Workshop on the History of AI in Europe (WHAI@EU)

Cristian Barrué is a senior researcher at the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (CSIC-UPC) and the Department of Computer Science at the UPC. He has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from UPC in 2012 and is a member of the Knowledge Engineering and Machine Learning group (KEMLg) and the Centre for Research in Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (IDEAI). He has been an active member of The Observatory on Society and Artificial Intelligence launched by the European AI on Demand Platform and manager of the Open Laboratory of Assistive Robotics (LabORA).

Ulises Cortés is a Full-Professor and Researcher of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). He has been at UPC since 1982 ( working on several areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Computer Science Department, including knowledge acquisition for and concept formation in knowledge-based systems, as well as on machine learning and in autonomous intelligent agents.

Professor Cortés advised 25 Ph.D. Thesis two of them have been awarded the EurAI AI Dissertation Award, and more than 20 Master Thesis in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and has more than 70 papers in international journals and more than 200 papers in Conferences and Workshops in the same period. Several of his former PhD students are now internationally known AI scientists. Since 2020, he has been a member of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya's Ethics Committee and a member of the Observatori d'Ética de l'Intel.ligencia Artificial de Catalunya. Since 2021, he has been a member of the EurAi Board and member of the AEPIA executive board, and a member of GPAI: Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence. Since 2023, he is a member of the Advisory Committee on AI ethics and Digital Rights of the city of Barcelona.

In 2023, Universitat de Girona awarded him a Doctor Honoris Causa degree.

Virginia Dignum is Professor of Responsible Artificial Intelligence at Umeå University, Sweden where she leads the AI Policy Lab. She is also senior advisor on AI policy to the Wallenberg Foundations. She has a PHD in Artificial Intelligence from Utrecht University in 2004, is member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA), and Fellow of the European Artificial Intelligence Association (EURAI). She is a member of the United Nations Advisory Body on AI, the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), UNESCO’s expert group on the implementation of AI recommendations, OECD’s Expert group on AI, founder of ALLAI, the Dutch AI Alliance, and co-chair of the WEF’s Global Future Council on AI. She was a member of EU’s High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence and leader of UNICEF's guidance for AI and children. Her new book “The AI Paradox” is planned for publication in late 2024.

Dr. Emilia Gómez (MSc. Telecommunication Engineering, PhD in Computer Science) joined the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in 2018, where she leads the Human Behaviour and Machine Intelligence (HUMAINT) team. Her team contributes with technical and scientific know-how to EU AI policies, notably the AI Act and the Digital Services Act, as part of the European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency. She is also a guest professor in Music Technology at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and has a long academic experience in the fields of Music Information Retrieval and Human-Centric Machine Learning. She was the 1st female president of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, is a member of the OECD One AI expert group, an ELLIS fellow, and her work has been recognized by means of citations and honors, e.g. EUWomen4Future, Red Cross Award to Humanitarian Technologies or ICREA Academia.

Member of the Knowledge Engineering and Machine Learning Group (KEMLG-IDEAI). Member of the Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Research Centre (IDEAI-UPC). He co-founded the spin-off company “Sanejament Intel·ligent S.L. (SISLtech)” [2003-2017] devoted to Advanced Control and Supervision of Environmental Systems. He is a pioneer member of ACIA (Catalan Association of Artificial Intelligence) and member of AEPIA (Spanish Association of Artificial Intelligence). He is a Fellow of the International Environmental Modelling and Software Society (iEMSs). He co-organized the first Environment and AI Workshop in Europe: Binding Environmental Sciences and Artificial Intelligence (BESAI 98) at ECAI conference in 1998. He has organised some international events in the AI field related to Environment (BESAI-ECAI, AAAI, iEMSs). His main research topics are Case-Based Reasoning, Intelligent Decision Support Systems, Recommender Systems, Machine Learning, Data Science, Knowledge Engineering, Integrated AI architectures, and AI applied to Environmental, Industrial and Health systems.

Franz Wotawa received an M.Sc. in Computer Science (1994) and a Ph.D. in 1996, both from the Vienna University of Technology. He is currently a professor of software engineering at the Graz University of Technology. From the founding of the Institute for Software Technology in 2003 to 2009, and starting in 2020, Franz Wotawa has been the head of the institute. His research interests include model-based and qualitative reasoning, theorem proving, mobile robots, verification and validation, and software testing and debugging. Since October 2017, Franz Wotawa has been the head of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Quality Assurance Methodologies for Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems. Franz Wotawa has written more than 450 peer-reviewed papers for journals, books, conferences, and workshops during his career. He supervised 104 master’s and 41 Ph.D. students. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Diagnosis Com- munity (DX) for his work on diagnosis in 2016. Franz Wotawa has been a member of various program committees and has organized several workshops and special issues of journals. He is a member of the Academia Europaea, the IEEE Computer Society, ACM, the Austrian Computer Society (OCG), the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence, and a Senior Member of the AAAI.