dr. Izidor Mlakar (M) received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maribor in Slovenia. He is currently employed as a research fellow with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Maribor. His research interests include embodied conversational agents, co-verbal behaviour analysis and synthesis, co-verbal synchrony, finite-state machines, and machine learning algorithms, deep learning, multimodal dialog, advanced multimodal interfaces, internet of things, and smart buildings and smart cities.

 

At the moment he is working on and leading a research project in conversational models for assisted environments, funded by the EU and the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of Slovenia, entitled SAIAL. He is also leading the activities of UM in EU project PERSIST (call H2020-SC1-DTH-2019) which will start in January 2020. Through his research in ambient assisted living and eHealth he is connected with Hospital in Maribor and elderly care centers DEOS, Dom Danice Vogrinec, Dom Ptuj, and specialized centers Center Korak (persons with acquired brain injury) and VDC Polž Maribor. During past years he has been actively engaged in the preparation of various EU proposals in ICT (focus on 5G) and ALL (focus on care and eHealth), and has collaborated in EU founded projects titled SandS (Social housekeeping through intercommunicating appliances and shared recipes merged in a pervasive web-services infrastructure) and SWEPT (Securing websites through malware detection and attack prevention technologies). He was also engaged in COST2102 project, regarding cross-modal analysis of verbal and non-verbal communication.