Prof. W. PEDRYCZ

Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering University of Alberta, Canada

Witold Pedrycz is a Professor and Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Computational Intelligence in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. He is also with the Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. He also holds an appointment of special professorship in the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, UK. In 2009 Dr. Pedrycz was elected a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Witold Pedrycz has been a member of numerous program committees of IEEE conferences in the area of fuzzy sets and neurocomputing. In 2007 he received a prestigious Norbert Wiener award from the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Council. He is a recipient of the IEEE Canada Computer Engineering Medal 2008. In 2009 he has received a Cajastur Prize for Soft Computing from the European Centre for Soft Computing for “pioneering and multifaceted contributions to Granular Computing”. In 2013 has was awarded a Killam Prize. In the same year he received a Fuzzy Pioneer Award 2013 from the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. His main research directions involve Computational Intelligence, fuzzy modeling and Granular Computing, knowledge discovery and data mining, fuzzy control, pattern recognition, knowledge-based neural networks, relational computing, and Software Engineering. He has published numerous papers in this area. He is also an author of 15 research monographs covering various aspects of Computational Intelligence, data mining, and Software Engineering. Dr. Pedrycz is intensively involved in editorial activities. He is an Editor-in-Chief journal of “Information Sciences” and Editor-in-Chief of “WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery” (Wiley), Editor-in-Chief of “Granular Computing” and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems. He is a member of the number of editorial boards of other international journals. His H-index is 129.

Keynote Speech:

A Unified Data and Knowledge Environment of Machine Learning:

Towards Sustainable Computing

Abstract

Over the recent years, we have been witnessing truly remarkable progress in Machine Learning (ML) with highly visible accomplishments encountered, in particular, in natural language processing and computer vision impacting numerous areas of human endeavours. Driven inherently by the technologically advanced learning and architectural developments, ML constructs are highly impactful coming with far reaching consequences; just to mention autonomous vehicles, control, health care imaging, decision-making in critical areas, among others. 

Data are central and of paramount relevance to the design methodology and algorithms of ML. While they are behind successes of ML, there are also far-reaching challenges that require urgent attention especially with the growing importance of requirements of interpretability, transparency, credibility, stability, and explainability.   As a new direction, data-knowledge ML concerns a prudent and orchestrated involvement of data and domain knowledge used holistically to realize learning mechanisms and support the formation of the models.

The objective of this talk is to identify the challenges and develop a unique and comprehensive setting of data-knowledge environment in the realization of the development of ML models. We review some existing directions including concepts arising under the name of physics informed ML.

Key ways of elicitation and accommodation of domain knowledge are investigated. An impact on the structuralization of the ML architectures and the ensuing implications on the interpretability, explainability and credibility as well as semantic stability are studied. We investigate the representative topologies of ML models identifying data and knowledge functional modules and interactions among them. The detailed considerations on the facet of explainability including new ideas of semantic stability are covered. We also elaborate on the central role of information granularity in this area.

Illustrative examples involving rule-based models, neural networks, logic-oriented networks are discussed.