Ana Cristina Silva

is Associate Professor of Finance and Chair of the Accounting and Finance Department at Merrimack College, North Andover, MA. She is also Founding Director of the Financial Capability Center (Merrimack College and ACT Lawrence) having received numerous recognitions for the contribution of her Center to the Community.

She has a Ph.D. in Financial Economics by the University of Houston (Texas, U.S.) and an MBA by Madrid Business School- U. of Houston. She is Bachelor in Biological Sciences by Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain).

Her Areas of interest are Financial Capability, Financial Inclusion, Behavioral Finance, and Social Finance. She has numerous publications in referee top international journals like Journal of Accounting and Organizational Change, Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Journal of Banking and Finance, Global Journal of Emerging Markets Economies, Emerging Market Review, etc.

Ivan Contreras Fernández-Davila

is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Computer Science Department of Universidad de Girona. He has been visiting researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering in Saarbrucken, Germany (one year) at the Computer Sciences School of University of Nottingham (two semesters) and at the Computer Sciences Department of the Universidad de Granada (one month).

He has an Official European PhD in Computer Sciences by Universidad Complutense de Madrid, a Master in Computer Sciences: Optimization and Process Control and a Bachelor in computer Science by the same University. He has received the GENIL award “Granada Excellence Network of Innovation Laboratories” for the best pre-doctoral work in Metaheuristics, Evolutionary and Bioinspired Algorithms awarded by the CEI BioTIC Granada.

His research has been published in referee international journals like Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, Computers and Programs in Biomedicine, Memetic Computing, Soft Computing o Parallel Architectures and Bioinspired Algorithms among others.

Silvia Casado Yusta

is Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Economics at Burgos University and Director of the Group of “Quantitative Methods for Economy and Companies”.

She holds a Bachelor and a PhD in Business Administration by Burgos University and was awarded with the outstanding prize of the Department of Economics and Business Administration for her PhD dissertation.

Her research has focused on the use of metaheuristic strategies for optimization, with applications to real life problems, such as work shifts, scheduling, logistic, or urban transport. Besides she has worked on data mining, mainly applied to the variable selection problem for classification through metaheuristics. Her research has been published in numerous referee international journals like European Journal Operational Research, IEEE Intelligent System, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Expert Systems with Applications, etc.

José Esteves

is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at IE Business School (Madrid, Spain) since2004. Before becoming a professor, Mr. Esteves served as an information systems analyst expert andconsultant in some companies. Currently, he still is in permanent contact with companies developingconsultancy and research projects applied to industry.

He holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems, a Diploma in Business Administration and a MSc. and EngineerDegrees in Information Systems.

He is author of many articles about information systems published in international conferences, booksand journals such as MIT Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, International Journal ofHuman Resources and Enterprise Information Systems Journal. His interests focus on the implementation and use of enterprise systems, big data, digital transformation and cybersecurity.

Joaquín Pacheco

is Tenure Professor at Burgos University since 2009. He is also the Director of the PhD School in the same University and the Principal Researcher of the Metaheuristics Techniques Research Group (GRINUBUMET).

He holds a PhD in Mathematics (Operational Research) and a Bachelor in Mathematics (Statistics) by Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

His research interest is focused on metaheuristics design for applications to real problems (like transport, health, logistic, etc.) and data mining (no hierarchical clusters design, neural network training and variables selection for classification problems). He has published more than 50 articles, among them 30 in journals included in the JCR of ISI like European Journal Operational Research, IEEE Intelligent System, Expert Systems with Applications Knowledge-Based Systems, Transportation Science, Transportation Research B o Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering.

Joshua Jorg Guyer

is a postdoctoral researcher at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, and also holds a research fellowship at the Center for Insurance Research at IE Business School (Madrid, Spain).

Dr. Guyer was awarded a Ph.D in social psychology from Queen’s University (Kingston, Canada), for which he received the Canadian Psychological Association Certificate of Academic Excellence for best dissertation. Dr. Guyer has been an invited guest lecturer at a number of prestigious international universities, and previously taught at the Royal Military College of Canada (Kingston, Canada).

His primary areas of interest investigate the psychological mechanisms by which different qualities of voice that reflect speaker confidence (e.g., rate of speech, intonation, pitch) as well as different emotional qualities of voice (e.g., fear, excitement, boredom, contentment) influence the success of a persuasive appeal. His research has been published in internationally recognized journals, including the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.

Periklis Thivaios

is a postgraduate from the London School of Economics (with Distinction), a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and an accredited Financial Risk Manager (FRM). Previously, he was teaching Counterparty Credit Risk and XVA at the department of Computational and Applied Mathematics, University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Currently, he is researching “Macroprudential regulation and financial (in)stability: banking & insurance regulatory capital standards and endogenous destabilising effects” at IE Business School in Madrid, Spain.

His experience transcends finance, risk, capital management and strategy for financial institutions (banks and insurance firms) across Europe, North America and Africa. Key areas of expertise include financial risk and regulation (Solvency, Basel), financial planning and risk forecasting, value based management, stress testing, capital management, counterparty credit risk, securitisation and structured products. Entrepreneurially, he has been the founder of a successful firm in financial services consulting, and of two (less successful) firms in the retail and hospitality fields.

He is a mentor for a number of ‘fintech’ startups at global financial accelerators and an active contributor to international conferences, research projects and publications.