Oleg Okun got his PhD from the Institute of Engineering Cybernetics, National Academy of Sciences (Minsk, Belarus) in 1996. Since 1998 he has worked abroad, doing both academic research (in Belarus and Finland) and industrial research (in Sweden and Germany). His research experience includes document image analysis, cancer prediction by analyzing gene expression profiles (bioinformatics), fingerprint verification and identification (biometrics), online and offline marketing analytics, credit scoring (microfinance), and text search and summarization (natural language processing). He has 80 publications, including one IGI Global-published book and three co-edited books published by Springer-Verlag, as well as book chapters, journal articles, and numerous conference papers. He has also been a reviewer of several books published by Packt Publishing.

Jared James Thompson, PhD, is a graduate of Purdue University and has held both academic and industrial appointments teaching programming, algorithms, and big data technology. He is a machine learning enthusiast and has a particular love of optimization. Jared is currently employed as a machine learning engineer at Atomwise, a start-up that leverages artificial intelligence to design better drugs faster.