Xiaoqiang Cai is a Professor of the Dept of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management (SEEM) at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).  He received his Ph.D from Tsinghua University, Beijing, in 1988.  During 1989-91, he conducted postdoctoral research at The University of Cambridge and The Queen's University of Belfast. He was Lecturer at The University of Western Australia in 1991- 1992, before joining CUHK in 1993. He served as the Chairman of Department of SEEM during 1996-2003, and has been Professor since October 2000.  He is also Dean of General Education of Lee Woo Sing College, and Director of the Center for Logistics Technologies & Supply Chain Optimization.  His current research is focused on scheduling theory and applications, logistics and supply chain management, and portfolio optimization. He has published over 100 papers in leading journals in these areas, including Operations Research, Management Science, Production and Operations Management, Naval Research Logistics, IIE Transactions, and IEEE Transactions.  He has been on the editorial boards of several international journals, including IIE Transactions on Scheduling and Logistics, Journal of Scheduling, and Fuzzy Decision Making and Optimization.  He received the Outstanding Young Scientist Award (overseas category) from the National Science Foundation of China in 2003.

Dr Toh is a Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He obtained his Bachelor degree from NUS in 1990 and the PhD degree from Cornell University in 1996. His current research focuses on the design, analysis and implementation of algorithms, and development of software for convex programming, particularly matrix optimization problems such as linear and convex quadratic semidefinite programming (SDP). He is also interested in designing efficient preconditioned iterative solvers for large scale linear systems arising from finite element discretization of soil-structure interaction problems. Together with M.J. Todd and R.H. Tutuncu, he developed the general purpose software, SDPT3, for solving medium scale SDP. SDPT3 is currently used as the computational engine in high-level modeling languages such as CVX and YALMIP. Together with D.F. Sun and X.Y. Zhao, he has developed the software SDPNAL (based on semismooth Newton-CG augmented Lagrangian framework) for solving large scale SDPs. He is currently an Area Editor for Mathematical Programming Computation, and an Associate Editor for the SIAM Journal on Optimization. He won the NUS Outstanding Researcher Award in 2003. He has been invited to speak at various international meetings including the International Symposium on Mathematical Programming in 2006 and the SIAM Annual Meeting in 2010.

Professor Masao Fukushima obtained all academic degrees in Engineering from Kyoto University. Currently he is a full-time professor at the Faculty of Information Systems and Engineering, Nanzan University, and professor emeritus at Kyoto University. His research interests include nonlinear optimization, variational inequality and complementarily problems, parallel optimization, nonsmooth optimization, global optimization, game theory, and applications in transportation, finance, data mining, etc. He has published over 200 papers in peer reviewed journals and has been selected as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher in Mathematics. Professor Fukushima is one of the founders of the Pacific Optimization Research Activity Group, and had served as the Chairman of the Working Committee. He is also the founder and the Co-Editor of Pacific Journal of Optimization. Besides, he is currently on the editorial boards of 15 international journals in optimization and operations research, including Computational Optimization and Applications, Optimization Methods and Software, Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, etc.

John Lavery is a Senior Program Manager at the U.S. Army Research Office (ARO) responsible for the Modeling of Complex Systems Program and the Social Informatics Program, extramural research programs for geometric/topological, small-group-social, sociolinguistic and social media modeling. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University. Dr. Lavery earned a B.A. in Russian from Michigan State University, an M.S. in mathematics from the University of Akron and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Maryland. Prior to assuming his current positions, Dr. Lavery was a professor, researcher and research manager at NASA, Tunghai University and Soochow University in Taiwan, the Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Novosibirsk, the Technical University of Munich (under the Humboldt Foundation), Case Western Reserve University, the Office of Naval Research and the National Research Council. His recent research includes development of a new class of splines (L¹ splines) that preserve the shape of irregular data and of l¹ Major Component Detection and Analysis for robust data analysis and compression. He has been an associate editor of the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications and of the Journal of Industrial and Management Optimization.

Juan Enrique Martínez-Legaz is a professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He received his PhD from the Department of Applied Mathematics at Universitat de Barcelona in 1981. His main research interests are in Optimization Theory, Convex Analysis, Generalized Convexity and Mathematical Economics. From 2006 to 2012 he was the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Optimization; he is a member of the editorial boards of Optimization, the Journal of Convex Analysis, the Journal of Global Optimization, TOP, Cuadernos Aragoneses de Economía, Set-Valued and Variational Analysis: Theory and Applications, the International Journal of Optimization: Theory, Methods and Applications, the Taiwanese Journal of Mathematics, the International Journal of Operations Research, the PanAmerican Mathematical Journal, the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, the Caspian Journal of Mathematical Sciences, Transactions on Mathematical Programming and Applications, and the Journal of Information and Optimization Sciences. He was the Chairman of the Working Group on Generalized Convexity in the period 2000-2002. Juan Enrique Martínez-Legaz has been a member of the research institute MOVE (Markets, Organizations and Votes in Economics) since its foundation in 2009.

Professor Li-qun Qi received his B.S. in Computational Mathematics at Tsinghua University in 1968. his M.S, and Ph.D. degree in Computer Sciences at University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981 and 1984 respectively. Prof. Qi has taught in Tsinghua University, China, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, University of New South Wales, Australia, and The City University of Hong Kong. Prof. Qi has published more than 230 research papers in international journals. He established the superlinear and quadratic convergence theory of the generalized Newton method, and played a principal role in the development of reformulation methods in optimization.

Prof. Qi's research work has been cited by the researchers around the world. According to the authoritative citation database www.isihighlycited.com, he is one of the world's most highly cited 300 mathematicians during the period from 1981 to 1999. Prof. Li-qun Qi was elected as a foreign member of the Peterovskaya Academy of Arts and Sciences, Russia in 2003. He received the Hong Kong Polytechnic University President’s Awards for Excellence Performance and Achievements, based upon Research and Scholarly Activities in 2004. Prof. Qi is the editor or an associate editor of eight international journals. He has chaired more than ten international conferences and workshops held at Australia, Italy, Hong Kong and the Mainland China. In 2005, Prof. Qi introduced the concept of eigenvalues for higher order tensors, which now has applications in biomedical engineering, statistical data analysis and solid mechanics.

Professor Jie Sun graduated from Tsinghua University (PRC) in 1970, obtained his MSc from Chinese Academy of Science in 1981, and obtained his PhD from the University of Washington (USA) in 1986, respectively. He has been assistant professor in Northwestern University (USA) and associate professor, professor, and chair professor in National University of Singapore. He was one of the pioneer researchers in interior point methods and generalized Newton methods. Jointly with Mehrotra he was the first to prove the polynomial solvability of quadratically constrained convex quadratic programs and jointly with Qi, he developed the superlinear and quadratic convergence theory of the generalized Newton method. Recently, his papers with D. Sun on semismoothness of matrix projection and spectral operators have made great impact on the research on semidefinite optimization. He was a winner of the Outstanding University Researcher Award at National University of Singapore and has played a pivotal role in developing a strong team in optimization research in Singapore. Currently, Professor Sun is the chair of Pacific Optimization Research Activity Group and is a member of several editorial boards including Mathematics of Operations Research and Pacific Journal of Optimization.

Kok Lay Teo (John Curtin Distinguished Professor) received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada. He was with the Department of Applied Mathematics, University of New South Wales, Australia, the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, the Department of Mathematics, the University of Western Australia, Australia. In 1996, he joined the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Curtin University of Technology, Australia, as Professor. He then took up the position of Chair Professor of Applied Mathematics and Head of Department of Applied Mathematics at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China, from 1999 to 2004. He returned to Curtin University of Technology as Professor and Head of Department of Mathematics and Statistics from 2005-2010. He is currently John Curtin Distinguished Professor at Curtin University. He has published 5 books and over 400 journal papers. He has a software package, MISER3.3, for solving general constrained optimal control problems. His editorial positions are:

• Editor-in-Chief: (i) “Journal of Industrial and Management Optimization”; and (ii) “Numerical Algebra, Control and Optimization”. 
• Regional Editor: “Nonlinear Dynamics and Systems Theory”
• Member of Editorial Board: (i) Automatica; (ii) Journal of Global Optimization; (iii) Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, (iv) Optimization and Engineering, (v) Discrete and Continuous Dynamic Systems, (vi) Optimization Letters, (vii) Differential Equations and Dynamical Systems, (viii) Journal of ANZIAM; (ix) Dynamics of Continuous, Discrete and Impulsive Systems, Series A; (x) Pacific Journal of Optimization; and (xi) International Journal of Innovational Computing & Information Control.

Professor Teo’s research interests include both the theoretical and practical aspects of optimal control and optimization, and their practical applications such as in signal processing in telecommunications, and financial portfolio optimization.

Po-Lung Yu, Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) of University of Kansas (KU), Kansas, and Distinguished Professor for Life of National Chiao-Tung University (NCTU), Taiwan, was raised in Taiwan, further educated and trained in USA. He earned BA—International Trade (1963) from National Taiwan University, and Ph.D.—Operations Research and Industrial Engineering (1969) from the Johns Hopkins University.

From 1977 to 2004, Dr. Yu held an endowed Chair as the Carl A. Scupin Distinguished Professor of the University of Kansas. He taught at NCTU from 1999 to 2011. Previously he taught at the University of Rochester (1969-73) and the University of Texas at Austin (1973-77). He won awards for outstanding research and for teaching.

Dr. Yu, the initiator of habitual domains theory, competence set analysis and second order games, has published, in English and Chinese, 19 books and over 190 professional articles over multiple criteria decision making, mathematical programming, differential games and optimal control theory, and various application problems including investment models, efficient market, marketing, automobile safety and energy policy, corporate acquisition and merger analysis, aside from what he initiated.

He is recognized as a remarkable thinker, scholar, teacher and advisor. He has given many keynote addresses around the world, academically and publicly. His audiences of habitual domains and related topics, sometimes exceeded thousands of people.

Ya-Xiang Yuan, an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences, is a professor at the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Scientific/Engineering Computing at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is also a Fellow of SIAM and a Fellow of AMS. He is recognized for his contributions to nonlinear optimization and for his leadership of computational mathematics in China. Professor Yuan was previously the director of the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Scientific/Engineering Computing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a position he held for 12 years. During the time, he also served as one of the vice presidents of the Academy of Mathematics and System Sciences for eight years. Professor Yuan was the President of the Operations Research Society of China (2004-2012) and the President of the Asia-Pacific OR Society (2010-2012). Currently, he is one of the vice presidents of International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS). Professor Yuan was an invited plenary speaker at the International Congress for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 1999, and he is invited to give a 45 minute invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians which will be held in Seoul next year.  He is the editor-in-Chief of Science in China: Mathematics, the editor-in-Chief of Journal of the Operations Research Society of China and serves on the editorial boards of many international journals such as   SIAM Journal on Optimization, and Mathematics of Computation.

Xiang-Sun Zhang is a full-time Research Professor of the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Sciences (AMSS) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, People's Republic of China. He graduated from the Chinese University of Science and Technology in 1965. He was an Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and a full-time Research Professor in the Institute of Applied Mathematics (IAM), CAS. Professor Zhang was also the Director of the IAM from 1992 to 1998. He has served as Executive Vice President of the Academy of Mathematics and System Sciences (AMSS), CAS, from 1998 to 2003 and as President of Operations Research Society of China (ORSC) from 1996 to 2004. Since 2002, Professor Zhang has served as the Director of the Research Center of Bioinformatics, AMSS. His research and consulting interests include Optimization Theory and Application, Bioinformatics, Complex Networks. Professor Zhang is the Honorary President of the Operations Research Society of China. Moreover, he was the first prize winner in the "OR in Development", awarded by the International Federation of Operations Research Societies (IFORS) at the 14th International Conference at Vancouver, Canada, in 1996.

Marco A. López-Cerdá received his education in mathematics from Valencia University (graduate in 1971, doctor in 1973). In 1981 became Full Professor in Operations Research (OR, in brief); in 1985 moved to Alicante University.  Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Limoges (July, 2012).  (Co)advisor of 17 Ph.D. students in several branches of OR such as semi-infinite programming, network flows, assignment problem, convex optimization, graphs, scheduling, game theory and variational analysis. His 1998 book (with M.A. Goberna) on Linear Semi-Infinite Optimization is considered a classical in the field. 116 papers published (according to MathSciNet) in first-rank journals as Math. Programming, MOR, SIOPT, JOTA, Optimization, etc. Collaborated, along the years, with Prof. Soon-Yi Wu (National Cheng Kung University, Tainan), publishing several joint papers and organizing the International Workshop on Semi-Infinite Programming (Tainan, 2005). Other positions related to the OR community are: co-editor in chief of TOP (the OR journal of SEIO, the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research) from 2000 to 2007, elected president of SEIO in 1986, chair of EUROPT in the period 2008-2010, coordinator of i-MATH Consolider (2006-2011), a huge research program of the Spanish Ministry of Education for all areas of mathematics, gathering more than 300 research groups, and with a budget of 7.5 millions of euros.

Professor Jane Ye received her BSc in pure mathematics from  Xiamen University, China in 1982. In 1984 she came to Canada for her graduate studies and obtained her MBA in 1986 and PhD in applied mathematics in 1990 from Dalhousie University, Canada.  From 1990 to 1992, she did her postdoctoral research at the University of Montreal under the supervision of Professor Francis Clarke.  In 1992 she joined the University of Victoria as an assistant professor and a NSERC woman’s faculty award holder and has been a full professor since 2002.  Over the years Professor Ye has done research in various areas including optimal control of piecewise deterministic Markov processes, variational analysis, infinite horizon optimal control problems, existence of error bounds and generalized semi-infinite programming problems. Professor Ye’s current research includes theory and algorithms for  various optimization problems such as mathematical programs with equilibrium constraints, bilevel programming problems,  principal-agent problems in Economics,  and optimal experimental design in Statistics. Professor Ye has published extensively in professional journals such as SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Mathematical Programming and Mathematics of Operations Reseaerch.