Charles K. Chui, Ph.D. Wisconsin-Madison, is Research Professor of Mathematics at Hong Kong Baptist University and Consulting Professor of Statistics at Stanford University. He is also Curators' Professor Emeritus of the University of Missouri and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Texas A&M University, where he had joint appointments in four departments and two colleges, namely the Department of Mathematics and Department of Statistics (College of Science) and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Department of Computer Science (College of Engineering). His current research interest is in Computational and Applied Mathematics with a focus on real-world data processing, visualization, and understanding for big data areas such as blind source decomposition and feature extractions of time series, medical images, surveillance videos and high-dimensional complex data on unknown manifolds of much lower dimensions. After spending over two decades of dedicated research in Function Theory, Approximation Theory, Harmonic Analysis and Computational Mathematics, he turned his attention to the applications of mathematics, particularly in solving real-world problems, first by working on medical imaging in collaboration with a team of radiologists and physicists in MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston (Texas), followed by founding his first company in Silicon Valley in California based on his expertise in image compression and manipulation.

Frank van Harmelen is a Professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning in the AI department (Faculty of Science) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. After studying mathematics and computer science in Amsterdam, he moved to the Department of AI in Edinburgh, where he was awarded a PhD in 1989 for his research on meta-level reasoning. While in Edinburgh, he worked with Dr. Peter Jackson on Socrates, a logic-based toolkit for expert systems, and with Prof. Alan Bundy on proof planning for inductive theorem proving. After his PhD research, he moved back to Amsterdam where he worked from 1990 to 1995 in the SWI Department under Prof. Wielinga. He was involved in the REFLECT project on the use of reflection in expert systems, and in the KADS project, where he contributed to the development of the (ML)² language for formally specifying Knowledge-Based Systems. In 1995 he joined the AI research group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he was appointed Professor in 2002, and is currently leading the Knowledge Representation & Reasoning Group.

Prof. Chongfu Huang is a full Professor at Beijing Normal University and President of the Society for Risk Analysis - China. He received his B.A.Sc. in Mathematics from Yunnan University, Kunming, China; his M.A.Sc. in Earthquake Engineering from the Institute of Engineering Mechanics, Harbin, China; and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Beijing Normal University. He worked at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as a Research Associate, and at Tokyo University of Science as an Associate Professor in 1996. As a visiting Professor, he worked at the University of Ghent in Belgium in 1997 and at the University Nebraska in Omaha in 2000. From 2000 to 2001, he was a Mercator Professor and worked at the University of Dortmund in Germany. As a visiting Professor, he worked again at Tokyo University of Science and at the University of Ghent in Belgium in 2004 and 2006 respectively.

Peter Hendriks is a senior publishing professional with broad experience in both professional as well as scientific publishing companies. He obtained an MBA from the University of Groningen after which he joined Wolters Kluwer as a Management Trainee in 1987. In 1991 he became a Publisher and later Business Unit Director at Kluwer Professional Netherlands, and in 1999 he joined Kluwer Academic Publishers, initially as Vice President U.S., and was later appointed as CEO & President in 2001. Kluwer Academic Publishers was subsequently bought by private equity investors and merged with Springer in 2003 where Peter became a member of the Springer Executive Board in different roles for the next 13 years. He left what had by then become Springer Nature in 2016 after which he took up a number of supervisory and advisory board positions in different publishing companies (including Atlantis Press). As of 2017, he serves as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Dutch educational publisher Malmberg which belongs to the Sanoma media group.

Professor Jie Lu is the Head of the School of Software in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, and Director of the Decision Systems and e-Service Intelligence Research Laboratory in the Centre for Quantum Computation & Intelligent Systems at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia. She received her PhD from Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia in 2000. Her main research interests lie in the area of computational intelligence systems, decision support systems, uncertain information processing, recommender systems and e-Government and e-Service intelligence. She has published five research books and 300 articles in academic journals, including IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, DSS and Information Systems, and various conference proceedings, and has won five Australian Research Council (ARC) discovery grants, an Australian Learning & Teaching Council grant and 10 other research and industry linkage grants. She also received the first UTS Research Excellence Medal for Teaching and Research Integration in 2010.