Francesca A. Lisi

Francesca A. Lisi, PhD holder in Computer Science (curriculum of Artificial Intelligence), is currently an Adjoint Professor at the Dept. of Computer Science of the University of Bari (Italy) where she teaches Database Design to undergraduate students and Information Systems to graduate students.

Since her PhD studies, Francesca’s research has been characterized by the cross-fertilization of results obtained in different areas inside AI and also outside AI, notably in databases. She has investigated several logic-based methods for Machine Learning and Data Mining, with applications to Knowledge Engineering and the Semantic Web. With reference to this research, Francesca was awarded with the 2006 Cyc Prize for the best research proposal and has been often invited to give talks at prestigious foreign institutions (e.g., TU Dresden and Imperial College) and tutorials in international conferences (e.g., ESWC 2007, ECML/PKDD 2007, AAAI 2010, ICLP 2015). She is (co-)author of about 100 scientific articles published in journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings.

Francesca serves as PC member in major international AI conferences such as IJCAI, AAAI and ECAI. She has organized several scientific events, also at the international level. In particolar, she was co-organizer and PC co-chair of the 16th International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (Bari, 14-17 Nov. 2017).

Since 2013 Francesca is elected member of the Executive Board of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA), and delegated contact person for the AIxIA awards. Partly under the patronage of AIxIA, she is active in dissemination of AI-related scientific knowledge, by organizing or participating in public events.