Yu-Chi Ho received his S.B. and S.M. degrees in Electrical Engineering from M.I.T. and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. Since 1969 he has been Gordon McKay Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics. In 1988, he was appointed to the T. Jefferson Coolidge Chair in Applied Mathematics and Gordon McKay Professor of Systems Engineering at Harvard and as visiting professor to the Cockrell Family Regent's Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin. In 2001, he retired from teaching duties at Harvard and became a Research Professor (2001-2006), Professor Emeritus (2007-date) and also was appointed to be a chair professor and chief scientist (part time), at the Center for Intelligent and Networked Systems (CFINS), Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing China. Since 2007 he has also begun blogging regularly on Science Net China and his book of blog articles 2007-2009 has just been published by Tsin ghua University Press.
He has published over 140 articles and six books, one of which (co-authored with A.E. Bryson, Jr.) has been translated into both Russian and Chinese and made the list of Citation Classics as one of the most referenced works on the subject of optimal control. He is on the editorial boards of several international journals and is the founding editor of the international Journal on Discrete Event Dynamic Systems. He is the recipient of various fellowships and awards including the Guggenheim (1970), the IEEE Field Award for Control Engineering and Science (1989), the Chiang Technology Achievement Award (1993), the American Automatic Control Council Bellman Control Heritage Award (1999), the ASME Rufus Oldenburger Award (1999), and the Isaacs Award from the International Society of Dynamic Games (2004). He is an IEEE Life Fellow and an INFORMS Inaugural Fellow, a Distinguished Member of the IEEE Control Systems Society, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and an elected foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In addition to services on various governmental and industrial panels, and professional society administrative bodies, he was the program chairman for the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control 1972, the general chairman of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Conference 1987, President of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society in 1988.

Xi-Ren Cao received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University, in 1981 and 1984, respectively, where he was a research fellow from 1984 to 1986. He then worked as a consultant engineer/engineering manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, Massachusetts, U.S.A, until October 1993. Then he joined the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), where he is currently chair professor, director of the Research Center for Networking. He held visiting positions at Harvard University, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, AT&T Labs, University of Maryland at College Park, University of Notre Dame, Tsinghua University, University of Science and Technology of China, and other universities.

Professor Cao owns three patents in data- and tele- communications and published three books in the area of stochastic learning and optimization and discrete event dynamic systems: “Stochastic Learning and Optimization - A Sensitivity-Based Approach,” Springer, 2007, “Realization Probabilities - the Dynamics of Queuing Systems,” Springer Verlag, 1994, and “Perturbation Analysis of Discrete-Event Dynamic Systems,” Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991 (co-authored with Y. C. Ho). He received the Outstanding Transactions Paper Award from the IEEE Control System Society in 1987, the Outstanding Publication Award from the Institution of Management Science in 1990, and the Outstanding Service Award from IFAC in 2008. He was elected as a Fellow of IEEE in 1995, and as a Fellow of IFAC in 2008. He is Editor-in-Chief of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems: Theory and Applications, Associate Editor at Large of IEEE Transactions of Automatic Control, and he served as the Chairman of IEEE Fellow Evaluation Committee of IEEE Control System Society (2005-2007), and member on the Board of Governors of IEEE Control Systems Society. He is the chairman of IFAC Coordinating Committee on Systems and Signals (2206-2011) and on the Technical Board of IFAC, He is/was associate editor of a number of international journals and chairman of a few technical committees of international professional societies. His current research areas include discrete event dynamic systems, stochastic learning and optimisation, performance analysis of communication systems, signal processing, and financial engineering.

Christos G. Cassandras is Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Boston University. He is Head of the Division of Systems Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and co-founder of Boston University’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE). He received degrees from Yale University, Stanford University, and Harvard University. In 1982-84 he was with ITP Boston, Inc. where he worked on the design of automated manufacturing systems. In 1984-1996 he was a faculty member at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts/Amherst. He specializes in the areas of discrete event and hybrid systems, cooperative control, stochastic optimization, and computer simulation, with applications to computer and sensor networks, manufacturing systems, and transportation systems. He has published about 400 refereed papers in these areas, and six books. In addition to his academic activities, he has worked extensively with industrial organizations on various systems integration projects and the development of decision-support software. He has most recently collaborated with The MathWorks, Inc. in the development of the discrete event and hybrid system simulator SimEvents.

Chun-Hung Chen received his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 1994. He is currently a Professor at George Mason University. Dr. Chen was an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania before joining GMU. He was also a professor with National Taiwan University (Electrical Eng. and Industrial Eng.) from 2011-14. Dr. Chen was awarded with “National Thousand Talents” (国家千人) in 2011 (via Peking University). Sponsored by NSF, NIH, DOE, NASA, FAA, Missile Defense Agency, and Air Force in US, he has worked on the development of very efficient methodology for simulation-based decision making and its applications. He has served as a Department Editor for IIE Transactions, Department Editor for Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research, Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Area Editor for Journal of Simulation Modeling Practice and Theory, Advisory Editor for International Journal of Simulation and Process Modeling, and Advisory Editor for Journal of Traffic and Transportation Engineering. Dr. Chen is the author of two books, including a best seller: “Stochastic Simulation Optimization: An Optimal Computing Budget Allocation”. He is an IEEE Fellow.

Professor Guanrong CHEN is a chair professor and the founding director of the Research Centre for Chaos and Complex Networks at City University of Hong Kong. He received the MS degree in computer science from Sun Yat-sen University, China in 1981 and the PhD degree in applied mathematics from Texas A&M University in 1987.

Edwin K. P. Chong received the B.E. degree with First Class Honors from the University of Adelaide, South Australia, in 1987; and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in 1989 and 1991, respectively, both from Princeton University, where he held an IBM Fellowship. He joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University in 1991. Since August 2001, he has been a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Mathematics at Colorado State University. He coauthored the best-selling book, An Introduction to Optimization (4th Edition, Wiley-Interscience, 2013). He received the NSF CAREER Award in 1995 and the ASEE Frederick Emmons Terman Award in 1998. He was a co-recipient of the 2004 Best Paper Award for a paper in the journal Computer Networks. In 2010, he received the IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Member Award.
Professor Chong is a Fellow of IEEE. He was the founding chairman of the IEEE Control Systems Society Technical Committee on Discrete Event Systems, and served as an IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer. He was a Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control until 2016. He was the General Chair for the 2011 Joint 50th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control Conference. He currently serves as President of the IEEE Control Systems Society.

Siyang Gao received the B.S. degree in Mathematics from Peking University, Beijing, China, in 2009, and the Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, in 2014. Dr. Gao is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, City University of Hong Kong. His research is devoted to simulation-based optimization, global optimization and their applications in healthcare management. His work has appeared in Operations Research, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Automatica, and etc. Dr. Gao is a member of INFORMS and IEEE.

Professor Jeff Hong is a Chair Professor of Management Sciences with a joint appointment with Department of Economics and Finance and Department of Management Sciences in College of Business at City University of Hong Kong (CityU). Before joining CityU, he was a Professor in Department of Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Professor Hong’s research interests include stochastic optimization and simulation, financial engineering, and business analytics.

Jie Huang studied at Fuzhou University (Diploma, 1980), Nanjing University of Science and Technology (Master, 1982), and the Johns Hopkins University (PhD, 1990), respectively. He is now Choh-Ming Li Professor of Mechanical and Automation Engineering and Chairman of the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include automatic control, robotics and automation, and guidance and control of flight vehicles. He is a Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, CAA, and HKIE.

Lucy Pao is a Professor in the Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering Department at the University of Colorado Boulder in the USA. She has completed sabbaticals at Harvard University (2001-2002), the University of California, Berkeley (2008), the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (2009), the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst, Germany (2016-2017) and the ForWind Center for Wind Energy Research at Oldenburg University (2016-2017). She earned B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Her research has primarily focused on combined feedforward and feedback control of flexible structures, with applications ranging from atomic force microscopy to disk drives to digital tape drives to megawatt wind turbines and wind farms. She is a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Selected recent awards include the 2012 IEEE Control Systems Magazine Outstanding Paper Award (with K. Johnson), the 2015 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Journal on Control and Optimization Best Paper Prize (with J. Marden and H. P. Young), the 2017 Control Engineering Practice Award from the American Automatic Control Council, and the Scientific Award 2017 from the European Academy of Wind Energy. Selected professional society activities include being a Fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (2009-present), General Chair of the 2013 American Control Conference, member of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) Board of Governors (2011-2013 and 2015), IEEE CSS Fellow Nominations Chair (2016-present), and member of the IFAC Executive Board (2017-2020).

Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison and also the founding chair of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at Peking University of China. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1992. Her research interests include simulation modeling and large-scale optimization with applications to operational planning and scheduling and digital supply chain management. She has developed a novel optimization framework, the Nested Partitions Method that has been applied to many large-scale and complex systems optimization problems. Her research work has been funded by NSF, NSFC, NIH, AFSOR, ONR, MOST of China, State of Wisconsin, and many private industrial companies. Her research work has been published on journals such as Operations Research, Management Science, JDEDS, IIE Trans. and IEEE Trans. She is currently serving as Editor for IEEE Trans on Automation Science and Engineering. She served on the editorial board for Manufacturing & Service Operations Management and INFORMS Journal on Computing. She was General Chair, co-Chair, and program committee for many national and international conferences. She is also one of the inventors for a set of digital management systems including Manufacturing Execution Optimization (MEO), Maintenance Repair & Overhaul Optimization (MRO2), and Dynamic Manufacturing Critical-Path Time (DMCT). She is the recipient of the Vilas Associate Award and IEEE fellow.

Professor Houmin Yan is Dean of the College of Business and Chair Professor of Management Sciences at City University of Hong Kong. Prior to joining CityU he was a Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was the Associate Director and Science Advisor for the Hong Kong Government R&D Center for Logistics and Supply Chain Management Enablibing Techonologies. He was also a tenured Associate Professor at the School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas. Professor Yan's main research areas are stochastic models, simulations, and supply chain management. He has published extensively in top-tier internation journals and has been awarded the Best Paper Prizes by professional societies such as the Production and Operations Management Society (POMs) in 2004 and Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) in 2005 and 2012. He consults a number of international and local enterprises. Professor Yan received his B.S. and M.S. from Tsinghua University and his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.

David D. Yao is the Piyasombatkul Family Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University, where he is the founding chair of the Financial and Business Analytics Center at Columbia Data Science Institute. Author/co-author of over 200 scientific publications, he is a principal investigator of over thirty grants and contracts from government agencies and industrial sources, and a holder of eight U.S. patents. Professor Yao's teaching and research interests are in operations research, applied probability and financial engineering, focusing on the analysis, design and control of stochastic systems, such as health care systems, communication networks, production systems and supply chains, and related resource control and risk management issues.

His honors and awards include the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Franz Edelman Award from the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences, SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Outstanding Technical Achievement Award from IBM Research, Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates, and the IBM Faculty Award.

He is an IEEE Fellow, an INFORMS Fellow, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He currently serves on the Board on Mathematical Sciences and Analytics of the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

Si Zhang, Associate Professor in the School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China. She received her BEng from the Department of Industrial Engineering at Nanjing University in 2008, and her Ph.D. from Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering of the National University of Singapore in 2013. Her research focuses on simulation optimization, especially the design and implementation of computing budget allocation algorithms for large-scale simulation optimization problems.

Qianchuan Zhao received the B.E. degree in automatic control in July 1992, the B.S. degree in applied mathematics in July 1992, and MS and Ph.D. degrees in control theory and its applications in July 1996, all from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He is currently a Professor and Director of the Center for Intelligent and Networked Systems (CFINS), Department of Automation, Tsinghua University. He was a Visiting Scholar at Carnegie Mellon University (worked with Prof. Bruce Krogh), Pittsburgh, PA, and Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, in 2000 and 2002, respectively. He was a Visiting Professor at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 2006. His current research focuses on the modeling, control and optimization of complex networked systems. He has published more than 80 research papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He is a recipient of the 4th HO PAN QING YI best paper award in DEDS field in the year 2000, the 9th Guan Zhao-Zhi Award best paper award in the year 2003 and the 2005 UTRC Outstanding Achievement Award, 2009 national natural science second award of China and 2013 national natural science second award by Ministry of education in China. Dr. Zhao is an associate editor for the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, an associate editor for the joint conference CDC-ECC’05 and International Program Committee member for WODES'04. He is a senior member of IEEE.