Konstantinos Pliakos

Konstantinos Pliakos received his diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) in 2011. He received his MSc in Digital Media – Computational Intelligence from the department of Informatics/Computer science of the same university in 2015. In the meantime, he had been working for two years as a data scientist at the Artificial Intelligence and Information Analysis (AIIA) laboratory at AUTH, as a member of the project ATLAS (Advanced Tourism pLAnning Systems). His research topics were in the domains of machine learning, multimedia information retrieval, computer vision, and recommender systems. In October 2015, he joined KU Leuven, Faculty of Medicine at Campus KULAK, to pursue a PhD in data mining for biomedicine, under the supervision of prof. Celine Vens. He successfully defended his PhD in September 2019. The overall goal of that project was to develop novel machine learning methods, that make it possible to mine biomedical interaction data (networks) exploiting background information of the data instances (i.e., features describing the instances). The impact of this work was in the area of bioinformatics, medical technology, and of course machine learning itself. During his PhD, he had also the opportunity to be involved in interdisciplinary projects and become a member of itec, imec research group at KU Leuven. In that role, he had the opportunity to extend his work to the field of educational sciences. His research was focused on performing predictions in education networks (students-items) and specifically tackling the cold start problem in adaptive learning systems. The latter was achieved by effectively integrating machine learning and item response theory.