Edy Portmann is Swiss Post Professor of Informatics at the Human-IST Institute of the University of Fribourg and member of the board of the Swiss Informatics Society. After an apprenticeship as an electrician, he studied information systems, business as well as economics and, later, got a doctorate in computer science. Among others, he worked for Swisscom, PwC, and EY. In addition, Edy Portmann was also a researcher at the universities of Singapore, Berkeley, and Bern. His transdisciplinary research focuses on cognitive computing and its application to the network industry.

Sara D’Onofrio is IT Business Partner Manager of one of the largest retail companies in Switzerland, author and editor of the journal HMD Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik at Springer, guest lecturer at universities, and member of the FMsquare Foundation. She studied business administration and information systems and holds a Ph.D. in computer science. Her research and consulting interests include innovation, smart cities, and cognitive computing.

Luis Terán is a senior researcher in cognitive computing at the Human-IST Institute, University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and external lecturer at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Dr. Teran holds an M.Sc. degree in communication systems from the Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), as well as a Ph.D. and a habilitation in computer science from the University of Fribourg. He was a researcher at the Universities of Bern and Zurich, and a Full Professor at Universidad de Las Fuerzas Armadas (ESPE), Ecuador. His research interests include Data Science, digitalization, information systems, machine learning, explainable artificial intelligence, recommender systems, human-centered computing, e-business, e-government, e-participation, e-democracy, e-health, and fuzzy classification.

Witold Pedrycz is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Computational Intelligence in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. He is also with the Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and in 2009 he was elected a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2007 he received a prestigious Norbert Wiener award from the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society. Besides he is a recipient of the IEEE Canada Computer Engineering Medal, a Cajastur Prize for Soft Computing from the European Centre for Soft Computing, a Killam Prize, a Fuzzy Pioneer Award from the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and the 2019 Meritorious Service Award from the IEEE Systems Man and Cybernetics Society. His main research directions involve Computational Intelligence, fuzzy modeling, and Granular Computing, knowledge discovery and data science, pattern recognition, data science, knowledge-based neural networks among others.