Kusum Deep is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Mathematics and the Mehta Family School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, IIT Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India. She is also visiting professor at Liverpool Hope University, U.K. She received her M.Phil. (Hons.) and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from the University of Roorkee, in 1984 and 1988, respectively. She carried out postdoctoral research from Loughborough University, U.K., under a bursary from the Commission of European Communities Brussels. Author of two books, she supervised 23 Ph.D. students and published more than 135 research articles. Her research interests include numerical optimization, nature-inspired optimization techniques, soft computing, and artificial intelligence. She received the Gold Medal from the University of Roorkee for the M.Phil. degree. Winning numerous awards during her career, she has been ranked amongst the top 2% of scientists in the world consecutively for four years. Millie Pant is Professor and the Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing, IIT Roorkee, where she is also a joint faculty member of the Mehta Family School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. She received her M.Sc. degree in mathematics from Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut, India, and the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Mathematics, IIT Roorkee. Author of more than 350 papers in various journals and conferences of national and international repute, her research interests include numerical optimization, operations research, evolutionary algorithms, supply chain management, swarm intelligence techniques, AI-assisted decision-making, data analysis, and image processing. She is a guest reviewer of the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Applied Mathematics and Computation, and Applied Soft Computing. She is also associate editor of the International Journal of Swarm Intelligence and a guest editor of the International Journal of Memetic Computing (Springer). Mohammad Khalid Pandit is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology (NIT) Hamirpur, Himachal Pradesh, India. He received her B.E. and M.E. degrees in computer science and engineering from Anna University, Chennai, India. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India. His research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning and edge computing. He was a student member of CSI and a member of IACSIT and IAENG. He has received various research grants and published papers in high-quality journals and conferences like IEEE Transactions and ACM Transactions. Naveen Chauhan is Associate Professor at NIT Hamirpur. His research interests include wireless communication and sensor networks. He has published various research articles in reputed journals and conferences. He has also completed various government sponsored projects. Ajay Kumar Mallick is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the NIT Hamirpur. He earned his B.E. in computer science and engineering from the University Institute of Technology, University of Burdwan, West Bengal, India. He completed his M.Tech. and Ph.D. degrees in CSE from the IIT (ISM), Dhanbad, Jharkhand, India. His research interests encompass computer vision, machine learning, content-based image and video retrieval, digital image security and analysis. He has published his papers on video retrieval frameworks, privacy-preserving image retrieval and applications of convolutional neural networks in agriculture. He served as the technical advisory committee and other diverse role in several international conferences. His professional affiliations include membership in IEEE and life membership in the Indian Unit for Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (IUPRAI) and others.
