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:-) Biographical Sketch for Dunja Mladenic

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Dunja Mladenic works at the Department of Intelligent Systems of the J. Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia since 1987, first as an undergraduate student and since 1992 as a researcher. She graduate in Computer Science at Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana and continued as PhD student there focusing on Artificial Intelligence. She got her MSc and PhD in Computer Science at University of Ljubljana in 1995 and 1998 respectively. Most of her research work is connected with the study and development of machine learning techniques and their application on real-world problems from different areas e.g., medicine, pharmacology, manufacturing, economy. Her current research focuses on using machine learning in data analysis, with particular interest in learning from text applied on the Web documents and intelligent agents. In 1996/97 she spend a year as a visiting researcher working with Prof. Dr. Tom M. Mitchell in the learning laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. In 2000/2001 she spend 15 months as a visiting faculty at School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Dunja Mladenic is coordinating European Research and Development project "Data Mining and Decision Support for business competitiveness: A European virtual enterprise (Sol-Eu-Net) (2000-2002), involving 12 partners from 7 countries (project description). She is currently involved in several other research projects including: "Analysis of large text datasets", "Reflection in Machine Learning", "Development of Digital Publishing with Distance Learning Support", "Slovenian Economy in Transition towards Market Economy". She has published several papers in refereed conferences and journals. She has served in the program committee of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-2000,ICML-99), she co-organized several international conferences and workshops including AWAMIDA-99 Conference on Analysis, Warehousing and Mining the data, ICML-99 Workshop on Machine Learning in Text Data Analysis and KDD-2000 Workshop on Text Mining.

Word "Dunja" is in Croatian language a name for a kind of fruit: quince. Some of you mingt have seen a beautiful quince tree or have tried delicius quince marmelade or jelly. Quince, Cydonia oblongata (=C. vulgaris) (Rosaceae) has long been cultivated in the entire Mediterreanean area. The fruit is, e.g. mentioned by the Greek physician Theophrastos 300 B.C., and is believed to have been the golden apples of the Hesperides. Some even say quince was the apple which lured Eve. Due to its colour, fragrance and many seeds the fruit was dedicated by the Greeks to Aphrodite and by the Romans to Venus, the godesses of love, and a symbol for beauty, love, fertility and a happy marriage. The eating of a Quince pear at weddings is said to be preparative of sweet and delightful days between the married persons. The high concentration of mucilage in the seeds made them very popular as an aphrodisiac. Quince jelly has also a good reputation as an amorous adjuvant. Quince is very rich in pectine. Thus, the addition of small quantity of quince will rapidly solidify any quivering mass of jelly.

I was born and grow up in Croatia, in the north-west part of the country (as shown on the maps belove).

[Croatia Map] [Istra Map] The right map shows a zoomed part of the left map.


Images on this document are taken from the pages they point to.

Updated: September, 1997
Dunja Mladenic