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Radislav (Slava) Vaisman is a faculty member in the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Queensland. Radislav earned his Ph.D. in Information System Engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in 2014. Radislav’s research interests lie at the intersection of applied probability, statistics, and computer science. Such a multidisciplinary combination allows him to handle both theoretical and real-life problems, in the fields of machine learning, optimization, safety, and system reliability research, and more. He has published in top-ranking journals such as Statistics and Computing, INFORMS, Journal on Computing, Structural Safety, and IEEE Transactions on Reliability. The Stochastic Enumeration algorithm, which was introduced and analyzed by Radislav Vaisman, had led to the efficient solution of several problems that were out of reach of state of the art methods. In addition, he is an author of 3 books with three of the most prestigious publishers in the field, Wiley, Springer, and CRC Press. Radislav serves on the editorial board of the Stochastic Models journal.

Emeritus Professor Phil Pollett has research interests in Markov process theory, and mathematical modelling in population biology, ecology, epidemiology, chemical kinetics and telecommunications.

He holds an honours degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Adelaide and a PhD degree in Applied Probability from the University of Cambridge. He joined the then Department of Mathematics in 1987 as Senior Lecturer, having previously held positions at the University of Adelaide, Murdoch University and University College of Cardiff. He was promoted to Reader in 1993 and to Professor in 2004.

His research is recognized internationally for significant contributions to Markov process theory, and mathematical modelling. This research has been supported by 12 ARC Large/Discovery/Linkage grants. He is a Chief Investigator within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistics Frontiers (ACEMS), and was a Chief Investigator (2002-2014) within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems (MASCOS). In 1993, he was awarded the Moran Medal by the Australian Academy of Science for distinguished research in Applied Probability.

Phil Pollett has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society, Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability, Stochastic Models, and The Annals of Applied Probability, and has served on the organizing committees of several major international conferences. He devised the Probability Web, recognized as the main Web resource for probabilists throughout the world, and one of the first academic web sites. He has a strong record of innovation in undergraduate teaching, and has guided the development of many postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows through supervision and collaboration.

Dirk Kroese's research interests are in: Monte Carlo methods, rare-event simulation, the cross-entropy method, applied probability, and randomised optimisation.

Dirk Kroese is a professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the School of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Queensland. He has held teaching and research positions at The University of Texas at Austin, Princeton University, the University of Twente, the University of Melbourne, and the University of Adelaide. His research interests include Monte Carlo methods, adaptive importance sampling, randomized optimization, and rare-event simulation. He has over 120 peer-reviewed publications, including six monographs:

• Rubinstein, R.Y., Kroese, D.P. (2004). The Cross-Entropy Method: A Unified Approach to Combinatorial Optimization, Monte-Carlo Simulation, and Machine Learning, Springer, New York.
• Rubinstein, R. Y. , Kroese, D. P. (2007). Simulation and the Monte Carlo Method, 2nd edition, John Wiley & Sons.
• Kroese, D.P., Taimre, T., and Botev, Z.I. (2011). Handbook of Monte Carlo Methods, Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics, John Wiley & Sons, New York.
• Kroese, D.P. and Chan, J.C.C. (2014). Statistical Modeling and Computation, Springer, New York.
• Rubinstein, R. Y. , Kroese, D. P. (2017). Simulation and the Monte Carlo Method, 3rd edition, John Wiley & Sons.
• Kroese, D.P., Botev, Z.I., Taimre, T and Vaisman, R. (2019) Data Science and Machine Learning: Mathematical and Statistical Methods, Chapman & Hill/CRC.
• Kroese, D.P. and Botev, Z.I. (2023). An Advanced Course in Probability and Stochastic Processes, Chapman & Hill/CRC.

Dr Huang has an Honours degree in Science (Advanced Mathematics) from the University of Sydney, and a PhD (Statistics) from the University of Chicago on a McCormick Fellowship. He previously lectured at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Technology Sydney, before moving to the University of Queensland where he is currently the Statistics Major Convenor and Mathematics Honours Coordinator.

Kazutoshi Yamazaki is a senior lecturer at the School of Mathematics and Physics, the University of Queensland. Before joining UQ in April 2022, he was an assistant professor at Osaka University and an associate professor at Kansai University. He is an applied probabilist with contributions in the field of insurance and financial mathematics and operations research. He has organised various conferences including the Probability Theory and Stochastic Processes session at the 65th AustMS 2021 annual meeting. He is also one of the organisers of Mathematics of Risk 2022, a MATRIX event to be held in December 2022. Kazutoshi obtained his PhD in Operations Research and Financial Engineering from Princeton University in 2009.

Ross McVinish has research interests in applied probability, Bayesian statistics and mathematical modelling of complex systems in population biology.

He received his PhD from Queensland University of Technology in 2002.

He is currently an associate editor for the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics.

Dr. Ian Wood’s research interests are in classification, bioinformatics, stochastic optimisation, machine learning and mixture models.

He received his PhD from the University of Queensland in 2004.

Professor Joseph Grotowski completed his Bachelor of Science with Honours in Mathematics at the Australian National University in 1985. He then moved to New York for postgraduate studies in Mathematics, and completed an MS in 1987 and a PhD in 1990 at the Courant Institute, NYU.

He held a number of positions in Germany, and completed his Habilitation at the Friedrich-Alexander Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg in 2001. He took up a position as an Associate Professor at the City College of New York of the City University of New York in 2003, and returned to Australia to take up a position as a Senior Lecturer at UQ in 2005. He was promoted to Associate Professor from 2010, and Full Professor from 2013.

His main research area is geometric and nonlinear partial differential equations.

He served as Head of the Mathematics Discipline from 1 January 2010 until 30 April 2014. From 1 May 2014 he has been Head of the School of Mathematics and Physics. As Head of School, he is responsible for ensuring that the School delivers a high standard of research and teaching, as well as engagement with the broader community, across our disciplines of mathematics, physics and statistics. He is also responsible for providing and fostering strategic leadership within the School, as well as for financial management of the School’s budget and management of the School’s resources.

He is a former Board Member of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, and serves on the advisory Board of the MATRIX Research Insitute. He has been active in CSIRO Mathematicians in Schools for a number of years.

Jerzy Filar is Emeritus Professor of Applied Mathematics. Jerzy is a broadly trained applied mathematician with research interests spanning a spectrum of both theoretical and applied topics in Operations Research, Stochastic Modelling, Optimisation, Game Theory and Environmental Modelling. Professor Filar co-authored, or authored, five books or monographs and approximately 100 refereed research papers. He has a record of research grants/contracts with agencies and research institutes such as NSF, ARC, US EPA, World Resources Institute, DSTO, FRDC and the Sir Keith and Sir Ross Smith Foundation. He is editor-in-chief of Springer’s Environmental Modelling and Assessment and served on editorial boards of several other journals. He has supervised or co-supervised 29 PhD students. Jerzy's Erdos Number is 3.