Dr. Valentina Emilia Balas is currently a Full Professor at the Department of Automatics and Applied Software at the Faculty of Engineering, “Aurel Vlaicu? University of Arad, Romania. She holds a PhD cum laude in applied electronics and telecommunications from the Polytechnic University of Timisoara. Dr. Balas is the author of more than 350 research papers in refereed journals and for international conferences. Her research interests cover intelligent systems, fuzzy control, soft computing, smart sensors, information fusion, modeling, and simulation. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the 'International Journal of Advanced Intelligence Paradigms' and the 'International Journal of Computational Systems Engineering', an editorial board member for several other national and international publications, as well as an expert evaluator for national and international projects and PhD theses. Dr. Balas is the Director of the Intelligent Systems Research Center and the Director of the Department of International Relations, Programs and Projects at the “Aurel Vlaicu? University of Arad. She served as the General Chair for nine editions of the International Workshop on Soft Computing Applications (SOFA) organized in 2005–2020 and held in Romania and Hungary. Dr. Balas participated in many international conferences as organizer, honorary chair, session chair, member in steering, advisory or international program committees, and keynote speaker. Now she is working on a national project funded by the European Union: BioCell-NanoART = Novel Bio-inspired Cellular Nano-Architectures. She is a member of the European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology, a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, a senior member of IEEE, a member of the IEEE Fuzzy Systems Technical Committee, the chair of Task Force 14 of the IEEE Emergent Technologies Technical Committee, a member of the IEEE Soft Computing Technical Committee. She is also the recipient of the "Tudor Tanasescu" prize from the Romanian Academy for contributions in the field of soft computing methods (2019).