About
Ioannis N. Athanasiadis is Professor and Chair of Artificial Intelligence at WUR. He researches the enabling role of artificial intelligence for understanding nature, and big data science applications related to environment, agriculture, food and the quality of life.
He has extensive experience in academic leadership of collaborative, transdisciplinary research projects. He leads the WUR investment theme on data-driven discoveries in a changing climate, and is a co-PI of the 60-million European flagship project Testing and Experimentation Facility for Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture (AgrifoodTEF). He is/was the principal investigator for several major European and national grants related artificial intelligence in agriculture and ecology (AgrifoodTEF, PHENET, SmartDroplets, LTER-LIFE, CYBELE, Dragon).
He has contributed more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications related to artificial intelligence in agricultural sciences, and was included in the 2024 Stanford/Elsevier List of Top 2% Scientists of the World in the category artificial intelligence.
Ioannis holds a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Before joining Wageningen, he was with the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA), University of Lugano, Switzerland, and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept, at the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece.
Ioannis has received several awards for as a teacher, researcher and mentor, by iEMSs, IEEE, ACM, SISO, Elsevier, and the Greek Ministry of Defence. He is proficient in supervising graduate students (20 PhDs, 60 MSc), organize international conferences, academic workshops, student groups, and capacity-building programs in the Global South. He was the founding managing editor of the new open access journal Socio-Environmental Systems Modelling, while he also served as an editor of Environmental Modelling and Software (2010-2022), chairman of the IFIP Working Group on Computers and the Environment (since 2017-today). He is a Fellow (and former Treasurer) of the International Environmental Modelling and Software Society. He has been regularly reviewing for national and European funding agencies (Netherlands, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, European Union), seats in scientific advisory boards all across the world (USA, New Zealand) and offered advice to FAO, CGIAR, the Gates Foundation, and the private sector. Since late 2022, he co-founded and coordinates AgML, the machine learning research team of AgMIP that aims to benchmark machine learning methods for advancing agricultural modelling.