Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA

* We regret to inform that Prof. Blum will not attend the conference due to some personal issues.

Biography. Manuel Blum is Carnegie Mellon's Bruce Nelson University Professor of Computer Science. He is one of the founders of computational complexity theory, work that has also had applications to cryptography and program checking. He is the 1995 winner of the A.M. Turing Award, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Manuel is also proud to be the husband of Lenore Blum, Carnegie Mellon's Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science, and with Lenore, the parents of Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Professor Avrim Blum.

Department of Optimization and Control
Institute of Mathematics
Hanoi, Vietnam

Talk: Discrete Monotonic Programming



Biography. Dr H. Tuy received his PhD in real analysis from Moscow University in 1959. In 1964 he published a significant work on concave minimization under linear constraints where a cut concept was introduced, which was later named as convexity cut, concavity cut or Tuy's cut. As a pioneer and a leading specialist in nonconvex and global optimization, he is a cofounder of Journal of Global Optimization and author or main coauthor of three well known monographs in this field. Dr Tuy received a honorary doctorate from Linkoping University in 1995 and from Rouen University in 2007. He was the dean of the faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Hanoi University (1960-1968) and director of the Hanoi Institute of Mathematics (1980-1990). He served on the editorial board of several mathematical journals, including Mathematical Programming (1975-1985) , Journal of Global Optimization (since its foundation), Optimization (1978 - present), Acta Mathematica Vietnamica, VN Journal of Mathematics, Nonlinear Optimization Forum, etc. His current research interests include: Continuous and discrete monotonic optimization, generalized DC and DM optimization, Min-max and Fixed point theory, Robust global optimization.

Department of Computer Science
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Talk: Computing with Cells: Membrane Systems

Biography. Oscar H. Ibarra received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Philippines and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, also in Electrical Engineering, from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Professor and past Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms, theory of computation, computational complexity, parallel computing, formal verification, molecular computing, membrane computing. Ibarra is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and IEEE. Among his honors and awards are the following: Guggenheim Fellowship, IEEE Computer Society's Harry H. Goode Memorial Award, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship, Nokia Visiting Fellowship, the 2007 Blaise Pascal Medal in Computer Science from the European Academy of Sciences, Foreign member of Academia Europaea (Informatics Section), Distinguished Visiting Fellowship from the UK Royal Academy of Engineeering. He was designated Highly Cited Researcher by the Institute for Scientific Information. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science and has served or currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals.