Dalma Novak, VP of Engineering at Octane Wireless, USA

Dalma Novak is VP of Engineering at Octane Wireless (formerly Pharad, LLC) where she develops high-performance RF-over-fiber technologies. She received the degrees of Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical) with First Class Honors and PhD from the University of Queensland, Australia, in 1987 and 1992, respectively. Prior to co-founding Pharad in 2004, she spent 12 years as a Professor and Chair of Telecommunications in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at The University of Melbourne, Australia. From June 2001 – December 2003 she was a Technical Section Lead at Dorsál Networks, Inc. and later at Corvis Corporation where she led cross-disciplinary R&D teams developing hardware for long-haul transmission systems.  Her research interests include microwave photonics, fiber-radio systems, wireless technologies, and optical communications. She has published more than 300 papers in these areas, including seven book chapters. In 2007 she was elected to the grade of IEEE Fellow and in 2018 she received the IEEE Photonics Society Engineering Achievement Award.  She is a member of the IEEE Board of Directors as the 2021 – 2022 Division X Director, Chair of the IEEE TAB Committee on Diversity and Inclusion for 2021 – 2022, and Vice Chair of the IEEE Board of Directors Committee on Diversity and Inclusion.

Associate Professor Katherine Malan, University of South Africa

Katherine Malan is an associate professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at the University of South Africa. She has 25 years’ lecturing experience at three different South African universities. Her research interests include fitness landscape analysis, automated algorithm selection and using computational intelligence to solve real-world problems. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief of South African Computer Journal, associate editor for Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and actively reviews for over 20 Web of Science journals. Katherine is a senior member of the IEEE and has been involved in several technical committees of the Computational Intelligence Society.

Prof Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier, Director of research emeritus at the National Centre for Scientific Research, France

Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier is a Director of research emeritus at the National Centre for Scientific Research, the former head of the department of Databases and Machine Learning in the Computer Science Laboratory of the University Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6 (LIP6). She supervised 52 PhD students. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-based Systems and the Co-executive director of the IPMU International Conference held every other year since 1986. She is the (co)-editor of 30 books, and the (co)-author of five. She has (co)-authored more than 400 papers on approximate reasoning and applications of fuzzy logic and machine learning techniques. She is Past President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. She is an IEEE Life Fellow, an International Fuzzy Systems Association Fellow and an Honorary Member of the EUSFLAT Society. She received the 2012 IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Meritorious Service Award, the 2017 EUSFLAT Scientific Excellence Award, the 2018 IEEE CIS Fuzzy Systems Pioneer Award and the 2019 Outstanding Volunteer Award of the IEEE France Section.

Prof.dr.ir. U Kaymak, Professor of Information Systems Jheronimus Academy of Data Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Uzay Kaymak is full Professor of Information Systems at Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. He works on the development of fuzzy set-based methods for decision models in which linguistic information, represented either as declarative linguistic rules derived from experts or obtained through natural language processing, is combined with numerical information extracted from data. His research aims to integrate computational algorithms with contextual information regarding the domain, the user, and the problem studied. In the past, he has fulfilled various functions, including advising the rector of Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on issues regarding diversity on the work floor.

Prof. Sanaz Mostaghim, Professor of Computational Intelligence, Otto von Guericke University of Magdeburg, Germany

 Sanaz Mostaghim is a full professor of computer science at the chair of Computational Intelligence and the founder and head of SwarmLab at the Faculty of Computer Science, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany. She holds a PhD degree (2004) in electrical engineering from the University of Paderborn, Germany. Sanaz has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and as a lecturer at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, where she received her habilitation degree in applied computer science. Her research interests are in the area of multi-criteria optimization and decision-making, collective learning and decision-making, and their applications in robotics and science. Sanaz is the vice president of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) and is associate editor of IEEE Transactions on AI, IEEE Transaction on Evolutionary Computation and member of the editorial board of several international journals on Robotics and AI. Since 2020, she is appointed as a distinguished lecturer at IEEE CIS.    

Prof. Nelishia Pillay is a Professor at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Nelishia Pillay is a Professor at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She holds the Multichoice Joint-Chair in Machine Learning and SARChI Chair in Artificial Intelligence. She is chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Intelligent Systems Applications, IEEE Task Force on Hyper-Heuristics and the IEEE Task Force on Automated Algorithm Design, Configuration and Selection. Her research areas include hyper-heuristics, automated design of machine learning and search techniques, combinatorial optimization, genetic programming, genetic algorithms and deep learning for and more generally machine learning and optimization for sustainable development. These are the focus areas of the NICOG (Nature-Inspired Computing Optimization) research group which she has established. She has published in these areas in journals, national and international conference proceedings. She has served on program committees for numerous national and international conferences and is a reviewer for various international journals.