Matthias Dehmer is a professor at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Steyr School of Management and UMIT - The Health and Life Sciences University in Austria. He also holds a guest professorship at Nankai University, College of Artificial Intelligence in China. His research interests are in graph theory, complex networks, complexity, data science, machine learning, big data analytics, and information theory. In particular, he is also working on machine learningbased methods to design new data analysis methods for solving problems in manufacturing and production.

Frank Emmert-Streib is a professor at Tampere University, Finland, heading the Predictive Society and Data Analytics Lab. His research interests are in the field of data science, machine learning and network science in the development and application of methods from statistics and machine learning for the analysis of big data from genomics, finance, social media and business.

Herbert Jodlbauer is a professor at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Steyr School of Management and also acts as a director of studies of the bachelor study program Production and Management and the master study program Operations Management. Furthermore, he leads the trans-faculty institute of Smart Production. His research is primarily concerned with production planning, time continuous production models, financial valuation of production related decisionmaking as well as digitalization.