Network for professionals
Halmstad Professionals is a network for individuals interested in AI, data analytics, cyber security, service design and business intelligence.
Knowledge exchange and collaboration
The network Halmstad Professionals organises seminars and network meetings for an increased exchange of knowledge and experience between academia and business. The network addresses professional engineers, consultants, business and organisation leaders and entrepreneurs who are interested in how their organisation can be improved through applied AI, data analysis, cyber security, service design and business intelligence. The network is run by the School of Information Technology at Halmstad University.

Previous events
February 10, 2023: Can Natural Intelligence Understand Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence, after six decades of development, is becoming one of the most important technologies and its impact on many areas of science and the economy can hardly be overestimated.
Consequently, it arouses great curiosity and also much controversy due to the profound social implications of its applications. As this technology grows in complexity and development, questions recur as to how much we can and should understand the technologies that shape our lives. We will therefore take a closer look at selected solutions in the field of artificial intelligence and try to answer these questions.
Grzegorz J. Nalepa is a professor of technical sciences at Jagiellonian University, an engineer specialising in artificial intelligence (AI) and an independent expert in the field of AI (KnowAI.eu).
January 16, 2023: When Explainability Meets Privacy on the Support Vector Machine
Rami Mochaourab, senior researcher at RISE, will give a talk on the specific topic of explainable machine learning models and present robust explanations which are suitable for support vector machine classifiers that guarantee differential privacy.
Machine learning models are today widely deployed in a real-world setting throughout various industrial sectors. It is not uncommon that machine learning drives decision support systems and in other cases even creates automatic decision. Therefore, to enable trust and usability there is a need for a machine learning based system to be interpretable and explainable, this is especially true for some sectors such as healthcare.
Guaranteeing differential privacy when learning a classifier from a dataset with sensitive data requires introducing uncertainty on identifying a specific individual in the database by adding noise to the model parameters. Consequently, the accuracy of the classifier is degraded as well as the credibility of its explanations.
June 15, 2022: Cybersecurity and organisations
In the lecture, Rasool Muhammad Ahsan, Lecturer in Network Forensics, provided common knowledge of cybersecurity to everyone working in or who wants to be a part of organisational information systems and networks.
We learned about how to manage cybersecurity risks, identify various types of common threats, evaluate security and precautionary measures to avoid incidents.
March 15, 2022: AI in healthcare
The event started with a presentation by Professor Ricard Gavalda, from the Computer Science Department at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Spain and co-founder and CEO at Amalfi Analytics. He talked about “Machine Learning for management problems: An easier introduction of AI in hospitals”.
Professor Martin Atzmüller from the ROSEN-Group-Endowed Chair of Semantic Information Systems at Osnabrück University and German Research Center for AI (DFKI), held a presentation on “Explicative model-augmented learning: Connecting computational approaches and human-centered perspectives in sensor-based, behavioral and social contexts”.
The event ended with a panel discussion on how “AI researchers meet healthcare professionals: vision for the common future”. A apart from Professor Gavaldá and professor Atzmüller the panel members were Markus Lingman, Chief Physician and Strategist at Region Halland and Adjunct professor at Halmstad University, Myra Spiliopoulou, Professor, Computer Science Department, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Miltiadis Triantafyllou, Clinical Lead Cardiology, Region Halland, Martin Engström, Health and Medical Director at Region Halland and Anita Sant’Anna (Moderator), founder and CEO ResearchOnTheGo.
February 1, 2022: Lena Hylving's docent lecture
This lecture adressed the balancing act that comes with digitalization dynamics. Digitalization dynamics can be described as the dynamic interplay between the social (organization) and the material (technology), and how they jointly evolve in the digital era.
January 20, 2022: Lunch talk with Rune Prytz
A lunch talk with Rune Prytz, Head of R&D at Stratio. Stratio is the world's leading real-time predictive fleet maintenance platform, a tool that provides a magnified look that leads to better planning and better decisions. The talk will be about the latest developments in the field and Rune will discuss how the company's proprietary technology combines large-scale processing with the latest machine learning techniques to prevent hundreds of thousands of breakdowns from happening every day, thus saving millions of people from the hassle of public transportation delays, postponed deliveries, or late arrival of essential goods.
December 3, 2021: Information driven care
A talk about information driven care with Farzaneh Etminani, Associate Professor in Machine Learning, and Mattias Ohlsson, Professor of Information Technology. Both are actively involved in Halmstad University's research profile CAISR Health.
June 18, 2021: Entrepreneurship in the Data Age
The event started with an inspirational talk by Nicolas Hassbjer, founder of HMS Networks and currently the Vice chairperson of the Board of Chalmers University of Technology Foundation. The talk was followed by breakout rooms where network members could meet and talk with leading entrepreneurs Nicolas Hassbjer, Magdalena Johansson and Siddhartha Khandelwal.
April 28, 2021: Privacy in Data Analytics
Halmstad Professionals was inaugurated on April 28, 2021, with a seminar about Privacy-by-Design Statistics by Alejandro Russo, Professor at Chalmers University of Technology and CEO at DPella. The talk was followed by a panel discussion with Alejandro Russo, Raúl Pardo Jiménez from the IT University of Copenhagen and Mohammad Reza Mousavi from the University of Leicester.