Nada Lavrač (born 1953) is a Slovenian computer scientist, the former head of the Department of Knowledge Technologies of the Jožef Stefan Institute in

Ljubljana {{Infobox settlement , name = Ljubljana , official_name = , settlement_type = Capital city , image_skyline = {{multiple image , border = infobox , perrow = 1/2/2/1 , total_widt ...

. Her research has involved

expert system In artificial intelligence (AI), an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as ...

logic programming Logic programming is a programming, database and knowledge representation paradigm based on formal logic. A logic program is a set of sentences in logical form, representing knowledge about some problem domain. Computation is performed by applyin ...

, and

rule induction Rule induction is an area of machine learning in which formal rules are extracted from a set of observations. The rules extracted may represent a full scientific model of the data, or merely represent local patterns in the data. Data mining in ...

data mining Data mining is the process of extracting and finding patterns in massive data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems. Data mining is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and ...

, especially for applications in medicine.

Education and career

Lavrač studied technical mathematics at the

University of Ljubljana The University of Ljubljana (, , ), abbreviated UL, is the oldest and largest university in Slovenia. It has approximately 38,000 enrolled students. The university has 23 faculties and three art academies with approximately 4,000 teaching and re ...

, earning a bachelor's degree in 1978. She returned to the University of Ljubljana for a 1984 master's degree in computer science, and went to the

University of Maribor The University of Maribor () is Slovenia's second-largest university, established in 1975 in Maribor, Slovenia. It currently has 17 faculties. History The university's roots reach back to 1859 when a theological seminary was established wi ...

for graduate study in technical sciences, completing her Ph.D. in 1990. Lavrač worked for ten years as a lecturer at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, and for five years at the

University of Bristol The University of Bristol is a public university, public research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Merchant Venturers' school founded in 1595 and University College, Br ...

in England. She joined the Jožef Stefan Institute as a postdoctoral researcher in 1993. In 2004 she was named head of the Department of Knowledge Technologies, also becoming a full professor of the University of Ljubljana, the Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School, and the University of Nova Gorica. After stepping down as head of department, she has continued at the Jožef Stefan Institute as a research councilor in the Department of Knowledge Technologies. She also retains her position at Nova Gorica, and has taught in a master's program on statistics and network analysis at the

Higher School of Economics HSE University (), officially the National Research University Higher School of Economics () is a public research university founded in 1992 and headquartered in Moscow, Russia. Along with its main campus located in the capital, the university ...

in Russia.

Books

Lavrač is the coauthor of books including: *''Prolog Through Examples: A Practical Programming Guide'', with Igor Kononenko, Sigma, 1988 *''Kardio: A Study in Deep and Qualitative Knowledge for Expert Systems'', with Ivan Bratko and Igor Mozetič, MIT Press, 1989 *''Inductive Logic Programming: Techniques and Applications'', with Sašo Džeroski, Horwood, 1994 *''Foundations of Rule Learning'', with Johannes Fürnkranz and Dragan Gamberger, Springer, 2012 *''Representation Learning: Propositionalization and Embeddings'', with Vid Podpečan and Marko Robnik-Šikonja, Springer, 2021

Recognition

Lavrač was named an Ambassador of Science of the Republic of Slovenia in 1998. She is a Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (formerly ECCAI), elected in 2007. In 2022 she was the recipient of a Zois Award of the government of Slovenia, for "outstanding scientific achievements in the field of machine learning ... on original data representation methods for efficient machine learning".

References

External links

Home page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Lavrac, Nada 1953 births Living people Slovenian computer scientists Slovenian women computer scientists University of Ljubljana alumni University of Maribor alumni Academic staff of the University of Klagenfurt Academics of the University of Bristol Academic staff of the University of Ljubljana Academic staff of the University of Nova Gorica Fellows of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence