Matthias Dehmerstudied mathematics at the University of Siegen (Germany) and received his Ph.D. in computer science from the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany). Afterwards, he was a research fellow at Vienna BioCenter (Austria), Vienna University of Technology, and University of Coimbra (Portugal). He obtained his habilitation in applied discrete mathematics from the Vienna University of Technology. Currently, he is Professor at UMIT - The Health and Life Sciences University. Also he holds a Guest Professorship at Nankai University. His research interests are in complex networks, complexity, data science, predictive analytics, machine learning and information theory.

He published more than 225 publications in computer science and related disciplines. Frank Emmert-Streibstudied physics at the University of Siegen, Germany, gaining his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Bremen. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the USA before becoming a Faculty member at the Center for Cancer Research at the Queens University Belfast (UK). Currently, he is a Professor at Tampere University Technology, Finland, in the Department of Signal Processing. His research interests are in the field of computational biology, data science and analytics in the development and application of methods from statistics and machine learning for the analysis of big data from genomics, finance and business. Herbert Jodlbaurstudied technical mathematics at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz (Austria) and received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Vienna (Austria).

After his studies, he was project leader at the HILTI AG (Liechtenstein). In his function as a member of the executive board of the FAZAT Steyr GmbH he founded study courses at the University of Applied Sciences with focus on Production, Logistics and Management. He is the director of studies of the bachelor study course Production and Management and the master study course Operations Management. Furthermore, he leads the trans-faculty institute of Smart Production. Beyond that, he owns since 1995 the consultancy enterprise TechTransfer in the field of production optimization, planning and control as well as industry 4.0. His current books are 'Die Datenspinne', 'Im Netz von Google', 'Facebook', 'Alibaba und Co!' (Leykam, 2016) and 'Produktionsoptimierung' (Verlag Osterreich, 2016).¨.