Invited speakers – European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology

Summer school will host 5 distinguished invited speakers:

Michał Baczyński: „A Survey of Fuzzy Logical Connectives and Their Applications”

Michał Baczyński received his MSc and PhD degrees (summa cum laude) in mathematics from the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, in 1995 and 2000, respectively. He obtained his habilitation in computer science from the Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw in 2010. In 2020, he was awarded the academic title of Professor by the President of Poland. He co-authored the research monograph Fuzzy Implications (Springer, 2008) and has authored or co-authored more than 100 scientific publications, including over 45 papers in refereed international journals. He regularly serves as a reviewer for respected international journals and is a member of various conference committees. He has presented his research at more than 80 conferences with proceedings, such as FUZZ-IEEE, EUSFLAT, IPMU, IFSA, FSTA, QLSC, and AGOP. He received the “Best Paper Award” three times at the following conferences: FLINS 2012, EUSFLAT 2019, and EUSFLAT 2023. Michał Baczyński is a member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE CIS), the European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology (EUSFLAT), the International Fuzzy Systems Association (IFSA), and the Polish Artificial Intelligence Society (PSSI). He also serves as President of the Upper Silesian Branch of the Polish Mathematical Society (PTM), Vice-President of the Upper Silesian Branch of the Polish Information Processing Society (PTI), and Secretary of the Polish Society for Fuzzy Sets (POLFUZZ). His research focuses on the mathematical foundations of intelligent systems, especially fuzzy systems. His work concerns different methods and systems that use multi-valued operators – the correct selection of which is one of the most important challenges in different algorithms, both theoretically and practically. His main scientific interests lie in fuzzy (multi-valued) implications, which are applied in various fields of computer science. His research methods combine appropriate tools from multiple branches of computational intelligence and mathematics, with particular emphasis on results from the theory of functional equations and inequalities, as well as algebra, to derive significant conclusions for engineers and practitioners.

Sebasten Destercke: „Fuzziness in supervised machine learning: focus on data and predictions”

Sébastien Destercke is a CNRS Researcher at the Heudiasyc Laboratory (UMR 7053), Université de technologie de Compiègne, France. His research focuses on uncertainty representation, imprecise probabilities, possibility theory, and their applications in artificial intelligence and decision-making under uncertainty. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Université Paul-Sabatier in 2008, with a dissertation on uncertainty representation and its applications to nuclear safety. Sebastien Destercke has authored over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and numerous conference papers, as well as book chapters and edited volumes. His work has appeared in leading venues such as Information Fusion, Pattern Recognition, and Information Sciences. He actively contributes to the scientific community as an editorial board member of journals including International Journal of Approximate Reasoning and Artificial Intelligence Review, and has served on program committees of major conferences such as UAI, IJCAI, and ECAI. He has supervised numerous PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, and has delivered several invited and plenary talks at international schools and conferences. His research has been recognized with multiple best paper awards, and he currently leads the “SAFE AI” research chair (2021–2026), focusing on robust and trustworthy artificial intelligence.

Maria Brigida Ferraro: „Fuzzy clustering”

Maria Brigida Ferraro is Associate Professor of Statistics at Sapienza University of Rome, where she chairs the Master Programme in Statistical Sciences. She has held several scientific service roles, including President of the European Regional Section of the International Association for Statistical Computing (ERS-IASC) for the 2022-2024 term and Board Member of CLADAG, the Classification and Data Analysis Group of the Italian Statistical Society (2025-2027). Since 2015, she has served as Co-Chair of the specialized team “Imprecision in Statistical Data Analysis” within the ERCIM Working Group on Computational and Methodological Statistics. Since 2022, she has been Vice Chair of the COST Action “Text, functional and other high-dimensional data in econometrics: New models, methods, applications” (HiTEc). Her research interests focus on fuzzy clustering and statistical methods for complex data, and she has authored numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. She serves as Associate Editor for Econometrics and Statistics (2026-present), the Journal of Classification (2024-present), the CSDA Annals of Statistical Data Science (2019-present), Metron (2019-present), and the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning (2018–present), and she is a member of the Editorial Board of Fuzzy Sets and Systems. She has been Guest Editor for several special issues and Co-Editor of two Springer volumes. She has also been actively involved in the organization of international scientific events, serving as chair, member of scientific committees, or organizer of invited and contributed sessions for various international conferences.

Susana Montes: „Beyond single numbers: exploring interval data with aggregation and dissimilarity measures”

Susana Montes is Full Professor of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of Oviedo (Spain). Her research lies at the intersection of statistics and approximate reasoning, with particular attention to applications in Artificial Intelligence, especially fuzzy systems, aggregation functions and interval-valued data. She founded and leads the research group UNIMODE, currently composed of 19 researchers, and maintains active collaborations with several international research teams. Her scientific output includes more than 100 papers in international journals and numerous contributions to international conferences, several of them as invited or plenary speaker. She has supervised several PhD theses and has participated in many national and international competitive research projects, as well as research transfer contracts with companies, often as principal investigator. At the University of Oviedo she has held several academic leadership roles and currently serves as Director of the International Doctoral School. In the international scientific community she has played an active role in the main societies of her field. She served as President of the European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology (EUSFLAT) from 2021 to 2025 and has been Vice-President of the International Fuzzy Systems Association (IFSA) since 2019.

Martin Štěpnička: „From fuzzy relations to decision-making”

Martin Štěpnička received his habilitation (Docent – Associative Professorship) in Applied Mathematics at the University of Ostrava in 2012. Since March 2023, he is the Vice-rector for Research and Artistic Activities at the University of Ostrava. Beforehand, he served as the Director of the Centre of Excellence IT4Innovations – Institute for Research and Applications of Fuzzy Modeling, University of Ostrava for two years and he held the vice-director and senior researcher position in the preceding years. Martin Stepnicka also held the positions of the President of the European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology (EUSFLAT) for two consecutive terms – elected in 09/2017 and re-elected in 09/2019. Martin is an Area Editor of JCR journals Fuzzy Sets and Systems, International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, and International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems, and furthermore, an editorial board member and guest editor member of other journals. His research interests mainly include fuzzy modeling, especially fuzzy inference systems and fuzzy relational calculus. His research in this area led to the FUZZ-IEEE Best Paper Award in 2016 (Vancouver, Canada) for the paper “On the Satisfaction of Moser-Navara Axioms for Fuzzy Inference Systems”.