Short Bio-data of Professor Dr. Maria Virvou :

Professor Dr. Maria Virvou

Professor Dr. Maria Virvou is the Head of the Department of Informatics at the University of Piraeus, Greece, Director and Founding Member of the Postgraduate Program in Computer Science, Director of the Research Laboratory "Software Technology". She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Springer book series "Learning and Analytics in Intelligent Systems" and "Artificial Intelligence-Enhanced Software and Systems Engineering". She is a co-founder and co-chair of the IEEE Intelligent Information Systems and Applications (IISA) International Conference series, which is organised annually.

Concerning her educational background, she received Ph.D. in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex, U.K., funded by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation award for ranking first in the nationwide exam of the year, specialising in "Artificial Intelligence". She received a Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Computer Science from University College London (UCL), U.K., and first degree in Mathematics from the University of Athens, Greece.

In her academic career, Prof.-Dr. Virvou has authored and co-authored over 400 publications in journals, books, and international conferences. She has edited over 40 conference proceedings and books and has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal SpringerPlus for the whole area of Computer Science. Moreover, she has been General Chair or Program Chair or an Invited Keynote Speaker in more than 30 international conferences worldwide. Recently, she was the General Co-Chair of the 14th IEEE IISA Conference in 2023 and was an invited keynote speaker at the 35th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T 2023) in Tokyo, Japan. Her work has earned numerous awards, best paper awards and recognitions in the field of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.

Her contributions to these fields have been extensive and widely recognised. She holds top positions in global rankings of scientific performance. Notably, she ranks first worldwide in Scopus for "User Modeling" out of 150,900 publications and first for "Educational Software" according to both Scopus and Microsoft Academic Search. Furthermore, she is ranked among the top scientists in User Interface, Multimedia, and Human-Computer Interaction according to Microsoft Academic Search analysing 262,751,231 Authors and 248,455,650 Publications.

She is also ranked among the top 2% of Artificial Intelligence researchers with the highest worldwide impact according to the international ranking of Stanford University.

Research Interests: Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence, Human-Centred AI, Human-AI Interaction, AI in Educational Software and Games, Personalised Software, AI-driven User Modelling, User Experience in AI, Virtual Assistants, Large Language Models and Affective Software.