Dr. Hong Zhang received his B.S. from Northeastern University (Boston) in 1982, and Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1986, both in Electrical Engineering. Subsequently he spent 18 months with the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania as post-doctoral fellow before joining the University of Alberta, Canada, in 1988, where he is currently a Professor in the Department of Computing Science. Dr. Zhang’s research interests include robotics, computer vision, and image processing, and he has published over 200 papers in international journals and conferences in these areas. Among his numerous professional activities, Dr. Zhang is currently a member of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Administrative Committee, and is serving as the General Chair of 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), to be held in Vancouver, Canada. Dr. Zhang holds the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Intelligent Sensing Systems. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.