The European Data Science Academy has established an Advisory Board to oversee the project and ensure that project activities continue to meet changes in the demands on data science across Europe.

The members of the Advisory Board are the following:

Samantha Chadwick 

Samantha is the Head of Partnerships, BBC Research and Development and is part of the Leadership team at BBC North, UK. Samantha manages strategic partnerships for BBC Research and Development within the BBC Digital Division. The outcomes from R&D’s diverse portfolio of partnerships ensure that ground-breaking advances and innovations add value to services and outputs from the BBC to audiences and to the wider industry and academia, and also help to develop a fluid talent pool of skilled people fit for the future. Samantha is also an Impact Assessor for HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) assessing the impact that research carried out in academia has beyond Higher Education, with benefits to economy, society and culture.

Theo-Jan Renkema 

Theo-Jan Renkema is Manager of Advanced Data Analytics at Rabobank, in the Netherlands. Theo-Jan has a background in Business Administration and Management Science at a masters and doctorate level, and pursued a career as researcher, executive consultant and manager. Theo-Jan Renkema aims to apply advanced analytic techniques to improve existing business processes and customer propositions and to build new business models. 

Ernestina Menasalvas 

Ernestina Menasalvas is a Professor at the Computer Science School at Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM), where she leads the MIDAS ‘data mining and data simulation’ research group. Currently, she develops her research at the Centre of Biotechnology in UPM. Ernestina collaborates with the Spanish CLC of the EIT-Digital for education and training and represents the UPM within the Big Data Value Association, where she leads the task responsible for education and skills.

Anders Arpteg 

Anders Arpteg is the Analytics Machine Learning Manager at Spotify and the CEO of Agent Central AB in Sweden. Previously, Anders was the AI Scientist at Campanja, working with global companies to optimise their worldwide campaigns. Anders specialises in machine learning and big data technologies.

Dave Clarke 

Dave Clarke is the Chief Data Scientist at Asystec, where he develops the company strategy for big data analytics service development for customers. He also leads the development of Asystec’s big data analytics Innovation Centre and Executive Briefing Centre in Ireland.  Previously, Dave worked with EMC where he consulted one-to-one with senior business executives across Europe, Middle East and Africa and set up multi-disciplinary teams in the data warehouse and business intelligence solutions space. Dave has over 20 years of experience in data science roles, software architecture and management consulting across multiple domains including manufacturing, retail, utilities, healthcare, banking and insurance.

Dr. Daniel Gillblad 

Dr. Daniel Gillblad is a senior researcher and Director, of Decision, Networks and Analytics Laboratory at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS). Daniel received his Ph.D. in computer science and focuses his current work on probabilistic methods for network management, diagnostics and large-scale data analytics.

Dr. Pawel Kobylinski 

Dr. Pawel Kobylinski is a Data Scientist for Interactive Technologies Laboratory at the National Information Processing Institute in Warsaw, where he works on projects that combine artificial intelligence, cognitive science and human-computer interaction with sociology and user experience design. Pawel specialises in quantitative structuralisation of research and business issues – he quantifies situations into data, analyses the data, and turns the data into meaningful explanations. He has been gaining his interdisciplinary experience as a Statistical and Machine Learning Consultant animating his StatMach project and undertaking challenges, which require coming into contact with various scientific and business fields, often distant from one another.

Philippe Van Impe 

Philippe Van Impe is a Founding Partner of the Brussels Data Science Community, a large open community of specialists in data and business. The community’s activities aim to bridge the gap between businesses and academia, through regular meet-ups, training and ‘Data for Good’ projects, where members contribute their skills to work on projects with NGO’s, public institutions and start-ups.

Philippe is also the Founder of the European Data Innovation Hub, which connects and supports data professionals throughout Europe to share and discuss best practices in open data, big data and data innovation.

Anders Caspár 

Anders Caspár is the Director of External Research Relations at Ericsson in Sweden, reporting to Head of Ericsson Research, with global responsibility for creating and maintaining a strategic viewpoint on Ericsson’s external research relations. He is actively involved in external research relations, having Supervisory Board Positions within academia, industry associations and governments’ reference groups at international and national level.

Anders has more than 25 years experience working in, and with, large multi-national organisations and SME’s managing technology development, deployment and change management associated with successful introduction of new technologies. With many years experience in system and software architecture development and in industrial applied research, Anders has contributed to the establishment of several international networks encouraging an efficient transfer of knowledge.

Prof. Dr. Milan Petković 

Prof. Dr. Milan Petković is the head of the Data Science department in Philips, in the Netherlands, which conducts innovation projects for Philips in the domain of data analytics, signal processing, advanced data management and security. Among his research interests are data science, big data analytics, information security and privacy protection. Prof. Petković serves at the board of directors of Big Data Value Association, and in the past of Trust in Digital Life Alliance, ENISA and several other institutions. Prof. Petković is very active in the EU and Dutch national collaborative projects. He currently leads the AU2EU and THeCS projects and participates in SuperCloud, ATTPS and CTMM projects.

Simon Fischer

Simon Fischer is one of the founders of the RapidMiner project, started as Yale in 2001 and now known as the world-leading open source data mining solution. He is now SVP Engineering at RapidMiner GmbH where he runs the international engineering team and completed various FP7 and nationally funded research projects. One of the core development efforts at RapidMiner is building a solution that delivers uncompromised power of advanced analytics that is accessible to business analysts without mathematical backgrounds.

Simon Fischer holds a master’s degree in computer science from Dortmund University and a PhD in computer science from RWTH Aachen University where he has conducted research on the intersection of game theory and network theory.

Dr Orlando Machado

Dr Orlando Machado is Chief Data Scientist at MoneySuperMarket, one of the UK’s largest digital businesses. His team includes data scientists, statisticians, insight analysts and customer marketing specialists, and is leading MoneySuperMarket’s mission to put customers at the heart of all its decisions.

Orlando joined MoneySuperMarket in 2012 from dunnhumby – a company that has been at the cutting edge of data analysis for over 20 years. Orlando spent 6 years in a number of leadership positions across all dunnhumby’s UK clients, and most recently led the development of dunnhumby’s solutions for creating personalised multi-channel customer experiences.

Previously, Orlando led the UK analytics team for Wunderman, the world’s largest online communications agency. He started his career in academia, and holds a PhD in Statistics from the University of Warwick.

Jim Kenneally

Jim Kenneally leads research on business value management practices for Intel Labs Europe (ILE) that accelerate technology adoption. ILE is Intel’s network of more than 40 research labs, development centres and open innovation collaborations spanning the European region.

Additionally, Jim holds the Head of R&D and the Technical Committee Chair roles at the IVI consortium (IVI – www.ivi.ie) – an international multi-industry/academia consortium aiming to change the way companies and governments achieve business value through information technology. Jim has co-authored numerous publications on the topic of managing IT for business value and innovation. Jim is a Senior Research Fellow at Maynooth University Ireland and a Fellow of the Irish Computer Society.

Maria Vigliotti

Maria Vigliotti holds a MSc in Advanced Computing and PhD in computing from Imperial College London. She has over ten years of experience as an academic working on formal methods for verification methods for safety and critical systems, performance analysis, queuing theory of distributed systems, computer security, and big data analysis for forensic investigations. In big data analysis, Maria has worked on the prediction of sentiment in social media using Hidden Markov Models and anomalies detection.

Maria has worked as consultant in the nuclear industry, assessing the integrity of software-based systems. She currently works at RSSB, supporting the railway industry in developing a cyber-security strategy as well as research and training programmes on the use of railway data to improve services and capacity.