Evgenios C Evgeniou, CEO, PwC Cyprus

Evgenios is the CEO and Senior Partner of PwC Cyprus. He is also a member of the EMEA Leadership Team of PwC. He started his career with PwC in London in 1990 and was admitted to partnership in 2001. He has worked with PwC in London and on short secondment in Athens and Moscow.

Before becoming CEO, he was a member of the firm’s Executive Board, the Banking and Capital Markets Services leader and the HC leader. He was also a member of the management team for the Assurance practice of PwC in continental Europe.

Evgenios is a member of the National Board for Research and Innovation (NBRI), a member of the council of the University of Cyprus, a member of the Board of the Cyprus Chamber of Commerce and Industry, ICAEW contact member for Cyprus, Vice President of the Board of the Nicosia Chamber of Commerce and President of the Cyprus-Russia Business Association. He is a member of the Board of Junior Achievement Cyprus and member of the Advisory Board of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) at the University of Cyprus. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Cyprus Investment Promotion Agency (CIPA) from 2011 until 2016.

Evgenios graduated from Imperial College London and he is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. He has attended leadership development programs of PwC.

Theodoros Evgeniou, Professor, INSEAD

Theodoros Evgeniou is a Professor at INSEAD. He has been working on Machine Learning and AI for more than 20 years (at MIT before INSEAD, from where he also received four degrees), focusing on the broader topic of AI, business and society, on areas ranging from AI and regulation to AI innovations for business process optimisation and improving decisions as well as on new Machine Learning methods. He is a member of the OECD Network of AI Experts. Professor Evgeniou gives talks and consults for a number of organisations.

Jahna Otterbacher, Assistant Professor, Open University of Cyprus (OUC)

Jahna Otterbacher received her doctorate from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, USA), School of Information. She is currently on the faculty of the Open University of Cyprus (OUC), School of Pure and Applied Sciences. Jahna coordinates the Cyprus Center for Algorithmic Transparency (CyCAT) at the OUC, funded by the H2020 Widespread Twinning program. The CyCAT seeks to promote transparency and accountability in algorithmic systems that people routinely use, but that are rather opaque to them (e.g., search engines), through three types of interventions – data-, developer- and user-focused. In addition to her post at the OUC, Jahna holds a concurrent appointment as team leader of the Transparency in Algorithms Group at RISE (Research centre on Interactive media, Smart systems and Emerging technologies), a new center of excellence and innovation in Nicosia, Cyprus, in collaboration with two international Advanced Partners, UCL and MPI.

Antonis C. Kakas, Professor, Dep. of Computer Science, University of Cyprus (UCY)

Antonis C. Kakas is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science of UCY. He obtained his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Imperial College London in 1984, and has since worked at King's College London, the University of Zurich and Imperial College, before taking a permanent position in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Cyprus in 1992. His research interests include abduction and argumentation with applications to multi-agent systems, cognitive agents, machine learning and ethics. He is a co-founder and developer of the area of Abductive Logic Programming, with his interest and work in Argumentation running in parallel to this. He has published over 100 papers, with his work on abduction and argumentation widely cited. He has coordinated two national research projects, the EU funded project Cultural Journeys in the Information Society (CJIS), and was the PI of the UCY participation in eleven EU funded projects. He has co-developed at the UCY several research software systems for Abductive Reasoning (ACLP, A-system and ProLogICA), Argumentation (GORGIAS), Abductive Learning (ACL), Temporal Reasoning using Argumentation (E-RES), Story Comprehension (STAR) and Cognitive Argumentation (COGNICA). Recently, with others he has proposed, Argumentation Logic, as a logic that offers a new perspective for logic-based AI that facilitates the synthesis of Cognitive Psychology with theory and methods from AI. Currently, he is working on the development of a new framework of Cognitive Programming that aims to offer a programming environment for developing Human-centric AI systems that can be naturally used by human users at large. He is the National Contact Point for Cyprus in the flagship EU project on AI, AI4EU.

Dr. Christina Orphanidou, Data and Artificial Intelligence Lab Manager, PwC Cyprus

Christina is the Manager of the Data and Artificial Intelligence Lab at PwC Cyprus. She holds a DPhil in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Oxford, UK. After her doctoral studies, she worked for a number of years at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford as a Senior Researcher, developing AI systems for application in the early detection of deterioration in hospital patients. After a 10-year academic career, she transitioned to the business world where she provides advisory services to private and public organisations regarding their digitalisation strategies and their use of analytics and Artificial Intelligence. Amongst other things, she currently acts as an expert in Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare for the European Commission and in parallel provides training to organisations about how to embed technology and AI in their operations. She is the co-founder of the Cyprus chapter of the international organisation Women in Machine Learning and Data Science, a TEDx UNIC 2019 speaker, and since November of 2019 she is the Proctor of the Parallel Parliament in Research, Innovation and Digital Policy of Cyprus.