Prof. Joseph Halpern

 IEEE&ACM Fellow

Cornell University, USA

Computer Science Dept.

Joseph Halpern received a B.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1975 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard in 1981.  In between, he spent two years as the head of the Mathematics Department at Bawku Secondary School, in Ghana.After a year as a visiting scientist at MIT, he joined the IBM Almaden Research Center in 1982, where he remained until 1996, also serving as a consulting professor at Stanford.  In 1996, he joined the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, where he is currently the Joseph C. Ford Professor and was department chair 2010-14. 

Halpern's major research interests are in reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty, security, distributed computation, causality, decision theory, and game theory.   Together with his former student, Yoram Moses, he pioneered the approach of applying reasoning about knowledge to analyzing distributed protocols and multi-agent systems.  He has coauthored 6 patents, three books ("Reasoning About Knowledge", "Reasoning about Uncertainty", and "Actual Causality"), and over 400 technical publications.

Halpern is a Fellow of AAAI, AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, ACM, IEEE, the Game Theory Society, the National Academy of Engineering, and SAET (Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory).  Among other awards, he received the Kampe de Feriet Award in 2016, the ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2011, the Dijkstra Prize in 2009, the ACM/AAAI Newell Award in 2008,

the Godel Prize in 1997, was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2001-02, and a Fulbright Fellow in 2001-02 and 2009-10. Two of his papers have won best-paper prizes at IJCAI (1985 and 1991), and another two received best-paper awards at the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Conference (2006 and 2012).   He was editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM (1997-2003) and has been program chair of a number of conferences, including the Symposium on Theory in Computing (STOC), Logic in Computer Science (LICS), Uncertainty in AI (UAI), Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC),and Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK).  He started the computer science section of arxiv.org, and serves on its advisory board.

Prof. Qing Li

IEEE&IET  Fellow

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China 

Qing Li is a Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Computing, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He received his B.Eng. from Hunan University (Changsha), and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Southern California (Los Angeles), all in computer science. His research interests include multi-modal data management, conceptual data modeling, social media, Web services, and e-learning systems. He has authored/co-authored over 500 publications in these areas,with over 45,000 citations and H-index of 87 (source: Google Scholars). He is actively involved in the research community and has served as Editor-in-Chief of Computer & Education: X Realitty (CEXR) by Elsevier, associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (TAI), IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (TCDS), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), Data Science and Engineering (DSE), and World Wide Web (WWW) Journal, in addition to being a Conference and Program Chair/Co-Chair of numerous major international conferences. He also sits/sat in the Steering Committees of DASFAA, ER, ACM RecSys, IEEE U-MEDIA, and ICWL. Prof. Li is a Fellow of IEEE, AAIA, and IET/IEE.