Md Atiqur Rahman Ahad, Ph.D. (SMIEEE, SMOPTICA) is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI), University of East London (UEL); Guest Professor of Kyushu Institute of Technology (KyuTech), Japan; Visting Academic Staff of The University of Osaka, Japan; Associate Staff Member, Artificial Intelligence & Health Technologies, Rix Inclusive Research Institute, UEL; and Expert Contributor & Member, Safer Agentic AI Criteria Development Community of Practice. He has previously served at The University of Osaka, University of Dhaka (DU), Aoyama Gakuin University, and UCSI University. He works on AI on healthcare (antimicrobial resistance, Parkinson’s Disease, well-being, rehabilitation, autism), AI & cyber safety, and gait-biometrics. He studied at KyuTech (Ph.D.), UNSW (MCompSc), and DU (BSc (Honors), MSc). He received 60 awards/recognitions, acquired grants from Innovate UK, UKRI, NIHR, OfS, etc. He has published 20 authored/edited books and over 240 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. Ahad has been a keynote/invited speaker more than 170 times at various conferences and universities. He has supervised or co-supervised over 150 Ph.D. students and other researchers. He is an Associate Editor, Pattern Recognition; Editorial Board Member, Scientific Reports, Nature; General Chair, 8th Intl. Conf. on Activity & Behavior Computing (ABC), 2026. His leadership focuses on growing interdisciplinary strength, elevating REF performance, and transforming academic excellence into measurable societal benefit. More: https://ahadVisionLab.comAnton Nijholt is interested in non-traditional human-computer interaction issues. These issuesinclude irrational behavior, deception, food, and humor. They are included in research onentertainment computing, augmented reality, brain-computer interfacing, multimodalinteraction, affective interaction, and modelling interactions in smart environments, includinghuman-human interaction, human-robot interaction, human-virtual agent interaction, andplayable cities.He has been program chair or general chair of the main international conferences of affectivecomputing (ACII), entertainment computing (ACE, INTETAIN, ICEC), virtual agents (IVA), faces& gestures (FG), and some others. He organised many workshops on related topics, such asmultisensorial augmented reality, humor engineering, human-food interaction, playable cities,and brain-computer interfacing. Recent edited books are "Playable Cities: The City as a DigitalPlayground", "Making Smart Cities more Playable", and "Brain Art: Brain-Computer Interfacesfor Artistic Expression".Nijholt held positions at various universities in Belgium and the Netherlands. He acted assupervisor for about fifty Ph.D. students. During some years Nijholt was scientific advisor ofPhilips Research, Eindhoven. He has been research-fellow at McMaster University (Canada), theNetherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, theImagineering Institute in Malaysia, and member of Microsoft's Technical Leadership AdvisoryBoard. Nijholt is Chief Editor of the section Human-Media Interaction of Frontiers in Psychologyand Frontiers in Computer Science, Springer Book Series Editor Gaming Media and Social Effects,and many editorial boards.Md Abdus Samad Kamal is working at the Cluster of Electronics and Mechanical Engineering,Graduate School of Science and Technology Gunma University, Japan. His details are inhttps://www.mst.st.gunma-u.ac.jp/kamal/biog.htmlBjörn W. Schuller received his diploma, doctoral degree, habilitation, and Adjunct TeachingProfessor in Machine Intelligence and Signal Processing all in EE/IT from TUM inMunich/Germany. He is Full Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Head of GLAM - theGroup on Language, Audio, & Music - at Imperial College London/UK, Full Professor and Chairof Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing at the University ofAugsburg/Germany, co-founding CEO and current CSO of audEERING – an Audio Intelligencecompany based near Munich and in Berlin/Germany, and permanent Visiting Professor atHIT/China amongst other Professorships and Affiliations. Previous stays include Full Professorat the University of Passau/Germany, Key Researcher at Joanneum Research in Graz/Austria,and the CNRS-LIMSI in Orsay/France. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and Golden Core Awardee ofthe IEEE Computer Society, Fellow of the BCS, Fellow of the ISCA, Fellow and President-Emeritus of the AAAC, and Senior Member of the ACM. He (co-)authored 1,000+ publications(40k+ citations, h-index=100+), is Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Digital Health and was Editorin Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing amongst manifold furthercommitments and service to the community. His 40+ awards include having been honoured asone of 40 extraordinary scientists under the age of 40 by the WEF in 2015. First-in-the-field ofAffective Computing and Sentiment analysis challenges such as AVEC, ComParE, or MuSe havebeen initiated and by now organised overall more than 30 times by him. He is an ERC Startingand DFG Reinhart-Koselleck Grantee, and consultant of companies such as Barclays, GN,Huawei, Informatics, or Samsung.Matthew Turk is the third President of TTIC. He earned a PhD from the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology, an MS from Carnegie Mellon University, and a BS from Virginia Tech.Prior to joining TTIC in 2019, Turk was a full professor at the University of California, SantaBarbara, where he continues as Professor Emeritus. His primary appointment was in theDepartment of Computer Science, where he served as Department Chair from 2017 to 2019, witha secondary appointment in Media Arts and Technology, where he served as Chair from 2005 to2010. He also had affiliate appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering and theDynamical Neuroscience Program and was involved in several interdisciplinary organizationsacross campus.Turk’s primary research interests are in computer vision and machine learning, augmented andmixed reality, and human-computer interaction. He has received several best paper awards andhas been general or program chair of several major conferences, including CVPR, WACV, ACMMultimedia, IEEE Face and Gesture Recognition, and International Conference on MultimodalInteraction (ICMI).He brings a dynamic background of academic, industry, and entrepreneurial experience to therole of President. In 2000, Turk helped to found the Vision Technology Group at MicrosoftResearch, and he brings additional industry experience gained in working with a small SiliconValley company and a large aerospace company. In 2014, he co-founded a startup company thatspun out from NSF-funded research in his lab and was acquired in 2016. He is a Fellow of theACM, the IEEE, and the IAPR and was the Fulbright-Nokia Distinguished Chair in Informationand Communications Technologies.
