Keynote Speakers

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  Kazem Abhary

  Associate Professor, University of South Australia, Australia.

  Research field: Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; Manufacturing Engineering; Applied Mathematics; Information and Computing Sciences.

  Kazem Abhary obtained his Bachelor and Master of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from Tehran University, and Masters by Research and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Manchester, England. Since then he has been continuously engaged in tertiary education and has acted as a consulting engineer to variety of industries. His publications, exceeding 200, include numerous international journal and conference papers, two handbook chapters, 13 book chapters, five books, and a bi-lingual (English-Persian) Mechanical Engineering Lexicon. He has also published two books and a number of non-technical articles on social, spiritual and literary issues. He has undertaken and supervised over 140 engineering projects in Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and Iran, has educated a few thousand engineers and supervised many post-graduate students (Masters and PhD). He has been on the international advisory board of a number of international engineering conferences and engineering journals; associate editor of an engineering journal; reviewer to a number of international engineering journals and conferences, and keynote speaker to international engineering conferences and engineering graduation ceremonies. His publications include eight new methods in Design of Machinery (Mechanical Design, Mechanisms and Vibrations) some of which have won awards and downgraded project-type design-problems to the level of classroom tutorials. He is also a co-inventor of a machine. He was on the Council of the University of South Australia as the representative of academics for two terms (2001-2004) and has been a member of Standards-Australia/Standards-New Zealand since 1994.

• 

  Chua Kian Jon Ernest

  Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

  Research field: Renewable/Clean Energy Technologies – Hybridization of RE Technologies; Solar-Thermal Energy Systems; Membrane Dehumidification; Dew-point Evaporative Cooling; Heat Recovery Systems; Building Energy Management and Total Performance; Tri-generation Systems; Quad-generation Systems; Poly-generation Systems.

  Dr Chua Kian Jon is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore. He has been conducting research on renewable energy systems and heat recovery systems since 1997. He has conducted both modelling and experimental works for specific thermal energy systems including the applications of AI and machine learning methods. He is highly skilled in designing, fabricating, commissioning, and testing of many sustainable energy systems to provide heating, cooling and humidity control for both small- and large-scale applications. He has more than 280 international SCI-indexed peer-reviewed journal publications, and 8 recent monographs on advances in sustainable thermal energy and cooling systems. He has been elected to several fellowships including Fellow of Royal Society, Fellow of Institution of Engineering and Technology, Fellow of Energy Institute and Fellow of IMechE. Consistently, he is highlighted among the top 1% of scientists in the world by the Universal Scientific and Research Network, top 2% of energy researchers in Elsevier database, and top 0.3% in the Stanford list of energy researchers. His works has garnered more than 17,500 over citations with a current H-index of 71. He is the Associate Editor of several reputable journals in Elsevier, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis. He is on the editorial boards of numerous journals in Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and MDPI. Further, he owns more than 10 patents related to several innovative cooling and dehumidification systems. On a regular basis, he has been invited to deliver many international plenaries, and keynote talks on his research findings. He is the Principal Investigator of several multi-million competitive research grants. Additionally, he has been awarded multiple local, regional, and international awards for his breakthrough research endeavours.