Yuhong Liu, PhD.
Director, Santa Clara University, California, USA
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering (SCU), serves as the Director of the Center to oversee the Center’s management and coordination. Her research interests include trustworthy computing, cybersecurity and responsible AI in emerging applications, such as Internet-of-things, online social media, and blockchain. She contributes to the Center with her research expertise on security and privacy for cyber-physical systems; trust modeling and management for multiagent systems; applied machine learning for multi-party decision-making; and blockchain-facilitated decentralized fair trading.
Jun Yan, PhD.
Co-director, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Dr. Jun Yan is an Associate Professor and Research Chair in AI for Cyber Security and Resilience at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He received his B.Eng. degree in information and communication engineering from Zhejiang University, China, in 2011. He also received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. (with Excellence in Doctoral Research) degrees, both in electrical engineering, from the University of Rhode Island, USA, in 2013 and 2017, respectively. He is the co-founder of the EuReCa Global Center as well as the Security Research Center, and the Applied AI Institute at Concordia University.
Dr. Yan’s research interests include smart grid security, cyber-physical systems, and applied computational intelligence. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers in related areas. He has received Best Paper Awards at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) and the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI), and the Best Readings on “Communications and Information Systems Security – Cyber Attacks” of the IEEE Communication Society, among others. Three of his papers are among the top 50 cited publications on respective IEEE transactions since 2017, according to Google Scholar. He will contribute to the Center with his research expertise in applied AI for transactive energy decisions and grid edge applications; secure and resilient energy management; scalable co-simulations of grids, markets, and prosumers; mechanism designs and behavior analysis.
Dr. Lee, Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering (SCU), will lead the education outreach program of the Center. He will also lead the scalable co-simulation of residential buildings with consideration of different income levels and random & diverse nature; Hardware-in-the-Loop simulation, and contribute to the Center with his expertise in energy system optimization of grid interactive residential buildings; and predictive control algorithms or/and optimization for building energy system control. He has served as a chair of the department since 2021 and serves at professional society as chair of the advanced energy system division and technical committees at ASME as well as an associate editor for the Journal of Energy Resources and Technology.
Dr. Fang, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering at SCU, has extensive research expertise in information retrieval, AI, NLP, and machine learning. He is serving as the Chair of the ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR), the premier conference of theoretical information retrieval. Dr. Fang also serves as Area Chair or on the Senior Program Committee for major IR/NLP/AI conferences including SIGIR, WWW, ACL, AAAI, IJCAI, WSDM, CIKM, EMNLP, NAACL, and others. He contributes to the Center with his expertise on equality and fairness for AI and machine learning-based decision-making, especially social decision problems (e.g., fair and affordable clean energy access for marginalized communities).
Dr. Ghafouri, Assistant Professor, received the B.Sc. and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2009 and 2011, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Polytechnique Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada, in 2018. Currently, he is an assistant professor in Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering (CU), contributes to the Center with his research expertise in modeling, control, and security of power and energy systems. He has been in charge of the development and management of a power and energy system testbed funded by a CAD $1.8 Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) grant. He leads various research efforts on the simulation, stability, reliability, and resiliency of clean energy systems as well as the modeling of energy markets and prosumers.