Wojciech Szpankowski is Saul Rosen Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University where he teaches and conducts research in analysis of algorithms, information theory, analytic combinatorics, network science, random structures, and stability problems of distributed systems. He held several Visiting Professor/Scholar positions, including McGill University, INRIA, France, Stanford, Hewlett-Packard Labs, Universite de Versailles, University of Canterbury, New Zealand, Ecole Polytechnique, France, the Newton Institute, Cambridge, UK, ETH, Zurich, and Jagiellonian University. Krakow, Poland. He has been on editorial boards on many journals including IEEE Trans. Information Theory, TCS, CPC, and ACM Trans. on Algorithms. Szpankowski is a Fellow of IEEE, and the Erskine Fellow. In 2010 he received the Humboldt Research Award, in 2015 he was recipient of the Inaugural Arden L. Bement Jr. Award, and in 2020 he delivered the Philippe Flajolet Lecture. In 2022 he was elected to Academia Europaea. He published two books: "Average Case Analysis of Algorithms on Sequences", John Wiley & Sons, 2001, "Analytic Pattern Matching: From DNA to Twitter" (with P.Jacquet) , Cambridge, 2015, and ``Analytic Information Theory: From Compression to Learning'' (with (M. Drmota), 2023. In 2008 he launched the interdisciplinary Institute for Science of Information, and in 2010 he became the Director of the NSF Science and Technology Center for Science of Information.

Naiming Xie is a full professor from Institute of Grey System Studies, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His major research interests are grey system theory and modelling in forecasting, scheduling and decision making. He has published 3 books and more than 180 journal articles, 120 of them indexed in SCI/SSCI. He took in charge of nearly 20 scientific research projects, including 4 projects funded by National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and 1 jointed funding by NSFC and Royal Society of UK. Prof Xie is an associate editor of the international journal, Grey Systems: Theory and Application since 2011. And Prof. Xie is also Vice President and Secretary-general of International Association of Grey System and Uncertainty Analysis and president of Grey System Professional Committee of Overall Planning an Economical Mathematics (China). Prof. Xie has been listed in World's Top 2% Scientists.