Prof. Dr. Simone A Ludwig is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at North Dakota State University (NDSU). She received her PhD degree and MSc degree with distinction from Brunel University (UK) in 2004 and 2000, respectively. She worked at the University of Saskatchewan (Canada), Concordia University (Canada), Cardiff University (UK), and Brunel University (UK) prior to joining NDSU. Dr. Ludwig's research interests center on computational intelligence, encompassing swarm intelligence, evolutionary computation, neural networks, and fuzzy reasoning. In particular, applying computational intelligence methods and algorithms to solve optimization problems in diverse domains such as machine learning, data mining (including big data), image processing, privacy and security, and speech recognition.