Lei Chen is a Chair Professor in Data Science and Analytics at HKUST (GZ) and Department of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST, a Fellow of ACM and IEEE. Currently, he serves as the Dean of the Information Hub and the Director of the Big Data Institute at HKUST (GZ). Prof. Chen’s research spans several areas, including Data-driven AI, Big Data Analytics, the Metaverse, knowledge graphs, blockchain technology, data privacy, crowdsourcing, and spatial and temporal databases, as well as probabilistic databases. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada.
Prof. Chen has received several prestigious awards, including the SIGMOD Test-of-Time Award in 2015 and the Best Research Paper Award at VLDB 2022. His team’s system also won the Excellent Demonstration Award at VLDB 2014. He served as the Program Committee Co-chair for VLDB 2019 and currently holds the position of Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering. In addition, he was the General Co-Chair of VLDB 2024 and served as the General Co-Chair of IJCAI China 2025.

Renée J. Miller is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Data Intelligence at the University of Waterloo. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Canada’s National Academy of Science, Engineering and the Humanities. She received the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their careers. She received an NSF CAREER Award, the Ontario Premier’s Research Excellence Award, and an IBM Faculty Award. She formerly held the Bell Canada Chair of Information Systems at the University of Toronto and a University Distinguished Professorship at Northeastern University. She is a Fellow of the ACM and the AAAS. Her work has focused on the long-standing open problem of data integration and has achieved the goal of building practical data integration systems. She and her colleagues received the ICDT Test-of-Time Award and the 2020 Alonzo Church Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation for their influential work establishing the foundations of data exchange. For her body of work, she has received the CS Canada Lifetime Achievement Award in Computer Science. Professor Miller served as president of the non-profit Very Large Data Base (VLDB) Foundation and an Editor-in-Chief of the VLDB Journal. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Cognitive Science from MIT.

Tim Kraska is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, where he is part of the Data Systems Group in CSAIL, and a Director of Applied Science at Amazon Web Services (AWS). He co-directs MIT’s Generative AI Impact Consortium (MGAIC), the Data Systems and AI Lab (DSAIL@CSAIL), and the new Everest@CSAIL initiative. He also co-founded Instancio and Einblick Analytics, both of which were acquired.
Before joining MIT, he was an Assistant Professor at Brown University, and spent time at Google Brain. He is a Sloan Research Fellow and has received several awards, including the VLDB Early Career Research Contribution Award, the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, the VMware Systems Research Award, Brown University’s Early Career Research Achievement Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and multiple best paper and demo awards at VLDB, SIGMOD, and ICDE.

Volker Markl is a German Professor of Computer Science. He leads the Chair of Database Systems and Information Management at TU Berlin and the Intelligent Analytics for Massive Data Research Department at DFKI. In addition, he is Director of the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD). He is a database systems researcher, conducting research at the intersection of distributed systems, scalable data processing, and machine learning. Volker led the Stratosphere project, which resulted in the creation of Apache Flink. Volker has received numerous honors and prestigious awards, including best paper awards at ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, and ICDE as well as the ACM SIGMOD Systems Award. In 2014, he was elected one of Germany‘s leading "Digital Minds" (Digitale Köpfe) by the German Informatics Society and is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He was elected an ACM Fellow for his contributions to query optimization, scalable data processing, and data programmability. He served President of the VLDB Endowment, and serves as advisor to academic institutions, governmental organizations, and technology companies. Volker holds eighteen patents and has been co-founder and mentor to several startups.