Valentina Emilia Balas is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Automatics and Applied Software at the Faculty of Engineering, “Aurel Vlaicu” University of Arad, Romania. She holds a Ph.D. in Applied Electronics and Telecommunications from Polytechnic University of Timisoara. Dr. Balas is author of more than 250 research papers in refereed journals and international conferences. Her research interests are in Intelligent Systems, Fuzzy Control, Soft Computing, Smart Sensors, Information Fusion, Modelling and Simulation. She is the Editor-in-Chief to International Journal of Advanced Intelligence Paradigms (IJAIP) and to International Journal of Computational Systems Engineering (IJCSysE); a member in editorial board member of several national and international journals; and director of Intelligent Systems Research Centre in Aurel Vlaicu University of Arad. She is a member of EUSFLAT, SIAM, and a senior member IEEE, member in TC –Fuzzy Systems (IEEE CIS), member in TC – Emergent Technologies (IEEE CIS), member in TC – Soft Computing (IEEE SMCS). Lakhmi C. Jain, Ph.D., M.E., B.E. (Hons), Fellow (Engineers Australia), is with the Faculty of Education, Science, Technology & Mathematics at the University of Canberra, Australia, and Bournemouth University, UK. Professor Jain founded the KES International for providing a professional community the opportunities for publications, knowledge exchange, cooperation and teaming. Involving around 5,000 researchers drawn from universities and companies worldwide, KES facilitates international cooperation and generates synergy in teaching and research. KES regularly provides networking opportunities for professional community through one of the largest conferences of its kind in the area of KES. His interests focus on the artificial intelligence paradigms and their applications in complex systems, security, e-education, e-healthcare, unmanned air vehicles and intelligent agents. Vincenzo Piuri is a Professor at the University of Milan, Italy (since 2000). He was an Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, a Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, and a Visiting Researcher at George Mason University, USA. He has founded a start-up company in the area of intelligent systems for industrial applications and is active in industrial research projects. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy. His main research and industrial application interests are artificial intelligence, intelligent systems, computational intelligence, pattern analysis and recognition, machine learning, signal and image processing, biometrics, intelligent measurement systems, industrial applications, distributed processing systems, Internet-of-things, cloud computing, fault tolerance, application-specific digital processing architectures and arithmetic architectures. He published over 400 papers in international journals, international conference proceedings and books. He is Fellow of the IEEE and Distinguished Scientist of ACM. He has been IEEE Vice President for Technical Activities (2015), member of the IEEE Board of Directors (2010–2012, 2015), and President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (2006–2007). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Systems Journal (2013–2019). Maria Virvou was born in Athens, Greece. She received a B.Sc. degree in Mathematics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the University College London, U.K., and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex, U.K.She is a Full Professor, director of postgraduate studies, director of the software engineering lab and former department head in the department of Informatics, University of Piraeus, Greece. She is author/co-author of over 350 research papers published in international journals, books and conference proceedings and of many books and monographs in Computer Science published by Springer and other publishers. She has been the Editor of over 20 collections of papers in conference proceedings or books, published by major academic publishers, such as IEEE, Springer and IOS Press. She has also been the Editor-in-Chief of the SpringerPlus Journal (Springer) for the whole area of Computer Science. Additionally, she has been an Associate Editor of the Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS) Journal (Springer) and member of the editorial board of many other International Journals. She has been the general co-chair of the yearly conference series of International Conference on Information, Intelligence, Systems and Applications (IISA 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013), technically sponsored by IEEE, which aims at promoting research in the areas of interactive multimedia and major applications such as e-learning and m-learning. She has been the general chair/programme chair of over twenty (20) international conferences. She has been the principal investigator or co-investigator of numerous national/international research projects. She has supervised 12 Ph.D. theses which have been completed successfully, and many of her former Ph.D. students hold academic positions in universities. She is currently supervising 5 Ph.D. students and 5 postdoctoral researchers. Many journal articles of her have been ranked among the most cited/downloaded papers of the respective journals where they have been published. She has been a recipient of many best paper awards in international conferences. She has been an invited keynote speaker for many international conferences. According to Microsoft Academic Search, she has been ranked as 52 in the top 100 authors out of 58000 authors worldwide in the area of computers and education. Her research interests are in the areas of computers and education, artificial intelligence in education, user and student modeling, e-learning and m-learning, knowledge-based software engineering and human–computer interaction.
