Prof. I.A. Karimi
Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering
National University of Singapore

Prof I.A. Karimi is a BTech graduate of Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India. He received his PhD from Purdue University, USA, in 1984. After his PhD, he was a faculty at Northwestern University, a leading private university in USA, for six years. Thereafter, he held a senior research position in DuPont, USA for several years. He is currently a faculty member of the National University of Singapore's Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering.
A leading optimization expert with world-wide recognition in the areas of design, planning, and scheduling in batch chemical industry, Prof Karimi has published extensively in a variety of top-tier, international journals both in the fields of chemical engineering and operations research & management. He has accumulated considerable industry experience in chemical logistics and supply chain management. During his tenure at NUS, he has led several industry-collaborative research and consulting projects with a variety of chemical and logistics companies and agencies including Sumitomo Bakelite, Singapore refining company, DuPont, Shell, Honeywell, Sembcorp Utilities & Terminals, Vopak, Danzas, GlaxoSmithKline, JTC and Stolt-Nielson.

With his unique blend of more than twenty years of research and consulting experience in academia and industry, Prof Karimi has been instrumental in developing several novel and efficient optimization models and methodologies for decision support on many complex and practical problems in noncontinuous process design and operation, logistics and supply chain management.

Associate Prof. Lau Hoong Chuin
Singapore Management University

Lau Hoong Chuin is a Singapore government scholar who received his doctorate degree in Computer Science from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan) in 1996. He was posted to the Kent Ridge Digital Labs (now I2R) as senior member of research staff where he led a group in transportation and logistics research and subsequently spinned off a software company with the technologies developed. In 1999, he joined the National University of Singapore where he held joint appointments as Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and Director of Defence Logistics at The Logistics Institute Asia Pacific. In 2005, he joined the Singapore Management University as Associate Professor in the School of Information Systems. His research interests include artificial intelligence and operations research, with application to transportation, logistics and supply chain management problems. He has published more than 70 papers in AI and OR journals and refereed international conferences. He developed optimization software that have been deployed in local companies such as MINDEF, PSA, LTA and CWT.
 

Assistant Prof. Cheng Shih-fen
Singapore Management University

Cheng Shih-Fen received his B.S.E. degree in mechanical engineering from National Taiwan University, and Ph.D. degree in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan. He is currently an Assistant Professor of information systems with Singapore Management University. His research focuses on the optimization of complex systems in engineering and business domains via game-theoretic and market-based approaches. He is particularly interested in the application areas of transportation, manufacturing, and decentralized resource allocation.
 

Prof. Michael Wellman
Computer Science & Engineering
University of Michigan

Prof. Michael Wellman received a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988 for his work in qualitative probabilistic reasoning and decision-theoretic planning. From 1988 to 1992, Wellman conducted research in these areas at the USAF's Wright Laboratory. For the past 15+ years, his research has focused on computational market mechanisms for distributed decision making and electronic commerce. As Chief Market Technologist for TradingDynamics, Inc. (now part of Ariba), he designed configurable auction technology for dynamic business-to-business commerce. Wellman previously served as Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (SIGecom), and as Executive Editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery.