Manish Parashar is Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute, Chair in Computational Science and Engineering, and Presidential Professor, Kalhert School of Computing at the University of Utah. He recently completed an IPA appointment at the National Science Foundation as Office Director of the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure where he oversaw investments in national cyberinfrastructure. He also served as co-chair of the National Science and Technology Council’s Subcommittee on the Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem and the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force.
Manish’s expertise is in high performance parallel and distributed computing and cyberinfrastructure, and he has made pioneering contributions towards enabling new insights through large-scale computations and data in a range of science and engineering domains.
Manish has received a number of awards for his research and leadership, including most recently the 2023 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award and the 2024 CRA Distinguished Service Award.
Manish is the founding chair of the IEEE Technical Consortium on High Performance Computing (TCHPC), and is Fellow of AAAS, ACM, and IEEE/IEEE Computer Society. For more information, please visit http://manishparashar.org

Mérouane Debbah is a researcher, educator and technology entrepreneur. Over his career, he has founded several public and industrial research centers, start-ups and is now Professor at Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi and founding Director of the KU 6G Research Center. He is also the Chief Scientific AI Advisor at the Technology Innovation Institute. He is a frequent keynote speaker at international events in the field of telecommunication and AI. His research has been lying at the interface of fundamental mathematics, algorithms, statistics, information and communication sciences with a special focus on random matrix theory and learning algorithms. In the Communication field, he has been at the heart of the development of small cells (4G), Massive MIMO (5G) and Large Intelligent Surfaces (6G) technologies. In the AI field, he is known for his work on Large Language Models, distributed AI systems for networks and semantic communications. He received multiple prestigious distinctions, prizes and best paper awards (more than 40 IEEE best paper awards) for his contributions to both fields and according to research.com is ranked as the best scientist in France in the field of Electronics and Electrical Engineering. He is an IEEE Fellow, a WWRF Fellow, a Eurasip Fellow, an AAIA Fellow, an Institut Louis Bachelier Fellow and a Membre émérite SEE. His recent work led to the development of NOOR (upon it release, largest language model in Arabic) released in 2022, Falcon LLM (upon its release, top ranked open source large language model) released in 2023 and the Falcon Foundation in 2024. The Falcon Model Series and The Falcon Foundation have positioned the UAE as a global leader in the generative AI field. He is a member of the Marconi Prize Selection Advisory Committee.

Georgios Theodoropoulos is a Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen, China’s Silicon Valley. He moved to Shenzhen from Durham University in the UK where he was Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Research Computing and held a Chair in the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences. Prior to that he was a Senior Research Scientist with IBM Research where he played a strategic role in the establishment of IBM’s Exascale Systems research roadmap for Europe at the company’s Smart City Technology Centre in Ireland. He has held an honorary Chair the Trinity College Dublin and senior appointments at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and the University of Birmingham, UK where he was Director of one of the UK’s e-Science Centres of Excellence.
His research work spans more than 30 years with contributions in Info-Symbiotic Systems, Distributed Simulation and Distributed Virtual Environments, Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems, Complex and Multi-agent systems and workload optimised systems for data-driven analytics. He has been an apostle of interdisciplinary research and over the years he has spearheaded numerous interdisciplinary initiatives and projects aimed at tackling major global societal problems aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
He is an Ordinary Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, Board Member and the Chief Operating Officer of the Info-Symbiotics Systems Society, an Accredited Board Director by the Singapore Institute of Directors, a Chartered Engineer, and holds a PhD from the University of Manchester, UK.