Andrew Chi-Chih Yao is currently the Dean of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He received his BS in Physics from National Taiwan University (1967), PhD in Physics from Harvard University (1972), and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois (1975). From 1975 onward, Yao served on the faculty at MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and, during 1986 – 2004, as William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. In 2004, he left Princeton to join Tsinghua University in Beijing. He is also a Distinguished Professor-at-Large at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Yao’s research interests are in the theory of computation and its applications to cryptography and quantum computing. He is recipient of the prestigious A.M. Turing Award in year 2000 for his contributions to the theory of computation, including pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity. He has received numerous other honors and awards, including the George Polya Prize, the Donald E. Knuth Prize, and several honorary degrees. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Free energy, the brain and life as we know it
Karl Friston

Karl Friston is a theoretical neuroscientist and authority on brain imaging. He invented statistical parametric mapping (SPM), voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and dynamic causal modelling (DCM). These contributions were motivated by schizophrenia research and theoretical studies of value-learning – formulated as the dysconnection hypothesis of schizophrenia. Mathematical contributions include variational Laplacian procedures and generalized filtering for hierarchical Bayesian model inversion. Friston currently works on models of functional integration in the human brain and the principles that underlie neuronal interactions. His main contribution to theoretical neurobiology is a free-energy principle for action and perception (active inference).
Friston received the first Young Investigators Award in Human Brain Mapping (1996) and was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (1999). In 2000 he was President of the international Organization of Human Brain Mapping. In 2003 he was awarded the Minerva Golden Brain Award and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006. In 2008 he received a Medal, Collège de France and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of York in 2011. He became of Fellow of the Society of Biology in 2012 and received the Weldon Memorial prize and Medal in 2013 for contributions to mathematical biology.

Modern rehabilitation methods in communication disorders
Henryk Skarżyński

Henryk Skarżyński, MD, PhD is a worldwide known otosurgeon, expert in otorhinolaryngology, audiology and phoniatrics. He is a full professor at the Institute of Physiology and Pathology of Hearing, and its originator and director since foundation in 1996. He is also the Chair of the Faculty of Audiology and Phoniatrics at the F. Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw and Poland’s national consultant in otorhinolaryngology.
His current research interests include innovative treatment methods in otosurgery, including application of cochlear implants in treatment of partial deafness, bimodal (electric - acoustic) auditory stimulation, as well as new electrode designs and new implants’ applications. He was the pioneer of many surgical techniques in the world (partial deafness treatment in adults in 2002 and in children in 2004) and in Poland (cochlear implants in 1992, brainstem implants in 1998, middle ear implants in 2003). He was the prime mover of the worldwide initiative of introducing hearing screening programs for school-age children and the international scientific consensus on the topic. His efforts during Polish presidency in the EU brought about the “EU Council Conclusions on early detection and treatment of communication disorders in children, including the use of e-Health tools and innovative solutions” in 2011.  He is the author and co-author of over 2500 research studies published in Poland and abroad, as well as nearly 2100 lectures, leads extensive teaching activity for students and physicians in Poland and abroad.
Prof. Skarżyński is the member of many prestigious national and international scientific associations including AOS, CORLAS, EAONO, EFAS, IAO, ISA and Politzer. He has been honored with numerous Polish state awards by the Prime Minister, the Minister of Health, the Minister of Science and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, as well as Polonia Restituta Knight’s and Officer’s Crosses. Awards from other countries include Papal Order Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, Ukrainian Order of Merit, Order of the King of Belgium and Order of the President of Georgia, as well as numerous awards for research and innovation. Twice he has been awarded the honoris causa doctorate, by Maria Grzegorzewska Academy of Special Education (2011) and by the University of Warsaw (2012).

Ontologies on the Web: an alternative model
Stefan Decker

Stefan Decker is a full professor at the National University of Ireland and the director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Galway. Prof Decker obtained in 1995 a masters in Computer Science at the University of Kaiserslautern (awarded with distinction). From 1995 to 1999 he worked towards a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe (awarded 2002 with distinction). From 1999-2002 he worked as a Postdoc and Research Associate at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University and established one of the first Semantic Web research groups. From July 2002 to July 2005, he worked as a Computer Scientist and Research Assistant Professor at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, USA. In October 2003 Prof Decker moved to Ireland to help to set up a new Research Institute concerned with the Semantic Web. Since July 2006 Prof Decker is full professor and director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute.
His current research interests include the Semantic Web, metadata, ontologies and semi-structured data, web services, and applications for Digital Libraries, Knowledge Management, Information Integration and Peer-to-Peer technology. He published around 80 papers as books and journal, book, conference, and workshop contributions. He co-organized around 35 scientific workshops and conferences and has edited several special issues of scientific journals. He was editor-in-chief of Elsevier’s Journal of Web Semantics, editoral committee member of the Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (ETAI) (the Semantic Web), the Journal on Internet Research and the Journal on Web Intelligence and Agent Systems (WIAS) and is recognized as one of the most widely cited Semantic Web scientists. His dissertation work was quoted as one of the inspirations for the DARPA DAML program, which span the Semantic Web effort.

Natural Language as an Inspiration for a Unifying Framework for Computing
Robert Kowalski

Robert Kowalski is Emeritus Professor and Distinguished Research Fellow at Imperial College London. He studied at the University of Chicago, the University of Bridgeport, Stanford University, the University of Warsaw, and the University of Edinburgh, where he completed his PhD in 1970. He joined Imperial College London in 1975, becoming Professor of Computational Logic in 1983 and Professor Emeritus in 1999.
During the 1980s, Kowalski was heavily involved in the British response to the Japanese Fifth Generation Project. He also served as an advisor to the UNDP Knowledge Based Systems Project in India, and to DFKI, the German Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He co-ordinated the European Community Basic Research Project, Compulog, and was the founder of the European Compulog Network of Excellence. Since 2009, he has been an advisor to the Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals, of the World Health Organization in Geneva.
His early research was in the field of automated theorem-proving, leading to the development of logic programming in the early 1970s. His later research has focused on the use of logic programming for knowledge representation, and includes work on the event calculus, legal reasoning, abductive reasoning and argumentation. His current work is aimed at developing a unified, logic-based framework for artificial intelligence, databases and programming. The philosophical background for this work is presented in his book Computational Logic and Human Thinking – How to be Artificially Intelligent published in 2011.
Kowalski is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the European Co-ordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence, and the Association for Computing Machinery. He received the IJCAI (International Joint Conference of Artificial Intelligence) award for Research Excellence in 2011, and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science Award for Eminent Scientists for the period 2012-2014.

Theories of Clustering
Sadaaki Miyamoto

Sadaaki Miyamoto is currently a professor of the Department of Risk Engineering, University of Tsukuba, Japan. He was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1950. He received the B.S.,M.S. and the Dr. Eng. degrees in Applied Mathematics and Physics Engineering from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1973, 1975, and 1978, respectively. Prior to his professorship at the University of Tsukuba, he was an Assistant Professor from 1980 to 1987 and Associate Professor from 1987 to 1990 in the University of Tsukuba. He also was a research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria in 1986. He was a Professor with the Faculty of Engineering, the University of Tokushima, where he was working from 1990 to 1994.
His current research interests include methodology for fuzzy systems and uncertainty modeling. In particular he has been working on data clustering algorithms and related classification methods, image indexing and retrieval, bags (multisets), rough sets, metaheuristic optimization, and algorithms for data mining. He is a member of the Society of Instrumentation and Control, Engineers of Japan, Information Processing Society of Japan, the Japan Society of Fuzzy Theory and Systems, and the Institute of Systems, Control, Information Engineers of Japan, and IEEE. He has served a number of international conferences as chairs, co-chairs and committee members. He received excellent paper awards from the Japan Society of Fuzzy Theory and Systems in 1994 and 1999. He has published three books of which two are in English and the other is in Japanese. He also has published 1 edited book and over 200 research papers. In 2007, he became a fellow of the International Fuzzy Systems Association (IFSA).

Yi Pan is a Distinguished University Professor of the Department of Computer Science and an Interim Associate Dean at Georgia State University, USA. Dr. Pan received his B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees in computer engineering from Tsinghua University, China, in 1982 and 1984, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh, USA, in 1991. His profile has been featured as a distinguished alumnus in both Tsinghua Alumni Newsletter and University of Pittsburgh CS Alumni Newsletter. Dr. Pan's research interests include parallel and cloud computing, wireless networks, and bioinformatics.
Dr. Pan has published more than 150 journal papers with over 50 papers published in various IEEE journals. In addition, he has published over 150 papers in refereed conferences. He has also co-authored/co-edited 37 books. His work has been cited more than 3950 times. Dr. Pan has served as an editor-in-chief or editorial board member for 15 journals including 7 IEEE Transactions. He is the recipient of many awards including IEEE Transactions Best Paper Award, IBM Faculty Award, JSPS Senior Invitation Fellowship, IEEE BIBE Outstanding Achievement Award, NSF Research Opportunity Award, and AFOSR Summer Faculty Research Fellowship. He has organized many international conferences and delivered over 40 keynote speeches at various international conferences around the world.

John F. Sowa spent thirty years working on research and development projects at IBM and is a cofounder of VivoMind Research, LLC.
He has a BS in mathematics from MIT, an MA in applied mathematics from Harvard, and a PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He has researched and developed emerging fields of computer science from compiler, programming languages, and system architecture to artificial intelligence and knowledge representation.
In the 1990s Sowa was associated with IBM Educational Center in New York. He taught courses at the IBM Systems Research Institute, Binghamton University, Stanford University, Linguistic Society of America, Université du Québec à Montréal and summer institutes (Linguistic Society of America and UQAM Cognitive Science).  He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
With his colleagues at VivoMind, he has been developing novel methods for using logic and ontology in systems for reasoning and language understanding. The language of conceptual graphs, which he designed, has been adopted as one of the three principal dialects of the ISO/IEC standard for Common Logic.

Keynote talk slides

Andrzej Szałas is a full professor at the University of Warsaw, Poland and the University of Linkoping, Sweden. In 1980 he obtained an M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Warsaw. Then he has been a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Mathematics of Polish Academy of Sciences and, in 1984, he was awarded a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Warsaw. At the same university he obtained habilitation in 1991 and, in 1990, the President of Poland has granted him a scientific title of professor.
During his scientific career he has been a visiting fellow/visiting professor at Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, UK (October 1986 - October 1987), Max-Planck-Institut fuer Informatik Saarbruecken, Germany (September 1991 - June 1992), King's College, London, UK (September 2006 - August 2007). He also cooperates with Altalog Ltd., a spin-off company recently founded by NASK4Innovation Ltd., with the purpose to offer a rule engine for advanced applications, based on the 4QL query language coauthored by J. Małuszyński and A. Szałas.
Prof. Szałas has published 6 books (2 of them in English) and 110 papers as international journal, book, conference, and workshop contributions. He has been a PC member of 55 conferences and a co-chair of 4 of them. His current research interests include logics applied in AI and multiagent systems, including rule-based reasoning, nonmonotonic reasoning and rough-set based approximate reasoning. He also actively works on database techniques varying from knowledge and belief bases to object-oriented databases.