Paul Aerts is Advanced Analytics Manager at Liberty Global's Telenet division, and is head of the team of data scientists in the BI Advanced Analytics department.

Wouter Buckinx is co-founder and Managing Partner at Python Predictions, a Brussels-based service provider specialized in data science projects with impact. Python Predictions has a strong legacy in predictive projects in a business context, and success cases of applied data science in marketing, risk, operations and HR. Founded in 2006, Python Predictions is active in b2b and b2c retail, financial services, utilities, postal services, manufacturing, telecommunications, entertainment and fundraising (www.pythonpredictions.com).

John Elder chairs America’s most experienced Data Science consultancy. Founded in 1995, Elder Research has offices in Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Washington DC, and London. Dr. Elder co-authored 3 award-winning books on analytics, was a discoverer of ensemble methods, chairs international conferences, and is a popular keynote speaker. John is occasionally an Adjunct Professor of Systems Engineering at the University of Virginia.

Miguel González-Fierro is a Data Scientist at Microsoft UK, where his job consists of helping customers leverage their processes using Big Data and Machine Learning. Previously, he was CEO and founder of Samsamia Technologies, a company that created a visual search engine for fashion items allowing users to find products using images instead of words, and founder of the Robotics Society of Universidad Carlos III, which developed different projects related to UAVs, mobile robots, small humanoids competitions, and 3D printers. Miguel also worked as a robotics scientist at Universidad Carlos III of Madrid and King’s College London, where his research focused on learning from demonstration, reinforcement learning, computer vision, and dynamic control of humanoid robots. He holds a BSc and MSc in Electrical Engineering and an MSc and Ph.D. in robotics. For more information about Miguel you can visit his website.

Grzegorz (Greg) Gawron, is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at LiveRamp. He is focused on applications of privacy-enhancing technologies. During his recent engagement at the IQSS OpenDP Fellows program at Harvard, he explored the privacy implications of split learning. He obtained his Master's degrees in computer science and economics from Warsaw University and is currently working toward a computer science PhD at AGH in Krakow.

Bas is a technology leader in the AI and big data domain. His academic background is in Artificial Intelligence and Informatics. Trained as a software engineer and architect, he has 15 years experience in delivering successful data-driven projects with a wide range of companies and technologies. He occasionally teaches programming courses and is a regular speaker on conferences and informal meetings, where he brings a mixture of market context, his own vision, business cases, architecture and source code in an enthusiastic way towards his audience.

João is Chief Science Officer at Inovretail, specializing in applying quantitative methods within the Retail Industry but also working over the past ten years in sectors such as Manufacturing, Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals. He is a frequent presenter on the topic of Applied Artificial Intelligence.

Professor Yike Guo has been the Founding Director of Data Science Institute, Imperial College London since April 2014.

Professor Guo lectured at Imperial College London from 1997 and become professor in computing science in the Department of Computing, Imperial College in 2002.  He is a world-renowned researcher in the area of big data analysis with the broad experiences of applying the data mining and machine learning technology for scientific applications, especially in the areas of engineering and medicine. In the last 20 years, he managed research projects as PI or Co-PI with total funding of £130 million (with £35m as Principal Investigator) with significant social and economic impacts. In last 17 years, he has been leading two companies, InforSense and IDBS by translating his technology achievements into successful products. He was the Chief Executive Officer of Inforsense, a spinout company of ICL he established from 1999 to 2009 and Chief Innovation Officer of IDBS, after its acquisition of Inforsense in 2009.  The products Professor Guo has been leading to develop have more than 50000 users worldwide.  

He is a Fellow of Royal Academy of Engineering, Fellow of Academy of Europe and a Fellow of British Computer Society.

Dr. Berlinda Hermsen is a data scientists at a Dutch insurance company of about 300 employees. She has a a background in Behavioural Science and 10+ years of experience in predictive analytics and machine learning. She focusses on combining analytics with explaining human behaviour and making it work for business challenges. 

Gabriel is the CEO and founder of Metageni, designing algorithms for customer journey optimisation and data driven decision making. With over 20 years experience in quantitative analytics research, Gabriel believes we are at a turning point where intelligent analytical systems can unlock the full value of big data.

Gabriel was previously Head of Attribution at Google (6 years), where he was instrumental in the development of new marketing attribution features for Google Analytics and enterprise platforms. He went on to become VP of Analytics at Elsevier, the world’s largest science publisher. He is now the CEO of Metageni, a company he founded to design algorithms for customer journey optimisation and data driven decision makin

Dr. George Iordanescu is a researcher in the Algorithms and Data Science Group at Microsoft, where he develops AI solutions using deep learning, computer vision, and multivariate time series forecasting. He received his Ph.D. in EE from “Politehnica” University in Bucharest, Romania, before training as a post-doctoral fellow in computer assisted detection at www.nih.gov .

Abhishek Joshi ‘AJ’ is a Sr. Director in Visa’s consulting & analytics group. He is responsible for helping financial institutions with improving growth and profitability through advanced analytics techniques. AJ has diverse experience in employing analytics to solve business problems across multiple industries – Manufacturing & Engineering, Financial Services and Telecom. 

Norbert Kraft is a senior researcher at Nokia Bell Labs, where he works to apply Big Data processing, data mining and artificial intelligence to industrial use cases in the telecommunication area.

Joey Marburger was labeled as The Washington Post's punk rock star by Digiday for the work he's accomplished as Director of Product. During his time at The Post, there has been immense growth which Columbia Journalism Review called a 'revolution.' Most recently, Fast Company placed him at number 13 on their Most Creative People in Business 2017 list.
Marburger leads a team of product designers and managers overseeing the development and design of digital products such as washingtonpost.com, Android and iOS apps, distributed news, and a variety of other platforms. He has been at The Post for more than eight years, moving from Mobile Design Director to Director of Digital Products and Design to his current role. He has also worked at Gannett and the Indianapolis Star.
He lives in Northeast D.C. with his wife, Cas, the social media manager for the Truth Initiative Foundation, and their black Labrador retriever, Walt.

Dr. Andreas Merentitis is head of applied data science at OLX, a global leader in online classifieds and a division of Naspers (Africa's largest listed company). Before joining OLX, he was a senior data scientist at Zalando. Andreas has more than 30 publications in the thematic areas of machine learning and was awarded an IEEE Certificate of Appreciation. He is a prize winner with a master ranking in Kaggle.

Dirk Nachbar is Data Scientist at Google. He specialises in media effectiveness and ML. He has experience across marketing analytics, in the past he worked for Nielsen, dunnhumby, Omnicom and a Fintech startup. 

Dr. Negro is the main author of the first recommendation engine ever built on the graph database Neo4j and is the author of the upcoming Manning book: Graph-Powered Machine Learning. He specialises in recommendation engines, graph-aided search, and NLP and has recently built an application using Neo4j and Elasticsearch aimed at personalising search results, utilizing several machine learning algorithms, natural language processing and ontology hierarchy.

Antal Nusselder is a data scientist with a background in social psychology. He has 10+ years of experience in predictive analytics, machine learning, analytics propaganda and keeping his work fun at a Dutch insurance company of about 300 employees.

Bohdan combines academic theories and practical approaches in the data science area. He is a Data Scientist at SoftServe company and an associate professor (Ph.D.) of Electronics and Computer Technologies Faculty at Lviv National University (Ukraine) and has more than 50 scientific publications. His current scientific interest lies in the area of quantitative linguistics, machine learning, predictive analytics, computer vision, social network mining, business intelligence, time series analytics, numeric modelling, risk assessment, reliability theory, financial modelling. He has practical experience in retail and supply chain analytics, customer’s behavior analytics, fraud detection. In predictive analytics models, he combines machine learning and Bayesian inference that is an effective approach for forecasting and risk assessment in the business processes with non-Gaussian statistics. He works on the state-of-the-art predictive analytics solutions, taking part in Kaggle competitions where he has a Master degree and 3 gold medals for top positions in leaderboards. As a teammate, he won one Kaggle competition (“Grupo Bimbo Inventory Demand”) among nearly two thousand teams where he and his team proposed the best solution for sales forecasting in the chain of nearly 800 thousand stores.

The Berlin-born CEO has worked for American technology disruptors since 2006, including Cisco Systems, Comscore and eBay. He has establish multichannel strategies with the world’s largest retail groups and brands, and, at eBay, he built a new business unit helping classical retailers navigate eBay's changed landscape. Silvan founded predict.io, an AI start-up, in 2014.

Andrey Sharapov is a data scientist and data engineer at Lidl. He is currently working on various projects related to machine learning and data product development. Previously, he spent 2 years at Xaxis where he help to develop a campaign optimization tool for GroupM agencies, then at TeamViewer, where he led data science initiatives and developed a tools for customer analytics. Andrey is interested in "explainable AI" and is passionate about making machine learning accessible to general public.

David Stephenson has over 20 years of experience leading analytics initiatives across a wide range of industries, including as Head of Global Business Analytics at eBay Classifieds Group. In addition to consulting for dozens of companies, including Adidas, Miro, ABN Amro, and Sky Germany, Dr. Stephenson also serves as part time faculty at the University of Amsterdam Business School and has developed and delivered data science trainings for hundreds of analytics professionals around the globe.

Mike serves as Head of Data Science at Uber ATG, UC Berkeley Data Science faculty, and head of Skymind Labs the Machine Learning research lab affiliated with DeepLearning4J.  He has led teams of Data Scientists in the bay area as Chief Data Scientist for InterTrust, Director of Data Sciences for MetaScale/Sears, and CSO for Galvanize where he founded the galvanizeU-UNH accredited Masters of Science in Data Science degree and oversaw the company's transformation from co-working space to Data Science organization.  Mike began his career in academia serving as a mathematics teaching fellow for Columbia University before teaching at the University of Pittsburgh. His early research focused on developing the epsilon-anchor methodology for resolving both an inconsistency he highlighted in the dynamics of Einstein’s general relativity theory and the convergence of “large N” Monte Carlo simulations in Statistical Mechanics’ universality models of criticality phenomena.

Dr Saúl Vargas Sandoval is a Senior Data Scientist in ASOS, the U.K.’s largest online-only fashion retailer. His current work focuses on designing and adapting recommendation algorithms to help customers discover clothes. Saúl has a PhD from the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain) on the topic of novelty and diversity in recommender systems, and has previously applied his skills in both academia (University of Glasgow) and industry (Mendeley).

Phil Winters is known internationally as The Father of Customer Intelligence. An independent business advisor, author,  keynote lecturer and workshop leader with 35+ years' experience working with some 300 companies, he focuses on Customer Intelligence and championing the customer perspective to help organizations raise customer value through outstanding customer experience.

Emre is co-founder and managing partner of Analytics Center, a thought leadership, knowledge & expertise center with a clear mission for supporting the entire eco-system with new and disruptive technologies around Big Data, Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence and more importantly their business applications via trainings, advisory and outsourcing services. He is also co-founder of Persona.tech, a machine learning research start-up curating collection of ML algorithms and ML-operationalization technologies at a vertical: (generative) models of how people act. Emre has a solid background in technology and management consulting in Finance and Telecommunication sectors with a special focus on digital transformation. Prior to co-founding Analytics Center & Persona.tech, Emre held managerial positions at Accenture and Peppers & Rogers Group.

Hector Leads a team at Google AI: Healthcare (formerly a part of Google Brain) researching the applications of AI on Medical Waveforms. His other Google projects include image search ranking, perception for the self-driving car, video content analysis and Youtube’s Emmy award winning personalized video recommendation system.

David Zdravkovic Ph.D. is the Head of Analytics for OC&C Strategy Consultants and is on the Advisory Board at Imperial College for Business Analytics. Follwoing his PhD and a post-doc in computational physics at Imperial College, he has spent over 16 years in strategy consulting and the Big Data arena. He advises clients across industries on both analytics strategy as well as how to apply advanced analytics for maximum commercial benefit.