Dr. Arash Hajikhani  VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland

"Tracing the Trajectory: Evolution and Impact of Sustainable Development Activities in Science, Technology, Innovation, and Business"

Bio:  Dr. Arash Hajikhani is a Research Team Leader in the Foresight and data economy area at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and Adjunct Professor at LUT University (Finland). Dr. Hajikhani's research focuses on innovation and technology management with a particular focus on quantitative and data-driven methods for measuring and assessing Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) systems. His prior research has been funded by the European Commission via H2020, Foundation for Economic Education, Research Foundation of Lappeenranta University of Technology. He worked as Visiting Scholar at The Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research facilitates, Stanford University and The Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business. He has practical knowledge and ten years of working experience in utilizing data analytics methods such as text analytics, network analysis and machine learning to transform big data into valuable insight that benefits the decision-making processes. He has been working and publishing on various aspects of utilizing novel and large data sources to design informative metrics on economical, societal, and technological shifts. His work in promoting automated and algorithmic use of data for spotting technological change and innovation systems has been published in top-tier journals such as Scientometrics, Journal of Business Research, Association for Computing Machinery and Journal of Cleaner Production as well as open-source code repositories.

Dr. Laura Piscicelli  Utrecht University

"How does a circular economy contribute to sustainability?"

Bio: Laura Piscicelli is Assistant Professor in the Innovation Studies group at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University (the Netherlands). Priorto this, she was a Research Fellow in Strategy, Innovation & Business Models at Bayes Business School – City, University of London (UK) and a postdoc at University ofTwente (the Netherlands). She obtained her PhD at Nottingham Trent University (UK), with a thesis on the role of consumer values in the acceptance, adoption and diffusionof peer-to-peer sharing platforms. Laura's research interests include the circular economy, digital innovation, sustainable business and consumption. She serves as Editorial Board member for the journal Sustainable Production and Consumption. Currently, Laura is involved in the INTRANSIT project (Innovation Policy for Industrial Transformation, Sustainability and Digitalization) funded by the Research Council of Norway and the ESCH-R project (Evidence-based Strategies to create Circular Hospitals: Applying the 10-Rs framework to healthcare) funded by NWO.

Dr. Giovanni Cerulli CNR-IRCrES

"Data-driven decision making: potential and limitations"

Bio: Giovanni Cerulli is research director at CNR-IRCrES, Research Institute on Sustainable Economic Growth, National Research Council of Italy, Unit of Rome. Hisresearch interest is in applied econometrics, with a special focus on causal inference, program evaluation, and machine learning applied to various fields of socio-economicscience. Giovanni has developed original causal inference models, such as dose-response and treatment models with social interaction providing Stata implementation. Hehas developed around twenty Stata commands for casual inference and machine learning working also on Stata/Python/R integration for this purpose. Giovanni is author ofthe book Econometric Evaluation of Socio-Economic Programs: Theory and Applications (Springer, 2015; second edition 2022), and of the book Fundamentals ofSupervised Machine Learning: with Applications in Python, R, and Stata (Springer, 2023). He has published his papers in several high-quality scientific journals, and iscurrently editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computational Economics and Econometrics.