Oscar Romero has an MSc and a PhD in computing from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Currently, he is a tenure-track 1 lecturer at the Barcelona School of Informatics. He is also a member of the MPI research group at the same university, specialized in software engineering, databases and information systems. His research interests are data warehousing, OLAP tools, multidimensional modeling, the semantic web and ontologies. He is the author of articles and papers presented and published in national and international conferences and journals on these subjects.

Nacéra Bennacer is currently a professor at the Computer Science Department of CentraleSupélec and member of Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique (LRI Laboratory). She has a PhD in computer science from Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM-Paris) and receives her accreditation to supervise research (HdR) from Paris-sud University. She heads the Data Support and Business Intelligence (DSBI) master’s Programme of CentraleSupélec. Her research interests include semantic-based information extraction from Web resources, ontology-based and user-centric information retrieval by covering semi-structured data, Linked Open Data and social networks data.

Patrick Marcel received his PhD from INSA Lyon in 1998. He is currently associate professor at the Computer Science Dept. of Université François Rabelais Tours (UFRT), France, where he heads the Master's Program in Business intelligence. He teaches databases, data warehousing and information retrieval. He is also and a member of the Computer Science laboratory of UFRT. His research interests include OLAP, data mining, query personalisation and recommendation in databases. He is the author of publications in international conferences and journals on these subjects.

Volker Markl is a Full Professor and Chair of the Database Systems and Information Management (DIMA) group at the Technische Universität Berlin (TU-Berlin). Prior to joining TU-Berlin, Dr. Markl lead a research group at FORWISS, the Bavarian Research Center for Knowledge-based Systems in Munich, Germany, and was a Research Staff member & Project Leader at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, USA. His research interests include: information as a service, new hardware architectures for information management, information integration, autonomic computing, query processing, query optimization, data warehousing, electronic commerce, and pervasive computing.

Volker has presented over 100 invited talks in numerous industrial settings and at major conferences and research institutions worldwide. He has authored and published more than 50 research papers at world-class scientific venues. Volker regularly serves as member and chair for program committees of major international database conferences. He also is a member of the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment. Volker has 5 patent awards, and he has submitted over 20 invention disclosures to date. Over the course of his career, he has garnered many prestigious awards, including the European Information Society and Technology Prize, an IBM Outstanding Technological Achievement Award, an IBM Shared University Research Grant, an HP Open Innovation Award, and the Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award.

Toon Calders graduated in 1999 from the University of Antwerp with a diploma in Mathematics. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the same university in May 2003, in the database research group ADReM, and continued working in the ADReM group as a postdoc until 2006. From 2006 till 2012 he was an assistant professor in the Information Systems group at the Eindhoven Technical University. In 2012 he joined the CoDE department at the ULB as a “Chargé de Cours” (associate professor). His main research interests include data mining and machine learning. Toon Calders published over 60 conference and journal papers in this research area and received several scientific awards for his works, including the recent “10 Year most influential paper” award for papers published in ECMLPKDD 2002. Toon Calders regularly serves in the program committees of important data mining conferences, including ACM SIGKDD, IEEE ICDM, ECMLPKDD, SIAM DM, was conference chair of the BNAIC 2009 and EDM 2011 conferences, and is a member of the editorial board of the Springer Data Mining journal and Area Editor for the Information Systems journal.