Ricardo Bessa was born in 1983 in Viseu, received his Licenciado (five-year) degree from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal (FEUP) in 2006 in Electrical and Computer Engineering. In 2008, he received the M.Sc. degree in Data Analysis and Decision Support Systems on the Faculty of Economics of the University of Porto (FEP). He obtained his Ph.D. degree in the Doctoral Program in Sustainable Energy Systems (MIT Portugal) at FEUP in 2013. Currently, he is is Coordination of the Center for Power and Energy Systems at INESC TEC.

His research interests include renewable energy forecasting, electric vehicles, data mining and decision-making under risk. He worked in several international projects such as the European Projects FP6 ANEMOS.plus, FP7 SuSTAINABLE, FP7 EvolvDSO, Horizon 2020 UPGRID, Horizon 2020 InteGrid, H2020 Smart4RES and H2020 InterConnect and an international collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy. At the national level he participated in the development of renewable energy forecasting systems and consultant services about energy storage and AI. Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy and received the ESIG Excellence Award in 2022.

He is co-author of more than 58 journal papers and 113 conference papers.

Gero Schindlmayr took his first professional steps as quantitative analyst for equity derivatives at Deutsche Bank before moving into the energy trading business at EnBW Energie Baden-Würrtemberg AG. In 2007 he left EnBW as Head of Market Risk and Valuation Models and spent more than a decade at RWE, where he held different leadership positions related to commodity risk and portfolio management. In 2020, he re-transitioned to EnBW and currently holds the position as Head of Longterm Portfolio Management.

Gero Schindlmayr graduated in Mathematics from University of Warwick and received his Ph.D in Mathematics from RWTH Aachen University. In addition to his career in business, Mr. Schindlmayr published numerous scientific papers and books.

Gero Schindlmayr will give a keynote with the title "New challenges managing renewable generation portfolios".

Rafal Weron  is Professor of Management Science, Rector's Proxy for the Evaluation of the Quality of Scientific Activity, Head of the Management and Quality Studies Council and Head of the Department of Operations Research and Business Intelligence at the Wrocław University of Science and Technology. He is a member of the Academia Europaea - Academy of Europe, the Statistics and Econometrics Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences (KSiE PAN) and the International Institute of Forecasters (IIF), General Chair of the Energy Finance Christmas (EFC) Workshops series and Associate Editor of Computational Statistics, Energies, International Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Energy Engineering, Journal of Energy Markets, National Economy and Operations Research and Decisions. He is the recipient of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education Prize for outstanding academic achievements (2016), the Emerald Citation of Excellence Award (2017), the IIF Tao Hong Award for the best paper on energy forecasting published in the International Journal of Forecasting (2017), the Hugo Steinhaus prize of the Polish Mathematical Society for outstanding achievements in Applied Mathematics (2018), one of the 30 Creative Minds of Wrocław (2019), and the International Journal of Forecasting Outstanding Paper in Energy Forecasting Award (2022).

Over the last 20 years Rafał has built an impressive international reputation. With over 5000 Scopus-indexed citations (w/o auto-citations) and an H-index of 40, he is one of the leading world experts on energy forecasting. His other research interests include agent-based modeling and simulation, complex systems, computational economics, computational statistics and machine learning, financial engineering and risk management, stochastic modeling and time series analysis. He is the author of the widely acclaimed Modeling and Forecasting Electricity Loads and Prices: A Statistical Approach (Wiley, 2006) and co-author of four other books. He has also published over 100 peer-reviewed book chapters and journal articles (most notably in top-tier Applied Energy, Energy Economics, Energy Policy, IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy, International Journal of Forecasting and Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews), including three extensive Review Papers on electricity price forecasting (IJF 2014, RSER 2018, APEN 2021). With a Ph.D. (1999) in Financial Mathematics and a habilitation (2009) and professor title (2015) in Economic Sciences, he is periodically engaged as a consultant to financial, energy and software engineering companies.