The Speakers

Ilker is a professor of AI & Optimization Techniques for Business & Society in University of Amsterdam (UvA), where he is a faculty member at the Business Analytics section of the Amsterdam Business School (ABS). In the past, he had served for three years as a professor of Data Science and Optimization at the Department of Econometrics of Erasmus University (EUR), and before EUR, he had been a professor of optimization at the Industrial Engineering Department of Sabancı University for more than a decade. His research interests center around optimization methods in artificial intelligence and decision making. Lately, he is interested in explainable optimization.

Rommert is a (em) Professor of Operations Research, Quantitative Logistics, and IT at the Erasmus School of Economics. He currently leads an industry-sponsored research program on service logistics. He has received numerous accolades for his research including ERIM's impact award which honours ERIM researchers who have successfully impacted management practice and the OR Society's Goodeeve medal for best applied paper. He began his career working at Shell Research. During his seven years at the company he published over 100 papers on topics including reverse logistics, service logistics, inventory control, maintenance optimisation, container logistics and transport optimisation. He was also co-founder of the well-known network for reverse logistics REVLOG.

Dimitris is a Professor of Computational Statistics – Time Series at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He previously held roles as Associate Professor at ECE (2013-2017), Assistant and Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematical, Physical, and Computational Sciences (2001-2013), and Lecturer at the University of Glasgow (2000-2001). He also worked as a PostDoc at the Max-Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems (1998-1999) and as an associate researcher at the State Center for Epilepsy in Norway (1997). Since 2019, he has directed the Informatics Lab at ECE and the Interdepartmental MSc in Biomedical Engineering (2021-2023).

Themis is an elected Senior Fellow of the French University Institute (IUF), a distinction that recognizes excellence across all academic disciplines, and Distinguished Professor of computer science at Université Paris Cité (France), where he is director of the data management group, diNo, and was the founding director of the Data Intelligence Institute of Paris (diiP). He received the BS degree from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and the MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Toronto, Canada. He has previously held positions at the University of California at Riverside, University of Trento, and at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and visited Microsoft Research, and the IBM Almaden Research Center. His interests include problems related to data science (big data analytics and machine learning applications). He is the author of 15 patents. He is the recipient of 3 Best Paper awards, and the IBM Shared University Research (SUR) Award. His service includes the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees (2018-2023), Editor-in-Chief for PVLDB Journal (2024-2025) and BDR Journal (2016-2021), PC Chair for IEEE BigData 2023 and ICDE 2023 Industry and Applications Track, General Chair for VLDB 2013, Associate Editor for the TKDE Journal (2014-2020), and Research PC Vice Chair for ICDE 2020.

Maria is a seasoned expert in innovation management, business development, and technology transfer, with a strong focus on digital health and health data utilization. She leads Business Development and Innovation Management at the Center for eHealth Applications and Services (CeHA) of FORTH-ICS, where she drives research commercialization, strategic partnerships, and funding acquisition. Her work centers on leveraging health data to develop digital health solutions. She co-founded Ypsilon Care Tech, a FORTH spin-off, and plays a key role in the flagship project PRECISEU, which helped establish Crete as a European Regional Innovation Valley. She is also part of the coordination team of smartHEALTH, the European Digital Innovation Hub supporting digital transformation in health. Previously, Maria headed FORTH’s Technology Transfer Office and served as a consultant in IP management, spin-off creation, and commercialization strategy. She led the creation of gnΩsi, Greece’s largest TTO network, and contributed to national initiatives such as the Hellenic Digital Health Cluster (HDHC), EKEPEK, and the EquiFund VC program. At the European level, she serves as Greece’s Ambassador in the RM Roadmap project and as National IPR Helpdesk Ambassador. She has held several roles as National Contact Point for EU Framework Programmes (Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe) and contributed to the Enterprise Europe Network’s Health and BioChemTech groups. Maria holds a PhD in Optical Neuroscience from the University of Manchester, an MSc in Optics and Vision, and a BSc in Physics from the University of Crete. She is certified as an AI Trainer and Innovation Assessor.