Biographical note

Magdi Sadek Mahmoud obtained BSc (Honors) in communication engineering, MSc in electronic engineering, and PhD in systems engineering, all from Cairo University in 1968, 1972, and 1974, respectively. He has been a professor of engineering since 1984. He is now a Distinguished University Professor at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), Saudi Arabia. He was on the faculty at different universities worldwide including Egypt (CU, AUC), Kuwait (KU), UAE (UAEU), UK (UMIST), USA (Pitt, Case Western), Singapore (Nanyang Technological) and Australia (Adelaide). He lectured in Venezuela (Caracas), Germany (Hanover), UK (Kent), USA (University of Texas at SA), Canada (Montreal, Alberta) and China (BIT, Yanshan). He is the principal author of thirty-four (34) books, inclusive book-chapters and the author/co-author of more than 510 peer-reviewed papers. He is the recipient of two national, one regional, and four university prizes for outstanding research in engineering and applied mathematics. He is a fellow of the IEE, a senior member of the IEEE, the CEI (UK), and a registered consultant engineer of information engineering and systems (Egypt). He is currently actively engaged in teaching and research in the development of modern methodologies of distributed control and filtering, networked-control systems, triggering mechanisms in dynamical systems, faulttolerant systems and information technology. He is a fellow of the IEE, a senior member of the IEEE, the CEI (UK), and a registered consultant engineer of information engineering and systems Egypt.

Yuanqing Xia was born in Anhui Province, China, in 1971 and graduated from the Department of Mathematics, Chuzhou University, Chuzhou, China, in 1991. He received his MS degree in Fundamental Mathematics from Anhui University, China, in 1998 and his PhD degree in Control Theory and Control Engineering from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Beijing, China, in 2001. From 1991-1995, he was with Tongcheng Middle-School as a teacher, Anhui, China. During January 2002 to November 2003, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute of Systems Science, Academy of Mathematics and System Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, where he worked on navigation, guidance and control. From November 2003 to February 2004, he joined the National University of Singapore as a research fellow, where he worked on variable structure control. From February 2004 to February 2006, he was with the University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, U.K., as a research fellow, where he worked on networked control systems. From February 2007 to June 2008, he was a guest professor with Innsbruck Medical University, Innsbruck, Austria, where he worked on biomedical signal processing. Since July 2004, he has been with the Department of Automatic Control, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, first as an associate professor, and then, since 2008, as a professor. His current research interests are in the fields of networked control systems, robust control, sliding mode control, active disturbance rejection control and biomedical signal processing.