Chair Professor, City University of Hong Kong
IEEE Fellow
Min Xie has been a Chair Professor at City University of Hong Kong since 2011. He joined National University of Singapore in 1991 as one of the first recipients of the prestigious Lee Kuan Yew Research Fellowship. He holds a Ph.D. from Linkoping University, Sweden in 1987. Prof Xie has carried out extensive research in reliability, quality control, and systems engineering. He has published over 300 journal papers and 10 books, including “Software Reliability Modelling”, “Weibull Models”, “Computing System Reliability” etc. His recently co-authored book, “Cyber-Physical Distributed Systems: Modeling, Reliability Analysis and Applications”, was published by Wiley. He has advised over 60 Ph.D. students, now working in industry or academia on different continents. Prof Xie has been a fellow of IEEE since 2006 and was recently elected to European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Queen Mary University of London
Ahmed M. A. Sayed is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, UK, and leads SAYED Systems Group (https://sayed-sys-lab.github.io/). He held the positions of Research Scientist at KAUST, Saudi Arabia, and Senior Researcher at Huawei's Future Networks Lab (FNTL), Hong Kong. He is the principal investigator and co-investigator on several national and international research projects, mostly funded by grants totaling over USD$1.5 million in funding. He received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong in 2017. He was awarded the prestigious Hong Kong PhD Fellowship from the Research Grant Council (RGC) of Hong Kong in 2013 to pursue his PhD at HKUST, HK. He has published numerous (more than 80) papers in top venues and journals in the areas of distributed systems, computer networking, and machine learning. His current research interests are in the areas of optimizing systems supporting distributed machine learning, federated learning, and cloud/data-center networking with an emphasis on performance, practicality, and scalability.
Professor and Head, Institute of Software Technology
Graz University of Technology
Franz Wotawa received an M.Sc. in Computer Science (1994) and a Ph.D. (1996) from the Vienna University of Technology. He is currently a professor of software engineering at the Graz University of Technology. From the founding of the Institute for Software Technology in 2003 to 2009, and starting in 2020, Franz Wotawa has been the head of the institute. His research interests include model-based and qualitative reasoning, theorem proving, mobile robots, verification and validation, and software testing and debugging. Besides theoretical foundations, he has always wanted to close the gap between research and practice. For this purpose, he founded Softnet Austria in 2006, a non-profit organization conducting applied research projects with companies. Since October 2017, Franz Wotawa has been the head of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Quality Assurance Methodologies for Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems. Franz Wotawa has written more than 440 peer-reviewed papers for journals, books, conferences, and workshops during his career. He supervised 102 Master’s and 39 Ph.D. students. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Intl for his work on diagnosis. Diagnosis Community in 2016. Franz Wotawa has been a member of various program committees and organized several workshops and special issues of journals. He is a member of the Academia Europaea, the IEEE Computer Society, ACM, the Austrian Computer Society (OCG), the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence, and a Senior Member of the AAAI.
