Isaac IT Ullah, PhD, (Arizona State University 2013) Dr. Ullah is a computational archaeologist who employs GIS and simulation modeling to understand the long-term dynamics of humans and the Earth System. Dr. Ullah is particularly interested in the social and environmental changes surrounding the advent of farming and animal husbandry. His focus is on Mediterranean and other semi-arid landscapes, and he conducts fieldwork in Jordan, Italy, and Kazakhstan. His field work includes survey for and excavation of early agricultural sites as well as geoarchaeological analyses of anthropogenic landscapes. His specialties include landscape evolution, complex adaptive systems science, computational methods, geospatial analysis, and imagery analysis.

I am currently a Senior Lecturer in Computational Epidemiology at Western Sydney University, School of Computer, Data and Mathematical Science where I am also a member of Translational Health Research Institute (THRI). I am a research associate at the Brain and Mind Centre, Sydney University and Adjunct Senior Lecturer at Psychiatry Monash Health, Monash University.
My work is in the areas of dynamic data-driven computer simulation and systems science. The product of my work is decision and research support software that applies agent and discrete event based models, and metaprogramming techniques to solve complex problems.
I am currently Chief Investigator (CI) on an international grant funded by Botnar foundation as well as on a MRFF funded grant with Brain and Mind Centre, The University of Sydney and an Associate Investigator (AI) on Suicide Prevention Australia funded research at The University of Melbourne. In he last 5 years I have been CI on 7 grants and commissioned research projects and AI on 1 grant with total value of over $8 million AUD.

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.

Biographical Sketch

(a) Professional Preparation

Brigham Young University Statistics & Computer Science B.S. 1986
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Biostatistics M.S. 1988
North Carolina State University Biomathematics & Entomology Ph.D. 1997

(b) Appointments

Associate Professor 2006-current: Brigham Young University Department of Biology
Assistant Professor 2000-2006: Brigham Young University Department of Integrative Biology
Research Scientist 1997-1999: Agriculture Research Service-USDA Pacific Basin Agricultural Research Center.

(c) Publications

i. Five most relevant publications

Ahmadou H. Dicko, Renaud Lancelot, Momar Talla Seck, Laure Guerrini, Baba Sall, Mbargou Low, Marc J.B. Vreysen, Thierry Lefrançois, Fonta Williams, Steven L. Peck, and Jérémy Bouyer. 2014. Using species distribution models to optimize vector control: the tsetse eradication campaign in Senegal. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 11 (28) : 10149-10154
Peck, S. L. 2014. Perspectives on why digital ecologies matter: Combining population genetics and ecologically informed agent-based models with GIS for managing dipteran livestock pests. Acta Tropica. 138S (2014) S22–S25
Peck, S. L. and Jérémy Bouyer. 2012. Mathematical modeling, spatial complexity, and critical decisions in tsetse control. Journal of Economic Entomology 105(5): 1477—1486.
Peck, S. L. 2012. Networks of habitat patches in tsetse fly control: implications of metapopulation structure on assessing local extinction probabilities. Ecological Modelling 246: 99–102.
Peck, S. L. 2012. Agent-based models as fictive instantiations of ecological processes.” Philosophy & Theory in Biology. Vol. 4.e303 (2012): 12

ii. Five other publications of note

Peck, S. L. 2008. The Hermeneutics of Ecological Simulation. Biology and Philosophy 23:383-402.
K.M. Froerer, S.L. Peck, G.T. McQuate, R.I. Vargas, E.B. Jang, and D.O. McInnis. 2010. Long distance movement of Bactrocera dorsalis (Diptera: Tephritidae) in Puna, Hawaii: How far can they go? American Entomologist 56(2): 88-94
Peck, S. L. 2004. Simulation as experiment: a philosophical reassessment for biological modeling. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 19 (10): 530 534
Storer N.P., S. L. Peck, F. Gould, J. W. Van Duyn and G. G. Kennedy. 2003 Sensitivity analysis of a spatially-explicit stochastic simulation model of the evolution of resistance in Helicoverpa zea (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) to Bt transgenic corn and cotton. Economic Entomology. 96(1): 173-187
Peck, S. L., F. Gould, and S. Ellner. 1999. The spread of resistance in spatially extended systems of transgenic cotton: Implications for the management of Heliothis virescens (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae). Economic Entomology 92:1-16.

Angelos Chliaoutakis received his PhD in Electronic & Computer Engineering in 2020 at Technical University of Crete (TUC), Greece. During 2005-2020 he was a research assistant at the Intelligent Systems Laboratory of TUC, participating in several research projects associated with NLP, semantic similarity and ontology based information systems. Since 2010 he is also a research assistant at the Laboratory of Geophysical - Satellite Remote Sensing and Archaeo-environment (GeoSat ReSeArch Lab) of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies of Foundation for Research and Technology (IMS-FORTH), were he is involved in various research projects related to the full-stack development of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), web-based GIS applications and Geoinformatics in the cultural and archaeological domain. This ultimately transformed his interest and research direction towards computational archaeology, in particular, agent-based modeling and simulation, while intertwining ideas and approaches from Artificial Intelligence, Multi-agent Systems and GIS.

**PROFESSIONS **

Associate Professor
School of Management Science and Engineering, Shandong Technology and Business University (Yantai 264005, P. R. China)

**EDUCATION BACKGROUDS **

Ph. D. Degree, 09/2009 – 07/2015
School of Economics and Management, Beihang University (P. R. China)

M. A. Degree, 09/2003 – 02/2006
The Institute of Systems Engineering, Dalian University of Technology (P. R. China)

B. A. Degree, 09/1999 – 07/2003
Department of Information and Control Engineering, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry (P. R. China)

**VISITING & SUMMER SCHOOLS **

Visiting Scholar at GECS – Research Group of Experimental and Computational Sociology (March, 2017 – February, 2018)
 Università degli Studi di Brescia (Italy)
 Co-supervisor: Professor Flaminio Squazzoni

Summer school in ‘Agent-based modeling for social scientists’ (September 4-8, 2017)
 University of Brescia, Italy
 Instructors: Flaminio Squazzoni, Simone Gabbriellini, Nicolas Payette, Federico Bianchi

The Santa Fe Institute’s Massive Open Online Course: Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling (Jun 5 – September 8, 2017)
 The Santa Fe Institute, Complexity Explore Web: abm.complexityexploer.org
 Instructors: Bill Rand

Summer school in ‘Complex systems and management’ (July 2-12, 2012)
 National Defense University, P. R. China
 Instructors: Xinjun Mao, Yongfang Liu, Dinghua Shi, Qiyue Cheng

Paul Hart BSc (Liverpool), BA (Open University), PhD (Liverpool), MAE, FLS, FMBA. From 1973-1976 I worked on the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey at the Oceanographic Laboratory, Edinburgh. From 1973 – 1976 I was employed by Nordreco AB (a Nestlé R & D company) in Sweden as a fishery biologist where he advised the Findus group on fish raw material supplies and assessed the future potential of aquaculture. In 1976 I moved to the University of Leicester as a lecturer in aquatic biology. My research focused on the foraging behaviour of fish with a side interest in marine commercial fisheries. I retired as Professor and Head of the Department of Biology and am now an Emeritus Professor. I was a Trustee of the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science, which ran the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey until it was merged with the Marine Biological Association: I then became a Trustee of the MBA. From 2010 – 2016 I was a member of the Science Advisory Board of Marine Scotland. I am co-author of Fisheries Ecology (1982) and co-editor of the two-volume Handbook of Fish Biology and Fisheries (2002). I was a co-editor of the journal Fish and Fisheries (Wiley) between 2000 and 2021.

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.

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.

As of my incorporation into the Department of Computer Architecture and Operating Systems of the UAB as a postgraduate student, it is possible to divide my scientific-technical career into the following stages:

Simulation of Parallel Applications (1992-99): Focused on the design and development of simulators of parallel applications. This research main objective was the definition of abstractions for parallel programs, based on characterizing tasks and their dependences. Two main abstractions were developed, at first a simpler one, which was easier to parametrize, and, next, a more complex an accurate one. Using these characterizations, several simulation tools were programmed and used in the context of national and European projects. As part of my Master’s thesis, I was involved in the design and development of some of these simulation applications.

National projects: 4, European: 2

International conferences: 3, National: 1, Journal papers: 3

Security in Distributed Systems (2007-12): Focused on the design and development of the FPVA (First Principles Vulnerability Assessment) methodology for the evaluation of vulnerabilities in Grid applications. This methodology clearly defined a set of steps for the assessment of Grid applications vulnerabilities, most of these steps could be automatized or at least supported by specific tools. Jointly with other professors of our group and from the University of Wisconsin, I was involved in the original definition and application of this methodology.

International projects: 2

Master Thesis: 1, Ph.D. Thesis: 1

International conferences: 2, National: 1, Journal papers: 2

Parallel Application Modeling (1999-present): This is my main line of research, aimed at defining high-level performance models for parallel applications. Initially, models were defined for MPI applications with a master-worker and pipeline structure, but later this line has been expanded with the definition of models for memory-intensive OpenMP applications, composed (mix of several structures) applications, applications based on mathematical libraries, distributed data-intensive applications and, finally, applications based on the simulation of agents (ABS) with SPMD structure.

As a result of the work on modeling the performance of ABS parallel systems, we have opened a new line for the definition and implementation of a benchmark for assessing the performance of the parallel simulators generated by well-known platforms, such as FLAME, Repast-HPC or D-Mason. In addition, the knowledge we have gained on this topic has opened new ways of collaboration for optimizing real parallel ABS in the health sciences area (tumor growth and infection spread).

National projects: 12, European: 1

International conferences: 17, National: 4, Journal papers: 11

International Presentations: 4

Parallel Applications Tuning Tools (2010-present): Focused on the design and development of tools for automatic tuning and, in some cases, also dynamic tuning of parallel applications. These tools allow the integration of performance models in the form of external components provided by the analyst. For this reason, this research line is tightly coupled with the Parallel Application Modeling one. The two main tools developed totally or partially by our group are Monitoring Analysis and Tuning Environment-MATE (and its highly scalable evolution ELASTIC) and Periscope Tuning Framework-PTF.

National projects: 2, European: 1

International conferences: 11, Journal papers: 2

Tools: MATE, ELASTIC, PTF

International Presentations: 5