Dr. Xu received his Ph.D. degree in the area of Optical Communications and Intelligent Signal Processing in School of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), at Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden. Following this, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at KTH and RISE Acreo Sweden and a visiting Research Fellow at Technical University of Denmark (DTU). After that, he worked as a Senior Research Fellow in Optical Networks Group (ONG) at University College London (UCL). His current research interests include optical communication systems and networks, intelligent signal processing, machine learning techniques, optical sensing systems and opto-electronics. He is a Senior Member of American Physical Society (APS) and a Fellow of Higher Education Academy. Dr. Xu is an Associate Editor of IEEE Access and Journal of the European Optical Society-RP. He has been the Chair of Optics in Digital Systems Technical Group in Optical Society of America (Optica), and the TPC co-chair/members of over 20 IEEE conferences, e.g. GLOBECOM, ICC etc. He is the project manager for an EU Horizon 2020 Grant and a UK National Grid Project. He has published over 160 journal and conference papers (including over 30 invited) and 2 invited book chapters.

Dr.Jian Wang is currently a Professor and servers as the Head of the Cross-Media Big Data Joint Laboratory with the College of Science, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao, China. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computational Mathematics from Dalian University of Technology, China. His research interests include computational intelligence, machine learning, pattern recognition, deep learning, differential programming, clustering, fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation. He was awarded several grants from the National Science Foundation of China, National Key Research and Development Program of China, Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities. Prof. Wang serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (IF: 8.793), International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics (IF: 3.753), and Journal of Applied Computer Science Methods. He also serves on the Editorial Board for the Neural Computing & Applications (IF: 4.774) and Complex & Intelligent Systems (IF: 3.791). In addition, He has served as the General Chair, the Program Chair, and the Co-Program Chair of several conferences such as the International Symposium on New Trends in Computational Intelligence, IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence and International Symposium on Neural Networks.

Liang Feng received the Ph.D degree from the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2014. He is currently a Professor at the College of Computer Science, Chongqing University, China. His research interests mainly include Computational and Artificial Intelligence, Memetic Computing, Big Data Optimization and Learning, as well as Transfer Learning and Optimization. He has been honored with the 2019 IEEE TEVC Outstanding Paper Award, the 2023 IEEE TETCI Outstanding Paper Award, and the 2024 IEEE CIM Outstanding Paper Award. He is Associate Editor of the IEEE TEVC, IEEE TETCI, IEEE CIM, Memetic Computing, etc. He is also the founding Chair of the IEEE CIS Intelligent Systems Applications Technical Committee Task Force on “Transfer Learning & Transfer Optimization”.