Reza Kianoush is a professor of civil engineering at Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada, and received his PhD from the University of Alberta in 1986. He has extensive experience in design, research and teaching of structures He is a member and the current Chair of ACI Committee 350, Environmental Engineering Concrete Structures. He is alsoserving as the Chair of the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) Sub-committee of N287.3 on Design of Concrete Containment Structures for Nuclear Power Plants. His research interests include analytical modeling and experimental investigation of concrete liquid containing structures under hydrostatic and seismic loading.

Sorooshian was born in a Zoroastrian family in Kerman, Iran. He did his primary education in Kerman before moving to United States in 1966. He got his bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and MSc and PhD from UCLA in systems engineering. Soroosh Sorooshian is the Director of the Center for Hydrometeorology & Remote Sensing (CHRS) and Distinguished Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Earth System Science Departments at UC Irvine. Prior to 2003, he was a faculty at the University of Arizona for 20 years. His area of expertise is Hydrometeorology, water resources systems, climate studies and application of remote sensing to earth science problems with special focus on the hydrologic cycle and water resources issues of arid and semi-arid zones. He also consults on problems related to surface hydrology and urban flooding. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE); Member of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA); Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and serves as a Member-at-Large, Section on Atmospheric & Hydrospheric Sciences; Fellow, American Geophysical Union (AGU) and serves as a member of the Board of Directors; Fellow, American Meteorological Society (AMS); Fellow, International Water Resources Association (IWRA); Member, Joint Scientific Committee, (JSC) of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP); Past Chair, Science Steering Group (SSG) of Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP); U.S. Member of the Hydrology Commission for WMO; Emeritus member of UCAR Board of Trustees and NOAA Science Advisory Board; Past-President of AGU's Hydrology Section; member of five editorial boards and former editor of AGU's Water Resources Research. He has served on numerous advisory committees, including those of NASA, NOAA, DOE, USDA, NSF, EPA, and UNESCO. Current member of the National Research Council’s (NRC) Space Study Board (SSB) and past member of the Water Science and Technology Board (WSTB).

Dr Ioannis Brilakis is a Laing O'Rourke Reader in Construction Engineering and the Director of the Construction Information Technology Laboratory at the Division of Civil Engineering of the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He completed his PhD in Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in 2005. He then worked as an Assistant Professor at the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2005-2008) and Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta (2008-2012) before moving to Cambridge in 2012 as a Laing O’Rourke Lecturer. He was promoted to University Reader in October 2017. He has also held visiting posts at the Department of Computer Science, Stanford University as a Visiting Associate Professor of Computer Vision (2014) and at the Technical University of Munich as a Visiting Professor, Leverhulme International Fellow (2018-2019), and Hans Fischer Senior Fellow (2019-2021). He is a recipient of the 2019 ASCE J. James R. Croes Medal, the 2018 ASCE John O. Bickel Award, the 2013 ASCE Collingwood Prize, the 2012 Georgia Tech Outreach Award, the NSF CAREER award, and the 2009 ASCE Associate Editor Award. Dr Brilakis is an author of over 190 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, an Associate Editor of the ASCE Computing in Civil Engineering, ASCE Construction Engineering and Management, Elsevier Automation in Construction, and Elsevier Advanced Engineering Informatics Journals, and the past chair of the Board of Directors of the European Council on Computing in Construction.