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

Jožef Stefan Institute The Jožef Stefan Institute (IJS, JSI) ( sl, Institut "Jožef Stefan") is the largest research institute in Slovenia. The main research areas are physics, chemistry, molecular biology, biotechnology, information technologies, physics, reactor ph ...

in Ljubljana. Her research has involved

expert system In artificial intelligence, 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 if� ...

s, logic programming, 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 g ...

in data mining, especially for applications in medicine.

Education and career

Lavrač studied technical mathematics at the University of Ljubljana, 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 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 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 The University of Nova Gorica, UNG ( sl, Univerza v Novi Gorici), is the fourth university in Slovenia. It is located in the towns of Nova Gorica, Gorizia (in Italy), Vipava, and Ajdovščina. History The University of Nova Gorica grew out of ...

. 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 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 The European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI) (formerly European Co-ordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI)) is the representative body for the European artificial intelligence community. EurAI was established in 19 ...

(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