Olivier Scaillet, University of Geneva & Swiss Finance Institute

Olivier Scaillet is Professor of Finance and Statistics at the University of Geneva and Head of the Geneva Finance Research Institute. Professor Scaillet is a regular speaker at leading finance and financial econometrics conferences. His papers have been published in top academic journals, and he is an elected fellow of several leading academic societies in econometrics and statistics. Professor Scaillet studies the gains institutional investors could achieve by reallocating their portfolios away from bonds and stocks and toward more illiquid assets. Using nearly 20 years of global asset-price data, he shows that reallocating one-fifth of a bond–stock portfolio to privately traded illiquid assets can significantly improve returns; moreover, a strategy aiming to minimize volatility offers the highest returns. The main driver is that illiquid assets, such as real estate and private equity, typically offer better returns than bonds and stocks and are negatively correlated with bonds. He also contributes to knowledge-exchange activities on cyber risk management, portfolio diversification, and crypto assets at SFI.

Ambrus Kecskés, Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada

Ambrus Kecskés is a Professor of Finance at the Schulich School of Business at York University. He studied at the Rotman School of Management and earned a B.Com. and a Ph.D. in Finance, both from the University of Toronto. His main research expertise and interests lie at the intersection of financial markets and the real economy. He has published numerous papers in the top finance and accounting journals. He is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Corporate Finance. His research has won many best paper awards at conferences around the world and is regularly cited by such media outlets as the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes, the Financial Post, the Globe and Mail, and CBC News. His teaching focuses on corporate finance and ranges from the undergraduate to the doctoral levels. He has won numerous teaching excellence awards. In addition to his teaching at York University, he has taught at Virginia Tech and the University of Toronto.

Long-Tran Thanh, Professor & Chair of the Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Spotlight in Digital, University of Warwick, United Kingdom

Long is a Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, UK. He is currently the Director of Research of the department (Deputy-Head) and the university’s Chair of the Digital, Data Science and AI Interdisciplinary Research Spotlight. Long has been doing active research in a number of key areas of Artificial Intelligence and multi-agent systems, mainly focusing on multi-armed bandits, game theory, and incentive engineering, and their applications to AI for Social Good. He has published more than 90 papers at peer-reviewed A* conferences in AI/ML (including AAAI, AAMAS, CVPR, ICLR, IJCAI, NeurIPS) and journals (JAAMAS, AIJ), and have received a number of prestigious national/international awards, including 2 best paper honourable mention awards at top-tier AI conferences (AAAI, ECAI), 2 Best PhD Thesis Award Honourable Mentions (UK's BCS and Europe’s ECCAI/EurAI), and the co-recipient of the 2021 AIJ Prominent Paper Award (for one of the 2 most influential papers between 2014-2021 published at the Artificial Intelligence Journal). Long has also been actively involved in a number of community services, including being the local co-chair for AAMAS 2021, AAMAS 2023, KR 2021, KR 2024, and AAMAS 2027. He is an Associate Editor for JAAMAS, the flagship multi-agent systems journal, and an Associate Editor for AIJ, the flagship AI journal. Previously he was a member of the IFAAMAS Board of Directors between 2018-2024 and was a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, UK. As the Chair of the Digital, Data Science and AI Interdisciplinary Research Spotlight, Long has been leading multiple interdisciplinary research initiatives, aiming to build real-world AI systems to tackle societal and environmental challenges in developing countries.

Toan Phan, Senior economist and research advisor, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, USA

Toan Phan is a senior economist in the Research Department. His research interests include understanding the effects of extreme weather and natural disasters on the macroeconomy and the financial system.

Phan joined the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond in July 2017 after serving as an assistant professor of economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned his doctorate from Northwestern University in 2012 and his bachelor of science in mathematics from Bucknell University in 2006. He is from Hanoi, Vietnam.