Prof. Saman Halgamuge, Fellow of IEEE, IET, AAIA and NASSL is a Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Melbourne. Previously, he was a member of the Australian Research Council grant assessment panel and the Head of Engineering School at Australian National University. He obtained the Dipl.-Ing and Ph.D. degrees in data engineering from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. He is listed as a top 2% most cited researcher for AI and Image Processing in the Stanford database. He is a distinguished visitor appointed by the IEEE Computer Society (2025-27) and was a distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (2018-21). He graduated over 50 PhD students in Australia. His publications can be viewed at https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?hl=en&user=9cafqywAAAAJ&pagesize=80&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
Jochen Wirtz is Vice Dean of MBA Programmes and Professor of Marketing at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is also an international fellow of the Service Research Center at Karlstad University, Sweden, an Academic Scholar at the Cornell Institute for Healthy Futures (CIHF) at Cornell University, and a Global Faculty member of the Center for Services Leadership (CSL) at Arizona State University. Previously, Professor Wirtz served as the founding director of the dual degree UCLA–NUS Executive MBA Programme (from 2002 to 2017), an Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford (from 2008 to 2013), and a founding member of the NUS Teaching Academy, the university's think-tank on education matters (from 2009 to 2015). He holds a Ph.D. in services marketing from the London Business School.
Dr. Haibing Lu is a Professor and Co-Chair of the Department of Information Systems & Analytics at Santa Clara University, located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Dr. Lu's research focuses on AI governance, data privacy, cybersecurity, and the responsible deployment of emerging technologies. His work has been published in leading journals such as IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (M&SOM), and ACM Transactions on MIS, and presented at top-tier conferences including IEEE S&P, KDD, ICDM, and ICDE. His research has received multiple recognitions, including the M&SOM Best Paper Award and AACSB’s Innovations That Inspire Award, and has been featured in global outlets such as The New York Times, Forbes, USA Today, and WIRED, as well as in United Nations reports.
Dr. Lu is also a co-founder of AIConform, a venture-backed company that leverages AI to streamline legal and compliance processes for enterprises, serving both large corporations and fast-growing technology startups. His work bridges academia and industry, advancing the adoption of trustworthy AI in real-world systems.
He received his Ph.D. in Information Technology from Rutgers University, and his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Mathematics from Xi’an Jiaotong University.
Sergei Gorlatch has been Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Muenster (Germany) since 2003. Earlier he was Associate Professor at the Technical University of Berlin, Assistant Professor at the University of Passau, and Humboldt Research Fellow at the Technical University of Munich, all in Germany. Prof. Gorlatch has more than 200 peer-reviewed publications in renowned international books, journals and conferences. He obtained several Best Paper Awards at top conferences. He has been principal investigator in several international research and development projects in the field of software for parallel, distributed, Grid and Cloud systems, machine learning, and networking, funded by the European Commission and by German national bodies.
