Keynote Speakers

Prof. Athman Bouguettaya
IEEE Fellow
University of Sydney, Australia

Athman Bouguettaya is Professor and Head of School of Computer Science, at the University of Sydney, Australia. He was previously Professor and Head of School of Computer Science and IT at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA) in 1992. He was previously Science Leader in Service Computing at the CSIRO ICT Centre (now DATA61), Canberra. Australia. Before that, he was a tenured faculty member and Program director in the Computer Science department at Virginia Tech (USA). He was also a visiting professor at Purdue University (USA). He received his undergraduate degree (Ingenieur D’Etat) from the University of Annaba, Algeria in 1984. He obtained his high school baccalaureate in technology and mathematics with high distinctions in 1979 and received an award from the President of Algeria. He is a founding member and past President of the Service Science Society, a non-profit organization that aims at forming a community of service scientists for the advancement of service science. He is or has been on the editorial boards of several leading journals including, the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, The ACM Computing Surveys, the International Journal on Next Generation Computing, VLDB Journal, Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal, and the International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Springer-Verlag book series on Services Science. He served as a guest editor of a number of special issues including the special issue of the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology on Semantic Web services, a special issue the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing on Service Query Models, and a special issue of IEEE Internet Computing on Database Technology on the Web. He served as the General Chair of ICSOC 2020. He served as a Program Chair of the 2017 WISE Conference, the 2012 International Conference on Web and Information System Engineering, the 2009 and 2010 Australasian Database Conference, 2008 International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) and the IEEE RIDE Workshop on Web Services for E-Commerce and E-Government (RIDE-WS-ECEG'04). He also served on the IEEE Fellow Nomination Committee. He has published more than 250 books, book chapters, and articles in journals and conferences in the area of databases and service computing (e.g., the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, the ACM Transactions on the Web, WWW Journal, VLDB Journal, SIGMOD, ICDE, VLDB, and EDBT). He was the recipient of several federally competitive grants in Australia (e.g., ARC), the US (e.g., NSF, NIH), Qatar (NPRP). EU (FP7), and China (NSFC). He also won major industry grants from companies like HP and Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). He trained 10 PhD students who are now professors at leading universities in the US and Australia. One of his previous postdocs is on the prestigious Scientia Professorship at the University of New South Wales. He is a WISE Conference Fellow, a Fellow of the IEEE, and a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM. He is also an ACM Distinguished Speaker and IEEE Distinguished Visitor.

Prof. Haizhou Li
IEEE Fellow
National University of Singapore, Singapore

Haizhou Li is currently a Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore (NUS). Prof. Li obtained a PhD degree in electrical engineering from South China University of Technology, China in 1990. Prior to joining NUS, he was the Principal Scientist and Department Head of Human Language Technology in the Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore (2003-2016). Prof. Li’s research interests include speech information processing, natural language processing, and neuromorphic computing. Prof. Li has served as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (2015-2018), a Member of the Editorial Board of Computer Speech and Language (2012-2018), and a Member of IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (2013-2015). He was the President of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA, 2015-2017), the President of Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (2015-2016), and the President of Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (2017-2018). He was the General Chair of ACL 2012, INTERSPEECH 2014, and IEEE ASRU 2019. Prof. Li is a Fellow of the IEEE, and a Fellow of ISCA. He was a recipient of the President’s Technology Award 2013 in Singapore. He was named one of the two Nokia Visiting Professors in 2009 by the Nokia Foundation, and U Bremen Excellence Chair Professor in 2019 by Bremen University, Germany.

Prof. Farid Meziane
University of Derby, UK

Farid Meziane has over 35 years experience in higher education. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Salford, UK on his work on producing formal specification from Natural Language requirements. The work was considered at that time as pioneering in the area and paved the way for a large interest in automating the production of software specifications from informal requirements. Upon completion of his PhD, he took a lecturer’s position at the Institute of Software Technology (IST) at the University Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) where he spent three years. He returned in 1998 to the University of Salford where he spent the last twenty-two years. He was promoted to a professor and held a chair in Data and Knowledge Engineering and leading research in computer Science as the head of the Informatics Research Centre. Professor Farid led the REF2020 UoA11 submission at Salford until the end of July 2020. For eight years, Professor Meziane was the Associate Dean for International Development for the School of Computing, Science and Engineering and was behind the development of the Internationalisation strategy for the school and setting partnerships and collaborations with international partners. Professor Meziane is currently with the University of Derby holding a chair in Data Science and the head of the Data Science Research Centre. He has authored over 100 scientific papers and participated in many national and international research projects. He is the co-chair of the international conference on application of Natural Language to information systems; co-chair of the international conference on Information Science and Systems. He is serving the programme committee of over ten international conferences and in the editorial board of three international journals. He was awarded the Highly Commended Award from the Literati Club, 2001 for his paper on Intelligent Systems in Manufacturing: Current Development and Future Prospects. His research expertise includes Natural Language processing, semantic computing, data mining and big data and knowledge Engineering.