Peter Druschel is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) and past Chair of the Chemistry, Physics, and Technology Section of the Max Planck Society in Germany. Previously, he was a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

His research interests include distributed systems, mobile systems, privacy-preserving, secure, and compliant systems. He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, a Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award, and the EuroSys Lifetime Achievement Award. Peter is a member of Academia Europaea and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Ling Liu is a Professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology. She directs the research programs in the Distributed Data Intensive Systems Lab (DiSL), examining various aspects of Internet-scale distributed systems, AI systems, algorithms, and analytics, including performance, reliability, privacy, security and trust.

Prof. Liu is an elected IEEE Fellow, a recipient of IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (2012), and a recipient of the best paper award from numerous top venues, including IEEE ICDCS, WWW, ACM/IEEE CCGrid, IEEE Cloud, IEEE ICWS. Prof. Liu served on editorial board of over a dozen international journals, including the editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Service Computing (2013-2016), and the editor in chief of ACM Transactions on Internet Computing (2019-2024). Currently, Prof. Liu is the editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Big Data (since Jan, 2025).

Prof. Liu is a frequent keynote speaker in top-tier venues in Internet Computing and data systems, AI/ML systems, Privacy, Security and Trust. Her current research is primarily supported by USA National Science Foundation under CISE programs, CISCO and IBM.