Amir Hussain’s Brief Biography Amir Hussain (ahu@cs.stir.ac.uk) obtained his BEng (with the highest 1st Class Honours with distinction) and PhD in Electronic and Electrical Engineering (EEE), both from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, in 1992 and 1997 respectively. He is full Professor of Computing Science, founding Director of the Cognitive Big Data Informatics (CogBiD) Laboratory, and Head of the Data Science Research Group at the University of Stirling in Scotland, UK. Amir’s research interests are cross-disciplinary and industry focused, aimed at pioneering brain-inspired, cognitive Big Data technology for solving complex real-world problems. In 2017, he was ranked, in an independent survey (published in Elsevier’s Information Processing and Management Journal), as one of the world’s top two most productive, highly cited researchers in sentiment analytics (since 2000). He has (co)authored more than 320 publications, with approximately 120 journal papers and over a dozen Books (including the world’s first research monographs on multi-disciplinary topics of: cognitively-inspired audio-visual speech filtering; sentic computing; and cognitive agent based computing). He has led major multi-disciplinary research projects funded by national and European research councils, local and international charities and industry, and supervised more than 30 PhDs to-date. He is founding Editor-in-Chief of (Springer Nature’s) Cognitive Computation journal (ISI SCI Impact Factor: 3.44) and BMC Big Data Analytics journal. He also serves as Associate Editor of several other leading journals including, the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, the IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine. He is Vice-Chair of the Emergent Technologies Technical Committee of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and Chapter Chair of the IEEE UK & RI Industry Applications Society Chapter. He is a Senior Fellow of the Brain Sciences Foundation (USA) and a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. Amir in academia Amir in the media - leading development of the world’s first Lip-reading Hearing Aid technology http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-33098322