Prof. Patrick Siarry received the PhD degree from the University Paris 6, in 1986 and the Doctorate of Sciences (Habilitation) from the University Paris 11, in 1994. He was first involved in the development of analog and digital models of nuclear power plants at Electricité de France (E.D.F.). Since 1995 he is a professor in automatics and informatics. His main research interests are computer-aided design of electronic circuits, and the applications of new stochastic global optimization heuristics to various engineering fields. He is also interested in the fitting of process models to experimental data, the learning of fuzzy rule bases, and of neural networks.