José Valente de Oliveira received his Ph.D. (1996), M.Sc. (1992), and the “Licenciado” degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the IST, Technical University of Lisbon.  Currently he is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Algarve where he served as Deputy Dean from 2002-2003.  He was recently appointed director of the University of Algarve Informatics Lab, a research laboratory specializing in computational intelligence including fuzzy sets, fuzzy and intelligent systems, machine learning, and optimization.

Witold Pedrycz is a Professor and Canada Research Chair (CRC) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.  He is also with the Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences.  He is actively pursuing research in computational intelligence, fuzzy modeling, knowledge discovery and data mining, fuzzy control including fuzzy controllers, pattern recognition, knowledge-based neural networks, relational computation, bioinformatics, and Software Engineering.  He currently serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems.