Professor Franco Gandolfi
Georgetown University, USA
Brief Introduction: Senior university leader, executive board member, published author, serial entrepreneur, public speaker, and international consultant, Prof. Dr. Franco Gandolfi is currently the Distinguished Professor in Management at the California Institute of Advanced Management (CIAM) in Los Angeles, California. Dr. Gandolfi previously served as the Inaugural Campus Director and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (PVC) of Iqra University’s Bahria Town Campus in Karachi, Pakistan, as CEO of Lancaster University in Ghana, and as a Member of the Executive Board of the Nguyen Hoang Group (NHG), a conglomerate of business units in the education space in Vietnam. Prior to his roles in Pakistan, Ghana, and Vietnam, he served as the Vice-Chancellor (VC) and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Manipal International University (MIU) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Previously, he had held deanships and senior professorial appointments at the Canadian University of Dubai, UAE, the University of the South Pacific, Fiji, California Baptist University in Riverside, California, and Central Queensland University in Sydney, Australia. Furthermore, Prof. Dr. Franco Gandolfi holds a full professorship in leadership with Georgetown University in Washington DC, one of the world’s most renowned research universities.
Prof. Reynold Cheng（inviting）
University of Hong Kong (HKU), Hong Kong China
Brief Introduction: Prof. Reynold Cheng is the Division Head and Professor (Computer Science), at the School of Computing and Data Science, in the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He is also a Steering Committee Member of the HKU Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science. He is an academic advisor to the College of Professional and Continuing Education of HKPU. He was an Associate Dean of Engineering in 2022-24. His research interests are in data science, big graph analytics and uncertain data management. Professor Cheng is named the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention in Database in 2023 and 2024. He received the ACM Distinguished Membership Award and the HKU Outstanding Research Student Supervisor Award in 2023. He was listed as the World’s Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University in 2022. He received the SIGMOD Research Highlights Reward 2020, HKICT Awards (2021, 2023), and HKU Knowledge Exchange Award (Engineering) (2024, 2021). He was granted an Outstanding Young Researcher Award 2011-12 by HKU. He received the Universitas 21 Fellowship in 2011, and two Performance Awards from HKPU Computing in 2006 and 2007. He was a PC co-chair of IEEE ICDE 2021. He is on the editorial board of IS, DAPD and DSEJ.
Professor Matthias Fuchs（inviting）
Free University of Bolzano, Italy
Brief Introduction: Matthias Fuchs, Ph.D., was tenured in Business Administration at University of Innsbruck, Austria in 2003. Subsequently, he was the director of the e-Tourism Competence Center Austria located at Innsbruck, Austria. From 2008 until June 2024, Matthias worked as a Full Professor of Tourism Management & Economics at Mid Sweden University, Östersund, Sweden. Since July 2024, Matthias holds the position of a Full Professor of Business Administration at the faculty of Economics and Management at Free University of Bolzano, Italy. He is also the director of the Competence Center for Tourism and Mobility, located at Brunico, Italy. Matthias’ main research interests include digital transformation in the tourism domain with a focus on big data and business intelligence applications, such as topic detection and sentiment analysis based on tourists’ online feedback. Moreover, Matthias’ research interests comprise network analyses and input output methodologies for conducting socio-economic impact analysis in tourism. Matthias also steered relevant studies in the field of customer-based destination brand equity. Finally, Matthias developed critical epistemologies grounded on Buddhist philosophy to foster more just and regenerative types of tourism (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2023.103688). Recently, Matthias’ research interests also cover the assessment of tourism’s contribution to sustain regional circular economies. Prof. Matthias Fuchs is Associate Editor of the Journal of Information Technology & Tourism. Matthias is also the co-editor of the recently published Springer Handbook of e-Tourism (https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-3-030-48652-5). Finally, Prof. Matthias Fuchs serves the editorial board of the Journal of Travel Research, Annals of Tourism Research, Tourism Analysis, and the Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Management.