S.R. Aurora, also known as Mai P. Trinh, is an Assistant Professor of Management at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her interdisciplinary work intersects leadership, complex systems science, education, technology, and inclusion. Her research harnesses technology to cultivate future leaders and helps people thrive in our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) high-tech world, aligning with four United Nations’ sustainable development goals: Quality education (#4), Gender equality (#5), Decent work and economic growth (#8), and Reduced inequalities (#10). She has published in top-tiered peer-reviewed journals such as The Leadership Quarterly and The Academy of Management Learning and Education and received multiple national and international awards for her research, teaching, and mentoring. Dr. Aurora earned her doctoral degree in Organizational Behavior from the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in 2016.

The goal of my research program is to improve our understanding about highly integrated natural and human processes. Within the context of Land-System Science, I seek to understand how natural and human systems interact through feedback mechanisms and affect land management choices among humans and ecosystem (e.g., carbon storage) and biophysical processes (e.g., erosion) in natural systems. One component of this program involves finding novel methods for data collection (e.g., unmanned aerial vehicles) that can be used to calibrate and validate models of natural systems at the resolution of decision makers. Another component of this program involves the design and construction of agent-based models to formalize our understanding of human decisions and their interaction with their environment in computer code. The most exciting, and remaining part, is coupling these two components together so that we may not only quantify the impact of representing their coupling, but more importantly to assess the impacts of changing climate, technology, and policy on human well-being, patterns of land use and land management, and ecological and biophysical aspects of our environment.

To achieve this overarching goal, my students and I conduct fieldwork that involves the use of state-of-the-art unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in combination with ground-based light detection and ranging (LiDAR) equipment, RTK global positioning system (GPS) receivers, weather and soil sensors, and a host of different types of manual measurements. We bring these data together to make methodological advancements and benchmark novel equipment to justify its use in the calibration and validation of models of natural and human processes. By conducting fieldwork at high spatial resolutions (e.g., parcel level) we are able to couple our representation of natural system processes at the scale at which human actors make decisions and improve our understanding about how they react to changes and affect our environment.

Dr. Chairi Kiourt is a research associate with the ATHENA - Research and Innovation Centre in Information, Communication and Knowledge Technologies - Xanthi’s Division, multimedia department since 2014. Also, as of December 2017, heis PostDoctoral researcher with the Hellenic Open University, School of Science and Technology, and as of 2018, visiting Lecturer at the Department of Informatics Engineering, Eastern Macedonia and Thrace Institute of Technology, Greece.
In 2003, he received his BSc degree in Electrical Engineering from the Electrical Engineering Department of the Eastern Macedonia and Thrace Institute of Technology, Greece. He also received an M.Sc. in System Engineering and Management in the specialty area: A. Information and Communication Systems Management from the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece. In 2017, received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering from the Hellenic Open University. He has participated in several national and European research programs and co- authored to the writing of several scientific publications in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences with judges in the fields of collective artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning agents, virtual worlds, virtual museums and gamification.

I am a University Academic Fellow (UAF) in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds. My research areas are agent-based modelling, decision making in complex systems, AI and multi-agent systems, urban analytics and housing markets. I obtained PhD in Economics from Iowa State University under supervisor Prof. Leigh Tesfatsion in 2014. I worked as a researcher at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland between 2014 and 2019. I joined the University of Leeds as a UAF of Urban Analytics in 2019. I am originally from Shanghai, China.

I am a computational archaeologist interested in how individuals and groups respond to both large scale processes such as climate change and local processes such as violence and wealth inequality. I am currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Washington State University.

He is a member of IEEE, a computer scientist, an Information Technologist, and a Research Lab Head at the Dig Connectivity Research Laboratory (DCRLab), Kampala, Uganda. My research broadly integrates and focuses on developing principled computationally and statistically efficient models and algorithms for various machine learning problems in Smart Agriculture, Ecological Informatics, Computer Vision, Applied AI, Cybersecurity and Privacy, and Smart Cities. I attained a Bachelor in Information Technology at the Faculty of Science & Computing, Ndejje University, Kampala, Uganda; a Master in Information Technology Engineering (Computer and Communication Networks); and PhD in Computer Science Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei. He has received additional training from, among others, the National Institutes of Health, US Department of Health and Human Services, and the Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA. Hundreds of scholarly publications, including those in prestigious peer-reviewed journal articles, numerous IEEE International, non-IEEE Conference proceedings, book chapters, and books have been published. Reviewer/editorial support of over twelve (Scopus, Compendex (Elsevier Engineering Index), and WoS International Journals, including Expert Systems With Applications, Scientific Reports and Computers and Electronics in Agriculture. I served in several capacities, including being departmental support for Mathematics for Data Science, Advanced Topics in Computing, and Advanced Algorithms. Prior to this, I served as a community data officer at Pace-Uganda, a research associate at TechnoServe, a research assistant at PSI-Uganda, a research lead at the Socio-economic Data Centre (SEDC-Uganda) and ag. managing director at Asmaah Charity Organisation.

Sedar is a PhD student at the University of Leeds, department of Geography. He graduated in Computer Science at King’s College London 2018. From a very early stage of his degree, he focused on artificial intelligence planning implementations on drones in a search and rescue domain, and this was his first formal attempt to study artificial intelligence. He participated in summer school at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul working on programming techniques to reduce execution time. During his final year, he concentrated on how argumentation theory with natural language processing can be used to optimise political influence. In the midst of completing his degree, he applied to Professor Alison Heppenstall’s research proposal focusing on data analytics and society, a joint endeavour with the Alan Turing Institute and the Economic and Social Research Council. From 2018 - 2023 he will be working on his PhD at the Alan Turing Institute and Leeds Institute for Data Analytics.

After completing my undergraduate education at Bilkent University (Turkey), I continued my studies at the University of Cambridge, receiving first my MPhil and then my PhD in Assyriology/Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology, funded by a Chevening Open Society Scholarship and the Board of Higher Education of Turkey. After teaching for several years at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, I moved to eastern Turkey to start the Archaeology Department of Bitlis Eren University, and I was the Head of Department until the end of 2018. I have been a visiting researcher at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman in 2011 (Mellink Fellowship), at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in 2014 (Fulbright Fellowship), and at the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History of Uppsala University in 2019 (Swedish Institute Fellowship). I have also held a Newton Advanced Fellowship here at Leicester in the UK. I have previously co-directed several fieldwork projects: the Cambridge University Kilise Tepe Excavations (southern Turkey, 2009-13), the Cide Archaeological Project (survey, Black Sea coast, 2010-1), the Sirwan Regional Project (survey, northern Iraq, 2012-5), and the Lower Göksu Archaeological Salvage Survey Project (survey, southern Turkey, 2013-7). I am currently co-directing the Çadır Höyük excavations, which is a joint American, British, Canadian and Turkish archaeological excavation project conducted in north-central Turkey, and the Taşeli-Karaman Archeological Project, which was initiated in 2018 as a continuation of the Lower Göksu Archaeological Salvage Survey Project, to study the Göksu River Basin in its wider geographical context in the hope of better understanding its role as a network hub connecting the eastern Mediterranean world to the central Anatolian Plateau.

Ifigeneia Koutiva (female) is a senior environmental engineer, holding a PhD in Civil Engineering (NTUA), a Postgrad Diploma in Water Resources and Environmental Management (Un. of Belgrade - e-learning), an MSc in Environmental Technology (Imperial College London) and an MSc in Mining and Metallurgy Engineering (NTUA). Her PhD was funded by the Greek Ministry of Education through Heracleitous II scholarship. She is currently a postdoctoral scholar of the State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) for 2020 - 2021. She has 10 years of experience in various EU funded research projects, both as a researcher and as a project manager, in the fields of socio-technical simulation, urban water modelling, modelling and assessment of alternative water technologies, artificial intelligence, social quantitative research, KPI and water indicators development and assessment and analysis of large data sets. She is very competent with programming for creating ICT tools for agent based modelling and data analysis tools and she is an experienced user of spatial analysis software and tools. She is also actively involved in the design and implementation of numerous consultation workshops and conferences. She has authored more than 20 scientific journal articles, conferences articles and research reports.