Luciano Mescia is Full Professor of Electromagnetic Fields at the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Politecnico di Bari. His theoretical and experimental research activities focus on electromagnetic technologies and devices for industrial, biological, optical, and biomedical applications.

He is currently conducting research on additive manufacturing technologies for electromagnetics, phased array antennas based on flexible ultra-light materials and printed RF components, novel dielectric lenses and UWB antennas, and new planar, monopole, spiral, and conformal antennas for 5G, wireless, and e-health applications. His work also includes the development of advanced FDTD algorithms based on fractional calculus, radiation-hardened and rare earth–doped fiber amplifiers and lasers, optical fiber strain and temperature sensors for harsh environments, as well as microwave and pulsed electric field electromagnetic systems for biomedical and food processing applications. Furthermore, he has contributed to the field of evolutionary computation, developing artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, and swarm intelligence techniques for solving electromagnetic optimization problems.

Professor Mescia has been involved in several national and international research projects both as coordinator and partner, and he is currently the scientific coordinator of two projects funded by the European Space Agency. His research output includes 85 articles published in indexed international journals, 2 international books, 1 teaching book, 9 chapters in international volumes, 4 editorials in international journals, 96 articles in international conference proceedings, 4 granted international patents, and 2 pending international patents.

He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Italian Society of Environmental Medicine. Since 2006, he has been part of the teaching staff of the PhD program in Electrical and Information Engineering at Politecnico di Bari. He also serves as a member of the University Quality Presidium (PQA) and as Process Manager for research quality assessment at Politecnico di Bari. Additionally, he is the Local Academic Coordinator of Politecnico di Bari for the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree RADMEP – Radiation and its Effects on MicroElectronics and Photonics Technologies.

In January 2015, he received the Honorable Mention by the IEEE MTT-S Central-Southern Italy Award 2014. He is also a member of the Italian Society of Electromagnetism (SIEm).

Dr. Chengappa Munjandira, a senior technologist, IEEE leader, and advocate for sustainability and inclusive innovation, has been appointed as a member of the 9th Academic Senate of Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU), Belagavi.

The appointment was formally announced through the Karnataka Governor’s Secretariat Notification No. GS 06 TUM 2025, dated June 25, 2025, and communicated by the Hon’ble Vice Chancellor of VTU. As the university’s highest academic body, the Academic Senate plays a crucial role in shaping academic policy, curriculum development, and institutional strategy.

With over two decades of experience in telecommunications and IT, Dr. Chengappa has worked extensively in virtualized and open Radio Access Networks, next-generation wireless systems, and AI-driven network intelligence. His contributions to scalable, energy-efficient digital infrastructure have supported the evolution of sustainable and future-ready communication technologies.

He is widely recognized for his leadership in emerging domains including Generative AI, Non-Terrestrial Networks, and edge intelligence, and for promoting standardization frameworks that enable scalable innovation.

As a passionate advocate of sustainability and Tech4Good initiatives, Dr. Chengappa has led several community-centric projects under the IEEE Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology. His work spans renewable energy, disaster response, and digital equity, emphasizing ethical technology deployment to support underserved communities and global development goals.

In his role as Vice Chair of IEEE Bangalore Section and Technical Lead for the IEEE MOVE Outreach India program, he has mobilized multidisciplinary teams across academia, industry, and non-profits, driving impactful technology interventions and fostering talent development among students and young professionals.

His appointment to the VTU Academic Senate acknowledges his significant contributions to technical education, policy-driven research, sustainability efforts, and social impact through technology. His expertise is expected to further curriculum modernization, interdisciplinary collaboration, and skill development aligned with national priorities such as Digital India, Make in India, and Atmanirbhar Bharat.

Dr. Chengappa brings a rare combination of industry insight, social responsibility, and academic vision—strengthening VTU’s mission to shape engineering professionals capable of building a sustainable and inclusive future.

Dr K Naveen Kumar is a researcher in Artificial Intelligence with expertise spanning trustworthy federated learning, AI security and privacy, agentic AI systems, and vision–language models for healthcare and autonomous systems. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Machine Learning Department at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Dr Naveen earned his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IIT Hyderabad), where he also received the PhD Research Excellence Award for the year 2023–2024. He also holds an M.Tech in CSE from IIT Hyderabad and a B.Tech from IIIT Vadodara, graduating with distinction throughout his academic journey.

His research contributions include advancements in secure and privacy-preserving federated learning, defense mechanisms against adversarial attacks, secure vision-language AI for medical imaging, and autonomous vehicle perception under transitional weather conditions. He has published in premier venues such as IEEE TPAMI, IEEE T-IFS, Pattern Recognition, IEEE T-ITS, CVPR, WACV, and others.

He is also a co-inventor of a granted Indian patent on adaptive object detection for autonomous vehicles, and has filed multiple patents related to federated learning security and transitional weather modelling.

Dr Naveen has held visiting research positions at Purdue University (USA), University of Agder (Norway), Hiroshima University (Japan), and TCS Research, contributing to projects on federated learning robustness, data poisoning defenses, and zero-shot object detection.

He has served as an expert reviewer for top-tier venues including CVPR, ICCV, BMVC, IEEE S&P (Oakland), USENIX-affiliated venues, and journals such as IEEE T-IFS and IEEE NNLS.

Beyond foundational research, Dr Naveen actively works on deployable AI systems, building end-to-end AI pipelines, optimizing models for edge devices, and contributing to practical AI innovations across healthcare and smart transportation.

Dr. Fernando Moreira established the Science and Technology Department at Universidade Portucalense, where he created the first engineering degrees and served as department head from May 2018 to February 2022.

He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science (1992), a Master's degree in Electronic Engineering (1997), and a Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering (2003), all from the Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto. In 2018, he obtained his Habilitation.

A dedicated member of Portucalense University since 1992, Dr. Moreira currently serves as a Full Professor. He is also a visiting professor at several esteemed universities and teaches subjects across undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He supervises both Ph.D. and Master's students.

Dr. Moreira has contributed significantly to research, with over 300 Scopus-indexed and peer-reviewed publications in national and international journals and conferences. He is part of Editorial Advisory Boards for various journals and books and has organized many special issues for JCR journals such as *Telematics and Informatics*, *Future Generation Computer Systems*, *Cluster Computing*, and *Expert Systems*.

His extensive involvement in academic events includes roles as Conference Chair, Workshop Chair, Chief Guest, Keynote Speaker, and member of scientific and program committees for numerous international conferences.

He also served for a decade as the MSc in Computation coordinator, demonstrating strong academic leadership. Currently, he is a steering committee member of the REMIT research center and has co-edited several books.

Dr. Moreira is a member of NSTICC, ACM, and IEEE. His main research interests include mobile computing, AI-Generated content in higher education, machine learning, and digital transformation.

He received the prestigious Atlas Elsevier Award in April 2019 for his contributions.

Dr. Alessandro Vizzarri received his Master’s degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Bologna, followed by a PhD in Telecommunication Engineering and Microelectronics from the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He also completed a post-lauream diploma from the Superior Institute of Communication, Italian Ministry of Communication, Rome.

He is currently a telecommunications researcher at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

Previously, Dr. Vizzarri worked as a Project Manager at the Radiolabs Consortium and as a researcher at the University G. Marconi. He has also served as a Consultant Engineer and Senior Manager for various vendor, manufacturing, and consultancy companies in the ICT sector.

His industry experience spans wireless networks (UMTS/HSPA, LTE, WiFi), broadcast networks (DVB-S/T/H), digital transmission systems, IMS-based multimedia systems, and large-scale project management. He has been involved in several major European and international ICT projects as a senior project manager.

Dr. Vizzarri also served as the Professional & Career Activities Coordinator for the IEEE Italy Section.

His research interests include:

• Wireless and Broadcast Networks
• Radio Network Planning
• QoS/QoE and interoperability
• 5G/6G and Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN)
• Goal-oriented semantic networks
• Blockchain-based platforms and applications
• Regulation and standardization in ICT

He is a Board Member of the Italian Association of Telecommunication Engineers (AICT) and a member of the Order of Engineers of Rome.