The Speakers
Spyros Makridakis is a Professor at the University of Nicosia, where he is a director of its Institute For the Future and the founder of the Makridakis Open Forecasting Center. He is also an Emeritus Professor at INSEAD he joined in 1970. He has authored or co-authored twenty-seven books and special issues and more than 360 articles. His book Forecasting Methods for Management, 5th ed., has been translated into twelve languages and sold more than 120,000 copies, while his book Forecasting: Methods and Applications, 3rd ed., has received more than 6,200 citations. Professor Makridakis was the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting and is the organizer of the renowned M (Makridakis) competitions that have fundamentally influenced the theory for the last 40 years practice of forecasting. His numerous papers and citations can be found in his Google scholar profile.
Rose is an Assistant professor at UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. Her research interests lie primarily in machine learning, especially for large-scale spatiotemporal data. She is generally interested in deep learning, optimization, and spatiotemporal reasoning. She is particularly excited about the interplay between physics and machine learning. Her work has been applied to learning dynamical systems in sustainability, health, and physical sciences.
Dr. Balch is a Research Managing Director at J.P. Morgan AI Research and a Professor of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech (on leave). He is interested in problems concerning multi-agent social behavior in domains ranging from financial markets to tracking and modeling the behavior of ants, honey bees, and monkeys. He co-founded Lucena Research, an investment software firm that applies Machine Learning and Big Data approaches to investment problems. Balch has published 120 peer-reviewed articles. His work has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, CNN, New Scientist, Institutional Investor, and the New York Times. His graduate students work at NASA/JPL, Boston Dynamics, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citadel, AQR, and BlackRock. Before his career in computing, Tucker was an F-15 pilot in the US Air Force.
Rami is a data scientist manager at a major tech company, where he focuses on time series analysis and forecasting. He develops open-source tools and is the author of the book "Hands-On Time Series Analysis with R: Perform time series analysis and forecasting using R." Rami holds an MA in Applied Economics and an MS in actuarial mathematics from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
Yan Liu
Yan is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department and the director of the Machine Learning Center at the University of Southern California. Dr. Liu joined USC in August 2010. Before that, she was a research staff member in the Data Analytics Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center since November 2006. She received M.S. and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests include machine learning and data mining with applications to biology, climate science, health, and social media.
Chak Wong
Chak is currently the London head of the machine learning center of excellence and the global technical lead of the time series and reinforcement learning group. He is also a professor of Science Practice of the Mathematics department of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He held various industry and academic positions previously in various institutions, including head of Asia Financial Institutions and Sovereigns of Societe Generale, Head of Asia IBD Structuring of Barclays, Head of Asia non-vanilla Trading of UBS, as well as Professor of Fintech of system engineering of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and professor of finance practice of the Business School of CUHK.