Laura Albert, Ph.D., is a Professor and the David Gustafson Department Chair of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests are in the field of operations research, with a particular focus on discrete optimization with application to homeland security and emergency response problems. She has authored or co-authored more than 70 publications in archival journals and refereed proceedings. She has been awarded many honors for her research, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow Award, Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) Fellow Award, the INFORMS Impact Prize, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a Fulbright Award, and a Department of the Army Young Investigator Award. Professor Albert’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of the Army, and Sandia National Laboratory. She is the author of the blog “Punk Rock Operations Research.” You can find her on twitter at @lauraalbertphd.
Davide La Torre is Full Professor of Business Analytics and Quantitative Methods at PRISM Research Centre, Director of the SKEMA Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Head of the (Programme Grande Ecole) PGE L3-M1 Finance and Quants track at SKEMA Business School – Université Côte d’Azur, Sophia Antipolis Campus, France. He is also Adjunct Professor of Mathematical Imaging at the Department of Applied Mathematics of the University of Waterloo (Canada). His research and teaching interests include Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Business, Business Analytics, Economic Dynamics, Mathematical and Statistical Modelling, Operations Management, Operations Research, and Financial Portfolio Optimization. He holds a Master in Applied and Industrial Mathematics (1997, magna cum laude) and a PhD in Computational Mathematics and Operations Research (2002) both from the University of Milan, Milan, Italy and professional certificates in Big Data and Analytics (2017) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA. In the past he held permanent and visiting university professor positions in Europe, Canada, Middle East, Central Asia, and Australia. He also served as Departmental Chair and Program Head at several universities. He has more than 150 publications in Scopus, most of them published in high IF journals.
Prof. Paulo Lisboa is the Co-Director of School of Computer and Mathematics and he is the Head of Department of Applied Mathematics at Liverpool John Moores University (UK). Prof. Paulo was appointed in 2017 as the Head of Engineering and Technology Research Institute with oversight of research strategy across the Faculty of Engineering and Technology (FET) and his appointment as the Project Director for Liverpool City Region Activate and just to give me an idea how large is this project it is sufficient to say that it is funded with £5m by European Regional Development Fund to accelerate the development of Small and Mid-Size Enterprises in the Digital Creative Sectors. He has more than 250 peer reviewed publications and he edited the first ever book on applications of neural networks that has been published in 1992. His research is advanced data analysis for decision support with applications to personalized medicine, public health, sports analytics and digital marketing. His research group on data science has developed rigorous methodologies for interpretable machine learning to enable validation by subject experts.
Dr. Omar Al-Ubaydli is the Acting Director of Research at Derasat, Bahrain, an affiliated associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and an affiliated senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center. Omar’s research interests include political economy, experimental economics, and the economics of the GCC countries. He previously served as a member of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Joint Advisory Board of Economists and a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. Omar regularly publishes his research in international peer-reviewed academic journals, and his mainstream media articles appear in Arabic and English-language newspapers and blogs such as AlHayat, The National, Forbes Opinion, and US News. Omar earned his BA in economics from the University of Cambridge, and his MA and PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.
Dr. Ivan Olier-Caparroso is a Senior Lecturer in Data Science of the Department of Applied Mathematics at Liverpool John Moores University (UK). He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Technical University of Catalonia, Spain. Before joining LJMU, he worked as Data Science Researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and at the University of Manchester, followed by lectureships in Health Informatics at the University of Keele and in Data Science at Manchester Metropolitan University. Dr. Ivan expertise is in machine learning and data science, with a particular focus on applications for healthcare which will be reflected in his talk today. His research work has been published in more than 60 peer-reviewed manuscripts in areas such as machine learning, biostatistics, bioinformatics, biomedicine, and databases. Dr. Ivan is the Link Tutor between LJMU and UOB for our master program “M.Sc. in Big Data Science and Analytics”.