Mr. Abbott is the author of Applied Predictive Analytics (Wiley, 2014) and co-author of IBM SPSS Modeler Cookbook (Packt Publishing, 2013). He is a highly-regarded and popular speaker at Predictive Analytics and Data Mining conferences and meetups, and is on the Advisory Boards for the UC/Irvine Predictive Analytics Certificate as well as the UCSD Data Mining Certificate programs.

He has a B.S. in Mathematics of Computation from Rensselaer (1985) and a Master of Applied Mathematics from the University of Virginia (1987).

In 1995, he worked with a group of prisoners in Manchester’s HMP Strangeways, recording and releasing a Top 40 single – and winning a BAFTA in the process.

Hedley launched Summit in 2000 at HMP Humber to provide online strategy, marketing and technology to businesses whilst establishing a rehabilitation programme for prisoners.

Today Summit is a multi-award winning business with a turnover in excess of £40 million and employs over 120 staff at its offices in Yorkshire, London and Prague.

Summit helps some of Europe’s most successful retailers and brands such as Argos, Homebase, Selfridges, Carpetright, Office Depot, Reckitt Benckiser transform the way they trade online.

Hedley is an engaging and enthusiastic speaker about all aspects of business, retail and a Digital evangelist.

Away from work, Hedley is a passionate polo player, pilot, water-ski instructor and sailor.

Anna is a Data Scientist at GfK Data Lab. Together with an international team of Data Scientists and Data Science Engineers she researches the possibilities of GfK’s data landscape and develops data-driven products. Before joining GfK she worked as a Data Science freelancer in South East Asia. She holds a PhD in physics from Aix-Marseille University where she did research on epidemic processes on dynamic networks.

Starting in 2001 as an e-business consultant, he was the founder and CEO of Mindworks Interactive since 2003. By 2015, when Mindworks was acquired by Dentsu Aegis Network, it had already become the fastest growing and biggest independent digital agency in Greece, with a team of over 60 people and a leading position in performance marketing and online communications in general.

In the same time, never-resting Costas had also managed to create and then sell 2 more start-ups.

Since 2015, Costas and Mindworks are proud members of the global Dentsu Aegis family and he is the Managing Director of iProspect Greece.

Costas believes that data beats opinion. He works with some of the leading brands in Greece and abroad such as Allianz, Mondelez, Aegean Airlines, Heineken, to support data-driven strategic decisions.

Enda is Data Scientist with over 10 years experience and author of the book “Guerrilla Analytics – a practical approach to working with data”. He is currently building a Data Science team and capability at Sainsbury’s, one of the UK’s largest grocery retailers.

Enda has significant experience across the predictive analytics life cycle. He has worked in pre-sales of social network software for fraud detection and as a professional services consultant helping clients in government, financial services, insurance, and audit. His Data Science has been reported to high-profile stakeholders including regulators, banking CROs, government committees and international bodies. Enda’s PhD was in “Design of Experiments for Tuning Algorithms”, establishing methodical approaches to evaluating predictive analytics solutions.

You can find further information at: http://guerrilla-analytics.net.

Sandro Saitta is a Data Scientist Manager at Expedia. He has 7 years of experience in different industries such as Civil Engineering, Finance, Telco, Security and Travel. More particularly, he applied data science in topics such as system identification, stock picking, online advertising, ink authentication and competitive intelligence. He is a blogger at www.dataminingblog.com and President of the Swiss Association for Analytics (www.swiss-analytics.com). Sandro holds a Master and PhD in Computer Science from EPFL.

Victor Schlegel began his career in Japan at Fujitsu Inc., Global Marketing Department. After further positions at T-Systems and Credit Suisse where he worked as Black Belt in efficiency projects, he took the position in the strategy department of Swisscom Inc., where he developed and rolled out analytical services.

Véronique Van Vlasselaer graduated magna cum laude as Master Information Systems Engineer at the faculty of Business and Economics, KU Leuven (Belgium). For her master thesis topic “Mining Data on Twitter”, she received the best thesis award from the faculty’s student branch.

In 2012, Véronique started as a Ph.D researcher with prof. Bart Baesens at the Faculty of Business of Economics at KU Leuven, department of Decision Sciences and Information Management. Her main research topics include social network analytics, fraud detection and net lift modeling.

He started his career in GfK’s Marketing & Data Science unit in 2005 and quickly became a renowned methodology expert in the market research community. Prior to launching the Data Lab, Ralph was part of the Global Innovation team, managing all stages of GfK’s innovation process – from continuous monitoring of emerging digital trends and strategy development to the roll-out of new, innovative market research tools.

Ralph holds a PHD in statistics and is author of numerous articles and conference papers.

David is Professor of Statistics at Durham University , and Director there of the Mathematical Sciences Consultancy Unit. He has been working in the area of applied statistics for around 40 years, with particular interests in Bayesian statistics and applications of statistics to commercial and industrial problems. He has published around 70 articles and books on a wide variety of applications. For the past six years he has been deeply involved in developing award-winning statistical methods and predictive analytics in digital commerce, in collaboration with Summit.