Prof. Giovanni Acampora Department of Physics “Ettore Pancini”, University of Naples Federico II, Italy
Computational intelligence refers to the ability of a computer to learn a specific task from data or experimental observation. It is part of the artificial intelligence area composed of three disciplines: approximate reasoning, evolutionary computation and machine learning. Approximate reasoning has been introduced as a way to emulate the human reasoning and, precisely, it represents the process by which a possible imprecise conclusion is deduced from a collection of imprecise premises; fuzzy logic plays the major role in this field. Evolutionary computation is a family of algorithms for global optimization inspired by biological evolution whose main goal is solving hard problems in approximated way; examples of evolutionary algorithms are genetic algorithms. Machine learning is a set of methodologies enabling computers to learn mathematical models from data; some examples of this methods are neural networks and clustering algorithms. Computational intelligence methods are strongly used in classical computation to solve several kinds of problems. As a consequence, it is necessary to pave the way towards the quantum implementation of these methodologies to enable the future generation of quantum devices to be ready to efficiently run algorithms for approximate reasoning, evolutionary computation and machine learning. In this talk the main concepts of computational intelligence will be introduced and a set of research questions will be posed to start this new fascinating research activity.
Bio: Prof. Giovanni Acampora is an Associate Professor in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Naples Federico II. Previously, he was Reader in Computational Intelligence (Sept 2012-Jun 2016) at the School of Science and Technology, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, U.K. From July 2011 to August 2012, he was in a Hoofddocent Tenure Track in Process Intelligence with the School of Industrial Engineering, Information Systems, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, the Netherlands. His main research interests include theory and applications of computational intelligence, fuzzy modeling, evolutionary computation, and learning systems. Prof. Acampora was a Secretary and Treasurer of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE CIS) Italian Chapter (2010–2012). He chaired the IEEE CIS Standards Committee (2011–2013, 2016-2017). He is the Chair of IEEE-SA 1855WG, the working group that has published the first IEEE standard in the area of fuzzy logic, starting from the Fuzzy Markup Language introduced by Prof. Acampora in 2004. As a result of this activity, he got a prestigious IEEE-SA Emerging Technology. He serves as an Editor in Chief of Springer Quantum Machine Intelligence, the first scientific journal publishing papers in the hybrid area of quantum computing and artificial intelligence. In 2017, he acted as General Chair of IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, the top leading conference in the area of fuzzy logic. Moreover, he organized about several special sessions in international conferences.
He is member of the scientific board of the Interdepartmental Center for Advanced RObotics in Surgery (ICAROS) of University of Naples Federico II. He is Senior Member of IEEE. He is qualified to act as Full Professor at Italian universities in the following scientific areas: 01/B1 – INFORMATICA. In 2019, he has been awarded with the 2019 Innovation Award in the area of Emerging Technology by the Canada Embassy in Italy for a project focusing on quantum machine intelligence to develop with the Institute of Quantum Computing of University of Waterloo.