Nikolaos Bilalis is Professor of Computer Aided Manufacturing, Director of CAD Laboratory, Department of Production and Management Engineering, Technical University of Crete.

Graduate Mechanical-Electrical engineer from National Technical University of Athens (1978), M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering Design from Aston University of Birmingham, UK (1979) and Ph.D. in Flexible Manufacturing Systems, Production Engineering, Loughborough University, UK, (1983).

His research interests are on Technologies for Product and Process Development and Integration, Tools for Product Design CAD/CAM/CAE/CAPP, Technologies for Product Development Rapid Prototyping and Rapid Tooling and Virtual Environments, Product Innovation, Tools and methodologies for Product Evaluation Design for Disassembly and Manufacturing Excellence. He has published more than 120 papers in Scientific Journals and Int. Conferences.

He serves as a consultant to Industry, he has an extensive participation in numerous (>50) European and National research projects. He has served in various committees as reviewer in National and European Research committees, in Investments for high technology and new products and in Innovation and Patents Grants. He acts as a reviewer to numerous scientific journals and International Conferences of the field.

Prof. Abdelaziz Bouras joined the College of Engineering of Qatar University (CSE Department) in Sept. 2013, where he holds the ictQATAR Supreme Council of Information & Communication Technology Scientific Chair position. Prior to that he was Professor at Université Lumière of Lyon (France) and Deputy Director of the DISP Information and Decision laboratory.

His current research interests focus on architectures for lifecycle engineering, and information modeling including ontology construction, semantic consistency, intelligent products modeling and digital preservation. He guided more than 20 PhD students in these fields. He currently participates in several international projects, such as the EU FP7 EASY-IMP project on Intelligent Products in the Cloud, EU FP7 FITMAN project on Future Internet Technologies for Manufacturing and coordinates a large ICT Erasmus-Mundus consortia on ICT for Sustainable eTourism.

Hi is currently the Chair of the International Federation of Information Processing IFIP WG5.1 Group on ICT for global products Lifecycle (PLM); and is member of the IFIP WG 5.7 Group on ICT for supply chains. He is also the Co-founder of the international IFIP conference on PLM and the annual IFIP doctoral workshop on PLM. In 2011 Dr. Bouras has been conferred the Honoris-Causa honorary Doctoral Degree in Science (ICT and Knowledge Management) of the Chiang Mai University (Thailand) by HRH Princess of Thailand.

See ACADEM 2013 invited speakers here.