 Metin Akay, PhD Founding Chair & John S Dunn Endowed Chair Professor Department of Biomedical Engineering Cullen College of Engineering University of Houston Chair, IEEE BRAIN Initiative Past President, IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society 2023-2024 Chair, International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering 2022-2025 Chief Ambassador, IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Prof. Metin Akay is currently the founding chair of the new Biomedical Engineering Department and the John S. Dunn professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Houston. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey in 1981 and 1984, respectively and a Ph.D. degree from Rutgers University in 1990. Dr. Akay has played a key role in promoting biomedical education in the world by writing and editing several books, editing several special issues of prestigious journals, including the Proc of IEEE, and giving more than hundred keynote, plenary and invited talks at international conferences, symposiums and workshops regarding emerging technologies in biomedical engineering. His Neural Engineering and Informatics Lab is interested in developing an intelligent wearable system for monitoring motor functions in Post-Stroke Hemiplegic Patients and detecting coronary artery disease. In addition, his lab is currently investigating the effect of nicotine on the dynamics of ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine neural networks as well as the detection of coronary occlusions. |
 Ajay Kumar Professor, Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Fellow of IEEE & IAPR; President of IEEE Biometrics Council (2021-2022) Prof. Kumar is currently a Professor in the Department of Computing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Chair of the Departmental Learning and Teaching Committee (2019-2021). He received B.Eng. degree in 1990, M.Eng. in 1992, and a Ph.D. degree from The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, in 2001. He has earlier been working as an Assistant Professor, in Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India from 2005-2007. His current research interests include biometrics with an emphasis on contactless hand biometrics, vascular biometrics, iris recognition, and multimodal biometrics. He holds seven U.S. patents and has authored a book on Contactless 3D Fingerprint Identification. He has served on the IEEE Biometrics Council as the Vice President for publications from 2011 to 2015. He was on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (2010-2013), IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior and Identity Sciences (2018-2020). He has served on the program committees and organizing committee of several international conferences in the field of his research interest and recently as an area chair for CVPR 2019, CVPR 2020. Prof. Kumar was also the Program Chair for CVPR 2013-2020 Biometrics Workshops, ICEB 2010 (Hong Kong) and Program Co-Chair for IJCB 2011 (Washington DC), ICB 2013 (Madrid). He has also served as the General Chair of WIFS 2018 (Hong Kong) and as the General Co-Chair of IJCB 2014 (Tampa) and ISBA 2015 (Hong Kong). Prof. Kumar is a Fellow of IAPR (since 2016), Fellow of IEEE (since 2018), recipient of ‘Faculty Award in 2018 for Outstanding Achievement in Research and Scholarly Activities’ and President’s Award in 2012 for ‘Excellent Performance in Research and Scholarly Activities (Team) in PolyU. He is currently on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2019 onwards). He was President of IEEE Biometrics Council (2021-2022). |
 Xu Jin Xu Jin, full professor of Peking University, received Ph.D. degrees both in science and engineering. He has published more than 300 academic papers, including more than 200 SCI indexed articles as the first author or correspondent; 5 monographs and 1 translation manuscripts. He has presided over more than ten major national projects, including the National Natural Science Foundation of China Key Project, Major International Cooperation Project, Major Instrument Special Project, 863 Program, National Defense Project, and National Key R&D Program, etc. In 2013, he won the second prize of National Natural Science as the first complete person. Additionally, he has been awarded two First Prizes in Natural Science by the Ministry of Education and one First Prize in Natural Science by Hubei Province, all as the first complete person. In academic terms, he was the first, second, fourth, fifth, seventh, eighth International Biomedical Conference chairman, he is the vice chairman of the China Institute of circuits and systems, the vice chairman of the cloud computing and Big Data Committee of the China Communications Society, the director of the China Cyberspace Security Association, and the chairman of the professional committee of biological computing and biological processing; Deputy editor in chief of " Artificial Intelligence Review" and "Journal of Electronics and Information", editor in chief of Journal of Guangzhou University (NATURAL SCIENCE EDITION), editorial board members of "Journal of Electronics", "Journal of Computer Science" and "Journal of Software", currently. His main research areas are graph theory and combinatorial optimization, novel computing, biological computing, information security, etc. |
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