Halina Kwasnicka

Halina Kwaśnicka, DSc, PhD, is a full Professor at the Department of Artificial Intelligence, the Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Poland. She graduated from the Faculty of Electronics at the Wrocław University of Science and Technology. She received a PhD and DSc (habilitation in Poland) at the Faculty of Electronics. In 2009, she was nominated by the President of Poland as a full professor (the highest scientific title in Poland); the System Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences conducted this procedure.

In the 1990/1991 academic year, she proposed and delivered the first course at Wrocław University of Science and Technology that explicitly featured "AI" in its title. It was an elective course within the integrated Master's degree program, titled "Introduction to Expert Systems and Artificial Intelligence." Due to its great popularity, the course was soon incorporated into the mandatory curriculum. She was joined by colleagues and numerous (and talented) Master's students, followed later by doctoral students. Other AI-related elective courses soon followed, such as "Genetic Algorithms", "Automated Knowledge Acquisition", and - for doctoral students - "Problem Solving Using Artificial Intelligence Methods".

She was a founder and the head (up to the end of 2020) of the Department of Artificial Intelligence. Between 2016 and 2020, she served as Head of Doctoral Studies at the Faculty of Computer Science and Management of Wroclaw University of Technology. In the years 2004 – 2012, she was the deputy director for research at the Institute of Computer Science.

Her research interests have evolved from nature-inspired methods through knowledge-based systems to machine learning and image interpretation. The last subjects are Object Hierarchy Generation and Explainable Artificial Intelligence. She is the author of over 200 scientific papers, four books and co-editor of two books (Springer). She gave several invited lectures. She was a patron of the Data Science specialisation created in 2018 (Master's program).

She managed research projects on the application of artificial intelligence methods in medicine and image analysis. She is active in international cooperation - she has participated in EU projects and managed the Polish-Singaporean research project. At the invitation of the Ministry of Digitisation, as part of the AI-Tech project consortium, she began, together with members of the Department of Artificial Intelligence, to create a new master's degree program in Artificial Intelligence. It was launched in February 2021. Lastly, she was involved in developing the engineering studies programs (first-level studies) in Artificial Intelligence and in Artificial Intelligence and Psychology. She was a member of the Program Council of this project.

She was awarded as TOP of the TOP Women in AI 2022 by Perspektywy Women in Tech and received the "Distinguished Mentor in AI" award https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A6940731034338521088. Awarded the Gold Cross of Merit in 2023.