Bio: Mengjie Zhang is a Fellow of Royal Society of New Zealan , a Fellow of Engineering New Zealan , a Fellow of IEEE, an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, Professor of Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington, where he heads the interdisciplinary Evolutionary Computation and Machine Learning Research Group. He is also the Director of the Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University. His research is mainly focused on AI, machine learning and big data. He received the “Evo* Award for Outstanding Contribution to Evolutionary Computation in Europe 2023”, the “2024 Australasian Artificial Intelligence Distinguished Research Contribution Award”, and the ACM SIGEVO Outstanding Contribution Award in 2025.  He is also a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher.  Since 2007, he has been listed as a top five (currently No. 2) world genetic programming researchers by the GP bibliography. Prof Zhang is the Chair for IEEE CIS Awards Committee. He is also a past Chair of the IEEE CIS Intelligent Systems Applications Technical Committee, the Emergent Technologies Technical Committee and the Evolutionary Computation Technical Committee, a past Chair for IEEE CIS PubsCom Strategic Planning subcommittee, and the founding chair of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Chapter in New Zealand.

Bio: Nelishia Pillay is a Professor at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She holds the Multichoice Joint-Chair in Machine Learning and SARChI Chair in Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Development. She is currently associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine and ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization. Her research areas include hyper-heuristics, automated design of machine learning and search techniques, transfer learning, combinatorial optimization, genetic programming, genetic algorithms and machine learning and optimization for sustainable development. These are the focus areas of the NICOG (Nature-Inspired Computing Optimization) research group which she has established. 

Bio: Lifang He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University. She received the B.S. degree in Computational Mathematics from Northwest Normal University in 2009, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from South China University of Technology in 2014. Before joining Lehigh, she was a postdoc associate in the Perelman School of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania, and the Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University. Her research interests primarily focus on machine learning/deep learning, multimodal data mining, and tensor analysis, with major applications in social science and neuroscience. She has published over 200 papers in refereed journals and conferences, achieving an H-index of 54 and more than 1,3500 citations. Dr. He also actively contributes to the scientific community not only as a reviewer and program committee member for prestigious journals and conferences, including IEEE TMI, TPAMI, TNNLS, TKDE, Bioinformatics, NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, and CVPR, but also as a (co)organizer for multiple conferences such as PSB, CHIL, SDM and IEEE SSCI. She currently serves as Associate Editor for the International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence in Radiology for Frontiers, and she is the chair of the Computer Science Chapter at the IEEE Lehigh Valley Section.

Bio: Dr. Bi Ying is currently a professor at Zhengzhou University. She has published two authored boo and 100+ papers in SCI/EI journals or conferences. She has received several awards, including the IEEE CIS Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award. She has served as an associate editor or editorial board member for seven journals, including IEEE TEVC, IEEE TAI, IEEE TASE and Applied Soft Computing. She serves as the vice chair of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Evolutionary Computer Vision and Image Processing. She was the panel chair of IEEE CEC 2026, LBA chair of GECCO 2026, publicity chair of PRICAI 2025, program chair of IVCNZ 2025, workshop chair of IEEE CEC 2024, student affairs chair of GECCO 2023, GECCO 2024, and student workshop chair of GECCO 2024.

Bio: Dr. Zhiguang Cao is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University (SMU). He received his Ph.D. from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2017. His research centers on AI for Optimization (AI4Opt), where deep learning techniques (including LLM) are applied to solve classical combinatorial optimization problems such as the vehicle routing, job-shop scheduling, and bin packing. Dr. Cao has published 30+ papers at ICML, NeurIPS and ICLR, where he also serves regularly as an Area Chair. More information about Dr. Cao can be found here: https://zhiguangcaosg.github.io/