Elena Mocanu 

University of Twente, Nederland

Elena Mocanu is an assistant professor at the University of Twente. She received her PhD in machine learning from the indhoven University of Technology in 2017. She visited the Technical University of Denmark (2015), University of Texas at  Austin (2016), and the University of Alberta (2022), working on machine learning and decision-making through the means of sparse neural networks. As a mathematician passionate about neural networks, her current research focuses on understanding sparse neural networks and how their learning capabilities can be improved.

Mirko Bunse 

University of Dortmund, Germany

Mirko finished his Ph.D. in 2022 at TU Dortmund University. There, he also received his M.Sc. degree in Computer Science in 2018, with honors and a specialization in Data Science. His involvement with machine learning ranges back to 2016, when he joined our AI group as a student assistant. Before, he was working as a software developer for geo-information systems and as a student assistant at Paderborn University, where he completed a B.Sc. in 2014.

Mirko studies the application of machine learning in astro-particle physics. This application field is characterized by extreme class imbalances, by a domain-specific post-processing of predictions, and by the fact that all training data is simulated while the learned models must be valid in practice. Mirko's current focuses are the aggregation of predictions in terms of ordinal quantification (a.k.a. unfolding), learning under class-conditional label noise, and the smart control of simulations through active class selection.