Dirk Van den Poel (PhD) is Senior Full Professor of Data Analytics/Big Data at Ghent University, Belgium. He teaches courses such as Statistical Computing, Big Data, Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics. He co-authored 80+ international peer-reviewed publications in journals such as Journal of Statistical Software, Journal of Applied Econometrics, European Journal of Operational Research. He co-founded the first predictive analytics master program in the world (Master of Science in Marketing Analysis). He co-authored five open-source R packages (hybridEnsemble, kernelFactory, bayesQR, interpretR, imputeMissings).He has given 100+ talks including Apache Big Data North America Vancouver 2016, Strata NYC, INFORMS Analytics, INFORMS Annual Meeting, Marketing Science Conf., Marketing EDGE. See: http://www.mma.ugent.be/predictive_analytics/customer_intelligence/Blog/Blog.html