Vilda Purutçuoglu is a Professor in the Department of Statistics and the Chair of the postgraduate programme of Biomedical Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey. She has a BSc in statistics and philosophy, and a minor degree in economics. She obtained a Master's (METU) and Doctorate (Lancaster University) in statistic. She is currently the Associate Editor of Biometrics, Editorial board member of BMC Bioinformatics, Chair of Award Fund Committee of International Biometrics Society and academic advisor of Huawei, Turkey R&G Center. Gerhard Wilhelm Webe r is a Professor at Poznan University of Technology. He has a Diploma and Doctorate in Mathematics, and Economics/Business Administration from RWTH Aachen, and Habilitation at TU Darmstadt. He has affiliations in METU (IAM/UME) Ankara, Turkey; University of Siegen, Germany; Federation University (Ballarat); University of Aveiro, Portugal; University of North Sumatra (Medan), Indonesia; Chinese University of Hong Kong; Instinye University, Istanbul, Turkey; Karatay University, Konya, Turkey; Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, India; and Georgian International Academy of Sciences; and in many journals and at POP. He is EURO Conference Advisor and IFORS Fellow.

Hajar Farnoudkia is an Assistant Professor at the Business Administration Department of Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey. Her bachelor and master's of statistics are from Tabriz University in Iran and doctorate from Middle East Technical University (METU) in Turkey. Her primary interests are in applied statistics and advanced machine learning methods.