Speakers
Prof. Rajkumar Buyya (Fellow IEEE)
Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Lab
The University of Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Dr. Rajkumar Buyya is a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and Director of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also serving as the founding CEO of Manjrasoft, a spin-off company of the University, commercializing its innovations in Cloud Computing.
He served as a Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council during 2012-2016. He has authored over 625 publications and seven text books including "Mastering Cloud Computing" published by McGraw Hill, China Machine Press, and Morgan Kaufmann for Indian, Chinese and international markets respectively. He also edited several books including "Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms" (Wiley Press, USA, Feb 2011). He is one of the highly cited authors in computer science and software engineering worldwide (h-index=158, g-index=334, 130,200+ citations). Microsoft Academic Search Index ranked Dr. Buyya as #1 author in the world (2005-2016) for both field rating and citations evaluations in the area of Distributed and Parallel Computing. "A Scientometric Analysis of Cloud Computing Literature" by German scientists ranked Dr. Buyya as the World's Top-Cited (#1) Author and the World's Most-Productive (#1) Author in Cloud Computing. Dr. Buyya is recognized as a "Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher" by Thomson Reuters, a Fellow of IEEE, Scopus Researcher of the Year 2017 with Excellence in Innovative Research Award by Elsevier, a Fellow of Academia Europea, Lifetime Achiever and Superstar of Australia Research (2021) by The Australian Research Review, and Cloud Architect of the Year 2022 by Oracle for his outstanding contributions to Cloud computing.
Software technologies for Grid and Cloud computing developed under Dr. Buyya's leadership have gained rapid acceptance and are in use at several academic institutions and commercial enterprises in 50+ countries around the world. Dr. Buyya has led the establishment and development of key community activities,including serving as foundation Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing and five IEEE/ACM conferences. These contributions and international research leadership of Dr. Buyya are recognized through the award of "2009 IEEE Medal for Excellence in Scalable Computing" from the IEEE Computer Society TCSC. Manjrasoft's Aneka Cloud technology developed under his leadership has received "2010 Frost & Sullivan New Product Innovation Award". Recently, Dr. Buyya received "Mahatma Gandhi Award" along with Gold Medals for his outstanding and extraordinary achievements in Information Technology field and services rendered to promote greater friendship and India-International cooperation. He served as the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. He is currently serving as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Software: Practice and Experience, which was established over 45 years ago. For further information on Dr.Buyya, please visit his cyberhome: www.buyya.com
Prof. James Tin Yau KWOK (Fellow IEEE)
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China
Biography:
Prof. Kwok is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Prof. Kwok is serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, Neurocomputing, Artificial Intelligence Journal, International Journal of Data Science and Analytics, and Editorial Board Member of Machine Learning. He also served/is serving as Senior Area Chairs of major machine learning / AI conferences including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, IJCAI, and as Area Chairs of conferences including AAAI and ECML. He is recognized as the Most Influential Scholar Award Honorable Mention for "outstanding and vibrant contributions to the field of AAAI/IJCAI between 2009 and 2019". Prof Kwok will be the IJCAI-2025 Program Chair. He is an IEEE Fellow.
Prof. Saman Halgamuge
The University of Melbourne, Australia
IEEE Fellow, AAIA Fellow, Fellow of IET
Biography:
Prof Saman Halgamuge, Fellow of IEEE, IET and AAIA, received the B.Sc. Engineering degree in Electronics and Telecommunication from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, and the Dipl.-Ing and Ph.D. degrees in data engineering from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. He is currently a Professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the School of Electrical Mechanical and Infrastructure Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also an honorary professor of Australian National University. He is listed as a top 2% most cited researcher for AI and Image Processing in the Stanford database. He was a distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (2018-21). His research interests are in AI, machine learning including deep learning, optimization, big data analytics and their applications in biomedicine and engineering.
Prof. Benjamin W. Wah
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Fellow of IEEE; Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery
Bio: Wah was born in Hong Kong and graduated from Queen Elizabeth School, Hong Kong. He received his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Columbia University, USA, then furthered his studies at the University of California, Berkeley, obtaining an MS in Computer Science and a PhD in Databases.[1] Wah began his teaching career in Purdue University in 1979. He later joined the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1985, which he served until his retirement at the end of 2011. In 1985-2011, he was the Franklin W. Woeltge Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. In 2008-2009, he also served as Director of the Advanced Digital Sciences Center in Singapore, a US$50 million research center established by the University of Illinois in Singapore in collaboration with the Singapore government's Agency for Science, Technology and Research. In 1998–1999, Wah was Chair Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and in that year received an Exemplary Teaching Award. From 1999 to 2003, he served as Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at CUHK. Between 2009-2019, he served as Provost of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Wah is an expert on non-linear programming, multimedia signal processing and artificial intelligence. He has published numerous research articles in top professional journals, such as Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Trans. in Computers, IEEE Trans. on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, IEEE Trans. on Parallel and Distributed Technology, IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, Journal of Global Optimization, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He is also the author of two books, and Editor-in-Chief of Wiley's Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering (published in 2008), and has contributed to many edited books and book chapters. He has served on many journal editorial boards. He also holds many Endowed Professorships and Honorary Professorships in leading universities in the United States of America and in Asia. Professor Wah was elected President of IEEE Computer Society in 2001. He was a member of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong between 2005 and 2009 and Chairman of its Engineering Panel between 2006 and 2009. He has been a member of the HK Research Grants Council since 2011. Professor Wah has received numerous honors and awards for his distinguished academic and professional achievements, including the Tsutomu Kanai Award, the W. Wallace McDowell Award, and the Richard E. Merwin Distinguished Service Award, all from the IEEE Computer Society, the Pan Wen Yuan Foundation Outstanding Research Award, and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal. In 2011, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. He has been elected: Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity
York University, Toronto, Canada
Bio: Dr. Arash Habibi Lashkari is a Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Cybersecurity. He is a Senior member of IEEE and an Associate Professor at the School of Information Technology. Prior to this, he was an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick (UNB), and the Research Coordinator of the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity (CIC). He has over 25 years of teaching and research experience, spanning several international universities, and served in different communities. At his previous University, he served as a search committee member of the faculty of Computer Science from 2018 to 2022, Chair or recruitment committee of the Faculty of Computer Science from 2019 to 2021, member of the assessment committee of the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity from 2019 to 2022 and a senator of the Senate Committee at University of New Brunswick (UNB) from 2019 to 2022. Since this January, when he joined York, he has been serving as a member of the curriculum committee, Faculty Appeals committee, Curriculum committee, and the search committee for two open positions at the School of Information Technology and a CRC Member to the Canada Research Chair Advisory Committee.He has received 15 awards at international computer security competitions - including three gold awards - and was recognized as one of Canada’s Top 150 Researchers for 2017.