Keynote speakers

    Prof. Trond Randøy (University of Agder, Norway) Trond Randøy is Professor of International Business at the School of Business and Law, University of Agder, Norway. Professor Randøy has a PhD from the Norwegian School of Economics and a MBA from the University of Oregon, USA. His research focuses on international business, corporate governance, and entrepreneurship in emerging economies. Trond Randøy is currently serving on three boards and has co-founded businesses in Norway, USA and Africa. "How can professors enhance student entrepreneurship?" Can business school student-professor cooperation be leveraged to produce successful business ventures? We investigate how business schools can improve their social mission performance by promoting academic entrepreneurship, and outline four routes to implementing such activities. Specifically, Professor Randøy will give explore this phenomena by showing how a Norwegian business school professor, a recently gradated PhD student from Sweden, and two graduated PhD students from Tanzania in a Scandinavian-Tanzania private equity venture which invests in African firms.         Prof.Guntis Barzdiņš (University of Latvia, Latvia) He is senior researcher at Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Latvia, IMCS  and the Head of Innovation Lab at the national news agency LETA. After returning from the post-doctoral studies in USA, New Mexico University, he established the first Internet connection to Latvia in 1992. Since then worked primarily on natural language processing for Latvian and English, coordinated several national and international projects.  Teaches Deep Learning and Computer Networking courses at Computer Science department, UL. "Benefits and drawbacks of the BigData era" We have voluntarily surrendered our private data to BigData companies like Google and FaceBook in hope that our data there will be safe and will be used only for ethical machine learning purposes to further advance artificial intelligence capabilities we already use daily: smart search, machine translation, speech recognition, guessing our interests etc. But alongside these positive BigData uses, unexpectedly the world was recently astounded by the success of the DataScience killer-application: microtargeting, discussed in this presentation.           Prof. Bruno Sergio Sergi (University of Messina, Italy) Bruno S. Sergi is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Messina, Italy. He is also an instructor of the Economics of Emerging Markets Asia and Eastern Europe and Political Economy of Russia and China at Harvard University. Sergi's primary research interest is international macroeconomics and the political economy of transition countries. He is the founder and Editor-In-Chief of International Journal of Trade and Global Markets; International Journal of Economic Policy in Emerging Economies and International Journal of Monetary Economics and Finance. "Banking competition: a case study"