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Prof. Natalia Loukachevitch
Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU), Russia -
Prof. Long Tran-Thanh
University of Warwick, United Kingdom
Prof. Natalia Loukachevitch is a Leading Researcher at the Research Computing Center of Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU). She also serves as a professor at both the Faculty of Philology and the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at MSU and holds a professorship at Bauman Moscow State Technical University.
Prof. Loukachevitch is widely recognized for her contributions to AI and NLP. In 2023, she was awarded the M.V. Lomonosov Medal, the highest honor of MSU, for her groundbreaking research in AI. Her work focuses on knowledge representation, ontologies, and information retrieval. She is the principal author of RuWordNet (Russian WordNet) and the Ontology on Natural Sciences and Technology. She has also developed a series of sentiment lexicons for the Russian language and widely used resources for information extraction in Russian.
With over 300 scientific publications, Prof. Loukachevitch has made significant contributions to linguistic research. She is also the author of two influential books in Russian: “Ontologies and Thesauri” and “Thesauri in Information Retrieval Tasks”.
She has developed an original theory and methods for the thematic analysis of coherent texts, integrating large linguistic ontological resources with machine learning techniques. The technologies developed at the MSU Research Computing Center, based on her methods, have been successfully applied in various R&D projects.
Prof. Loukachevitch also plays a key role in the NLP community, organizing numerous Russian evaluation workshopson sentiment analysis, argument mining, information extraction, and information retrieval. Additionally, she has led several international evaluation contests, including ABSA SemEval (2016) and CLEF BioASQ (2024, 2025).
Prof. Long Tran-Thanh is a Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, UK.
He is the Director of Research (Deputy-Head) of the department and the university’s Chair of Digital Research Spotlight. He has been doing active research in a number of key areas of Artificial Intelligence, mainly focusing on reinforcement learning, game theory, and their applications to many subfields of AI. For his work he has received a number of prestigious international awards, including 2 best paper honourable mention awards at top-tier AI conferences (AAAI, ECAI), 2 Best PhD Thesis Award Honourable Mentions (UK's BCS and Europe’s ECCAI/EurAI), and the co-recipient of the 2021 AIJ Prominent Paper Award (for one of the 2 most influential papers between 2014-2021 published at the Artificial Intelligence Journal).