One of the plenary sessions is a panel discussion on the application of Metaheuristics and other close related techniques in industry. We have an excellent panel including Nuria Oliver (Data-Pop Alliance), Ricardo Baeza-Yates (NTENT), Kristof Roomp (Microsoft) and Enrique Alfonseca (Google). Some invited researchers are still to confirm! Looking forward to have an interesting discussion on the application of Metaheuristics in different organizations.

Nuria Oliver

Nuria Oliver is a computer scientist with a PhD from MIT on perceptual intelligence. She has over 20 years of research experience, first at MIT, then at Microsoft Research (Redmond, WA) and finally she was the first female Scientific Director at Telefonica R&D (Barcelona, Spain). Nuria is actually the Chief Data Scientist at Data-Pop Alliance (https://datapopalliance.org/). Her work on computational human behavior modeling, human-computer interaction, Mobile computing and Big Data analysis, particularly applied for Social Good, is internationally known with over 100 scientific articles in international conferences and journals, cited over 10000 times and with several best paper awards and nominations. She is co-inventor of 40 filed patents and a frequent keynote speaker in international conferences. She is the first Spanish female computer scientist named a Distinguished Scientist by the ACM and a Fellow of the European Association of Artificial Intelligence. Her work has received many international awards, such as the MIT TR100 (today TR35) Young Innovator Award (2004), and the Gaudí Gresol award to Excellence in Science and Technology (2016). She has been selected as one of the “top 9 female technology directors” in Spain by EL PAIS (2012), one of the “100 leaders for the future” by Capital (2009), a Rising Talent by the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society (2009)  and one of “40 youngsters with great potential in Spain” by EL PAIS (1999), among others.Her passion is to improve the quality of life of people, both individually and collectively, through technology. She also has great interest for scientific outreach and to inspire new generations –and particularly girls—to pursue careers in technology. Therefore, she is a frequent collaborator with the media and she gives talks both to the general public and especially to thousands of teenagers.
Twitter: @nuriaoliver
URL: https://www.nuriaoliver.com   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuria_Oliver

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Ricardo Baeza-Yates areas of expertise are web search and data mining, information retrieval, data science and algorithms. He is CTO of NTENT, a semantic search technology company based in California, USA. Before he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, based in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California, from January 2006 to February 2016. He also is part time Professor at DTIC of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, Spain, as well as at DCC of Universidad de Chile in Santiago. Until 2004 he was Professor and founding director of the Center for Web Research at the later place. He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1989. He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook published by Addison-Wesley in 2011 (2nd ed), that won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award. From 2002 to 2004 he was elected to the board of governors of the IEEE Computer Society and in 2012 he was elected for the ACM Council. Since 2010 is a founding member of the Chilean Academy of Engineering. In 2009 he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow, among other awards and distinctions.
URL: https://users.dcc.uchile.cl/~rbaeza/ NTENT: https://www.ntent.com/

Kristof Roomp

Kristof Roomp is a Principal Software Architect working at Microsoft on the Exchange cloud-based email system in Office 365. He was co-founder of NCompass Labs, building a web content management system which was sold to Microsoft in 2001 for $33 million.
After joining Microsoft, he then went on be architect working on the Microsoft Xbox payment platform, building the Xbox points micropayment system. Following this, he was one of the designers of a cloud storage system that powered OneDrive. He then went on to work for Outlook.com, improving the cloud storage system to dramatically lower the cost of storage for email.
URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristofr

Enrique Alfonseca

Enrique Alfonseca is a Staff Research Scientist at Google, working on conversational search for the Assistant. He currently manages a Natural Language Understanding team in Google Research Europe (Zurich) working on topics like answer summarization, paraphrasing and conversationalization. Before that, he held various positions in search quality (ranking), and ads quality. He holds a Ph.D. from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, co-supervised at the University of York, and performed a post-doc stay at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is the author of over fifty publications, and has recently contributed as area chair or program committee member to conferences such as ACL, EACL, NAACL, EMNLP, WSDM and others.