Dr. Cheng-Zhong Xu, IEEE Fellow, is the Dean of Faculty of Science and Technology and the Interim Director of Institute of Collaborative Innovation, University of Macau, and a Chair Professor of Computer and Information Science. He was a professor of Wayne State University and the Director of Institute of Advanced Computing of Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences before joining UM in 2019. Dr. Xu is a Chief Scientist of the Key Project on Smart City of MOST, China and a Principal Investigator of the Key Project on Autonomous Driving of FDCT, Macau SAR. His research interests focus on parallel and distributed computing and cloud computing, particularly resource management for performance, reliability, availability, power efficiency, and security, as well as data-driven intelligence applications in smart cities and autonomous driving systems. He has published two research monographs and more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and received multiple Best Paper Awards and nominations from leading IEEE and ACM conferences. He also holds more than 100 patents and founded Shenzhen Baidou Applied Technology dedicated to location-based services. Dr. Xu received the prestigious President’s Awards for Excellence in Teaching at Wayne State University. He has served on editorial boards of leading journals including IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, and Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. Since 2015, he has served as Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Distributed Processing.