Keynote Speakers & Invited Speaker

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Keynote Speakers

Prof. Zheng Yan (IEEE Fellow, IET Fellow, AAIA Fellow, and AIIA Fellow)
Xidian University, China

Dr. Zheng Yan is currently a Huashan distinguished professor at the Xidian University, China. She is a Fellow of IEEE, IET, AAIA, and AIIA. She received the B. Eng in electrical engineering and M. Eng in computer science and engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University in 1994 and 1997. She received a second M. Eng in information security from National University of Singapore in 2000. She earned the Licentiate of Science and the Doctor of Science in Technology in electrical engineering from Helsinki University of Technology in 2005 and 2007. She joined the Nokia Research Center, Helsinki in 2000, working as a senior researcher until 2011. She worked as a visiting professor and a Finnish Academy Fellow at the Aalto University, Finland for over seven years.

Her research interests are in cyber trust, security, privacy, and data analytics. She has led 30+ projects, sponsored by EU, Academy of Finland, NSFC, MOST, telecom industry, etc. At the helm of a research team with 60+ members, she has supervised 160+ post-doctoral researchers and graduates. She has authored 400+ publications, with 270+ first and corresponding authorships, featured prominently in top-tier venues. Thirteen of them are top 0.1% or 1% highly-cited ESI papers. She is the sole author of two books on trust management, utilized in teaching for a decade. 150 patents (including 82 independent international inventions) invented by her have been adopted by industry, a few of them have been incorporated into international standards and widely used in practice with billions of users. She has delivered 30+ invited keynote speeches and talks at international conferences and world-leading companies. Her Google Scholar citation is over 16,000 with an H-index of 66,

Zheng served and is serving as an EiC/area/associate/guest editor for 60+ reputable journals, e.g., executive EiC of Information Sciences, associate editor of ACM Computing Surveys, area editor of Information Fusion. She is a steering committee member of several conferences, a general/program chair for 40+ international conferences. She is a founding steering committee co-chair of IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, which becomes a leading venue in the field.

Dr. Yan is recognized as a Stanford World Top 2% Scientist since 2019 and an Elsevier Highly Cited Chinese Researcher since 2020. She has earned many accolades, including Distinguished Inventor of Nokia for significant technology contributions, N²Women Star in Computer Networking and Communications, IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing, IEEE TEMS Distinguished Leadership Award, ELEC Impact Award for patent contributions to Finnish society, the Best Journal Paper Award issued by IEEE ComSoc and several other Best Paper awards, 18 times other IEEE Distinguished/Outstanding Leadership/Service awards, three EU awards, Excellent PhD Dissertation Supervisor Award of Chinese Society of Electronic Education, Shaanxi Nature Science Prize, etc. Her students have been rewarded more than 50 national or international awards. Her excellence has been covered by the media on numerous occasions.

 

Prof. Xiaoli Li (IEEE Fellow and AAIA Fellow)
Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore

Prof Li Xiaoli joined SUTD on 15 August 2025 as Head of the Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD) Pillar. In this role, he provides strategic leadership in academic programme development, research direction, and industry engagement across the Pillar.

Prof Li brings over 30 years of combined experience in academia and industry. Before joining SUTD, he was the Department Head of Machine Intellection at A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R), where he led more than 100 scientists to develop cutting-edge AI technologies that delivered high-impact solutions across diverse sectors. He also served as the Technical Director of the Sectoral AI Centre of Excellence for Manufacturing (AIMfg)—a national initiative supported by the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) with a funding of S$35.8 million.

He has been a trusted advisor and technical panel member for several key government agencies, including the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), Ministry of Education (MOE), Ministry of Health (MOH), and the Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO) under the Prime Minister’s Office. In academia, he has held adjunct faculty appointments at both the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

Prof Li is internationally recognised in the AI community and has held leadership roles at top-tier conferences including NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, ICDM, WWW, IJCAI, AAAI, ACL, and EMNLP—serving as Conference Chair, Area Chair, Workshop Chair, and Session Chair.

He has published over 380 research papers in leading AI and data science conferences and journals. He is currently an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence. His research excellence is widely acknowledged—he has been named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher and is listed among the world’s top 2% scientists by Stanford University.

In addition to his academic credentials, Prof Li has deep industry experience. He has led more than 10 collaborative R&D projects with partners across verticals including aerospace, telecommunications, insurance, and aviation. He has also served as joint lab director with industry leaders such as DBS, Singtel, and KPMG. His expertise in AI, machine learning, and data mining has enabled him to develop innovative solutions addressing complex real-world challenges.

Prof. Irwin King (ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, INNS Fellow and AAIA Fellow)
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Professor Irwin King, a distinguished professor at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests span machine learning, social computing, artificial intelligence, and data mining. Professor King’s extensive research has been recognized through numerous publications and awards in internationally renowned venues. He holds prestigious fellowships in the IEEE, INNS, AAIA, and HKIE, and is an ACM Distinguished Member. In addition to his research work, he has also been an evangelist, promoting E-Learning with AI technology. He serves as the Director of the ELearning Innovation and Technology (ELITE) Centre, the Machine Intelligence and Social Computing (MISC) Lab, and the Trustworthy Machine Intelligent Joint Lab. Professor King obtained his Bachelor of Science degree from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and his Master’s and Doctorate degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC).

 

Prof. Tomoaki Otsuki (IEICE fellow, AAIA fellow)
Keio University, Japan

Tomoaki Otsuki (Ohtsuki) received the B.E., M.E., and Ph. D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Keio University, Yokohama, Japan in 1990, 1992, and 1994, respectively. From 1994 to 1995 he was a Post Doctoral Fellow and a Visiting Researcher in Electrical Engineering at Keio University. From 1993 to 1995 he was a Special Researcher of Fellowships of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for Japanese Junior Scientists. From 1995 to 2005 he was with Science University of Tokyo. In 2005 he joined Keio University. He is now a Professor at Keio University. From 1998 to 1999 he was with the department of electrical engineering and computer sciences, University of California, Berkeley. He is engaged in research on wireless communications, optical communications, signal processing, and information theory. Dr. Ohtsuki is a recipient of the 1997 Inoue Research Award for Young Scientist, the 1997 Hiroshi Ando Memorial Young Engineering Award, Ericsson Young Scientist Award 2000, 2002 Funai Information and Science Award for Young Scientist, IEEE the 1st Asia-Pacific Young Researcher Award 2001, the 5th International Communication Foundation (ICF) Research Award, 2011 IEEE SPCE Outstanding Service Award, the 27th TELECOM System Technology Award, ETRI Journal’s 2012 Best Reviewer Award, 9th International Conference on Communications and Networking in China 2014 (CHINACOM ’14) Best Paper Award, 2020 Yagami Award, The 26th Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications (APCC2021) Best Paper Award, and International Conference on Internet of Things, Communication and Intelligent Technology (IoTCIT) 2024 Best Paper Award. He has published more than 276 journal papers and 518 international conference papers.
He served as a Chair of IEEE Communications Society, Signal Processing for Communications and Electronics Technical Committee. He served as a technical editor of the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine and an editor of Elsevier Physical Communications. He is now serving as an Area Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and an editor of the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. He is also serving as the IEEE Communications Society, Asia Pacific Board Director. He has served as general-co chair, symposium co-chair, and TPC co-chair of many conferences, including IEEE GLOBECOM 2008, SPC, IEEE ICC 2011, CTS, IEEE GLOBECOM 2012, SPC, IEEE ICC 2020, SPC, IEEE APWCS, IEEE SPAWC, and IEEE VTC. He gave tutorials and keynote speeches at many international conferences including IEEE VTC, IEEE PIMRC, IEEE WCNC, and so on. He was Vice President and President of the Communications Society of the IEICE, also he was a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE. He is a fellow of the IEICE, a Fellow of Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of the Engineering Academy of Japan.

 

Invited Speaker

Prof. Seungshik Kang
Kookmin University, Republic of Korea

He received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Seoul National University in 1986, 1988 and 1993, respectively. He is working for Kookmin University as a full professor. His research interests include natural language processing, text mining, big data processing, and machine learning.

His doctoral dissertation focused on Korean morphological analysis, and the new algorithm he proposed laid the foundation for the development of a practical Korean morphological analyzer. He has made significant contributions to the field of Korean information processing, and the morphological analyzer he developed has been widely used as a Hangul indexer in domestic and international search engines.

Recently, his interest in deep learning NLP is Hangul tokenization and embedding techniques. He is studying the impact of tokenizer performance on the learning speed and accuracy of deep learning NLP systems.