Ming Fan is the Ingersoll Endowed Professor in the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management at the Foster School of Business, University of Washington. He is a Senior Editor of Production and Operations Management and served as Chair of the INFORMS Information Systems Society from 2023 to 2025. Ming received his Bachelor’s degree from Nanjing University in 1983 and his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of Texas at Austin in 1999. Among the earliest scholars to research the Internet and e-commerce, his work spans digital platforms, e-commerce, supply chain management, FinTech, and blockchain applications. He has published extensively in top-tier international journals, accumulating over 6,400 citations according to Google Scholar, and his research has been featured in prominent outlets including the Financial Times and Fortune. He co-authored the book Electronic Commerce and the Revolution in Financial Markets (2002), and its Chinese edition was subsequently published by Peking University Press. In 2014, he was invited to deliver a keynote address on China's mobile payment at the Chinese Capital Markets conference hosted by New York University.

Dr. Xitong Li is a professor of information technologies at HEC Paris, a research fellow of Hi! PARIS, the joint research center between HEC Paris and Polytechnic Institute of Paris (2026 QS World University Ranking #41), and a visiting professor at Imperial College London (2026 QS World University Ranking #2). His primary research interests are in the economics of information and AI technologies, including social media, FinTech, digital marketing, online education, and human-AI/algorithms collaboration. His research appears in leading business journals, such as Management Science, Information Systems Research, Management Information Systems Quarterly, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Management Information Systems, and various ACM/IEEE Transactions as well as top computer science conferences, such as WWW and CHI.

Dr. Li’s research has been granted by ANR AAPG France (solo PI), equivalent to National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US. Xitong currently serves as Associate Editor for Management Science and Associate Editor for Information Systems Research, and Senior Editor for Production and Operations Management. Xitong received INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) Sandy Slaughter Early Career Award in 2022, and the HEC Foundation Researcher of the Year Award in 2023. Xitong served as a Program Co-chair of the 42nd International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) 2021, the premier international conference in IS, and a Program Committee Co-chair of the 16th and 17th International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom). He received a Ph.D. in management from MIT Sloan School and a Ph.D. in engineering from Tsinghua University. 

Rui Tomás is IT Transformation Director at Jerónimo Martins, an international food retail group whose businesses include Biedronka in Poland, Pingo Doce in Portugal and Ara in Colombia. In this Group-wide role, he focuses on the evolution of the IT operating model and technology adoption across an IT organization of more than 500 people in four countries.

Rui has more than three decades of experience in information technology, beginning his career at IBM Portugal, and has developed particular expertise in technology-enabled business transformation, retail innovation and digital customer experience. His technology leadership and advisory experience spans initiatives such as Pingo Doce & GO Nova, Jerónimo Martins’ laboratory store, the Biedronka customer app, with over 10 million active users, and new digital commerce models, including Biedronka’s partnership with Glovo and the Biek quick-commerce service.

Alongside his corporate career, Rui is a Teaching Fellow in Operations, Technology and Innovation at AESE Business School, where he teaches in executive education programmes. He has also supervised several master’s theses in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence applied to retail.

Rui holds a degree in Computer Engineering from NOVA University Lisbon and an Executive MBA from AESE/IESE Business School, complemented by advanced management and executive education at Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics, Kellogg School of Management, and IESE Business School.