Visiting Scholars

Violetta Cavalli-Sforza is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Al Akhawayn University, where she has taught since 2008. She obtained her Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems from the University of Pittsburgh in 1998, working on computer-assisted instruction. She worked as staff member (1994-199) and visiting researcher (2003-2007) at Carnegie Mellon University on machine translation projects, and as an assistant professor at San Francisco State University (2000-2002). She has also consulted for the Linguistic Data Consortium and other organizations on Arabic-related projects (2003-2008, 2012, 2013-2015). Her interest in the Arabic language, first as a language learner and then for Natural Language Processing, led to research funding from the National Science Foundation and Fulbright for working on Arabic in Morocco, where she eventually settled. Her teaching interests include natural language processing, artificial intelligence, languages and compilers, and data structures; she has also promoted the development of undergraduate research courses at Al Akhawayn University. Her research interests focus on: artificial intelligence applied to computer-assisted language learning, especially for reading and more recently for writing; resource construction for Arabic and Berber; and visualization of information. Violetta Cavalli-Sforza visited ULB in 2017.

Alejandro Vaisman is a professor at the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires. He has been a professor and chair of the master’s program in data mining at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and professor at Universidad de la República in Uruguay. He received a BE degree in civil engineering, and a BCS degree and a doctorate in computer science from the UBA, under the supervision of Prof. Alberto Mendelzon, from the University of Toronto (UoT). He has been a postdoctoral fellow at UoT, and visiting researcher at UoT, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Universidad de Chile, University of Hasselt, and Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). His research interests are in the field of databases, business intelligence, and geographic information systems. He has authored and coauthored many scientific papers published at major conferences and in major journals. Alejandro Vaisman will visit ULB in 2018.

Stefano Rizzi received his Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science in 1996 from the University of Bologna, Italy. Since 2005 he is Full Professor at the University of Bologna, where he is the head of the Business Intelligence Group and teaches Data Warehousing and Software Engineering. He has published more than 100 papers in refereed journals and international conferences mainly in the fields of data warehousing and pattern recognition, and a research book on data warehouse design. He joined several research projects on the above areas and has been involved in the PANDA thematic network of the European Union concerning pattern-base management systems. He is member of the Steering Committee of DOLAP and of the Editorial Board of DKE. He has been General Co-Chair of the 31st International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2012) and Program Co-Chair of the 1st International Workshop on Social Business Intelligence (SoBI 2013). His current research interests include data warehouse design and business intelligence, in particular multidimensional modeling, OLAP preferences, and what-if analysis. Stefano Rizzi will visit ULB in 2018.

Martín Ugarte is a postdoctoral researcher at the Free University of Brussels (ULB) in Belgium, where he has been working for the last two years under the Laboratory for Web & Information Technology. He obtained a PhD from the Catholic University of Chile on the topic of logics and query languages for the Semantic Web. His current research interests include query answering over dynamic datasets and information extraction, amongst other aspects of data management. He has recently published and participated on the main database conferences and journals. Martin is also an advocate of Cryptocurrencies, and has given several tutorials at universities, private institutions and conferences on the foundational aspects of Cryptocurrencies and their applications to Smart Contracts. Martín Ugarte visited UPC in 2018.