Computer Science & AI

Pascal chair 2023

Peter Flach is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bristol. An internationally leading scholar in the evaluation and improvement of machine learning models using ROC analysis and calibration, he has also published on mining highly structured data, on knowledge-driven and explainable AI, and on the methodology of data science. He is author of Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example (John Wiley, 1994) and Machine Learning: the Art and Science of Algorithms that Make Sense of Data (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Professor Flach was Editor-in-Chief of the Machine Learning journal, one of the two top journals in the field, for a decade (2010-20). He was Programme Co-Chair of the 1999 International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming, the 2001 European Conference on Machine Learning, the 2009 ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD’09), and the 2012 European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases in Bristol. He was a founding board member of the European Association for Data Science (EuADS.org), was elected President in 2019, and is currently Vice-President. He is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ellis.eu), and of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (eurai.org).

Flach has several past and ongoing collaborations with LIACS. He has co-authored several papers on subgroup discovery with Arno Knobbe, and collaborates with LIACS researchers in the TAILOR European Network of Excellence in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence through Integrating Learning, Optimisation and Reasoning. Flach says 'I am honoured to have been awarded the 2023 Pascal Chair and look forward to extend and deepen my relationship which such an eminent centre of excellence in computer science and artificial intelligence.'