Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation

Dr. Fei Tao is a Professor at the School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering and the Dean of the International Institute for Interdisciplinary and Frontiers at Beihang University, Beijing, China. His research focuses on smart manufacturing and digital twins. He has served as PI for over 30 national research and industry projects. He has published seven books and over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles as the first/corresponding author in Nature, CIRP Annals, and IEEE/ASME Transactions, with over 30 of them being ESI highly cited papers. His publications have over 50,000 citations. He was elected as the Global Highly Cited Researcher (2019-2024) and one of the 20 Most Influential Academics in Smart Manufacturing by SME in 2021. He is currently the Associate Editor of Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (RCIM), CIRP Associate Member and IEEE Senior Member. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Digital Twin in Taylor & Francis Group and Digital Engineering in Elsevier; and he also initiated the Digital Twin Global Forum (DTGF) and the Digital Twin International Conferences (DigiTwin).

Prof. Thippa Reddy Gadekallu is currently working as Chief Engineer at Zhongda Group (Jiaxing City, China). He has more than 15 years of experience in teaching and research. He has more than 350 international/national publications in reputed journals and conferences. Currently, his areas of research include Machine Learning, Internet of Things, Deep Neural Networks, Blockchain, Computer Vision. He is an editor in several publishers like Springer, Hindawi, Plosone, Scientific Reports (Nature), Wiley. He also acted as a guest editor in several reputed publishers like IEEE, Elsevier, Springer, Hindawi, MDPI. He is recently recognized as one among the top 2% scientists in the world as per the survey conducted by Elsevier in the years 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024. He is also recognized as a highly cited researcher, young scientist category, by Clarivate (web of Science) for the period 2017-2022 in the year 2023.

Prof. Vikas Kumar is a Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Professor Kumar is a distinguished academic and researcher with over 15 years of experience in the operations and supply chain management domain. Professor Kumar has significantly contributed to areas of sustainable supply chains, circular economy, operational excellence, and supply chain 4.0. As a prolific author, Professor Kumar has published numerous papers (over 300) in top-tier journals and regularly presents his findings at international conferences. Prof Kumar serves on the editorial board of several international journals and regularly edits special issues in high-ranked international journals. His research has been cited extensively. He has over 19K citations and a h-index of 75 on Google Scholar. He was featured among the top 1% of the Highly Cited Researchers 2024 list, which draws on data from the Web of Science Core Collection citation index and is published by Clarivate. He also featured in the World's Top 2% Scientists list in 2024.

Dr. Victoria Akberdina is Deputy Director of the Institute of Economics of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Head of the Department of Regional Industrial Policy and Economic Security. She conducts fundamental and applied research on problems concerning industrial policy formation, forecasting methodologies, and modeling the evolution of the economic and technological development of industrial complexes, as well as the structural dimensions of economic development. In 2019, she was selected as a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Evgeny Kuzmin is a researcher at the Department of Regional Economic Policy and Economic Security at the Institute of Economics of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He serves as a reviewer for several high-impact international journals, including the Journal of Cleaner Production, PLOS ONE, Sustainability (Switzerland), Heliyon, Business Strategy and the Environment, among others. Kuzmin has authored over 150 scientific publications. He has participated in the execution of more than 10 research projects (grants) funded by scientific foundations. His research interests encompass risk and uncertainty, economic crises, sustainability, public-private partnerships, industrial policy, economic growth, and entrepreneurship.