Mohammed Usman received his Ph.D. from University of Strathclyde, UK. He has more than a decade of experience in academics and academic administration. He is a senior member of IEEE and IEEE Communications Society. He has been the TPC chair and the organizing chair for IEEE conferences and actively involved in IEEE activities. He is currently working as an assistant professor in the department of Electrical Engineering at King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia. He received the academic excellence award from the College of Engineering at King Khalid University and also received the award for best project in 2016. A senior design project under his supervision received the talent and innovation award in 2018. His research is focused on technologies for next-generation wireless networks, signal processing for biomedical application, probabilistic modelling, and channel coding. Xiao-Zhi Gao received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the Harbin Institute of Technology, China, in 1993 and 1996, respectively. He obtained his D.Sc. (Tech.) degree from the Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University), Finland, in 1999. He has been working as a professor at the University of Eastern Finland, Finland, since 2018. He is also a guest professor at the Harbin Institute of Technology, Beijing Normal University, and Shanghai Maritime University, China. Prof. Gao has published more than 400 technical papers in refereed journals and international conferences. His research interests are nature-inspired computing methods with their applications in optimization, data mining, machine learning, control, signal processing, and industrial electronics.
