The University of Melbourne, Australia

Biography: SAMAN HALGAMUGE, is a Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE), USA, and a Distinguished Lecturer/Speaker appointed by IEEE in the area of Computational Intelligence.  He is currently a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Electrical, Mechanical and Infrastructure Engineering at the University of Melbourne, an honorary Professor of School of Electrical, Energy and Materials Engineering at Australian National University (ANU).  He was previously the Director of the Research School of Engineering at the Australian National University (2016-18) and held Professor, Associate Dean International, Associate Professor and Reader and Senior Lecturer positions at University of Melbourne (1997-2016).  He graduated with Dipl.-Ing and PhD degrees in Data Engineering from Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany and B.Sc Engineering degree in Electronics and Telecommunication from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. His research interests are in Machine Learning including Deep Learning, Big Data Analytics and Optimization and their applications in Energy, Mechatronics, Bioinformatics and Neuro-Engineering. His fundamental research contributions are in Unsupervised and Near Unsupervised type learning as well as in transparent Deep Learning and Bioinspired Optimization. His h-index is 45 (10,000 citations) in Google Scholar and he graduated 50 PhD students as the primary supervisor. He has also been a keynote speaker for 40 research conferences.