Monday 31st of March (Portland Building 3.31)

12:00 -- 13:00 Arrival and buffet lunch

13:00 -- 14:30 Towards triple-loop learning in retail demand forecasting: a systematic evaluation of benchmarking and reproducibility of Machine Learning and roadmap for research

Dr Huijing Chen, Prof Ashraf Labib (with discussion)

14:30 -- 15:00 Coffee break

15:00 -- 16:00 World Cafe style discussions

Tuesday 1st of April (University Library 0.35)

10:00 -- 11:00 Presentation 1: The Computer and the Brain, part II: the return of HI

Professor Kostas Nikolopoulos, Durham University

11:00 -- 11:40 Presentation 2: Feature Engineering for intermittent demand

Dr Ivan Svetunkov, Lancaster University

11:40 -- 12:20 Presentation 3: Technology Roadmapping Using Text Mining: A Foresight Study for the Retail Industry

Professor Sercan Ozcan, University of Portsmouth

12:20 -- 14:00 Lunch and close

Speaker Bio

Dr Huijing Chen

I am a Senior Lecturer in Operations Management and hold a PhD in short-term seasonal demand forecasting. I have published in high quality journals such as European Journal of Operational Research, International Journal of Forecasting and Journal of the Operational Research Society. I have won funding from EPSRC, Innovate UK and the British Academy. I am Deputy Director of NATCOR. Previously I held lecturing positions at London Metropolitan University and the University of Salford.

Prof Ashraf Labib

I am a Professor of Operations and Decision Analysis at the Faculty of Business and Law. I have also been the Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty and Director of the DBA Programme. My main research interest lies in the field of Strategic Operations Management and Decision Analysis. This includes Manufacturing, Reliability Engineering and Maintenance Systems, Multiple Criteria Decision-Analysis and Applications of Artificial Intelligence such as Fuzzy Logic.

I have published 150-refereed papers in professional journals and international conferences proceedings. I have been active in attracting research-funded projects from EPSRC, ESRC, European Commission and industry. I have also been involved in teaching modules to various industries such as the EDF, HP, Royal Mail, Qatar Gas, SABEC, and University of Manchester, and Glasgow Caledonian, and the NSF funded research centre IMS in the USA.

Professor Kostas Nikolopoulos

Dr. Konstantinos (Kostas) Nikolopoulos is the Professor in Business Information Systems and Analytics at Durham University Business School. Professor Nikolopoulos' work has been consistently appearing in the International Journal of Forecasting (29 outputs) but also in journals for broader audiences including the Journal of Operations Management, the European Journal of Operational Research, and the Journal of Computer Information Systems. His research interests are:

Analytics
Forecasting
Information Systems
Operations

Dr Ivan Svetunkov

Ivan Svetunkov is a Senior Lecturer of Marketing Analytics at Lancaster University, UK. He has PhD in Management Science from Lancaster University. His main area of interest is statistical learning for demand forecasting. He is a creator and a maintainer of several forecasting- and analytics-related R packages and an author of many papers and a monograph “Forecasting and Analytics with the Augmented Dynamic Adaptive Model” (https://openforecast.org/adam/).

Professor Sercan Ozcan

Prof. Dr. Sercan Ozcan is a Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at the University of Portsmouth, where he also serves as Associate Head of Research and Innovation and Head of the Innovation Intelligence and Policy Research Group. Prof. Ozcan’s work sits at the intersection of machine learning, text intelligence, and innovation management. With over 30 publications in leading journals and extensive experience in collaborative research projects and consultancies, his research focuses on leveraging data-driven techniques to extract actionable insights from diverse data sources including patents, academic publications, social media, and job advertisements to enhance innovation performance and strategic decision-making in both academic and industrial settings.

For further information, please contact Dr Huijing Chen (huijing.chen@port.ac.uk)