Brief bios of organizers:

Fuad Rahman: Fuad Rahman, Ph.D., is an academician and entrepreneur, known for founding Apurba Technologies, a company specializing in machine learning applications. He also holds the position of Adjunct Professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at the University of Arizona, which focuses on interdisciplinary research at the intersection of computer vision, medicine, and engineering. This position is aimed to enhance the exchange of information and ideas between academia and industry, facilitating research collaborations, and developing funding opportunities. Apurba Technologies is very active in the computerization of Bangla - the seventh most popular language by a number of speakers but unfortunately a low-resource language because of a lack of research and commercial solutions in this language. Apurba is currently building the first-ever commercial Bangla OCR and a screen reader system for computer and mobile platforms that will produce output speeches in Bangla language under a contract from the Information and Communication Technology Division of the Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications, and Information Technology of the Government of Bangladesh.
Fuad has published widely in scientific journals. His published body of work comprises over 100 technical peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature including 6 book chapters and 30 journal papers. He has worked on the editorial boards of technical journals, acted as a referee to many journals, and worked as a technical committee member at many international conferences.
Email: fuad@apurbatech.com
Website: apurbatech.com

Syed Akhter Hossain: Dr. Syed Akhter Hossain is an esteemed figure in the realm of computer science and engineering, with a long history of making substantial contributions to education, research, and industry in Bangladesh. Presently, he holds the position of the Dean of the Faculty of Science and Information Technologies at Daffodil International University. During his tenure, he made remarkable strides in enhancing the department's reputation in areas like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other research domains. Dr. Hossain has been actively involved in research and has an impressive record of more than 250 published papers and presentations. His work has received recognition and acknowledgment from reputable research databases such as ACM, DBLP, and IEEE Xplore. Moreover, he has played a pivotal role in guiding various research projects and establishing productive collaborations with different institutes and industries. He received the prestigious Best Professor of IT Award from Singapore in 2012 and the National ICT Award in 2016 for his exceptional dedication to ICT education. One of his notable accomplishments includes his work on developing a machine translator for Bangla Braille, significantly benefiting the visually impaired society and garnering international acclaim for its impact and significance. Through his unwavering dedication and remarkable achievements, Dr. Hossain has played a crucial role in shaping the future of technology and education in Bangladesh, leaving a lasting impact on the nation's academic and technological landscape.
Email: deanfsit@daffodilvarsity.edu.bd
Website: https://faculty.daffodilvarsity.edu.bd/profile/swe/akhter.html

Sheikh Abujar: Sheikh Abujar is a prominent researcher with a focus on deep learning, computer vision, and speech recognition applications. Currently affiliated with the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Research Lab (KDDM) at The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), his work seeks to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence. Alongside his research commitments, Abujar holds a faculty position in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB). His expertise is reflected in numerous publications in esteemed Scopus Indexed proceedings of IEEE, Springer, and Elsevier, establishing him as a respected authority in the field. Under his mentorship, many of his students' research projects have achieved accolades, winning the "Best Research Paper - Award" at prestigious international conferences.
Recognizing the need for nurturing innovation, Abujar founded and supervised the Computational Intelligence LAB (CI LAB) and DIU - NLP and Machine Learning Research LAB. His leadership has driven significant contributions to computational intelligence, resulting in the creation of two vital low-resource language datasets - Bayanno (Bangla Speech Dataset) and IsharaLipi (Bangla Sign Language Dataset).
Email: sabujar@uab.edu
Website: https://sites.google.com/site/iamabujarsheikh

AKM Shahariar Azad Rabby: AKM Shahariar Azad Rabby is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and a Technical Lead (ML & Systems) at Apurba Technologies. His work focuses on computer vision, deep learning, and production machine learning systems, with particular emphasis on OCR, vision-language models, and MLOps. He has contributed to the development of large-scale OCR systems and low-resource language technologies for Bangla. He has authored over 46 peer-reviewed publications and has received multiple academic and professional recognitions.
Email: shahariar@rabby.dev
Website: rabby.dev

Haihua Chen: Dr. Haihua Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Data Science and Health Informatics at the University of North Texas (UNT). He directs the Intelligent Data Engineering and Analytics (IDEA) Lab at UNT. His research interests include applied data science, data quality, information retrieval, natural language processing, text mining, legal artificial intelligence, and health informatics. Dr. Chen has co-authored over 50 publications in both Information Science and Computer Science. He serves as the co-editor of The Electronic Library and as a guest editor for journals such as Frontiers in Big Data and Information Discovery & Delivery. He is an active member of academic associations including ACM, IEEE, SIGIR, ASIS&T, and AAAI. Dr. Chen received his Ph.D. from the University of North Texas, M.S. from Wuhan University, China, and B.S. from Central China Normal University, China.
Email: Haihua.Chen@unt.edu
Website: https://idealabunt.github.io/home/haihua-chen.html