Jean-François Bousquet joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Dalhousie University in July 2013 and the Ocean Frontier Institute in July 2023. He is a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal where he completed his B. Eng. in Electrical Engineering in 2001. He also completed his MSc and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering at the University of Calgary in 2007 and 2011 respectively, where he focused on the implementation of low-power integrated circuits applied to wireless communication. Between 2009 and 2011, he was employed as a high-speed analog IC designer at Ciena for the development of coherent fibre optics communication networks. Between 2019 and 2022, he was appointed as Head the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is currently Associate Editor for the Canadian Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a member of the Mitacs Research Council.

Since joining Dalhousie University, he has developed a research program on underwater communications and technology, developing digital signal processing algorithms to mitigate the effects of the distortive acoustic propagation media. He is particularly interested in enabling underwater networks, using low-power electronics systems, and in 2022, his team developed an embedded system to detect harbour porpoises, a system that was deployed in the Bay of Fundy in the Summer 2022 to prevent the animals from being caught in tidal turbines. On the long-term, he is striving towards the development of new standardized underwater communication platforms on application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for the deployment of next-generation underwater drones.

Dario Pompili is a professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Rutgers University, NJ, USA, where he directs the Cyber-Physical Systems Laboratory (CPS Lab), which focuses on mobile computing, wireless communications/networking, underwater (acoustic and optical) communications, and sensor networks/IoTs. He received a PhD degree in ECE from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2007, where he worked in the Broadband Wireless Networking Laboratory. He had previously received a “Laurea” (combined BS/MS) and Doctorate degrees in Telecommunications and Systems Engineering from the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” Italy, in 2001 and 2004, respectively.

In 2011, Dr. Pompili received the US NSF CAREER award to design efficient communication solutions for underwater multimedia applications. In 2012, he received the US ONR Young Investigator Program (YIP) award, one out of 26 awarded nationwide, to develop an uncertainty-aware autonomic mobile computing framework as well as the US DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), one out of 51 awarded nationwide, to enable real-time information processing based on compute-intensive models for operational neuroscience. In 2015, he was nominated Rutgers-New Brunswick Chancellor's Scholar. In terms of scholar impact, he is Top Cited Author for “Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks: Research Challenges,” Ad Hoc Networks (Elsevier), vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 257-279, March'05 (Scopus citations in '05-'10); and Most Cited Ad Hoc Networks Author for “Three-dimensional and Two-dimensional Deployment Analysis for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks,” Ad Hoc Networks (Elsevier), vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 778-790, June'09 (Scopus citations since '09). He won Best Demo Award with “Towards Reconfigurable Cyber Physical Systems” at IEEE MASS'14. He won the 2016 Googol T-ASE Best Applications Paper Award (received at IEEE CASE'16). He won Best Paper Awards at IEEE MASS'17, IEEE/IFIP WONS'17, and HiPC'12; and Best Paper Runner-Up at WUWNet'15. Dr. Pompili published more than 200 refereed scholar publications: with more than 16K citations, he has an h-index of 50 and an i10-index of 138 (GS, March'24). He is a Fellow of the IEEE (2021) and a Distinguished Member of the ACM (2019). In the past six years, he has served as Editor for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC) and Area Chair for IEEE INFOCOM, besides serving in many international conference organization committees.

Shanshan Song has been an associate professor at Jilin University since 2021. She received the Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. degree from Jilin University. She was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University. Her major research focuses on underwater acoustic network design, protocol design, network performance evaluation, and localization and navigation. She has led a number of national projects and national key project sub-topics, including the National Natural Science Foundation Youth Fund, National key research and development plan sub-topics. To date, she has published more than 30 papers, including IEEE/ACM ToN, IEEE TMC, IEEE IoT, IEEE TVT, IEEE Network and other international journals, published 1 monograph "Underwater Acoustic Communication Network Research". Complete underwater acoustic network simulation system, semi-physical simulation system and 3D visualization system. She was a recipient of the National Commercial Science and Technology Progress Award in 2022, selected as "Jilin Province provincial top talent", the national Innovation and Entrepreneurship outstanding postdoctoral. She serves as a member of the Underwater Communications Committee of the Chinese Society of Communications, the WUWNet 2023' Publicy Chair, 2021' EDAS Chair, and a reviewer for IEEE/ACM ToN, IEEE TMC, IEEE IoT, IEEE TVT, ACM Computing Surveys, etc.

Zhi Sun has been a tenured Associate Professor at Tsinghua University since 2021. He received the Ph.D. degree from Georgia Institute of Technology, the M.S. degree from Tsinghua University, and the B.S. degree from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT). Before joining Tsinghua University, Zhi Sun was a tenured Associate Professor at University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, which he joined as an Assistant Professor. Zhi Sun is a senior member of IEEE.

Zhi Sun's research mainly focuses on the fields of underground and underwater wireless communications and networking, physical layer security, and mobile millimeter wave networking using reconfigurable reflect-arrays. He was a recipient of the US NSF CAREER Award in 2017 and the UB Exceptional Scholar-Young Investigator Award in 2017. To date, he has published more than 90 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. He received the Best Demo Award at IEEE Infocom in 2017 and the Best Paper Award at IEEE Globecom in 2010. Zhi Sun has been serving as the editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and Computer Networks (Elsevier) since 2016. During his tenure at University at Buffalo, he has led 7 US federal research projects, from US National Science Foundation and US Department of Energy.