Koen De Backer is the Vice President of smart manufacturing and artificial intelligence at Micron Technology. He is responsible for driving Micron’s smart manufacturing initiatives and digital operations including capabilities with IoT, artificial intelligence, advanced analytics, cognitive computing and machine learning to enhance our business, global operations and product development. Prior to joining Micron, Koen led large-scale operations projects for more than a decade to help clients reduce inefficiencies and achieve excellence in manufacturing, procurement, supply chain and support functions. Most recently, Koen was a Partner at McKinsey & Company where he steered the semiconductor consulting practice in Southeast Asia and was one of the firm’s leading experts on applying artificial intelligence and automation techniques across operations and support functions such as finance, human resources and procurement. Additionally, Koen consulted with high-tech global clients while working at Deloitte Consulting, Altran Europe and CSC. Koen holds a master’s degree in business administration from INSEAD and master’s degrees in both industrial management and electromechanical engineering from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

MICHAEL FU holds the Smith Chair of Management Science in the Decision, Operations and Information Technologies department of the Robert H. Smith School of Business, with a joint appointment in the Institute for Systems Research and an affiliate appointment in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (both in the Clark School of Engineering), all at the University of Maryland. He received degrees in math and EECS from MIT in 1985 and a Ph.D. in applied math from Harvard in 1989. His research interests include stochastic gradient estimation, simulation optimization, and applied probability. He is the co-author of the books, Conditional Monte Carlo: Gradient Estimation and Optimization Applications, which received the INFORMS Simulation Society’s 1998 Outstanding Publication Award, and Simulation-Based Algorithms for Markov Decision Processes, and editor/co-editor of four volumes: Perspectives in Operations Research, Advances in Mathematical Finance, Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science (3rd edition), and Handbook of Simulation Optimization. He served as Program Chair for the 2011 Winter Simulation Conference, as the Operations Research Program Director at the National Science Foundation from 2010 to 2012 and in 2015, on the INFORMS Board of Directors from 2017-2018, and as General Co-Chair for the 2020 INFORMS National Meeting. Recent awards include the INFORMS Simulation Society’s Distinguished Service Award (2019) and the INFORMS Saul Gass Expository Writing Award (2021). He is a Fellow of IEEE and INFORMS.

Robert Hunjet is the Australian Defence Science and Technology Group’s (DSTG) Program Leader for Artificial Intelligence. In this role he is responsible for driving Defence’s Innovation Science and Technology investment in Artificial Intelligence. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Adelaide, Australia for his thesis on Self Adaptive Network Topologies in 2014 and serves as an adjunct Associate Professor with the Trusted Autonomy Group in the School of Engineering and Information Technology, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia. He is the chair of the IEEE Symposium of Computational Intelligence for Security and Defense Applications and serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence. His research interests include all things AI and Autonomy with a specific interest on their use in distributed systems.