Biographical note

Dr. Tripathy received his Ph.D. degree in 1983. During his student career, he received 3 gold medals for standing first at graduation level, standing first at postgraduate level, and being adjudged as the best postgraduate of the year from Berhampur University, Odisha. He has the distinction of receiving the national scholarship at PG level, UGC (Govt. of India) fellowship for pursuing his research, DST (Govt. of India) fellowship for pursuing M. Tech. (Computer Science) in Pune University, and the SERC fellowship (DOE, Govt. India) for joining IIT Kharagpur as a visiting fellow. As recognition of his distinguished research in the field of Mathematics, he was included by American Mathematical Society as a reviewer for Mathematical Reviews and later honored with an honorary membership of American Mathematical Society in 1992. A year later, he was selected as a reviewer for Zentralblutt fur Mathematik (Germany). At present, Dr. Tripathy is a reviewer for over 100 international journals from all top publishing houses world over. He has published over 600 research articles in several international journals, proceedings of international conferences, edited research volume chapters, and national conference proceedings. Some of his publications are in journals like Information Sciences, Applied Soft Computing, IEEE Access, Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, Bulletin of the Malaysian Mathematical Society, Ind. Jour. Pure & Appl. Mathematics, Journal of Educational Technology and Society, International Journal of Earth Sciences and Engineering, Kybernetes, World Applied Sciences Journal, International Journal of Communication Systems, Journal of Web Engineering and Evolutionary Intelligence, only to name a few. As an evidence of his research supervising ability, Prof. Tripathy has supervised over 52 candidates for Ph.D. degrees, M. Phil. degrees, and M. Tech./ M. S. by research degrees. Dr. Tripathy is a member of more than 20 professional bodies likea senior member of IEEE, a senior member of ACM, a senior member of IRSS, a senior life member of CSI, Indian Academy of Mathematics, IEEE Communication Society, Indian Mathematical Society, ACM Compute News group, Indian Science Congress Association, International Science and Technology group, and IEEE fuzzy logic society. He has evaluated the Ph.D. thesis of several universities from India. He has been sanctioned with three research projects from central agencies of India.

Pawan Lingras is a graduate of IIT Bombay with graduate studies from University of Regina. He is currently a professor and a director of Computing and Data Analytics at Saint Marys University, Halifax. He is also internationally active having served as a visiting professor at Munich University of Applied Sciences, IIT Gandhinagar, as a research supervisor at Institut Superieur de Gestion de Tunis, as a scholar-in-residence, and as a Shastri Indo-Canadian scholar. He has delivered more than60 invited talks at various institutions around the world. He has authored more than 210 research papers in various international journals and conferences. He has also co-authored three textbooks and co-edited two books and eight volumes of research papers. His academic collaborations/co-authors include academics from Canada, Chile, China, Germany, India, Poland, Tunisia, UK, and USA. His areas of interests include artificial intelligence, information retrieval, data mining, web intelligence, and intelligent transportation systems. He has served as the general co-chair, the program co-chair, the review committee chair, the program committee member, and a reviewer for various international conferences on artificial intelligence and data mining. He is also on editorial boards of a number of international journals. His research has been supported by Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada for twenty-five years, as well as other funding agencies including NRC-IRAP and MITACS. His total research and development grants as of May 2020 exceed $2.5 million with $2 million coming in the last five years. He has collaborated with more than 25 companies on projects ranging from feasibility studies to product development. He has supervised 135 research students (1 PDF, 9 Ph.D., 77 Master's, 48 UG). He has coached highly successful academic teams for computer programming as well as software development competitions. He has also served on the NSERC's Computer Science peer-review committee. He has been awarded an Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award, Student Union's Faculty of Science Teaching Award, and President's Award for Excellence in Research at Saint Mary's University.

Prof. Arpan Kar is Amar S Gupta Chair Professor in Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. Within IIT Delhi, he shares a joint appointment in the Department of Management Studies and School of Artificial Intelligence. Administratively he is theChair of Corporate Relations (DMS) and is a member of Board of Academic Programme and Institute of Eminence Committee, among others. His research interests are in the domain of data science, digital transformation, internet ecosystems, social media and ICT-based public policy. He has authored over a 170 peer reviewed articles and edited 8 research monographs, all of which are highly cited. He is the recipient of Research Excellence Award by Clarivate Analytics (Web of Science) for highest citations from 2015-2020. He is the recipient of Basant Kumar Birla Distinguished Researcher Award for the highest count of ABDC A*/ABS 4/FT50 level publications in India between the period 2014 - 2019. In terms of teaching cases, he is the recipient of the Best Seller Award from Ivey Cases / Harvard Business Publishing in 2020. He has received numerous other awards as well from reputed organizations like 3 International Federation of Information Processing Best Research Papers, Association of Computing Machinery ICEGOV Best Research Paper, Tata Consultancy Services Best Research Project, Project Management Institute Research Scholar, Association of Indian Management Schools Faculty Research, IIT Delhi Teaching Excellence, and many more best paper awards. Prior to joining IIT Delhi, he has worked in IIM Rohtak, Cognizant Business Consulting and IBM India Research Laboratory. He is the Editor in Chief of International Journal of Information Management Data Insights, published by Elsevier. He is also Associate / Coordinating Editor in Int. Journal of Electronic Government Research, Journal of Public Affairs, Information Systems Frontiers and Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management. He has undertaken over 40 research, consultancy and training projects from organizations like BASF, PWC, Fidelity, EY, Facebook, CIPPEC, BitGrit, Govt. of India (DST, MOTA, MOT, MEITY, MHRD, etc).

Chiranji Lal Chowdhary is an associate professor in the School of Information Technology & Engineering at VIT University, where he has been since 2010. He received a B.E. (CSE) from MBM Engineering College at Jodhpur in 2001 and M. Tech. (CSE) from the M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology at Bangalore in 2008. He received his Ph.D. in Information Technology and Engineering from the VIT University, Vellore, in 2017. From 2006 to 2010, he worked at M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology in Bangalore, eventually as a lecturer. His research interests span both computer vision and image processing. Much of his work has been on images, mainly through the application of image processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, biometric systems, deep learning, soft computing, and computational intelligence. He has given few invited talks on medical image processing. Professor Chowdhary is the editor/co-editor of 8  books and is the author of over fifty articles on computer science. He filed two patents deriving from his research.