Dr. Ismail is an Associate Professor at the College of Information Technology (CIT) of the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), UAE, joined in 2005, and is the founder and director of the High Performance, Grid & Cloud Computing Research Laboratory at CIT, and the UAEU supercomputer, with state-of-the-art architecture and technology. Dr. Ismail completed higher studies (DEA) in distributed systems at the Joseph Fourrier University (Grenoble I)/ENSIMAG Engineering School in France, and earned Ph.D. in distributed systems from Computer Engineering/Distributed Systems from the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble, France, in September 2000 with very honorable degree. Dr. Ismail has a vast industrial and academic experience; at Sun Microsystems R&D Center, worked on the design and implementation of highly-available distributed systems; and participated in the deposit of a US patent in the domain. She served in teaching at Grenoble I, France, Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut, and has been serving as an Adjunct Professor at the Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence Institute Curtin University, Australia. Dr. Ismail current research interests include performance analysis in distributed systems, energy efficiency and management, green computing, resource management and scheduling problems in distributed systems with emphasis in clouds, middleware, High Performance Computing, and software security in distributed systems. She won the IBM Shared University Research Award and the IBM Faculty Award, very competitive world-wide, won funding for major projects as a PI/Co-PI and the funded project by UAE/NRF was top ranked by external reviewers following a competition. Dr. Ismail has international collaborations and publishing her research results in prestigious journals and international conferences. She is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems, and Editorial Board Member of the International Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, served as chair, co-chair and track chair for many IEEE international conferences, including being a General Chair for IEEE DEST 2009 and a General Chair, Technical Program Chair and Organizing Committee Chair for the 11th International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology 2015 (IIT'15) for which Dr. Ismail got the IEEE Computer Society (HQs) Technical Sponsorship. Dr. Liren Zhang joined the United Arab Emirates University as a full Professor of Network Engineering in 2009. He received his M.Eng. from the University of South Australia in 1988 and his Ph.D. from the University of Adelaide, Australia in 1993, both in electronics and computer systems engineering. He has since served as a Senior Lecturer at Monash University, Australia, Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and full Professor at the University of South Australia, where he is currently an Adjunct Professor. Dr. Zhang has vast experience as an engineer, academia and researcher in the field of network modeling and performance analysis, teletraffic engineering, optical communications and networks, queuing theory and applications, coding theory and applications, switching and routing algorithms, wireless/mobile networks, electro-optical sensor networks, information assurance and network security. He has published more than 150 research papers in international journals. Dr. Zhang is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and an editor of the Journal of Computer Communications and Journal of Networks and Computer Applications. Currently, Prof. Zhang's research interests include ultra-wideband (UWB) sensor networks for real-time target tracking and communications; biomedical imaging using ultra-wideband penetration; extraction of biometric signatures for forensic identification and multi-layer security architectures in next-generation wireless communication networks.
