Dean Abbott is President of Abbott Analytics and currently is the Bodily Bicentennial Professor in Analytics at UVA Darden School of Business. He is an internationally recognized thought leader and innovator in data science and predictive analytics with more than three decades of experience solving a wide range of private and public sector problems. Mr. Abbott is the author of Applied Predictive Analytics (Wiley, 2014) and coauthor of The IBM SPSS Modeler Cookbook (Packt Publishing, 2013).

Professor Florian Artinger is co-founder and managing partner of Simply Rational - The Decision Institute, Professor of Digital Business at Berlin International University of Applied Sciences, and associated scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Reference customers of Simply Rational include among others Morningstar Investment Management, Swiss Life, and the DFB (German Football Association).

Dr. Dominik Ballreich studied Business Mathematics and Economics at the University of Wuppertal. He holds a Doctorate at the Department of Applied Statistics at the FernUniversität in Hagen and is employed as a Data Scientist at Arvato Financial Solutions. His special research interests are Bayes‘ Filter, Time Series Analysis and Heuristic Optimization.

Andreas Baudisch studied Sociology (FU Berlin) with focus on quantitative statistics and economics (TU Berlin, Université de Genève). He has about 10 Years working experience in the field of data science and worked for several companies like infas, DHL, mobile.de, Stepstone.de and McMakler. His major topics include the development and organizational implementation of dynamic pricing engines, recommendation engines and forecasting methods with a strong focus to create impact. 

Dr. Frank Block joined Roche in February 2017. He has over 15 years of experience in analytics, ranging from start-ups to big companies in leading digital industries (banking, e-commerce). At Roche, he is responsible for building a data science practice within Diagnostics. The Data science activities include analyzing big data, advanced analytics, proof of value experiments, predictive modeling, machine learning, process optimization and data quality management. 

After working for about three years as a (Senior) Consultant for Data Science & AI with an emphasis on machine learning in the cloud, Timo Böhm is now a Data & Cloud Engineer for Codecentric. In this role, he focuses on enabling organizations to bring their machine learning projects into production.

Julia Butter is an AI evangelist at Scout24, where she’s actively driving culture change within the company. Julia has a strong background in product development, including data products, strategy, and innovation. She’s an initiator of forward thinking and energizes through her creativity and enthusiasm.

Thiago de Faria is the Head of Solutions Engineering at LINKIT, a knowledge-driven organization with IT experts supporting partners with a transparent path toward pain mitigation and solving business problems. Passionate about data, programming and the people behind it, he’s given many talks and workshops at conferences. Sometimes on stage, sometimes coding and sometimes in meetings, Thiago loves to learn and try new things... he also likes to crack bad jokes that sounded better on his own mind. He is an active part of the community (devopsdays Amsterdam, ITNEXT & Codemotion), married to someone smarter than him, open-source enthusiast, knowledge-sharer and a proud father. Thiago wakes up every day with one goal: develop happy high-performing teams to decrease time-to-market and build production-ready applications, always!

Alexander Dietzel studied business administration at the University of Bielefeld with a focus on empirical economic research and quantitative methods. He is a lecturer for the subject controlling and author of books. Since 2017 he has been the head of the interdisciplinary research group 'instat' - institute of applied statistics and is a consultant, among others for institutions of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Federal Government.

Dr. Markus Eberl has more than 15 years of experience in Data Science, Machine Learning, Segmentation, Technology and Solutions Architecting and Analytics Consulting. He is leading Kantar Analytics Practice in Germany since 2012. The team of 40 analytics and machine learning specialists and marketing consultants helps clients unlock deeper insights from their data to fuel growth. Markus holds a Ph.D. from LMU Munich University and previously held senior architecting positions at SPSS and IBM.

Olalekan Elesin spent early years of his career as a software engineer, building data intensive applications in the telecommunications and e-commerce sectors in Nigeria. His passion for creating business value with big data architectures, machine learning and AI-driven products at scale led him into doing what he loves at Scout24 Group as the Technical Product Manager - AI Platform at Scout24.

Taras Firman is a Senior Data Scientist at ELEKS, working with machine learning, statistical analysis, optimization, forecasting, etc. to solve customer’s problems through data power. Having a lot to contribute, he frequently participates in meetups and speaks at industry conferences. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Ivan Franko National University in 2017. A mathematician by education and by calling, Taras also leads the Course on decision-making theory at Ukrainian Catholic University.

Cecilia is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of DataLab GmbH, a Düsseldorf based marketing consultancy specialising in Loyalty, Data Analytics and Customer Equity. She is a Customer Management Expert with extensive experience in the international and German CRM industry. In 2012 Cecilia received the “Manager of the Year” award from “Generation CEO”, the German business network for women in top management.

Philipp Fuhrmann (MBA) is Regional Director Germany, Austria and Switzerland at Lucidworks and is the contact person for customers, partners and interested parties throughout the DACH region. Philipp has been advising companies on innovative and visionary technologies for more than 10 years with a focus on sustainable growth, personalisation and optimisation for enterprise customers.

Andreas Goedecke has been working in a variety of technical and management positions from big companies (Siemens), to small and medium (Eleks GmbH). Starting out as a researcher in what would today be called the Internet of Things, he worked in domains ranging from Electricity, Automotive, Manufacturing to Robotics. After a few years in R&D strategy, he is now leading the German office of Custom Software Development company ELEKS GmbH, Berlin. His interests are especially the application of data science in IoT and industrial domains. Andreas has a broad educational from physics (Diplom, RWTH Aachen), engineering (Ph.D., JKU Linz), and business (MBA, ESMT Berlin) with research stays in the USA and China.

Alwin is the Founder and Managing Director of the data analytics and technology boutique Haensel AMS – Advanced Mathematical Solutions, with offices in Berlin and New York. He holds a Phd in Applied Mathematics and studied in London, Berlin and Amsterdam. His main fields of interest are the modeling of individual customer purchasing behavior to optimize pricing and marketing strategies. Most recently, he concentrated on eCommerce topics such as: multi-touch attribution, dynamic pricing.

Mojan is a Toronto-based engineer, working at Shopify as part of the marketing data science team. Her focus is applied statistics, with recent projects including an open source python package to calculate marketing attribution using Markov chains and modelling propensity scores. She and her team have spent the past year bringing various predictive models into production as part of Shopify's initiative to power marketing acquisition with intelligent data science solutions.

Dr. Niklas Keller is Cognitive Scientist and Organisational Psychologist specializing in the development of decision support for high-stakes situations such as the military, police or medical services. He is a co-founder and managing partner of Simply Rational, a spin-off from the Max-Planck-Institute, where he is also an associate researcher. He is furthermore guest researcher at the Charité University Hospital Berlin and member of the Working Group on Data Science in Peri-Operative Care of the Charité. Simply Rational is a consulting and training company specialized in predictive analytics, behavioural science, and organizational change. Reference customers include Morningstar Investment Management, Swiss Life, and the DFB (German Football Association).

Sigrid Keydana has experience as a psychologist, software developer and data scientist. She is passionate about applying deep learning to real-world tasks, and enjoys blending ML/DL with a Bayesian approach.

Dr. David Koll is a Senior Data Scientist in the Advanced Analytics team at Continental Tires. He joined Continental in early 2018 where he is mainly responsible for supply chain and manufacturing (Industry 4.0) analytics. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Göttingen, where he graduated in early 2015 and subsequently worked as a Senior Researcher and Project Lead for large multi-national research projects. During this time he received multiple DAAD scholarships as a visiting researcher in the United States, Sweden and China. His research focus was on the application of Machine Learning in data-driven computer networks.

Among to credit risk management, purchasing and marketing/sales, always using machine learning and AI, Andreas Kulpa's main focus is on DATA - the source of every decision. That´s why one of his company stations name is DATAlovers AG. But also Pironet NDH, Steria Mummert, arvato financial solutions and the Kerkhoff Group were stations of his professional career.

With international 27 years’ data & AI experience in tech and pharma, Jack Lampka has built analytics teams, developed data strategies, and accelerated AI adoption. He has enabled companies to turn data into business impact, supported executives with data-driven decisions, and cultivated a data mindset through data literacy programs … all that while having fun. Having fun, he also has as a keynote speaker at analytics conferences.

Christian holds a degree in statistics (from LMU Munich). Before joining GfK Global Data Science he worked for an electric utility and for GfK Geomarketing where he helped clients exploit their regional market potential. Nowadays, Christian focuses on the development of end-to-end prescriptive analytics solutions for the durable goods and electronics industries.

Jan manages data science projects at Dativa, and is an aspiring data scientist himself. He has lead the image recognition project with Tradera. Having worked across multiple industries he has gathered insights from various industries from telephony, mobile and media streaming. He is also privacy adviser and works on a blockchain based privacy agreements to ensure full control and transparency of the processing of private data. He has led product development collecting analytics data from smart phones to web browsers at VisualOn. Before that he was client solution manager at Ericsson Multiscreen solution.

Benedikt Mangold is working as a Principal Data Scientist at GfK in Nuremberg. He has over 10 years of experience in the fields of statistics and machine learning, applied to marketing intelligence, finance, and property. He studied mathematics and economics and earned his doctorate at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg where he also conducts lectures concerning statistics, Data Science, and programming courses

Nikita is a professional in the field of data products and data management. He currently holds a position of the Chief Data Officer in S7 Airlines. His team consists of around 70 specialists in product management, data engineering, database administration, data science, software development and business analysis. They focus on three areas: The first is development of data warehouses and data management practices, which improve data availability, transparency and quality.  Then, they do a lot of research in the field of data science and develop models for core processes improvement. And, finally, they work closely with the business departments and identify their needs in data and analytical instruments. 

Nikita's areas of expertise include Customer Communications, Revenue management, MRO and Process Management. Before joining S7, he worked on business process optimization for a national Russian telecom company and gained experience as a Consultant in Roland Berger.

As a Marketing Science Lead, Diana uses analytics to provide organizations with data to understand the ‘why,’ bridging the gap between marketing & other departments, driving consistency across all channels/departments/, maximizing the power of Data Science for the business. Diana has extensive experience with some of the biggest advertising platforms.

Stefan is the CEO of Tradera Sweden AB, a PayPal owned online marketplace very similar to Ebay. Tradera has some 2M items for sale at any given time and approximately 20% of the Swedish population is a registered user. The business model lends itself extremely well for the use of ML and AI technologies and Tradera has already done a lot in the areas of fraud prevention, product recommendations, marketing automation, predictive analysis and image recognition. It is Traderas ambition to be the market leader in the space and there is still great opportunities. Prior to the current position, Stefan was the CPO of Skype. 

Michael Oettinger, founder and owner of oetti-ds, is a data scientist who advises companies in various industries. After studying business administration with a focus on mathematics and market research in Augsburg and Oviedo, he fulfilled various managing roles at PwC, IBM (inter alia SPSS) and other software companies. The focus of his activities is the application of analytical models at several business use case scenarios, using “classic” but also new software tools (in particular R, Python, KNIME, Spark MLlib, H2O and Tensorflow). He is the author of the book: "„Data Science: Eine praxisorientierte Einführung im Umfeld von Machine Learning, künstlicher Intelligenz und Big Data“", which will be published in the summer of 2019 in its second edition.

Malte Pietsch is a Co-Founder at deepset, where he crafts custom NLP solutions for diverse clients, such as Siemens, Airbus and Springer Nature. He holds a M.Sc. with honors from TU Munich and conducted research at Carnegie Mellon University. Before founding deepset he worked as a data scientist for multiple startups. He is an active open-source contributor and creator of the NLP package FARM.

In 25 years of work Frank led various teams in tech and general management, incl. 10 years at IBM, as CTO of Deutsche Messe and as Head of CeBIT. Today Frank is CEO of iDIGMA GmbH, specialized on AI & Data Governance and Strategy. Frank acts as co-head of Institute “Data & AI Governance” at Uni. of Digital Sciences Berlin and initiated the „Data Governance School“ for data decision makers. He coded his first neural network in 1995 to detect satellite signals and was fascinated since.

Dennis Proppe is a leading data scientist and entrepreneur in the field of relationship marketing. Starting out with a Ph.D. in Marketing & Statistics, he founded a data science consultancy with a research colleague in 2008. This company evolved into Gpredictive, a software company that allows easy scaling and productionizing of machine learning initiatives for relationship marketing efforts. Dennis has led several hundert machine learning initiatives into production.

David M. Raab is founder of the Customer Data Platform Institute, which educates marketers and technologists about customer data management. Mr. Raab named the CDP category in 2013 and has been active in defining it ever since. He founded the CDP Institute in 2016. 

As a consultant, author, and speaker, Mr. Raab has been helping marketers to make better use of technology since 1987. Typical consulting projects include marketing process analysis, architecture planning, needs definition, and vendor selection. Mr. Raab also consults with industry vendors on product and business strategy.  He regularly speaks at conferences around the world.  

Mr. Raab has published hundreds of articles on marketing technology and is author of Marketing Performance Measurement Toolkit (Racom Books, 2009). Additional research appears regularly on his blog http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com. Prior to his consulting career, Mr. Raab held senior marketing positions in the publishing and continuity industries.

Mr. Raab holds a bachelor's degree from Columbia University and MBA from the Harvard Business School.  

Dr Nora Reich has been driving the use of data science solutions at KfW Bankengruppe's customer interfaces (domestic) since 2018. Current machine learning projects include email classification and routing, fraud detection, forecasting and text mining. Dr Nora Reich has extensive expertise in the use of analytical methods as a basis for data-driven business solutions and decisions, including previous positions at DHL Paket GmbH and the management consultancy mm customer strategy.

Robin is founder and CEO of apheris AI GmbH, a start-up that develops artificial intelligence algorithms for biomedical data with a focus on privacy preserving technologies. Robin studied medicine, philosophy and mathematics and was professionally trained at UBS in Global Banking. In recent years, Robin has already founded another start-up in the healthtech sector, where he build an automatic speech recognition for children with language disorders. Prior to and during his various studies he intensively focused on data harmonization techniques using artificial intelligence and algebraic theories on privacy preserving data processing. With apheris AI he pursues the mission to fully leverage the value of biomedical data for the benefit of patients, while preserving the privacy of the data.

Lars Schleithoff studied Mathematics at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn, specializing in numerical methods for Machine Learning. At Fraunhofer SCAI Research Institute, he studied Machine Learning Models for applications in the automotive industry. Today, Lars is Data Scientist at Informationsfabrik GmbH. His focus lies on IoT and Predictive Analytics for manufacturing.

Dr. Christian Schneider is Senior Machine Learning Expert at the online weather portal wetter.com. He manages many well-known customers and develops innovative data science solutions. He holds a PhD from ETH Zurich about “The robustness of complex networks“ and was a postdoc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research focused on complex systems, big data and environmental engineering.

Chris Schneider is Associated Head of Sales at LexisNexis GmbH. He has been working in the Data & Analytics environment for about six years and has gained a large wealth of experience in managing compliance projects in the finance industry and banking sector. He has been involved in numerous corporate projects.

Alexey Shaternikov is Founder and CEO at DSLab. Alexey has 10+ years of practical experience in applying data analysis, machine learning and artificial intelligence to solve business problems. He currently focuses on forecasting demand and optimizing replenishment strategies to help retailers reduce the number of write-offs and out-of-stocks. Alexey received his degree from Saint Petersburg State University of Engineering and Economics.

Simon Stiebellehner is Head of AI at craftworks, lecturer in Statistics and Digital Marketing and passionate speaker. Currently, he focuses on bringing Artificial Intelligence into the industry in the form of Industrial AI. He designs systems that focus on enhancing human decision-making abilities using Artificial Intelligence technologies. After gaining diverse industry experience, ranging from Microsoft to global players of the consulting industry, he obtained his Masters degree from University College London (UCL), specializing in Machine Learning and Data Science. Subsequently, he was a doctoral candidate and research associate, conducting research at the intersection of Neural Probabilistic Language Models and Recommendation Systems in a Real-Time Bidding context.

With over 20 years of professional experience in advanced analytics, and a PhD in mathematics, Artur has led over 100 projects for companies at different stages of development – from startups to global corporations. Several scientific papers and thousands of hours of commercial training later, Artur still has undying enthusiasm for sharing his expertise in business analytics, Data Science, and Machine Learning. He currently holds the position of CTO at QuantUp.

After his PhD at Dortmund University (together with Fraunhofer IDMT, Ilmenau) in 2008 he has worked for seven years as head of scoring and rating models for the Santander Consumer Group. Since 2016 he has a professorship for Statistics, Business Mathematics and Machine Learning at Stralsund University of Applied Sciences.

Martin Szugat is founder and managing director of Datentreiber, a data strategy consultancy supporting companies to digitally transform to a data-driven business. He invented the Data Strategy Design method and provides a free Data Strategy Designkit. Prior to Datentreiber, Martin Szugat was managing director of SnipClip, an agency for social media marketing & analytics. With a degree in bioinformatics, he has conducted research in machine learning and worked as a freelance software developer, consultant & author. Since 2014, he is responsible for the Predictive Analytics World & Deep Learning World conferences in Europe as program director.

René studied business administration (at Nordakademie Elmshorn) and business informatics (at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg). Before he joined GfK, he blended loyalty card, transaction, geographical, and market research data at a German drugstore chain. At GfK, he has worked as a Data Scientist in the DataLab and SUPERCRUNCH units, and nowadays at Global Data Science, where he focuses on developing end-to-end prescriptive analytics solutions.

As a Principal Engineer/Architect and Tech Lead at DreamLab - an IT hub of Ringier Axel Springer, Piotr is designing and building data-driven products for millions of people, solving business problems and extracting value out of vast quantities of data. In doing so, he touches all layers of modern Software & Big Data stack. He loves to have a direct impact on the Big Picture, which made him develop an interest in Software Architecture, Domain-Driven Design and Distributed Systems. Also, he hates buzzwords. Ends up utilizing many of them anyway. Previously at Google, CERN and Zendesk.

Dr Jonas Vogt has worked for Quoniam Asset Management since 2013. He is a member of the equities portfolio department where he is working on quantitative investment strategies. He received his PhD in Statistics from Dortmund University and studied Economics and Statistics.

Steffen Wagner is co-founder of and Lead Data Scientist at INWT Statistics, a Berlin-based data science consultancy. He focuses on the topics of predictive analytics and explainable AI. Since September 2021, he holds a professorship for Applied Statistics at BHT Berlin.

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.

As Global VP Data at PAYBACK, Norbert draws on his extensive experience in marketing analytics, Data Science end to end solution development, the digital ecosystem, innovation management, data product, and algorithm development. Before joining PAYBACK, Norbert was ramping up and managing Sqooba Germany and SUPERCRUNCH by GfK, two Data Science startups. He worked as Director Data Science and AI at PwC, Global Head of Data and Science and Global Head of Innovation and Digital at GfK.

Believes that Computer Scientists need to explore the vast landscape of their field to choose the right tools for every problem. In that spirit, he delved into HPC Erlang distributed systems, front-end, peer-to-peer networks, JVM technologies, high-throughput CPP messaging, and Big Data engineering. Currently designing and building a personalization platform for 30M users at DreamLab – an IT hub of Ringier Axel Springer.