Chai Tianyou received the Ph.D. degree in control theory and engineering from Northeastern University, Shenyang, China, in 1985.
He has been with the Research Center of Automation, Northeastern University since 1985, where he became a Professor in 1988 and a Chair Professor in 2004. He is the founder and Director of the Research Center of Automation, which became a National Engineering and Technology Research Center in 1997 and The State Key Laboratory of Synthetical Automation for Process Industries in 2011. He has made a number of important contributions in control technologies and applications. He has published two monographs，130 peer reviewed international journal papers and around 224 international conference papers. He has been invited to deliver more than 30 plenary speeches in international conferences of IFAC and IEEE.  His  current research interests include adaptive control, intelligent decoupling control, integrated plant control and system, and the development of control technologies with applications to various industrial processes.
Prof. Chai is a member of Chinese Academy of Engineering, an academician of International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, IEEE Fellow and IFAC Fellow. He is a distinguished visiting fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering (UK) and an invitation fellow of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). For his contributions, he has won three prestigious awards of National Science and Technology Progress, the 2002 Technological Science Progress Award from Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation, the 2007 Industry Award for Excellence in Transitional Control Research from IEEE Control Systems Society and the 2010 Yang Jia-Chi Science and Technology Award from Chinese Association of Automation.

Wolfgang Maass holds a Phd (1974) and Habilitation (1978) in Mathematics from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. From 1979 to 1984, he conducted research at MIT, the University of Chicago, and UC Berkeley, as a Heisenberg Fellow of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. He then joined the faculty of the University of Illinois in Chicago, where he served as an Associate Professor (1982-1986) and Full Professor (1986-1993). Since 1991, he has been Professor of Computer Science at the Graz University of Technology in Austria, where he became Head of the Institute für Grundlagen der Informationsverarbeitung (Institute for Theoretical Computer Science) in 1992. Maas was a Sloan Fellow at the Computational Neurobiology Lab of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California in 1997-1998. He was a Visiting Professor at the Brain-Mind Institute at EPFL (2002-2003 and 2012). Since 2005, he has been an Adjunct Fellow of the Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies (FIAS). Maass was a Member of the Board of Governors of the International Neural Network Society (2008-2012), and has been a Member of the Academia Europaea since 2013. He has been the Editor of Machine Learning (1995-1997), Archive for Mathematical Logic (1987-2000), and Biological Cybernetics (2006-present). Maass has served on the editorial boards of Machine Learning (1998-2000), Neurocomputing (1994-2007), and Cognitive Neurodymamics (2006-present). He was Associate Editor of the Journal of Computer and System Sciences (1992-2014).

Prof Xin Yao is the Vice-President (Research and Innovation) and the Tong Tin Sun Chair Professor of Machine Learning at Lingnan University. Previously, he held academic positions at the Southern University of Science and Technology (China), the University of Birmingham (UK), Australian Defence Force Academy, University College, the University of New South Wales (Australia), and the University of Science and Technology of China (China). Prof Yao is an internationally renowned scholar in the field of artificial intelligence and his research work has received several awards, including the 2001 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award, the 2011 IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems Outstanding Paper Award, and the 2010, 2016, and 2017 IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation Outstanding Paper Awards. Prof Yao was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2003. He won the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2012, the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award in 2013, and the prestigious IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award in 2020. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation in 2003-08 and the President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society in 2014-15. He was listed in the World's Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University since 2021 and named Highly Cited Researcher in 2022 and 2023. According to Google Scholar, his research has been cited over 76,000 times by other scholars, with an H-index of 126.