Conference Committee

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Join us at the Conference in Malta from December 7th to 12th, 2025. Explore new ideas, network with industry experts, and gain valuable insights to advance your career. Don't miss this opportunity to learn, connect, and grow!

Leadership

Varadraj Gurupur

Chair

Varadraj Gurupur, PhD is currently working as an Associate Professor with the School of Health Management and Informatics and has a joint appointment with the Department of Computer Science, and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with the University of Central Florida (UCF). He is also the founding member and Director of the Center for Decision Support Systems and Informatics at UCF. Dr. Gurupur received his Doctoral degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2010. Dr. Gurupur is a recipient of two international awards, two national awards, and several regional and institutional awards. This includes the prestigious AHIMA Research Award in the year 2017, and the AHIMA Triumph Award for Innovation in 2021. Additionally, he is also the recipient of the prestigious Joseph M. Biedenbach Outstanding Engineering Educator Award from IEEE Region 3 and the recipient of FHIMA Literary Award in 2016. His core research is focused on software engineering decision support systems for healthcare and education. Dr. Gurupur is also someone who has worked in the healthcare industry for several years. Based on this work experience and academic training he is involved in discovering innovative solutions to difficult problems associated with Electronic Health Records. Dr. Gurupur has more than 100 publications which include: edited book, book chapters, journal articles, conference papers, abstracts, and published reviews. Additionally, he has been involved in many research projects funded by the United States Federal government agencies such as National Science Foundation, and National Institutes of Health.

Prof Neville Calleja

Co-Chair

Prof Neville Calleja is the Head of Department for Public Health at the University of Malta Medical School, which is affiliated with the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region (ASPHER).  He is also Director for Health Information & Research within the Ministry for Health in Malta, Europe.    This is the national health data repository for the country of Malta and also the designated Health Data Access Body for the newly setup European Health Data Space (EHDS) within the EU.  He also served as Chief Medical Officer for Malta a few years ago.  During the COVID-19 emergency period, he has been a senior member of Malta's COVID-19 Response Team and has also been involved in discussions on COVID-19 monitoring and other public health policy at EU level.   He has also been supporting WHO (Europe) and WHO Global (Geneva) on several areas, mainly however on assessment of national health information systems since 2016.

Prof. Lalit Garg

Co-Chair

Prof. Lalit Garg is an associate professor of computer information systems at the University of Malta, Malta, and an honorary lecturer at the University of Liverpool, UK. He has been a researcher at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Ulster University, UK. Prof Garg has supervised 200+ Master's dissertations, 2 DBA and 5 PhD theses and published 200+ high-impact publications in refereed journals/conferences/books, 22 edited books and 24 patents. He has delivered numerous keynote speeches, organised/chaired international conferences, and consulted countless public and private organisations for information systems implementation and management. His research interests are business intelligence, machine learning, data science, deep learning, cloud computing, mobile computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), information systems, management science and their applications, mainly in healthcare and medical domains. He participates in many EU and locally funded projects, including a one million euro Erasmus+ Capacity-Building project in Higher Education (CBHE), titled Training for Medical Education via Innovative eTechnology (MediTec) and Malta Council of Science and Technology's Space Research Funds. The University of Malta has awarded him the 2021-22 Research Excellence Award for exploring Novel Intelligent Computing Methods for healthcare requirements forecasting, allocation and management (NICE-Healthcare). 

Dr. John N. Carbone

Co-Chair

Coming Soon

Steering Committee

Prof. Patrick Then

Chair

Prof. Patrick Then assumed the Chief Executive Officer of state-owned Sarawak Artificial Intelligence Centre (SAIC) since March 2025. SAIC aims to accelerate Sarawak economic growth by leveraging AI technologies. SAIC conducts high-impact research and development for Sarawak’s needs, and advises policymakers on AI governance, policy, audit, and talent development.

Before that, he led School of ICT as Head of School, Centre for Digital Futures as Director, Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak. As SAIC CEO, he continues mentoring researchers and academics in academia. He has been recognized as eminent researcher in health informatics in the region collaborating with prominent cardiologists and clinicians in Clinical Research Centre Sarawak General Hospital in Malaysia and the National Institutes of Health, Ministry of Health Malaysia. He has published papers in high impact journals and proceedings. He is a strong advocate of transdisciplinary research where he translated artificial intelligence techniques into healthcare, manufacturing and other applications. He is a sought-after keynote speaker in IT and cardiology conferences in Europe, India, Indonesia and South Korea. He is the holder of multiple patents and software copyrights that have been translated into commercial product. He is a highly recognised digital health Key Opinion Leader by Ministry of Health Malaysia.

He is an elected fellow of the European Society of Cardiology, fellow of the Society for Design and Process Science USA, Senior member of Australian Computer Society, Senior member of IEEE, and Board member of Sarawak Development Institute.

Yong Zeng, PhD

Member

Yong Zeng, PhD is a Full Professor at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. His research has focused on design theory and its applications to transdisciplinary design problems. Using the Environment-Based Design (EBD) methodology he has proposed, he and his colleagues have designed many algorithms including human vision-based non-parametric curve reconstruction algorithms DISCUR and VICUR, Gauging series non-parametric clustering algorithms, and a reinforcement learning-enabled automatic 2D quadrilateral mesh generation algorithm. He has pioneered EEG-based neurocognitive studies of human design, particularly creative design, founded on his work on formalizing conceptual and creative design activities. His work has been applied to behavior modeling and design in aerospace engineering, healthcare, learning and training, the construction industry, and sustainability, all supported by major grants funded by industry and government. He was Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Design Science (2004-2014) and NSERC Chair in Aerospace Design Engineering (2015-2020). He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Design and Process Science after having served as its president from 2019 to 2023.

Kyoung-Yun "Joseph" Kim

Member

Coming Soon

Murat Tanik

Member

Coming Soon

Dr. Ali Doğru

Member

Dr. Ali Doğru is currently a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA).  Previously he has been in the Middle Eas Technical University (METU) and has visited New Jersey Institute of Technology and National University of Singapore.  He founded the Software Engineering Laboratory, the Master of Science Program in Software Engineering, and the Center for Verification and Validation for the Modeling and simulation, all in METU.  Dr. Doğru has supervised 16 PhD dissertations and over 50 Master of Sicence theses studies.  He published 3 books, 9 book chapters,  24 Journal publications, and more than 95 conference papers.  He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Southern Methodist University in Computer Science and his previous degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington and Istanbul Technical University. His long term research fields are related with Software Engineering, covering Component Orientation, Specifications, Methodologies, and Real-time critical software.  Dr. Doğru has been active within the Society for Design and Process Science since its beginning, as a founding member where he served as the president and vice president for the Software Engineering Society.  

Dr. Radmila Juric

Member

Dr Radmila Juric is an SDPS fellow, with 30+ years of experience as an academic, working in the UK Higher Education, in various capacities: from lecturing, course development and management, and academic quality assurance, to research management, supervision, and editorial jobs.  Dr Juric has published extensively, contributed towards academic events in various roles, delivered talks in academia and in industry and encouraged young scholars to undertake interdisciplinary research, which she has been passionately promoting for decades.  Her research interest is wide and spans decades of publishing on software interoperability, semantic technologies, software architectures, pervasive computational environments, translational bioinformatics and generative AI.  Over the last five years Dr Juric has focused on research trends which range from intelligent computational edge, computing continuum and human machine augmentation to addressing problems of obscurity, explainability and bias of AI algorithms and the way we evaluate AI models.  The synergy of logic and predictive inference, has triggered her research on transdiagnostic dimension of mental health disorders in computational psychiatry, semantics of prompting mechanisms in generative AI and the impact of logic reasoning in knowledge augmented generation when using GenAI.

Communications

Fan Xiong

Chair

Coming Soon

David Robbins

Co-Chair

Coming Soon

Cara Li

Co-Chair

Coming Soon

Awards Committee

Murat Tanik

Chair

Coming Soon

Bernd Kramer

Co-Chair

Coming Soon

Dr. Ali Doğru

Member

Dr. Ali Doğru is currently a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA).  Previously he has been in the Middle Eas Technical University (METU) and has visited New Jersey Institute of Technology and National University of Singapore.  He founded the Software Engineering Laboratory, the Master of Science Program in Software Engineering, and the Center for Verification and Validation for the Modeling and simulation, all in METU.  Dr. Doğru has supervised 16 PhD dissertations and over 50 Master of Sicence theses studies.  He published 3 books, 9 book chapters,  24 Journal publications, and more than 95 conference papers.  He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Southern Methodist University in Computer Science and his previous degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington and Istanbul Technical University. His long term research fields are related with Software Engineering, covering Component Orientation, Specifications, Methodologies, and Real-time critical software.  Dr. Doğru has been active within the Society for Design and Process Science since its beginning, as a founding member where he served as the president and vice president for the Software Engineering Society.  

Varadraj Gurupur

Member

Varadraj Gurupur, PhD is currently working as an Associate Professor with the School of Health Management and Informatics and has a joint appointment with the Department of Computer Science, and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with the University of Central Florida (UCF). He is also the founding member and Director of the Center for Decision Support Systems and Informatics at UCF. Dr. Gurupur received his Doctoral degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2010. Dr. Gurupur is a recipient of two international awards, two national awards, and several regional and institutional awards. This includes the prestigious AHIMA Research Award in the year 2017, and the AHIMA Triumph Award for Innovation in 2021. Additionally, he is also the recipient of the prestigious Joseph M. Biedenbach Outstanding Engineering Educator Award from IEEE Region 3 and the recipient of FHIMA Literary Award in 2016. His core research is focused on software engineering decision support systems for healthcare and education. Dr. Gurupur is also someone who has worked in the healthcare industry for several years. Based on this work experience and academic training he is involved in discovering innovative solutions to difficult problems associated with Electronic Health Records. Dr. Gurupur has more than 100 publications which include: edited book, book chapters, journal articles, conference papers, abstracts, and published reviews. Additionally, he has been involved in many research projects funded by the United States Federal government agencies such as National Science Foundation, and National Institutes of Health.

Publications

Dr. John N. Carbone

Chair

Coming Soon

Prof. Lalit Garg

Co-Chair

Prof. Lalit Garg is an associate professor of computer information systems at the University of Malta, Malta, and an honorary lecturer at the University of Liverpool, UK. He has been a researcher at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Ulster University, UK. Prof Garg has supervised 200+ Master's dissertations, 2 DBA and 5 PhD theses and published 200+ high-impact publications in refereed journals/conferences/books, 22 edited books and 24 patents. He has delivered numerous keynote speeches, organised/chaired international conferences, and consulted countless public and private organisations for information systems implementation and management. His research interests are business intelligence, machine learning, data science, deep learning, cloud computing, mobile computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), information systems, management science and their applications, mainly in healthcare and medical domains. He participates in many EU and locally funded projects, including a one million euro Erasmus+ Capacity-Building project in Higher Education (CBHE), titled Training for Medical Education via Innovative eTechnology (MediTec) and Malta Council of Science and Technology's Space Research Funds. The University of Malta has awarded him the 2021-22 Research Excellence Award for exploring Novel Intelligent Computing Methods for healthcare requirements forecasting, allocation and management (NICE-Healthcare). 

Varadraj Gurupur

Co-Chair

Varadraj Gurupur, PhD is currently working as an Associate Professor with the School of Health Management and Informatics and has a joint appointment with the Department of Computer Science, and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with the University of Central Florida (UCF). He is also the founding member and Director of the Center for Decision Support Systems and Informatics at UCF. Dr. Gurupur received his Doctoral degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2010. Dr. Gurupur is a recipient of two international awards, two national awards, and several regional and institutional awards. This includes the prestigious AHIMA Research Award in the year 2017, and the AHIMA Triumph Award for Innovation in 2021. Additionally, he is also the recipient of the prestigious Joseph M. Biedenbach Outstanding Engineering Educator Award from IEEE Region 3 and the recipient of FHIMA Literary Award in 2016. His core research is focused on software engineering decision support systems for healthcare and education. Dr. Gurupur is also someone who has worked in the healthcare industry for several years. Based on this work experience and academic training he is involved in discovering innovative solutions to difficult problems associated with Electronic Health Records. Dr. Gurupur has more than 100 publications which include: edited book, book chapters, journal articles, conference papers, abstracts, and published reviews. Additionally, he has been involved in many research projects funded by the United States Federal government agencies such as National Science Foundation, and National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Mey Goh

Co-Chair

Dr. Mey Goh is a Reader in Transdisciplinary Digital Manufacturing at the Wolfson School of Mechanical, Electrical, and Manufacturing Engineering, Loughborough University, UK. She received her BEng (Hons) in Mechanical Engineering from Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Malaysia, in 2001, and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Bristol, UK, in 2005. Her transdisciplinary research aligns with the human-centricity pillar of Industry 5, focusing on advancing knowledge, processes, and methods for designing effective and inclusive industrial systems and technologies. This includes pioneering work on digital twin interfaces, human-robot interaction, human factors and user-centric explainable AI (XAI). Dr. Goh is an Associate Director at the Intelligent Automation Centre and Co-Director of the Made Smarter Innovation Research Centre on People-Led Digitalisation (P-LD). In this role, she collaborates with the Universities of Bath and Nottingham, along with various industry partners, to enhance the adoption of digital technologies through a people-led approach. She serves on the Committee of the Consortium of UK University Manufacturing and Engineering (COMEH) and is a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science (JIDPS).