**About the Editors**

**Marco S. Reis** is an Associate Professor with Habilitation of Chemical Engineering at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. His research interests are centered on the fields of process systems engineering, industrial data science, sensor fusion, feature engineering, hybrid modeling, fault detection/diagnosis/prognosis, predictive analytics, structured process improvement, AutoML, design of experiments, and chemometrics. He was President of the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS), and is currently an Honorary Member of this society. He has published 130+ articles in international journals or book series, 5 book chapters, 2 books, and authored or co-authored 160+ presentations in international congresses. He was awarded with a Fulbright scholar fellowship (2020) and with the Professor Almiro e Castro award that distinguishes the scientific merit of a Portuguese researcher or faculty under 45 years old (2018).

**Furong Gao** is a Chair Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering and the funding director for the Center for Polymer Processing and Systems (CPPS) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He received his BEng in automation from the East China Institute of Petroleum in 1981 and MEng and PhD in chemical engineering from McGill University in 1989 and 1993. His research interest includes batch process modeling, monitoring, optimization and control, and automation systems applications to polymer processing and energy management. To date, he has published over 500 journal and conference papers and 6 books. He has received numerous awards including a dozen best journal and conference paper awards and the 1st and 2nd prizes in Natural Science from the Chinese Ministry of Education.
