, signals and systems, energy systems, safety, environmental sustainability.
Andreas-Georgios Stafylopatis: Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece; director of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory; Head of the School (2010-2013); main research interests in the modelling and performance evaluation of computer, intelligent systems and computational intelligence, with application to pattern recognition, classification and diagnosis, data mining and knowledge extraction; supervisor of 24 PhD students; leader or key researcher in more than 50 national and EU-funded research projects; author or coauthor of approximately 180 refereed papers, of which more than 60 in international journals, with about 1000 citations; chairman of a many international scientific conferences; invited speaker/author in many conferences/books and journals; associate editor of scientific journals and reviewer for a large number of scientific journals and conferences; evaluator of research proposals for national and international organisations; book evaluator for Greek and international publishers; has served as scientific consultant and member of advisory/evaluation committees concerning large computer system projects in various ministries and public sector organizations; has acted as a Director of the Computer Science Section of the School, as a Coordinator of the Graduate Studies Program of the School; is a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece, IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Assoc. Professor Kostas Karatzas, Dr.-Eng., holds a Diploma and a Doctor degree in Mechanical Engineering, and leads the Informatics Systems and Applications – Environmental Informatics Research Group at the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, where he teaches Informatics, Environmental Informatics and Environmental Impact Assessment. He is also teaching/has taught in various EU universities in MSc and PhD seminar level, while he has been a visiting professor for the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) and an Adjunct Professor for the University of Western Macedonia, Greece. The research work of Dr. Karatzas focuses mainly in informatics applications and environmental informatics with personalised service orientation, urban environment management and information systems, environmental data analysis and forecasting with the aid of computational intelligence methods and mathematical models, multimedia information content tools, and participatory environmental sensing. Dr. Karatzas has participated in more than 30 European R&D projects, is Member of the International Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of CLEEN’s Measurement, Monitoring and Environmental Efficiency Assessment (MMEA) research programme, and an Associate Member of the OGC. He has authored approx 200 scientific papers, has been a member of the scientific committee of the many Environmental Informatics and Computational Intelligence conferences, and has/is supervising a number of PhD and MSc thesis in the area of Environmental Informatics-environmental information analysis and modelling.
Professor Mikko Kolehmainen, originally a system analyst and chief software engineer in the software industry developing solutions for energy companies, moved to the academia in the 90’s working as a researcher in bioinformatics and environmental sciences. This was followed by a nomination to research director and - subsequently - professor of environmental informatics. Currently professor and leader of the research group of environmental informatics, University of Eastern Finland (UEF), lecturing and developing courses on environmental data mining, environmental bioinformatics and ecological risk assessment. In the future, my goal is to create strong international research in the focus areas, as well as develop e-learning to enable students worldwide to take part in the studies of environmental of environmental informatics and modeling. Current focus of research: environmental safety and security, sustainable energy systems. Professional goals: developing methods for utilizing data and databases in the information society; modeling of complex systems in life sciences.
