Keynote Speakers
Keynote Speakers in Alphabetical Order
Panagiotis Bamidis
Panagiotis Bamidis is currently Assoc. Prof. in the Lab of Medical Physics, Medical Schoolof the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He has founded and has been leading fourresearch groups, namely, in Medical Education Informatics, in Assistive Technologies and Silver Science, in Applied and Affective Neuroscience, and in Health Services Research. In the last 7 years, he has been the co-ordinator of five large European projects (SmokeFreeBrain.org; www.meducator.net; www.longlastingmemories.eu, www.epblnet.eu, www.childrenhealth.eu) as well as the principal investigator for a number of national and international funded projects. His publication record consists of more than 90 international refereed journal papers, and over 330 international peer reviewed conference papers, as well as several book chapters / edited conference proceedings volumes and over some 1200 citations (h-index>20). In addition, he has been acting as a referee in more than 30 journals, and as Guest Editor in some 25 journal special issues. He is a member of the Editorial Board in 6 journals, Editor in Chief of the Int.Journal of Bioelectromagnetism and Associate Editor in the prestigious series of JMIR journals. He is the President of the Hellenic Biomedical Technology Society (ELEBIT),a member of the Administration Boards of the Society of Applied Neuroscience, the Greek Federation of Alzheimer’s Associations and Related Disorders, the Greek AeroSpace& Space Medicine Research Association, a member of the Life Sciences Division of the International Academy of Astronautics and past member of the Innovation Zone of Thessaloniki, Greece. He is also advisor to the Northern Greece Association of Parkinson’s patients. He is/has been the Chairman/Organiser of nine international conferences (iSHIMR2001, iSHIMR2005, MEDICON2010, GASMA2010, SAN2011, MEI2012, ΜΕΙ2015, SAN2016, CBMS2017) and several national Biomedical Technology conferences. He is the Conference Producer of the Medical Education Informatics Conferences and associated Spring/Summer School Series in Internet Sharing Technologies and Open Data.He is a visiting scientist at Karolinska Institute, Sweden. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Open Knowledge Foundation and a founding member of Chapter Greece. In 2009, he was awarded the Prize of the AUTH Research Committee for the Best Track Record in funded research projects among AUTH young academic staff.In 2015, he was awarded the title of the Honorary Professor of Karaganda State Medical University, Kazakhstan, as well as the Pospelov Medal for his contributions to Medical Education development by the same University. In 2017, he became a visiting Professor of Medical Education Technology, Innovation and Change for the Leeds Institute of Medical Education (LIME), Leeds, UK.
His research interests are within technology enhanced learning in Medical Education (web2.0, semantic web and open linked data, serious games, virtual patients, PBL and scenario based learning, learning analytics), Affective and Applied Neuroscience, Affective and Physiological Computing, multimodal interaction and HCI, Health Information Management, Bio-medical Informatics with emphasis on neurophysiological sensing, signal analysis, and imaging of human emotions. He is also actively researching Assistive Technologies for Active and Healthy Ageing, as well as, special education/developmental disorders, and silvergaming/exergaming/silver-science and the associated use of semantic technologies and IoT. Since 2012 he has established LLM Care ecosystem (www.llmcare.gr), the business exploitation of the LLM project, which is a candidate reference site of the EIP-on-AHA. In 2013 he established the Active and Healthy Ageing Living Lab in Thessaloniki (ThessAHALL; http://www.aha-livinglabs.com/) which in 2016 became an adherent member of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL).
Title: Affective Learning: Principles, Technologies, Practice
Although the issues around emotions and learning are not new, the term affective learning has only recently been defined as the learning that relates to the learner’s interests, attitudes, and motivations. In the digital age we live though, affective learning is destined to be technology driven or at least enhanced. Having overemphasised the cognitive and relatively neglecting the affective dimension in the past, technology enhanced learning is now enforced by new neuroscience findings that confirmed that affect is complexly intertwined with thinking, and performing important functions that may guide rational behaviour, assist memory retrieval, support decision-making and enhance creativity. To cope with personalised learning experiences in such models of learners though, intelligent tutoring systems must now contain “emotion, affect and context”, in analogy to successful human tutors. However, measuring and modelling learners’ emotional and affective states remains a difficult task, especially when real-time interactions are envisaged. In this paper, the concept of affective learning is furnished with case studies where the roles of technologies, neuroscience, learning and education are interwoven. Medical education is borrowed as a domain of reference. Neuroscientific emphasis is placed in the synergy of two perspectives, namely, the detection and recording of emotions from humans and ways to facilitate their elicitation and their subsequent exploitation in the decision-making process. The paper concludes with a visionary use case towards affective facilitation of training against medical errors and decision making by intelligent, self-regulated systems that could exploit scenario based learning to augment medical minds for tomorrow’s doctors.
Presentation: Affective Learning: Principles, Technologies, Practice
Andreas Ioannides
Prof. Andreas A. Ioannides was born in Morphou, Cyprus. He studied Physics (1970-73) and completed his PhD at Surrey University UK (1973-76), continuing with research in nuclear Physics until 1988. Since 1986 he started research in biology that by 1989 narrowed to magnetoencephalography. The initial emphasis on basic theory and mathematical analysis techniques lead also to development of experimental protocols and dedicated hardware (freely donated to the community with some nowadays installed in MEG systems world-wide). Prof. Ioannides established theoretical teams and set up functional neuroimaging laboratories in international centers of excellence in the UK (1989 -98), Germany (1994-8) and Japan (1998 – 2009) leading to over 130 scientific papers. Over ten of his PhD students are now leading scientist, some heading international centers of excellence in Europe, North America and Asia. Prof. Ioannides returned to Cyprus in 2009 as the director of AAI Scientific Cultural Services Ltd (AAISCS) a private company that continues the basic neuroscience research of previous years with the additional goal of using the resulting knowledge to develop new services and products with cheaper and widely accessible technology. The company also provides support for experiments and data analysis in Electroencephalography and Magnetoencephalography. For much of the last decade Prof. Ioannides research emphasized three main areas of basic and applied research: the understanding of sleep processes and how these influence health, using the results of basic research to advance new non-invasive, non-pharmacological methods of intervention with strong emphasis on neurofeedback and the development of methods for identifying strengths and weaknesses of pupils in pre-school or in the first year of elementary school and making theses suitable for mass screening. Some important results from this research will be presented for the first time in Patras at BFAL2017.
Title: Understanding how learning takes place with neuroscience and applying the results to education
Our understanding of brain function advances constantly and in many different directions, each demanding specialized knowledge and continuous updating from an ever increasing volume of publications. The implications of the neuroscience findings for learning in general and the evaluation of the methods used in schools in particular are not always obvious and often their significance is clouded by the (often conflicting) political biases and accepted views that prevailed for many years and have become dogmas in education. The talk will start with a short review of recent key results of neuroscience research and the way these have capture the interest of education policy makers and transnational organizations.The second part of the talk will be devoted to the research in the last eight years that attempted to address the problem of early evaluation of children at pre-school or first year of elementary school initially focusing on specific needs like developmental dyslexia and eventually moving to the development of methods for efficient mass screening for special needs or abilities,with minimal disruption of school teaching. The talk will conclude with a synthesis of the results presented earlier and other recent neuroscience findings that show learning at schools as a natural continuationof tendencies endowed to humans by their evolutionary history and reinforced by parents in the protected family environment of the early years of life: it is a refinement of the constant drive to retain the individuality of the cognitive and social self while at the same time updating the internal model of the world (with the neural representation of self at its center) according to the ever changing and often challenging experiences of the modern world.