Patrick Siarry was born in France in 1952. He received the Ph.D. degree in computer science and optimization from University Paris VI, Paris, France, in 1986, and the Doctor of Sciences (Habilitation) degree in computer science and optimization from University Paris XI, Orsay, France, in 1994. He was first involved in the development of analog and digital models of nuclear power plants with Electricité de France, Paris. Since 1995, he has been a Professor of Automatics and Informatics with Université Paris-Est Créteil, Créteil, France. His main research interests include computer-aided design of electronic circuits, cognitive intelligence, and the applications of new stochastic global optimization heuristics to various engineering fields, also including the fitting of process models to experimental data, the learning of fuzzy rule bases, and neural networks.