Christian Blum is a Senior Research Scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He is one of the most influential researchers at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Operations Research, Optimization, Heuristics, Natural Computing and Computational Intelligence. He is the co-editor of ""Swarm Intelligence"" (Springer, 2006) and co-author of ""Hybrid Metaheuristics"" (Springer, 2016).