Mark J. Emrbrechts is an Associate Professor of Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY. He has been with Rensselaer since 1983 and was previously employed as a postdoctoral staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory (1981-1983). He is a pioneer in introducing neural networks, data mining and computational intelligence to the Graduate Engineering Curriculum at Rensselaer and has been teaching courses related to these topics since 1988. He has worked as a consultant or staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Max Planck Institute for Plasme Physics (Germany), the Paul Scherrer Institute (Switzerland), the World Bank (D.C. Headquarters), Nikkei Research (Japan), MetaLogic (Belgium), KODAK (USA), and General Electric (Schenectady, USA). He holds secondary appointments as Associate Professor of Environmental and Energy Engineering and in the School of Information Technology at Rensselaer. He was Guest Professor of Materials Science at the University of Leuven in 1990 (Belgium) and spent six months on sabbatical leave in the Center for Economical Studies at the University of Leuven.

      Dr. Embrechts is past president of the New York Northeastern Section of the American Nuclear Society, authored more than one hundred peer reviewed journal articles and professional publications, and is organizer or member of the organizing committee in numerous professional meetings. Most recently he was the publications chair for SMC'97, and is co-chair for ANNIE'99. Dr. Embrechts is guest-editor of a special issue on Neural Networks for Data Mining for the IEEE Transaction of Neural Networks (to appear). Dr. Embrechts co-authored Exchange Rate Theory: Chaotic Models of Foreign Exchange Markets.

      Dr. Embrechts holds a Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Nuclear Engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute ('78 & '81), and a M.S. in Electro-Mechanical Engineering from the University of Leuven ('77) in Belgium. His research interests relate to data mining, neural networks, soft computing, and computational intelligence. Mark Embrechts is a member of IEEE, the Royal Flemish Engineering Society, and Sigma XI.

      Dr. Embrechts supervised 15 Master's students and 2 Ph.D. Students during his tenure at Rensselaer. He sat in on 30 doctoral committees and is currently supervising 2 Ph.D. students and 2 Master's students.