Towards a Theoretical Framework of Autonomous Systems Underpinned by Intelligence and Systems Sciences

Yingxu Wang (M’99–SM’08) is a Full Professor of both Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Hotchkiss Brain Institute at University of Calgary, Canada. He received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Nottingham Trent University, UK, in 1998 and B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Tongji (Shanghai Tiedao) University in 1983. He is elected Fellows of British Computer Society (BCS), ICICC, and World Innovation Foundation (UK), and Senior Members of IEEE/ACM. He has been a Full Professor since 1994. He has held visiting professor appointments at Oxford University (1995, 2019–2022), Stanford University (2008, 2016), UC Berkeley (2008), and MIT (2012). He is the Founding President of International Institute of Cognitive Informatics and Cognitive Computing (ICICC) since 2008. His expertise is across computational intelligence, cognitive systems, brain science, autonomous systems, software science, intelligent mathematics, and cognitive cybernetics. He is an Associate Editor and the IEEE Computer Society representative to the steering committee for IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Development Systems (TDCS), Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on System, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems (TSMC-Systems), and Associate Editor of IEEE System, Man, and Cybernetics Magazine. He has published 560+ peer reviewed papers and 36 books. He has presented 58 invited keynote speeches in international conferences. He has served as honorary, general, and program chairs for 38 international conferences and led 10+ international, European, and Canadian research projects as PI. His work has been cited for 10600+ times. He is recognized by Research Gate as among top 2.5% scholars worldwide with a 319800+ reader index. He has been a representative of Canada at 2018 IEEE Meeting of Global Brain Initiatives (MGBI’18)

Ming Hou (M’05–SM’07) obtained the Ph.D in human factors from the University of Toronto, Canada, in 2002. Currently he is a Fellow Defence Scientist at Defence Research & Development Canada and the Principal Authority of Human-Technology Interactions within the Department of National Defence, Canada. He is responsible for providing science-based advice at national and international levels to the Canadian Armed Forces and coalition partners about the investment in and application of advanced technologies for human-machine systems requirements. Dr. Hou is an Integrator for the Canadian government $16 billion IDEaS program and one of the three Scientific Advisors to the National Centre of Expertise in Human Systems Performance with responsibilities for guiding national R&D activities in Automation, Robotics, and Telepresence. His research interests include applied cognition, human interaction with intelligent adaptive systems, human-autonomy/AI teaming, unmanned/autonomous systems, intelligent tutoring systems, training, telepresence, and 3D virtual and mixed reality. His book: “Intelligent Adaptive Systems: An Interaction-Centered Design Perspective” became a guiding document to the development of Standard Recommendations on “NATO Human Systems Integration Guidance for UAS”, “NATO Sense and Avoid Guidance”, and “NATO UAS Human Factors Experimentation Guidebook”. Dr. Hou delivers the invited NATO Lecture Series on “UAVs: Technological Challenges, Concepts of Operations, and Regulatory Issues”. Dr. Hou also serves for multiple international associations/programs as a chair and a board member

Konstantinos N. Plataniotis (S’93–M’95–SM’03–F’12) is currently a Professor and the Bell Canada Chair in multimedia with the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Canada. He is also the Founder and the Inaugural Director-Research for the Identity, Privacy and Security Institute (IPSI), University of Toronto, where he was the Director for the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI), from January 2010 to July 2012. He is a registered Professional Engineer in Ontario. Among his publications in these fields are the recent books WLAN Positioning Systems (2012) and Multi-Linear Subspace Learning: Reduction of Multidimensional Data (2013). His research interests include knowledge and digital media design, multimedia systems, biometrics, image and signal processing, communications systems, and pattern recognition. Dr. Plataniotis is a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada. He has served as the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters, and as the Technical Co-Chair for the IEEE 2013 International Conference in Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. He was the Vice President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society for Membership from 2014 to 2016. He was the General Co-Chair of the 2017 IEEE GlobalSIP, the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2018), and is the General Co-Chair of the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2021)

Sam Kwong (F’14) received the B.Sc. degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA, in 1983, the M.A.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1985, and the Ph.D. degree from the Fernuniversität Hagen, Germany, in 1996. From 1985 to 1987, he was a Diagnostic Engineer with Control Data Canada, where he designed the diagnostic software to detect the manufacture faults of the VLSI chips in the Cyber 430 machine. He later joined the Bell Northern Research Canada as a Member of Scientific Staff, where he worked on both the DMS-100 voice network and the DPN-100 data network project. In 1990, he joined the City University of Hong Kong as a Lecturer in the Department of Electronic Engineering. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He was responsible of the software design of the first handheld GSM mobile phone consultancy project in which it was one of the largest consultancy projects at the City University of Hong Kong in 1996. He coauthored 3 research books on genetic algorithms, 8 book chapters, and over 200 technical papers. He has been a consultant to several companies in telecommunications. Prof. Kwong was awarded the Best Paper Award for his paper entitled “Multiobjective Optimization of Radio-to-Fiber Repeater Placement Using a Jumping Gene Algorithm” at the IEEE International Conference on Industrial Technology (ICIT’05), Hong Kong, China, in 2005. In addition, he received the Best Paper Award at the 1999 BioInformatics Workshop, Tokyo, for the paper entitled “A Compression Algorithm for DNA Sequences and Its Application in Genome Comparison” in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the conference. Currently, he is the Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, and the Journal of Information Science. Currently, he is the Head and Professor of the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, China. Prof. Kwong was elevated to IEEE Fellow for his contributions on optimization techniques for cybernetics and video coding in 2014

Henry Leung (F’15) is a Professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Calgary, Canada. Before joining U of C, he was with the Department of National Defence (DND) of Canada as a Defence Scientist. His current research interests include information fusion, machine learning, IoT, nonlinear dynamics, robotics, signal and image processing. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine and the Journal of Sensors. He is the Topic Editor on “Robotic Sensors” of the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems. He is the Editor of the Springer book series on “Information Fusion and Data Science”. He is a Fellow of IEEE and SPIE

Edward Tunstel (S’92–M’96–SM’99–F’12) is an IEEE Fellow and was 2018–2019 president of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society. He is an Associate Director of robotics at the United Technologies Research Center, which he joined in 2017 after working for a decade at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, where he served as senior roboticist in its research department and Intelligent Systems Center and as space robotics and autonomous control lead in its space department. He was previously with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 18 years, where he was a senior robotics engineer, group leader of its Advanced Robotic Controls Group, and flight systems engineer responsible for autonomous navigation, mobility and robotic arm subsystems for NASA Mars Exploration Rover missions. He maintains expertise in robotics and intelligent systems with current research interests in mobile robot navigation, autonomous control, cooperative robotics, robotic systems engineering, and soft computing applications to autonomous systems. He has authored more than 160 technical publications and co-edited/-authored five books in these areas. He received bachelor and master degrees in mechanical engineering from Howard University, USA, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from University of New Mexico, USA

Imre J. Rudas (M’90–SM’95–F’01) graduated in Budapest in 1971 in mechanical engineering, received the master degree in mathematics from the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, the Ph.D. degree in robotics from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1987, while the doctor of science degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2004. He served as the Rector of Budapest Tech from 2003 till 2010. He was the Founder of Óbuda University, the successor of Budapest Tech and was elected as the first Rector in the period 2010–2014. He served as the President of the Hungarian Rector’s Conference and Member of European University Association Steering Committee in 2008. He is Rudolf Kalman Distinguished Professor, Rector Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Óbuda University. He is a Fellow of IEEE and the President of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society in 2020–2021. He is the Senior Past Chair of IEEE Hungary Section. He serves as an editor of some scientific journals, and runs several annual IEEE conferences. He received many awards, among others the Denes Gábor award in 2006, John von Neumann Award in 2006, Hungarian Order of Merit in 2009 and Pro Óbuda award in 2014. He received Doctor Honoris Causa degree from the Technical University of Košice, Slovakia, from “Polytechnica” University of Timisoara, Romania, from Óbuda University, and from Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava. He was awarded by the Honorary Professor title in 2013 and Ambassador Title by Wroclaw University of Science and Technology. His present areas of research activities are computational cybernetics, fuzzy control and fuzzy sets, robotics, cyber physical systems of systems. He has edited and/or published 22 three books, published more than 850 papers in international scientific journal, conference proceedings and book chapters, and received more than 6000 citations

Ljiljana Trajkovic (S’78–M’86–SM’95–F’05–LF’15) received the Dipl. Ing. degree from University of Pristina, Yugoslavia, in 1974, the M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering and computer engineering from Syracuse University, USA, in 1979 and 1981, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from University of California at Los Angeles, in 1986. She is currently a Professor in the School of Engineering Science at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada. From 1995 to 1997, she was a National Science Foundation (NSF) Visiting Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department, University of California, USA. She was a Research Scientist at Bell Communications Research, USA, from 1990 to 1997, and a Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, USA, from 1988 to 1990. Her research interests include high-performance communication networks, control of communication systems, computer-aided circuit analysis and design, and theory of nonlinear circuits and dynamical systems. Dr. Trajkovic serves as IEEE Division X Delegate/Director (2019–2020) and served as IEEE Division X Delegate-Elect/Director-Elect (2018). She served as Senior Past President (2018–2019), Junior Past President (2016–2017), President (2014–2015), President-Elect (2013), Vice President Publications (2012–2013, 2010–2011), Vice President Long-Range Planning and Finance (2008–2009), and a Member at Large of the Board of Governors (2004–2006) of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society. She served as 2007 President of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and a Member of its Board of Governors (2004–2005, 2001–2003). She is Chair of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society joint Chapter of the Vancouver/Victoria Sections. She was Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Nonlinear Circuits and Systems (1998). She is General Co-Chair of SMC 2020 and SMC 2020 Workshop on BMI Systems and served as General Co-Chair of SMC 2019 and SMC 2018 Workshops on BMI Systems, SMC 2016, and HPSR 2014, Special Sessions Co-Chair of SMC 2017, Technical Program Chair of SMC 2017 and SMC 2016 Workshops on BMI Systems, Technical Program Co-Chair of ISCAS 2005, and Technical Program Chair and Vice General Co-Chair of ISCAS 2004. She served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems (Part I) (2004–2005, 1993–1995), the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems (Part II) (2018, 2002–2003, 1999–2001), and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine (2001–2003). She is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (2020–2021) and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (2010–2011, 2002–2003). She is a Professional Member of IEEE-HKN and a Life Fellow of the IEEE