Vassilios S. Verykios received his Diploma from the University of Patras, Greece, in 1992 and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from Purdue University, Indiana, USA, in 1997 and 1999, respectively. From 1999 to 2001, he was an Assistant Professor at the College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He is currently a Professor as well as the Director of two Graduate Programs in Information Systems and Data Science and Machine Learning at the School of Science and Technology, Hellenic Open University (HOU). He is also the Founder and Director of the Big Data Analytics and Anonymization Lab, also at HOU. His main research interests include Data Management, Data Mining, Big Data, Parallel Systems, and Educational Data Mining. He has published over 170 publications in major refereed journals such as TKDE, DAPD, VLDB Journal, JDIQ, Information Systems, Information Sciences, etc., and in the proceedings of international conferences and workshops, while his work has received more than 10,800 citations in Google Scholar. He has served on the program committees of several international scientific events and has been a member of the Editorial Boards in many International Journals.