Thomas Villmann is with the University of Applied Sciences Mittweida (UASM), Mittweida, Germany. He holds a diploma degree in Mathematics, received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1996, and his habilitation as well as venia legendi in the same subject in 2005, all from the University of Leipzig, Germany. From 1997 to 2009, he led the computational intelligence group of the hospital for psychotherapy and psychosomatic medicine at Leipzig University. In 2006, he was a visiting professor at the University of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne in the department for statistical analysis and mathematical modelling (SAMM). Since 2009, he has been a full professor for Technomathematics/ Computational Intelligence at the UASM (Saxony), Germany. Since 2017, he has been the director of the Saxon Institute for Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning (SICIM) at the UASM. His research focus includes the theory of prototype-based clustering and interpretable classification models, causal machine learning and counterfactuals, non-standard metrics, information-theoretic and similarity-based learning, quantum-enhanced machine learning and quantum computing, knowledge-informed AI, statistical data analysis, and their application in pattern recognition, data mining, and knowledge discovery for use in medicine, bioinformatics, remote sensing, and hyperspectral analysis, among others.