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Plenary Speakers

Dr. Risto Miikkulainen (University of Texas at Austin)

Risto Miikkulainen is a Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He received an M.S. in Engineering from the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, in 1986, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA in 1990.

His recent research focuses on methods for evolving neural networks and applying these methods to game playing, robotics, and intelligent control. He is an author of over 200 articles on neuroevolution, connectionist natural language processing, and the computational neuroscience of the visual cortex. He is an editor of the Machine Learning Journal and Journal of Cognitive Systems Research.

Dr. Erkki Oja (Helsinki University of Technology, Finland)

Erkki Oja is Director of the Adaptive Informatics Research Centre and Professor of Computer Science at the Laboratory of Computer and Information Science, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. He received his Dr.Sc. degree in 1977. He has been research associate at Brown University, Providence, RI, and visiting professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Dr. Oja is the author or coauthor of more than 280 articles and book chapters on pattern recognition, computer vision, and neural computing, and three books: "Subspace Methods of Pattern Recognition" (RSP and J.Wiley, 1983), which has been translated into Chinese and Japanese, "Kohonen Maps" (Elsevier, 1999), and "Independent Component Analysis" (J. Wiley, 2001). In the first book, he presented his theory of Hebbian learning rules for on-line Pricipal Component Analysis -- the so-called Oja rule -- which became an influential model in unsupervised learning neural networks.

Dr. Oja's research interests are in the study of principal component and independent component analysis, self-organization, statistical pattern recognition, and applying artificial neural networks to computer vision and signal processing. Dr. Oja is member of the editorial boards of several journals and has been in the program committees of several recent conferences including ICANN, IJCNN, and ICONIP. He is member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the IEEE, Founding Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR), Governing Board member of the International Neural Network Society (INNS) and past president of the European Neural Network Society (ENNS). He is recipient of the IAPR Pierre Devijver Award and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Pioneer Award.

Dr. Manfred Glesner (Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany)

Professor Dr. Dr. h. c. mult. Manfred Glesner studied Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering at the Saarland University in Saarbrücken/Germany and received his diploma in 1969. In 1975 he received the PhD. degree form the same university for his research work on optimization techniques in computer aided circuit design. In 1981 he became Associate Professor in the Faculty for Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of Darmstadt University of Technology. Since 1989 he is a full professor for Microelectronic Systems at Darmstadt University. He is responsible for teaching courses in microelectronic circuit design and CAD for microelectronics. His research interests are in high-level synthesis and physical design, especially for deep submicron technologies and intelligent signal processing. Further he is responsible in a special research area of the German National Science Foundation (DFG) for microelectronic system design in mechatronics. He is a member of several national and international professional organizations. He has organized several national and international conferences, and he is a member of the program committee of many conferences and workshops.

Prof. M. Glesner has an extensive experience in organizing and participating successfully in large-scale research projects, on the national level as well as on the European level. He participated within the CVT-project (CAD-VLSI for Telecommunication) and in many ESPRIT projects. For the European Commission he acts as a project consultant. With the EU-based TEMPUS-initiative he built up several microelectronic design centers in Eastern Europe. For his contributions to the field of microelectronics he has received three honorary doctoral degrees from Tallinn Technical University (Estonia), from Bucharest Polytechnical University (Romania), and from Mongolian Technical University in Ulaan Bator (Mongolia), as well as one honorary professorship from Mongolian Technical University in Ulaan Bator (Mongolia). He also received the title “Chevalier de l’ordre des palmes académiques” (“Knight of the Order of the Academic Palms”) of the French Minister of Education. Prof. Glesner is a Fellow of the IEEE.