Dr. Mehmet Aksit holds an M.Sc. degree from the Eindhoven University of Technology and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Twente. Currently, he is working as a full professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Twente and affiliated with the institute Centre for Telematics and Information Technology. He is the head of the Software Engineering chair and the leader of the Twente Research and Education on Software Engineering (TRESE) Group. He has served as the program co-chair of several conferences and symposia, such as ECOOP’97, SACT’00, HQSAD’00, NoD’02 and AOSD2003. He has been serving as a program committee member of various international conferences and he was the tutorial chair of the ECOOP’92 conference and the organizing chair of the AOSD’02 conference. Since 1988, he has been serving as a reviewer of various European projects.

He has given more than 100 international and in-company courses and conference tutorials mainly in the Netherlands, but also in Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States. Mehmet Aksit has been the user and developer of object-oriented systems since 1983. Later, in the end of 80’s, he started to work on firstly, software composition techniques and later, on aspect-oriented software engineering. He has been involved in designing architectures for several large industrial projects. He and the TRESE group were among the pioneers of the following techniques.

Since 1988, the TRESE group has developed, probably the first aspect-oriented language called Sina, which has later evolved into Composition Filters. The group has organized the first Aspect-Oriented Software Development conference (AOSD2002) and Aksit is the co-editor of the first aspect-oriented journal. Since begining of the 90’s, the TRESE group has developed synthesis based architecture/software design, which adopts controlled problem solving techniques in designing software architectures. Since 1994, the TRESE group has applied, probably for the first time, fuzzy-logic based techniques to modeling software design heuristics and processes. Since 1997, the TRESE group has been developing new design formalisms called Design Algebra for managing large design spaces.

David is a structural engineer with Biggs Consulting Engineering based in the US. He works internationally and teaches remotely as an Honorary Associate Professor, University of Auckland New Zealand, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

David specializes in historic restoration, structural forensic engineering, and masonry design. He is a Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, an Honorary Member of The Masonry Society, and has been a lecturer for the European Advanced Masters in Structural Analysis of Monuments and Historical Constructions in Prague and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) in Rome.

His historic restoration consulting work includes projects in the US, Canada, Costa Rica, Iraq, Turkey, Czech Republic, Nepal, Italy, and Egypt. He has been involved with disaster assessments in Nepal and New Zealand. In 2001, he was a team member for the investigation of the World Trade Center disaster in New York City.

Helena Geirinhas Ramos received the Ing. Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1980, the M.Sc., PhD. and Habilitation in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon in 1987, 1995 and 2005 respectively. She is Associate Professor in IST where she is a member of the teaching staff since 1980. She is senior researcher at Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT). Her main lines of research include non destructive testing, PC based instrumentation, transducers, measurement interfaces, ADC testing and ferromagnetic materials modelling. She was and still is involved in many research projects in these areas. She is author or co-author of 3 book chapters, 66 scientific papers in international journals and more than 190 conference proceeding papers. She supervises or has supervised 8 PhD thesis, more than 40 Master thesis and internship supervisions and participated in several national and international academic juries.

Presently, she is Vice President of IST since 2020. Previously, among the most significant management positions that she has already exercised one can refer: Coordinator of a Working Group on Gender Balance by appointment of the President of IST, Vice-President of the IST Scientific Board, Member of IST Board of Directors, Vice-President of the Electrical and Computer Department, Director of IT and Member of the Scientific Board of the Electrical and Computer Department. Presently she is Treasurer of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society (IMS). She was Associate Editor of Measurement from Elsevier (Q1) during 2 years. She acts regularly as an expert evaluator for the European Commission. She is also a member of the evaluator’s board of R&D projects requiring funding to the National Agency Slovak Research and Development Agency, to the Italian Research Assessment Exercise and to the Innovation National Agency in Portugal. She also works as an Expert Evaluator for the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation. She is member of Ordem dos Engenheiros, Sociedade Portuguesa de Metrologia and Forum Sectorial de Ensaios Não Destrutivos. She is Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee (TC-1) on Nondestructive Evaluation and Industrial Inspection and member of the Steering Committee on Electromagnetic Nondestructive Evaluation (ENDE).

Curriculum Vitae at: http://www.it.pt/person_detail_p.asp?ID=478

Zbigniew W. Kundzewicz is a Professor of Earth Sciences (lifetime title granted by the President of the Republic of Poland, in 1993), a Corresponding Member of Polish Academy of Sciences (since 2010) and a Member of Academia Europaea (since 2017). He holds a master degree in automatics from the Warsaw University of Technology (1974), as well as a doctorate (1979) and a habilitation (1985) in hydrology from the Institute of Geophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland.

He worked in the Institute for Agricultural and Forest Environment, Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznan, Poland in 1990-2022. Since 2022 he has been working, part time, in the Meteorology Lab., Faculty of Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, Poznan University of Life Sciences, Poznan, Poland. Since April 2018, he has enjoyed the status of an Honorary and Visiting Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (NUIST), in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China. He was a Senior Scientist in the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Potsdam, Germany (part time, from 2001 to April 2016). He was an Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation Research Fellow at the University of Karlsruhe and a Scientific Officer at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva.

Since 1994 to date, he has considerably contributed to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), being a four-fold Co-ordinating Lead Author, so that he takes a pride of being responsible for a meaningful part in the collective achievement of IPCC that was awarded Nobel Peace Prize.

He was a member of the prominent Advisory Group on Environment (including Climate) for 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission. Now, he is a Member of the elitary Assembly of the Mission on Climate Change Adaptation including Societal Transformation, in the framework of the Horizon Europe initiative of European Commission.

He has led and participated in many national, bi-national, European and international research projects. He has co-ordinated a Polish-Swiss (2011-2016) and a Polish-Norwegian (2014-2017) project and several projects funded by Polish agencies, most recently – one funded by the Polish National Science Centre (2018-2021).

In 2017 and 2020 he received two top international scientific awards in the field of hydrology and water resources. In 2017, he received a prestigious International Hydrology Prize of IAHS-UNESCO-WMO and a Dooge Medal for “outstanding contributions to an improved understanding of flood events, climate impact on water resources and … leadership in the international community of hydrologists”. This top international distinction, is aimed to recognize his fundamental contributions to the science of hydrology. In 2020, he received a prestigious Prince Sultan International Water Prize (category - Surface Water) “for advancing our understanding of the relationship between flood risk, river flow, and climate change”. He is the fourth individual ever awarded both prestigious water prizes specified above.

In 2008, he was awarded the Large Golden Seal of the City of Poznań „for extraordinary achievements in the area of climate and environment protection, that make Poznań famous in the world and are a reason for pride for its inhabitants” that was handed to him by the Mayor of Poznan. He received Polish state orders: Golden Cross of Merit and Knight’s Cross of Polonia Restituta, a Tison Award of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS), and awards of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2014, he received an honorary distinction “Distinguished for Agriculture” from the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development of Poland and a distinction “Distinguished for SGGW” from the Rector of Warsaw University of Life Sciences (WULS – Polish acronym SGGW). In 2018, he received an honorary doctorate at WULS.

His H-index is 50 (Web of Science) / and 52 (Scopus). His most-cited single source item is a co-authored paper published in Science that has acquired 2715 citations (Web of Science). In addition to JCR-rated outlets, his contributions to IPCC publications were frequently cited. The single highest cited source item of this category is the co-edited IPCC Technical Paper on Climate Change and Water that gathered 5625 citations (Google Scholar).

Prof. dr. h.c. Huub Lelieveld, formerly with Unilever, now President of the Global Harmonization Initiative (GHI), a non-governmental organisation working towards globally harmonised and science based food safety regulations. He is a Past-President of the European Federation of Food Science and Technology (EFFoST); Founder and Past-President of the European Hygienic Engineering and Design Group (EHEDG); Fellow of the International Academy of Food Science and Technology (IAFoST); Fellow of the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT); he served on the Governing Council of the International Union of Food Science and Technology (IUFoST) and has been Chair of the Nonthermal Processing and International divisions of IFT. At Unilever, he was responsible for hygienic processing and plant design and novel processing technologies. He is editor or co-editor of many books, on food hygiene, food safety and food processing technologies. He also wrote many chapters for such books as well as hundreds of articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and in relevant magazines. He is visiting professor at the National University of Food Technologies in Kiev, Ukraine.

Dr. Regli is a computer scientist who has focused his career on interdisciplinary and use-inspired problems spanning engineering, artificial intelligence and computational modeling and graphics. His most recent activities have deployed cyber-infrastructure systems to capture and curate engineering and science data in order to ensure long-term sustainability. Dr. Regli’s current interests include computational tools to exploit the properties of advanced materials, additive manufacturing systems and enabling new paradigms for design and production. He has published more than 250 technical articles and his research has spawned two start-up technology companies (one focused on mobile communications for public safety, the other on information management in edge networks) and resulted in five foundational U.S. Patents in the area of 3D CAD search.

He was the sixth director of the Institute for Systems Research, from 2018-2019. From 2014 to 2017 Regli served on the leadership team of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as Deputy Director (9/2014-12/2016) and then Acting Director (1/2017-7/2017) of the Defense Sciences Office (DSO). During his tenure, DSO initiated programs in areas as diverse as artificial intelligence, design and manufacturing, social science, applied mathematics, physical sciences and advanced sensing technologies. Regli’s other government service includes as a Scientific Adviser to the U.S. Department of Energy's (DoE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in the areas of information technology and manufacturing (2010-2014) and as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (1995-1997). For his contributions, Regli received the DARPA Meritorious Public Service Medal (2018).

Dr. Regli holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park and Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Saint Joseph's University. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); an elected senior member of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI); and a Fellow of the Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his “contributions to 3D search, design repositories and intelligent manufacturing.”

HONORS AND AWARDS
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science “for his work at the interface between science and government primarily at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,” 2020

Fellow of the Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for "contributions to 3D search, design repositories and intelligent manufacturing," 2017

Prof. Miroslav Svítek was born in Rakovník, Czech Republic, in 1969. He graduated in radioelectronic from Czech Technical University in Prague, in 1992. In 1996, he received the Ph.D. degree in radioelectronic at Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague. Since 2005, he has been nominated as the extraordinary professor in applied informatics at Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Matej Bel in Banska Bystrica, Slovak Republic. Since 2008, he has been Full professor in engineering informatics at Faculty of Transportation Sciences, Czech Technical University in Prague. In 2010 – 2018 he was Dean of Faculty of Transportation Sciences, Czech Technical University in Prague. Since 2018, he has been Visiting professor in smart cities at University of Texas at El Paso, USA.

The focus of his research includes complex system sciences and their practical applications to Intelligent Transport Systems, Smart Cities and Smart Regions. He is the author or co-author of more than 200 scientific papers and 10 books.

Dr. Wolfgang Wahlster is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a pioneer of AI in Germany and Europe. As a founding director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and in his role as its long-time CEO and scientific director, he has developed DFKI into one of the world’s largest research institutions in this field with more than 1300 employees by 2022 and more than 100 successful spin-off companies. He has served as an elected President of three international AI organizations: IJCAII, EurAI, and ACL. He is an elected Fellow of AAAI, EurAI, and GI. He laid some of the foundations for natural language dialog systems, user modelling, and speech-to-speech translation. His current research areas are multimodal dialog systems for human-centered AI and cyber-physical production systems for the fourth industrial revolution (Industrie 4.0), a concept that he coined in 2010. He is on the Executive Board of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at UC Berkeley and a member of the steering board of Germany’s platform for AI. Wahlster is a member of the Nobel Prize Academy in Stockholm, the German National Academy Leopoldina and four other prestigious academies, including the Engineering Academy of the Czech Republic. For his research, he has been awarded the German Future Prize, the First Class Cross of Merit and the Grand Cross of Merit by the Federal President of Germany. Other awards include five honorary doctorates from universities in Darmstadt, Linkoeping, Maastricht, Prague and Oldenburg . For his substantial contributions to various fields of AI, Wolfgang Wahlster received the IJCAI Donald E. Walker Award in 2013 and the ICMI Sustained Accomplishment Award of the ACM in 2016. As a member of numerous advisory bodies of the German Chancellor and the Federal Government such as the Partners for Innovation, the Research Union and the Data Ethics Commission, he has co-founded innovation platforms such as Industrie 4.0 and Learning Systems. He holds a seat on ten industrial supervisory boards and technical advisory boards of large companies, medium-sized enterprises and start-ups.