The 1st International Online Conference on Forecasting

Department of Electrical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Raipur, India;
Dr. Anamika Yadav is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Raipur and currently serves as Associate Dean (Academics – PG & PhD). She earned her B.E. in Electrical Engineering (2002), M. Tech. in Integrated Power Systems (2006), and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (2010). With over 17 years of teaching and research experience and 5 years of industrial experience, she has made significant contributions to power systems research and education. She is a Senior Member of IEEE, Vice Chair of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (since 2026), and served as Vice Chair of the IEEE Power Electronics Society Chapter, MP Section (2022–2025). Dr. Yadav serves as an Editor of IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery (since 2021), Electric Power Systems Research (Elsevier, since 2025), Electrical Engineering (Springer, since 2024), International Transactions on Electrical Energy Systems (Wiley, since 2025), and Forecasting (MDPI, since 2026). She has been recognized among the World’s Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University and Elsevier for four consecutive years (2021–2024). Her research interests include power system protection, load forecasting, artificial intelligence and machine learning applications in power systems, power electronics, HVDC, microgrids, FACTS, smart grids, cable fault detection, and power quality.

Mediterranea University DICEAM Department Reggio Calabria, Italy;
Mario Versaci is an Associate Professor of Electrotechnics (Electrical Engineering) at the Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria (Italy), Department of Civil, Energy, Environmental and Materials Engineering. He holds a degree in Civil Engineering as well as Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Mathematics, providing a strong interdisciplinary background in engineering, applied mathematics, and theoretical modeling. He is the Scientific Director of the Laboratory of Electrical Engineering and Nondestructive Testing (NDT). His academic and research activity focuses on theoretical and applied electrotechnics, with particular emphasis on advanced numerical modeling, tensor calculus, and algebraic techniques based on Lie group and Lie algebra approaches for the analysis of complex physical systems. His work addresses wave propagation phenomena, signal and image processing, and ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation systems, with applications to inverse problems and diagnostic methodologies for industrial and civil engineering structures. Prof. Versaci has authored more than 250 peer-reviewed scientific publications in international journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters. His research output is widely cited in the scientific literature. He serves as editor, guest editor, and reviewer for international journals and conferences and is actively involved in international research collaborations.

Research Excellence Framework (REF) Director School of Management, University of Bath, UK;
Professor Fotios Petropoulos is an internationally recognized scholar in forecasting, operations research, and supply chain management. His research has produced more than 80 research articles and book chapters, including papers in Management Science, Journal of Operations Management, European Journal of Operational Research, and the International Journal of Forecasting, attracting over 9,000 citations. He has co-led large-scale collaborative projects, including three encyclopedic reviews with 80+ co-authors, and contributed to widely-used statistical software such as the R packages forecast, MAPA, and tsintermittent. His work spans methodological advances, judgmental forecasting, and real-world applications, supported by research grants from organisations such as the National Research Council of Canada. In 2017, he received the "Best Paper Award 2014-2015" for his work on temporal aggregation published by the International Journal of Forecasting. He serves as Area Editor of the Operations Research and Decisions journal and Associate Editor of Foresight, while also holding leadership positions such as REF Director at the University of Bath. Previously, he was an Associate Editor (2016-2020) and then a Senior Editor (2020-2025) of the International Journal of Forecasting. Fotios was elected to serve at the Board of Directors of the International Institute of Forecasters from 2016 to 2018. He has organised major international conferences, delivered invited seminars across Europe, Asia, and North America, and contributed extensively to teaching at undergraduate, postgraduate, and MBA levels in four countries.

Meteorology Department, University of Reading, UK;
Professor Paul D. Williams was educated in physics to PhD level at Oxford and is now Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading. He is a world-leading authority on atmospheric turbulence, including how to forecast it for the aviation sector and its response to climate change. He has published two books and over 80 papers in leading scientific journals. He is a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, Institute of Physics, and Royal Meteorological Society.

Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory, University of Miami, Hurricane Research Division, USA ;
Dr. Jun Zhang's main research interests are hurricane boundary layer structure and dynamics, turbulence observations, air-sea interaction, numerical modeling and physical parameterizations. He has recently studied turbulent fluxes in the hurricane boundary layer using research aircraft and portable wind tower observations, dissipative heating in the surface layer both over the ocean and land, hurricane boundary layer height using dropsonde data, air-sea thermodynamic exchange using buoy observations, vertical and horizontal turbulence mixing processes in the low-level troposphere of intense hurricane eyewall, and evaluation and improvement of the planetary boundary layer (PBL) schemes used in the WRF and HWRF models simulating hurricanes.