New lecturers bring further research excellence to the School
The Cardiff School of Computer Science & Informatics is pleased to welcome three new members of academic staff who each bring exciting new research specialisms to the School.
Lecturer and Assistant Professor Dr Grigorios Loukides is a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow. These prestigious annual Research Fellowships are awarded to outstanding researchers in engineering, to promote excellence in the field by providing support for high-quality engineers who are developing their interests in academic research as a stepping stone to a successful research career.
Dr Loukides research interests lie broadly in the field of data management with a focus on privacy. His recent research investigates theoretical and practical aspects of data privacy, including algorithmic design, optimisation, and formal modelling, and explores applications in healthcare and business. He serves in the Editorial Board of Journal of Health Informatics and the program committees of conferences and workshops, including ICDM 2011 and PADM 2011. Before joining Cardiff University, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Cardiff University and a Diploma in Computer Science from University of Crete, Greece.
Dr Steven Schockaert studied computer science at Ghent University, where his PhD thesis earned him the 2008 ECCAI Artificial Intelligence Dissertation Award and the IBM Belgium Prize for Computer Science, as well as being published by World Scientific.
His current research interests are largely centred around three areas: multi-valued logics, common-sense reasoning, and geographic information retrieval. In the area of multi-valued logics, he is mainly working on ?ukasiewicz logic (e.g. automated reasoning and complexity) and on extensions of answer set programming, a form of logic programming based on the notion of stable models. In the area of common-sense reasoning, he is interested in qualitative techniques for managing inconsistency and uncertainty, including possibilistic logic and qualitative approaches to similarity-based reasoning. His main focus in the area of geographic information retrieval is on acquiring geographic information from semi-structured web resources. He has participated twice in the MediaEval Placing Task, which is a benchmark initiative for systems that try to find out where a video of photo on Flickr has been captured.
Lecturer Dr Kirill Sidorov (BSc PhD) is a member of the School's Visual Computing research group. Before joining Cardiff University, Dr Sidorov has worked as a research fellow for the University of Edinburgh, on the TOMSY (Topology Based Motion Synthesis for Dexterous Manipulation) project, investigating applications of computational topology for motion planning of humanoid robots, computer graphics and animation, as well as computational geometry. This topic has now become one of Dr Sidorov's main research interests.
His other major interests lie in the field of computer vision, in particular in groupwise non-rigid registration of images and surfaces - the topic in which Dr Sidorov has achieved several important pioneering results. His other research interests include computer graphics, statistical modelling, unsupervised machine learning, digital signal processing, physical simulations and computational mechanics.