Dr. Conrad Attard

Deputy Dean Faculty of ICT University of Malta, Senior Lecturer,
Region 8 IEEE Professional and Education Activities Sub Committee Chair at IEEE Region 8

Title of the Talk: Technology-enhanced Learning in a Collaborative Research Project Adopting Digital Health Solutions for Healthcare Professionals

Date: July 2nd, 2022, 10.00 (GMT+3)

Short bio:

Dr. Conrad Attard is a Senior Lecturer and researcher at the Faculty of ICT (FICT) at the University of Malta and also the Deputy Dean of the same Faculty. He is the lead researcher of a project funded through RIDT and the industry on pervasive electronic monitoring in healthcare PEM. He has taken part in various panels discussing ICT, digital health, and science. His main research areas are digital health, mobile computing, and enterprise IT planning particularly the way they are adopted in the workplace. He is the Chair of IEEE Malta Computer Society and Chair of IEEE Region 8 Professional and Education activities subcommittee.


Prof. Peter Fuhr

Professor, Oak Ridge National Laboratory: Oak Ridge, TN, US

Title of the Talk: Multidisciplinary R&D at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Date: July 2nd, 2022, 14.00 (GMT+3)

Short bio:

Dr. Peter Fuhr has been involved in industrial wireless, sensors, and secure systems for 30+ years as a NASA space optical physicist, university professor (right here at UVM!), serial entrepreneur, and researcher at a U.S. National Laboratory. In his role as Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Smart Grid Secure Communications, Dr. Fuhr has written and delivered numerous briefs pertaining to the electric utilities’ implementation of advanced technologies that have been presented to the Dept of Energy, the FCC, and Congress. Peter’s R&D interests are broad ranging but principally involve secure communications, sensors, multi-disciplinary applications and control systems. Projects have included embedding sensors into various structures worldwide ranging from buildings (e.g., UVM’s Stafford Building), dams (such as the Winooski One Dam), airplanes (Boeing 787, Lockheed Martin F22 Raptor, hot air balloons, spacecraft, nuclear power plant containment vessels, even humans. His recent activities have included R&D pertaining to sensors and systems appropriate for environmental monitoring of fracking; water quality sensing for industrial enterprises; sensing and communication systems for operation in harsh environments (deep water, within nuclear reactors, corrosive environments) and examining the intricacies of printed electronics in an additive manufacturing (3D printing) environment. Dr. Fuhr is a Distinguished Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Grid Communications and Security Group Leader and also serves as the Technology Director for the ORNL Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Research Laboratory. He is a Fellow of the International Society of Automation (ISA) – and finally – is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee serving as a graduate student doctoral research advisor.


Prof. İlker Birbil

Head of Business Analytics Section at Amsterdam Business School

Title of the Talk: Exciting World of Interpretable Machine Learning

Date: July 3rd, 2022, 10.00 (GMT+3)

Short bio:

İlker Birbil is a professor in AI & Optimization Techniques for Business & Society at University of Amsterdam, where he is currently the head of Business Analytics Section. He received his PhD in 2002 from North Carolina State University with a major in Industrial Engineering, and minors in Operations Research and Mathematics. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Erasmus Research Institute of Management for two years. From 2004 to 2018, he was a faculty member at Sabancı University in Istanbul, where he was one of the founders of the Data Analytics professional degree program. He held the Chair in Data Science and Optimization at Erasmus University Rotterdam from 2018 to 2021. With his colleagues and students, he authored research articles on mathematical optimization, operations management, and data science. These articles appeared in leading journals such as Mathematical Programming, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, Management Science, European Journal on Operational Research, and Transportation Science. He completed various research projects as the principal investigator and participated in several initiatives as a researcher or as a committee member. He also collaborated with industry to work on business problems ranging from cloud computing to airline crew planning. His research interests center around optimization methods in data science and decision making. Lately, he is interested in interpretable machine learning and data privacy in operations research.