Mario Francesco PAVONE

Mario Pavone is Associate Professor in Computer Science and lecturer of Operating Systems and Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Catania. His research focuses on the design and development of metaheuristics and their combination with Machine Learning techniques, applied in several areas, such as optimization; computational biology; complex networks; reverse engineering; detection and prediction activities; and analysis of dynamics in collective behaviors.

He is member of several Editorial Boards of international journals, and he is Associate Editor for the journals Soft Computing, Frontiers in Big Data and Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, as well as a member of the program committee of many important international conferences and workshops, mainly in the field of evolutionary computation. Since January 2023 he is Editor in Chief for the international journal IJSI - International Journal of Swarm Intelligence. He is reviewer for several national and international research projects, as well as an external reviewer of several international PhD theses.

Over the years, he has acquired a vast experience in organizing successful international conferences and summer schools. Indeed, he is currently the founder and Director of the Metaheuristics Summer School (MESS). Thanks to this long experience, he has established several fruitful international research collaborations over the years.

He was invited as a Keynote Speaker at the international conference INTIS 2024 (12th International Conference on New Technologies, Artificial Intelligence and Smart Data), and over the years he has participated as an invited speaker at several international conferences. He is editor of several special issues in renowned international journals in the field, such as International Transactions in Operational Research; Applied Soft Computing; Swarm and Evolutionary Computation; BMC Immunology; Artificial Life and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence.

Today he is co-director of the research group "Complex Intelligent Systems" (http://cis-lab.dmi.unict.it/) at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Catania.