Prof. Hiroshi Iskikawa

Tokyo Metropolitan University

Japan

Hiroshi Ishikawa received the B.S. and Ph.D degrees in Information Science from the University of Tokyo. After working for Fujitsu Laboratories and being a full professor of Shizuoka University, he is now a full professor of Tokyo Metropolitan University from April, 2013. His research interests include database, data mining, social media, and big data. He has published actively in international, refereed journals and conferences, such as ACM TODS, IEEE TKDE, VLDB, IEEE ICDE, and ACM SIGSPATIAL. He has authored some books, which include books entitled Social Big Data Mining (CRC, forthcoming), Object-Oriented Database System (Springer-Verlag), databases (Morikita Publishing), an introduction to social big data science (Corona Publishing), data mining and collective intelligence (Kyoritsu Shuppan), and social big data mining (CRC Press).

He received the Sakai Memorial Distinguished Award from IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan) and the Director General Award from Science and Technology Agency of Japan. He was an invited professor at the Polytechnic School of the University of Nantes, France, twice. He was a trustee board member of the Database Society of Japan, an editorial board member of VLDB Journal, the chairman of the SIG on Database Systems of IPSJ, and an editor-in-chief of IPSJ Trans. on Databases. He is fellows of IPSJ and IEICE (The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers) and members of ACM and IEEE.

Prof. Panos Kalnis
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
Saudi Arabia

Panos Kalnis is Professor of Computer Science in the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). In 2009 he was visiting assistant professor in the Dept. of Computer Science, Stanford University. Before that, he was assistant professor in the Dept. of Computer Science, National University of Singapore (NUS). In the past he was involved in the designing and testing of VLSI chips in the Computer Technology Institute, Greece. He also worked in several companies on database designing, e-commerce projects and web applications. From 2013 to 2015 he was an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. Currently, he serves on the editorial board of the VLDB Journal and the Data Science and Engineering Journal. He received his Diploma in Computer Engineering from the Computer Engineering and Informatics Dept., Univ. of Patras, Greece in 1998 and his PhD from the Computer Science Dept., Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2002. His research interests include Databases, Cloud Computing, Parallel and Distributed Systems, Large Graphs and Long Sequences.

Prof. Ernesto Damiani

EBTIC - Khalifa University - Abu Dhabi

UAE

Ernesto Damiani is currently  Director of the Information Security Research Center at Khalifa University of Technology, Abu Dhabi. He is the leader of the Big Data Initiative at the Etisalat British Telecom Innovation Center (EBTIC). Ernesto is on extended leave from the Department of Computer Science, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy, where he leads the SESAR research lab (http://sesar.di.unimi.it) and has served the Head of the Ph.D. Program in Computer Science for many years . Ernesto's research interests include secure cloud-based architectures, privacy-preserving Big Data analytics and Cyber-Physical Systems security.Ernesto holds/has held visiting positions at a number of international institutions, including George Mason University in Virginia, US, Tokyo Denki University, Japan, LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA) at Lyon, France. He is a Fellow of the Japanese Society for the Progress of Science. Ernesto is currently the Principal Investigator of the Toreador project, funded by the European Commission in the framework of the  ICT-16-2015: Big data - Research call.
He  has been Principal Investigator in a number of large-scale research projects funded by the European Commission, the Italian Ministry of Research and by private companies such as British Telecom, Cisco Systems, SAP, Telecom Italia, Siemens Networks (now Nokia Siemens) and many others. Ernesto serves in the editorial board of several international journals; among others, he is the EIC of the International Journal on Big Data and of the International Journal of Knowledge and Learning. He is Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Service-oriented Computing and of the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems. Ernesto is a senior member of the IEEE and served as Vice-Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Industrial Informatics. In 2008, Ernesto was nominated ACM Distinguished Scientist and received the Chester Sall Award from the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society. Ernesto has co-authored over 350 scientific papers and many international patents and books, including "Open Source Systems Security Certification" (Springer 2009).