Ilias S. Kotsireas serves as a full professor of Computer Science at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. In 2002 he founded the CARGO Lab, and serves as its director for more than 15 years. He has over 150 refereed journal and conference publications, chapters in books, edited books and special issues of journals, in the research areas of Computational Algebra, Metaheuristics, High-Performance Computing, Dynamical Systems and Combinatorial Design Theory. He serves on the Editorial Board of 7 international journals. He serves as the Managing Editor of a Springer journal and as the Editor-in-Chief of a Springer journal and a Birkhauser book series. He has organized a very large number of international conferences in Europe, North America and Asia, often serving as a Program Committee Chair or General Chair. His research is and has been funded by NSERC, the European Union and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). He served as Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Symbolic Computation (SIGSAM) on a 4-year term: July 2013 to July 2017. He is a co-chair of the Applications of Computer Algebra Working Group (ACA WG), a group of 45 internationally renowned researchers that oversee the organization of the ACA conference series. He has delivered more than 10 invited/plenary talks at conferences around the world.
Anna Nagurney is the John F. Smith Memorial Professor in the Department of Operations and Information Management at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is also the Founding Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks. Anna received her AB, ScB, ScM, and PhD degrees from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She is the author/co-author of over 190 refereed journal articles and 14 books and has been recognized for her research with honors and awards, including being elected an INFORMS Fellow in 2013 and an RSAI Fellow in 2007. She is the recipient of a 2016 INFORMS Volunteer Service Award for Distinguished Service, the 2007 WORMS Award, and the 2005 Moving Spirit Award of INFORMS. Anna has held a variety of visiting positions, including being a Science Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College at Oxford University in the UK, a Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg and at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. She has also been a Fulbrighter twice – in Austria and Italy and her research has received support from the National Science Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Panos M. Pardalos serves as distinguished professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Florida. Additionally, he is the Paul and Heidi Brown Preeminent Professor of industrial and systems engineering. Pardalos is also an affiliated faculty member of the computer and information science department, the Hellenic Studies Center, and the biomedical engineering program. Additionally, he serves as the director of the Center for Applied Optimization. Pardalos is a world leading expert in global and combinatorial optimization. His recent research interests include network design problems, optimization in telecommunications, e-commerce, data mining, biomedical applications, and massive computing. Pardalos is a prolific author who lectures all over the world. He is the recipient of a multitude of fellowships and awards, the most recent of which is the Humboldt Research Award (2018).
