IPMU2026

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

SHORT BIO: Robert Kowalski is an Emeritus Professor at Imperial College London. His research is concerned with developing both human-oriented models of computing and computational models of human thinking. His early work, in the field of automated theorem-proving, contributed to the development of logic programming and Prolog. Later work, on the use of logic programming for knowledge representation and problem solving, includes contributions to the event calculus, legal reasoning, abductive reasoning, argumentation and the language LPS, which combines production systems with logic programs. Currently, he is working on the development and legal applications of the controlled natural language, Logical English, which is a form of syntactic sugar for Prolog and other logic programming languages. Kowalski is a Fellow of the AAAI, the EurAI, and the ACM. He received the 2011 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence “for his contributions to logic for knowledge representation and problem solving, including his pioneering work on automated theorem proving and logic programming”. He received the 2012 JSPS Award for Eminent Scientists, and he shared the Inaugural 2022 Stanford University CodeX Prize for his “ground-breaking work on the application of logic programming to the formalization and analysis of the British Nationality Act.

SHORT BIO: Prof. Dr. Luc De Raedt is Director of Leuven.AI, the KU Leuven Institute for AI, full professor of Computer Science at KU Leuven, and guest professor at Örebro University (Sweden) at the Center for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems in the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program. He is working on the integration of machine learning and machine reasoning techniques, also known under the term neurosymbolic AI. He has chaired the main European and International Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence conferences (IJCAI, ECAI, ICML and ECMLPKDD) and is a fellow of EurAI, AAAI and ELLIS, and member of Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium. He received ERC Advanced Grants in 2015 and 2023.

SHORT BIO: María Ángeles Gil has a BSc+/MSc in Mathematics from the University of Valladolid and a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Oviedo, where she is Professor of Statistics and Operations Research since January 1992. She spent a research period of nearly two years at the University of California, Berkeley (1988-1990), especially in connection with fuzzy sets and statistics. Since the early 1980s, her research interests have focused primarily on the statistical analysis of fuzzy set-valued data. Because of her research within the Research Group SMIRE+CoDiRE, she has been Awarded with a Medal of the Principality of Asturias in 2014 and the SEIO Medal in 2021. She is a Fellow of the International Fuzzy Systems Association (IFSA) since 2015, and she is a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences (RAC), the Asturian Academy of Sciences and Engineering (AACI), and an honorary member of the Royal Institute of Asturian Studies (RIDEA).

SHORT BIO: Marco Zaffalon is Full Professor at SUPSI and Scientific Director at IDSIA (USI-SUPSI). His interests are on the foundations of imprecise probability, causal AI, and machine learning. On these topics he has 170+ refereed publications, has been granted 17 million francs in research funds, and has grown up a group of 40 researchers. Marco is regularly a Senior Program Committee Member for IJCAI, AAAI, and UAI, and is listed as a top 2% scientist according to Stanford's science-wide author databases of standardised citation indicators since its inception. In his applied research he has worked with several companies, such as UBS, Novartis, and Mastercard. In 2020 he has co-founded Artificialy, a Lugano-based company for products and services in AI, where he works as the company's Chief Scientist. Artificialy employs 50 people at the moment.