Biographical note

Panos Pardalos is Distinguished Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida. He is also affiliated faculty member of the Computer Science Department, the Hellenic Studies Center, and the Biomedical Engineering Program. He is also the director of the Center for Applied Optimization. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Global Optimization, Journal of Optimization Letters, and Computational Management Science. In addition, he is the managing editor of several book series, and a member of the editorial board of several international journals. He is the author of 8 books and the editor of several books. He has written numerous articles and developed several well known software packages. His recent research interests include network design problems, optimization in telecommunications, e-commerce, data mining, biomedical applications, and massive computing. My T. Thai is an Associate Professor in the Computer & Information Science & Engineering department at the University of Florida. Her research interests are centered on the Combinatorial Optimization and its connection to Networks, including communication networks, online social networks, wireless sensor networks, and biological networks. The results of her work have been published in about 60 articles and 4 books since 2005. She has engaged in many professional activities, serving many conferences such as being a conference chair of COCOON 2010 and DIS 2011. She is an associate editor of Journal of Combinatorial Optimization (JOCO), Optimization Letters, and Ad Hoc & Wireless Sensor Networks journal. She is also a guest editor of several other journals and a series editor of Springer Briefs in Optimization. She has received many research awards including a Provost's Excellence Award for Assistant Professors at the University of Florida, a DoD Young Investigator Award, and an NSF CAREER Award.