Dr. Piet Kommers is an emeritus professor at the University of Twente. His specialty is "A.I. for Advanced Learning Technologies." As director of the NATO Advanced Research Workshops he built a world-wide network of institutions for critical applications in knowledge maintenance and conceptual representations. In his recent projects for the EU, World-, Asian- and African Development Bank, he developed methodologies for collaborative engineering and creative problem solving in design cases. His lecture highlights design cases for problem-based learning in Vocational Training.

Alfonso Farina received the Dr. Ing. degree in electronic engineering from the University of Rome La Sapienza, Rome, Italy, and a PhD HC in ICT from the University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy. From 1973 to 2014, he worked at Selex ES until he became Senior Vice President (SVP) and Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Currently, he is President of the Leonardo Radar & Sensors Academy and President of the Underwater and Sensors Systems of the Leonardo Electronics Division. Alfonso is a Fellow of IEEE, IET, Royal Academy of Engineering, AcadémicoCorrespondiente de la Real Academia de Ingeniería de España, European Academy of Science, and National Academy of Engineering (USA). Dr. Farina was a recipient of the Fred Nathanson Memorial Radar Award (1987), Finmeccanica Award for Innovation Technology (2004), IEEE Dennis J. Picard Medal for Radar Technologies and Applications (2010), Oscar Masi Award (2012), IET Achievement Medal (2014), IEEE SPS Industrial Leader Award (2017), Christian Hülsmeyer Award (2019), and IEEE AESS Pioneer Award (2020). His main best paper awards include the M. Barry Carlton of IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems (2001, 2003, and 2013), the IET Proceedings on Radar Sonar and Navigation (2009–2010), and the International Conference on Fusion (2005).

Laura Miller is the founder and CEO of NextGen Ethics, where she works to further ethical AI innovation. She is also a respected philosophy and ethics instructor at Webster University. Her contributions to tech ethics have earned her recognition by NASA, support of NIST as a public volunteer, and sponsorship by the US State Department for international talks. She has also received a Knights of Columbus award for her humanitarian efforts. In addition, Laura has been honored with Leadership in Education and Technology awards and a Best of the Nation business award. Her ethnographic research was featured in The New York Times online Lens Magazine. She has also been featured in magazines like Trusted and Afriblocks. Under Laura's leadership, NextGen Ethics is participating in the Arch Grants and World Cup 2024 Startup competitions, seeking funding for an ethical solution to social media harms (MVP). Laura presents nationally and internationally on ethical issues of AI and earned her BA and MA in Philosophy, focusing on applied ethics, from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Prof. Dr. Eng. Nedra Mellouli is professor of computer science at ESILV Devinci Group and Université Paris 8 (France), co-director of LIASD research Lab since January 2021 and head of the Data&AI engineering program. She is a member of the European D4B project. Her research focuses on multimodal Big Data-driven approaches to time series analysis, such as rainfall monitoring, precision agriculture, smart irrigation systems, energy optimization, healthcare decision systems and recommender systems.

Luke Theogarajan is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Theogarajan received his Ph. D. in 2007 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Prior to joining M.I.T. he worked for Intel corporation from 1996-2001, where he was part of the Pentium 4 design team. Prof. Theogarajan’sresearch lies at the intersection of biology and engineering. He is especially interested in replicating principles of learning & inference found in biological systems in synthetic AI/ML systems. Prof. Theogarajan was the recipient of the National Institutes of Health New Innovator Award in 2010, the National Science Foundation Career Award in 2011, the Northrupp Grumman Excellence in teaching award in 2011 and the outstanding faculty member in EE for the years 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2017.

Professor Yun Li FIEEE obtained his PhD from University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. He taught and researched into “AI for Engineering” at University of Glasgow for 28 years, where he was recognized by the University library as the second Top Author and served as the Founding Director of University of Glasgow Singapore and Founding Director of Joint Education with University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC). Since mid-2021, he has been Director of Industrial Artificial Intelligence Centre at Shenzhen Institute for Advanced Study, UESTC. Prof Li has published over 300 papers and books, one of which with the assistance of AI resolved a PID control issue puzzling practising engineers for over 50 years and has been the most popular paper in IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology almost every month still today since its publication in 2005. He holds 30 patents in China, Europe, United States and Japan. He has been funded over 30 million pounds to lead or co-lead 40 research projects in the UK, EU, Singapore and China. Currently, he leads two National Natural Science Foundation of China major projects and one National Key R&D Program of China project concerning the third-generation and compute-in-memory AI.

Hamed Taherdoost is an award-winning leader and R&D professional. He is the Founder of Hamta Group | Hamta Business Corporation and Associate Professor at University Canada West. He holds PhD of Computer Science from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Master of Computer Science (Information Security), and Bachelor degree in the field of Science of Power Electricity. With over 20 years of experience in both industry and academic sectors, Dr Hamed has established himself as an industry leader in the field of Management and Information Systems. Dr. Hamed has been a part of many important breakthroughs in IT and industrial projects. He specializes in Information Technology Management, and Research & Development. He started his career in 2001 as an electrical designer and programmer in Tablokar, a leading switchgear panel manufacturer in the Middle East. He has subsequently worked at international companies from Cyprus, the UK, Belize, Iran, Malaysia, and Canada and has held positions as varied as Project Manager, R&D Manager, CTO and CEO.

Xiaoyan Dai has received her Ph.D in image processing from Muroran Institute of Technology in Japan in 2004 where she specialized in computer vision and machine learning. Since then, she has focused on image processing and document processing in Canon Inc. From 2019, she joined Research Center of Kyocera Corporation as an Expert. Her current interests include deep learning and computer vision for objects detection, fraud detection, object recognition and object tracing. She serves as committee member for multiple international conferences

Dr. Overmyer is currently Instructional Assistant Professor at Illinois State University in Bloomington/Normal, Illinois, where he teaches programming languages, software engineering, and computer architecture. Dr. Overmyer started his career in the software field with TRW, Inc. as a user interface designer and requirements engineer on the Space Defense Operations Center project in Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain NORAD Complex. After completing several government projects with TRW, he was appointed manager of TRW’s Research and Technology Center in Virginia. He earned a Ph.D. in Information Technology (Information and Software Systems Engineering), while appointed as Research Instructor in George Mason University’s Center of Excellence in Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence. Dr. Overmyer has nearly 10 years of industrial experience, followed by over 30 years of academic experience. During his academic career, he was awarded two summer faculty fellowships at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and a National Science Foundation research grant. While an Associate Professor at Drexel University, he was also the Founding Director of the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for Information Technology, a five-week summer residential program for talented high school students. Internationally, he served at Subject Coordinator for both Software Engineering and Information Systems while at Massey University in New Zealand, and taught for 3 years as a founding Professor of Computer Science at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan.

Dr. Ali Soofastaei is a seasoned technology leader and expert in full-stack data governance, AI, and advanced analytics. With over 15 years of global experience, Ali has led high-impact projects in the mining and resource industries, utilizing data-driven solutions to drive operational excellence, sustainability, and innovation. As the Program Leader for Data and Analytics at Newmont, the world’s largest gold mining company, Ali oversaw multi-million-dollar initiatives, focusing on predictive analytics, AI applications, and digital transformation. His leadership in developing Centers of Excellence (CoE) has been instrumental in positioning organizations as leaders in data-driven decision-making and operational efficiency. Ali holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Queensland and has held senior roles at Vale, BHP, and Shell. He has published over 60 journal papers, authored 25 book chapters, and holds multiple patents in AI-driven technologies. Ali is recognized as a thought leader in AI, machine learning, and business intelligence, frequently speaking at international conferences and contributing to the advancement of digital technologies across industries.

Jeshwanth Challagundla is a Senior Machine Learning Software Engineer at Google, where I focus on advancing the capabilities of machine learning models and AI-driven systems. My primary work has been with the Gemini project, where I led the development and launch of the advanced data analysis feature and seamlessly integrating it with Google Workspace and other tools. I have architected scalable infrastructure for agent orchestration, dynamic prompting and multi-step planning, which enhances model adaptability and flexibility across diverse tasks. My work has also involved improving model quality using prompt engineering, fine-turning and reinforcement learning. Before Google, I worked on autonomous driving technologies at General Motors, where I helped improve perception and localization for autonomous vehicles. I have a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington, where my research focused on second-order optimization for neural network training, and I’ve published papers on topics ranging from optimization to autonomous robotics. In addition to my engineering work, I regularly contribute to the research community by reviewing papers for leading conferences like NeurIPS, ICLR, and IEEE Transactions. My interests span LLMs, deep learning, computer vision, and agentic workflows. I’m continuously seeking new ways to push the boundaries of AI and multimodal understanding to solve complex, real-world problems.

Soham is a third CSE PhD student at University of Washington in the AI for biomedical sciences (AIMS) Lab. Prior to starting his Ph.D, he spent a year as a data engineer at Microsoft in the Windows Experience team. Soham completed his master’s from Stanford in Computer Science with a depth in AI, where he was a research assistant in the Computational Neuroimage Science Lab (CNSLAB) and part of the AI for Healthcare (AIHC) bootcamp in the Stanford ML Group. Soham’s research lies at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare, focusing on understanding the reasoning processes of machine learning models. He is developing AI techniques to increase model interpretability in settings where features are not trivial to obtain (like Emergency Medicine), auditing AI models to make them more trustworthy by exploring causal relationships between inputs and predictions, and using multi-modal datasets (images, text, time-series, etc.) with deep learning to perform diagnoses and treatment of various ailments.

Hazrat Bilal received his MS degree in Control Science and Engineering in 2018 from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China, and his PhD degree in Control Science and Engineering in 2024 from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, respectively. His research interests include robot control, fault diagnosis of robot manipulator, trajectory tracking of manipulator, Autonomous driving and Artificial Intelligence. In 2018, considering his research achievement, the Nanjing University of Science and Technology awarded him with the outstanding graduate award, while the University of Science and Technology of China award him CAS-TWAS Fellow Award. He is currently a member of IEEE, Member of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and Member of IEEE Control Systems Society.

Ifeoluwa Emmanuel Olagbaju is an Internal Audit Data Analytics expert, with extensive experience in leveraging data to drive risk assurance, operational efficiency, and business insights. With a background in Computer Science and an MBA in Management, Ifeoluwa has built a career in financial services, working with multinational institutions including asset managers, fund managers, and pension fund administrators. His work in internal audit has centred on data analysis, ETL development, data modeling, and reporting, empowering audit teams to make data-driven decisions. In recent years, Ifeoluwa has expanded his expertise into the field of Machine Learning (ML), focusing on how ML can bridge the gaps in anomaly detection, fraud detection, and continuous audit automation. He is exploring ways to integrate AI models into internal audit workflows, aiming to enhance risk detection and reduce audit cycle times. Passionate about knowledge sharing, he actively mentors aspiring data professionals, particularly those transitioning from non-technical backgrounds, and contributes his thoughts through writing and public speaking engagements.