Abdelaziz Bouras is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the College of Engineering at Qatar University and the current Director of the Office of Research Support (acting). He obtained a PhD in 1993 in Computer Science from the University of Lyon, France, where he was Professor until 2013. His current research focuses on distributed software for data life cycle management and preservation. He is currently leading several projects, such as the Supply Ledger NPRP Project on Smart Ledger Technologies in Supply Chain Management. During his previous academic involvement with the University of Lyon, he managed several EU projects in the context of supply chains including an EU FP7 project on smart wearable’s and meta-product lifecycle management. He has published many research papers in refereed journals/conferences and edited several books. He also founded the IJPD and IJPLM international journals in the ICT for engineering domains. He is the chair of the IFIP International Federation of Information Processing WG5.1, which holds a regular international conference on digital life cycle information systems and publishes a yearly edited book with Springer. Ibrahim Khalil is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT University in Melbourne. He obtained his PhD in 2003 from the University of Berne in Switzerland. He has several years of experience in Silicon Valley for networking companies as a software engineer, working on secure network protocols and smart network service provisioning. He worked for EPFL and at University of Berne in Switzerland and Osaka University in Japan before joining RMIT University in 2004. Dr. Khalil leads a fairly large research group and supervised more than 28 PhD students towards completions. His research interests are in security and scalable computing in distributed systems in different domains, ranging from healthcare to supply chain management, and his works involve data analytics of encrypted data on cloud without any decryption. He has led several research projects related to privacy and security, such as: Constraint-Based Privacy Preserving Bio Signal Data Management on Block chain; Designing an Efficient Smart Contract Based Block chain System from Multi-Modal Supply Chain Systems; and Privacy-Preserving Cloud Data Mining-as-a-Service. Belaid Aouni is a Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies at the College of Business and Economics at Qatar University. He received a BSc (Cum Laude Graduate) in Production and Operations Management from Tlemcen University, Algeria, and a MBA and PhD in Management Science from Laval University, Quebec. His teaching and research interests are in the supply chain management domain and related to the areas of multiple objective programming and goal programming, multiple criteria decision aid, mathematical programming, production planning and control, and supply chain and logistics management. Dr. Aouni publications have appeared in several top-tier journals. He is the recipient of Laurentian University 2010 Research Excellence Award and the 2005 Canadian Operational Research Society Service Award, where he served as President. Prior to joining Qatar University, Dr. Aouni was a Professor of Quantitative Methods and Operations Management and Acting Dean for Faculty of Graduate Studies at Laurentian University, Canada. Dr. Aouni has extensive professional experience with Quebec Government, Canada.
