Fady Alajaji is a professor of Mathematics and Engineering at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He received a B.E. degree with distinction from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon in 1988, and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland at College Park, USA, in 1990 and 1994, respectively.In 2001, he was a recipient of the Premier’s Research Excellence Award from the Province of Ontario in recognition for his research in “the theory and practice of joint source-channel coding in telecommunication systems.” His research interests include information theory, applied probability, joint source-channel coding, error control coding, data compression and digital communications. Po-Ning Chen is a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Taiwan. He received B.E. and M.Sc. degrees from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, in 1985 and 1987, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Maryland at College Park, USA, in 1994. He was a recipient of the 2000 Young Scholar Paper Award from the Academia Sinica, Taiwan.He was also selected as the NCTU Outstanding Tutor Teacher in 2013 and 2014, and received the NCTU Distinguished Teaching Award in 2014. His research interests include information and coding theory, large deviations theory, distributed detection and sensor networks.
