Dr. Song Sze Looi is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS), Universiti Malaya, specialising in Phylogenomics and eDNA Metagenomics. She obtained her PhD in the field of Algal Biotechnology in 2013. Following her doctorate, she was appointed as a Postdoctoral Researcher on a high-impact research project in Molecular Phylogenetics and Systematics. In 2016, she took on the role of Research Fellow, focusing on Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and Bioinformatics. In 2019, Dr. Song joined the China-ASEAN College of Marine Sciences (CAMS) at Xiamen University Malaysia as an Assistant Professor. She returned to Universiti Malaya in 2021 and currently serves as the Program Coordinator for the Master of Advanced Studies (MAS) and the Program Director for Future Studies. Dr. Song’s research integrates high-throughput sequencing technologies and advanced analytical tools to explore the evolutionary relationships and biodiversity of a wide range of organisms, including both marine and terrestrial taxa. Her projects examined the phylogenetic and phylogeographic structures of biota of economic, agriculture and public health importance, such as seaweeds, parasites, insects, and vertebrates, as well as microbial communities associated with host organisms and environmental samples. She has published over 60 WoS–indexed journal articles. In addition, she has led or contributed to numerous research projects funded by national, international, and industry bodies, including the Japan Toray Science Foundation, the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS), the National Conservation Trust Fund (NCTF), and a Petronas-funded project in collaboration with UCSI University. Her recent work focuses on the application of eDNA for assessing marine biodiversity and ecosystem health, particularly in sensitive estuarine and coastal habitats. Her research excellence has been recognized (1) through multiple awards, including being a co-recipient of the Malaysia Toray Science Foundation 2023 Science and Technology Award, and (2) as a lead speaker at conferences.

Dr. Tuan Zaharinie Binti Tuan Zahari is a Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Malaya (UM). She holds a Bachelor of Engineering (2006) and a Master of Engineering Science (2009) in Materials Engineering, as well as a PhD (2014) in Advanced Manufacturing Technology: Brazing, all from the same university. She specializes in metal and alloys heat treatment and joining technology, particularly brazing process for similar or dissimilar materials and porous metal joining. She also explores the research areas of heat transfer, energy, and material recycling. She has published more than 25 technical papers and a book chapter in this fields which are mostly International Scientific Indexing (ISI)-indexed journal papers. She is also an active researcher who has received and been the principal investigator for various research grants, including University of Malaya Research Grant (UMRG), Impact-Oriented Interdisciplinary Research Grant Programme (IIRG), two times Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS) from Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia (MOHE), etc. She teaches several courses for Mechanical Engineering undergraduates, such as Manufacturing Technology, Machine Tool Engineering, Advanced Manufacturing Processes, Energy and Environment, etc.

Tutut Herawan is an associate professor at the Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya. He is also a research fellow at the Institute for Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (IBDAAI) of UiTM Shah Alam, Malaysia. He was named in the Top 2% World Scientists Ranking by Stanford University and Elsevier BV, since 2019-present and his mathematics Erdos number is 4. He is also named in the most prolific DBLP-computer science authors and one of the best computer scientists from Malaysia according to https://research.com/. He received a PhD degree in information technology from Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia in 2010. He was a visiting researcher at Parallel and Distributed Computing Research Lab of Deakin University, Australia. He has more than 18 years experiences as academic staff and has supervised many Master & PhD students. He has also examined many Master & PhD Theses from Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and China. He is the associate editor of Springer Nature Computer Science Journal (Scopus), editor of International Journal of Knowledge and Systems Science, IGI Global (Scopus), and editor-advisory board member of the book series “Information Systems Engineering and Management / ISEM” of Springer Nature. He has edited many Springer-series books and published more than 330 articles in various book chapters, international journals, and conference proceedings (with Scopus h-index 36 and ISI WoS h-index 29). He is a reviewer for international journals including top reputable journals e.g., Knowledge-Based Systems, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, Information Sciences, IEEE Access, and many more. He delivered more than 50 keynote addresses, invited workshop and seminars, and has been actively served as a chair, co-chair, program committee member and co-organizer for numerous international conferences/workshops. He is the general chair of the 8th Asian Conference in Pattern Recognition /ACPR-2025, which will be held in Bali, Indonesia. His research area includes data science and big data, data engineering and information systems, soft computing and data mining, and information technology for tourism.