Omid Ansary, Ph. D. is Special Assistant to the Chancellor on Strategic Initiatives, Executive Director for International Affairs, and Professor of Electrical Engineering at Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg (PSH). Prior to his current position, he served as the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for 13 years at PSH. He earned his B.E. in Electrical Engineering degree from Youngstown State University, USA, and his MS and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from The University of Akron, USA. Dr. Ansary joined Penn State University in August of 1985, where he is a tenured Professor. He has been involved in all phases of education throughout his career at Penn State University; as a teacher, as a researcher, as an administrator, and as a member of various professional organizations. The significance of his involvement has been recognized by his colleagues and peers through various awards; he is the only individual who has the honor of receiving all three awards for excellent performance in teaching, research, and service in the history of Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg. Dr. Ansary is also the recipient of several other awards such as the Central Pennsylvania Engineers Council’s Technical Achievement Award in 2005, the American Society of Engineering Education’s Harden-Simons Prize for the best paper in 1994, and the recipient of the IEEE Third Millennium Medal for outstanding contribution to Region 2 and Susquehanna Section of the IEEE in 2000. He is a senior member of the IEEE. Dr. Ansary has multi-disciplinary expertise in electrical engineering, mathematics, computer engineering, and computational methods. He has published more than 100 refereed articles in top journals and proceedings in various areas related to his expertise. Most of his published articles include developing new methods and theorems. Furthermore, he has been engaged in research and scholarly activities through various other means, including serving as PI and Co-PI for over five million dollars of sponsored research. Some of his other activities during the past thirty years include mentoring faculty, staff, and students; resolving faculty, staff, and students' problems that were either academic or personal; designing and implementing various articulations agreements between PSH and various national and international institutions; introducing new degree programs at both undergraduate and graduate levels; recruiting quality faculty, staff, and students in various disciplines to achieve the college’s goal of academic excellence; effectively managing multiple budgets and reviewed and approved budgetary allocations of many units within PSH; leading various programs to achieve regional and national accreditations; and, assisting the various units within PSH to improve and ensure a nurturing environment for all constituencies. Lin Meng is a Professor at the College of Science and Engineering and the head of the Intelligent High-performance Computing Lab., at Ritsumeikan University, Japan. He earned his BE from the College of Science and Engineering, MS, and Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Science and Engineering at Ritsumeikan University. He served as a Research Associate (2011-2012), Assistant Professor (2013-2017), Lecturer (2018), and Associate professor (2018-2023), at the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Ritsumeikan University. In 2015, he was a visiting scholar in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota at Twin Cities, USA. He services several high-quality journals as an associate editor, such as Internet of Things (IoT), IPSJ Transactions on System LSI Design Methodology (T-SLDM), International Journal of Human Factors Modelling and Simulation (IJHMS), Biomimetic Intelligence and Robotics (BIROB), etc. In addition, he has held posts like general chair for multiple international academic conferences/committees, including The International Conference on Advanced Mechatronic (ICAMechs), The International Symposium on Advanced Technologies and Applications in the Internet of Things (ATAIT), International Conference on Virtual Reality (ICVR), etc. His research focuses on Computer Architecture, Parallel Processing, Intelligence high-performance computing (IHPC), FPGA-based Accelerator Design, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). He has published over 300 papers, including IEEE TETCI, IEEE TIM, IEEE TSC, IEEE TITS, IEEE IoT J, AIRE, APIN, Neurocomputing, Heritage Science, etc. In the past five years, he received several funds from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), etc. He is a senior member of IEEE and is a member of ACM, IPSJ, IEICE, and IEE. Shivakumar B.R. obtained his Ph.D. in digital image processing and remote sensing from Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belagavi. He specializes in extracting Land Use Land Cover (LULC) information from high/medium-resolution multispectral remote sensor data. With over a decade of academic expertise, Dr. Shivakumar has excelled in academia, serving as an Assistant Professor at various reputed institutes. At NMAM Institute of Technology, Nitte, as Assistant Professor-III, led the Power Electronics and Control Systems (PE & CS) special interest group and played pivotal roles in curriculum coordination, placement coordination, and overseeing significant academic responsibilities. An ardent researcher and prolific author, Dr. Shivakumar has numerous indexed publications and best paper awards to his credit. Furthermore, his published book, ‘Introduction to Power Electronics Devices and Circuits,’ showcases his commitment to imparting knowledge through scholarly works. He is currently working on ‘Spatial Vegetation Distribution Analysis of the Western Ghats, India, under Research Grants for Scientists/Faculty (RGS-F), funded by Vision Group on Science and Technology (VGST), Govt. of Karnataka, India. Dr. Shivakumar possesses a wide range of interdisciplinary skills, including geographic information systems, remote sensing, and electronics engineering. He has authored over twenty-five peer-reviewed articles and proceedings in diverse fields pertinent to his expertise. The majority of his published works concern the utilization of various classifiers to classify remotely sensed data. Outside academia, Dr. Shivakumar is an avid content creator, producing over 250 educational videos on Electronics and Communication Engineering topics, which have garnered significant attention on various platforms.
