Biographical note

Thirimachos Bourlai is an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and an adjunct faculty at the Institute for Cybersecurity and Privacy, both at the University of Georgia; he is also an adjunct faculty at WVU in CSEE, School of Medicine, Forensics, and Chemical Engineering. He is the founder and director of the Multi-Spectral Imagery Lab (milab.uga.edu), a Springer Nature Series Editor of the Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications, a member of the board of directors at the Document Security Alliance, the VP of Education at the IEEE Biometrics Council, and a member of the Academic Research and Innovation Expert Group at the Biometrics Institute. He has published four books with Springer Nature, “Face Recognition Across the Imaging Spectrum”, 2016, “Surveillance in Action”, 2018, “Securing Social Identity in Mobile Platforms”, 2020, and now the “Disease Control Through Social Network Surveillance”, 2022. He has various patents, journals, and conference publications.

Panagiotis Karampelas holds a Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering from the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK and a Master of Science degree from the Department of Informatics, Kapodistrian University of Athens with specialization in “High Performance Algorithms”. He also holds a Bachelor degree in Mathematics from the same University majoring in Applied Mathematics. Currently, he is with the Department of Informatics and Computers, at the Hellenic Air Force Academy teaching courses to pilots and engineers participating at the same time in a number of internationalization activities on behalf of his institution. He is the author of the book “Techniques and Tools for Designing an Online Social Network Platform” published in Lecture Notes in Social Networks (2013) and editor in a number of books such as “Electricity Distribution - Intelligent Solutions for Electricity Transmission and Distribution Networks” in the BookSeries Energy Systems (2016), Surveillance in Action – Technologies for Civilian, Military and Cyber Surveillance” (2018) and Securing Social Identity in Mobile Platforms: Technologies for Security, Privacy and Identity Management” (2020) in the Book Series Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications and “From Security to Community Detection in Social Networking Platforms” (2019) in the Book Series Lecture Notes in Social Networks. He is also a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining. He serves as a Series Editor in the Book Series Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications and as an Associate Editor in the Social Network Analysis and Mining journal. He also serves as program committee member in a large number of scientific journals and international conferences in his fields of interests. Finally, he participates in the Organizing Committee of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysisand Mining (ASONAM).

Reda Alhajj is a tenured professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is also affiliated with Medipol University, Istanbul, Turkey, and University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark. He published over 500 papers in refereed international journals, conferences and edited books. He served on the program committee of several international conferences. He is founding editor in chief of the Springer premier journal “Social Networks Analysis and Mining”, founding editor-in-chief of Springer Series “Lecture Notes on Social Networks”, founding editor-in-chief of Springer journal “Network Modeling Analysis in Health Informatics and Bioinformatics”, founding co-editor-in-chief of Springer “Encyclopedia on Social Networks Analysis and Mining” (ranked top 3rd in most downloaded sources in computer science in 2018), founding steering chair of the flagship conference “IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining”, and three accompanying symposiums FAB (for big data analysis), FOSINT-SI (for homeland security and intelligence services) and HI-BI-BI (for health informatics and bioinformatics). He is member of the editorial board of the Journal of Information Assurance and Security, Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, Journal of Data Mining, Modeling and Management; he has been guest editor of a number of special issues and edited a number of conference proceedings. Dr. Alhajj's primary work and research interests focus on various aspects of data science and big data with emphasis on areas like: (1) scalable techniques and structures for data management and mining, (2) social network analysis with applications in computational biology and bioinformatics, homeland security, disaster management, etc., (3) sequence analysis with emphasis on domains like financial, weather, traffic, energy, etc., (4) XML, schema integration and re-engineering. He currently leads a large research group of PhD and MSc candidates. He received best graduate supervision award and community service award at the University of Calgary. He recently mentored a number of successful teams, including SANO who ranked first in the Microsoft Imagine Cup Competition in Canada and received KFC Innovation Award in the World Finals held in Russia, TRAK who ranked in the top 15 teams in the open data analysis competition in Canada, Go2There who ranked first in the Imagine Camp competition organized by Microsoft Canada, Funiverse who ranked first in Microsoft Imagine Cup Competition in Canada.