Panos Pardalos is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida, USA. Additionally, he is the Paul and Heidi Brown Preeminent Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He is also an affiliated faculty member of the Computer and Information Science Department, the Hellenic Studies Center, and the Biomedical Engineering Program. He is also the Director of the Center for Applied Optimization. Professor Pardalos is a world-leading expert in global and combinatorial optimization.  He is also a member of several  Academies of Sciences, and he holds several honorary PhD degrees and affiliations. He is the Founding Editor of Optimization Letters, Energy Systems, and Co-Founder of the International Journal of Global Optimization, and Computational Management Science. His recent research interests include network design problems, optimization in telecommunications, e-commerce, data mining, biomedical applications, and massive computing. Ilias S. Kotsireas serves as a Full Professor of Computer Science at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. In 2002 he founded the CARGO Lab and serves as its director for more than 15 years. He has over 150 refereed journal and conference publications, chapters in books, edited books, and special issues of journals, in the research areas of Computational Algebra, Metaheuristics, High-Performance Computing, Dynamical Systems and Combinatorial Design Theory. He serves on the Editorial Board of 7 international journals. He serves as the Managing Editor of a Springer journal and as the Editor-in-Chief of a Springer journal and a Birkhauser book series. He has organized a very large number of international conferences in Europe, North America and Asia, often serving as a Program Committee Chair or General Chair.  Yike Guo is a Professor of Computing Science in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, UK. He is the founding Director of the Data Science Institute at Imperial College, as well as leading the Discovery Science Group in the department. Professor Guo also holds the position of CTO of the tranSMART Foundation, a global open source community using and developing data sharing and analytics technology for translational medicine. He received a first-class honours degree in Computing Science from Tsinghua University, China, in 1985 and received his PhD in Computational Logic from Imperial College in 1993 under the supervision of Professor John Darlington. He founded InforSense, a software company for life science and health care data analysis, and served as CEO for several years before the company's merger with IDBS, a global advanced R&D software provider, in 2009. He has been working on technology and platforms for scientific data analysis since the mid-1990s, where his research focuses on knowledge discovery, data mining and large-scale data management. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society. William Knottenbelt is a Professor of Applied Quantitative Analysis in the Department of Computing at Imperial College, London, UK. His broad area of research interest is the application of mathematical modelling techniques to real life systems. Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to, modelling and optimisation in parallel queuing systems, modelling of storage systems, stochastic modelling of sport, stochastic modelling of healthcare systems, resource allocation and control in cloud-computing environments, numerical solution of Markov-models and specification techniques for SLA specification, compliance prediction and monitoring.