Acknowledgements

Our Gratitudes

We would like to extend our warmest gratitudes to:

Mrs. Yordanka Fandakova, Mayor of Sofia and Sofia Municipality.
Mrs. Svetla Lomeva and the Sofia Development Sofia Association for organizing this important and fascinating event.
Ms. Elitsa Panayotova from Sofia Green City for the endless passion.
Code Foundation – Bulgaria and AirBG.info, also OK Lab Stuttgart and LuftDaten.info for doing the great deed they are doing and supplying all of us citezens and researchers the valuable data on air quality.
Prof. Teodor Sedlarski, Dean of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Sofia University for the invariable support to the project team
Data Science Society and its many members and volunteers for starting the noble cause and for relentlessly solving this challenge.
Mr. Petar Nikolov at A.I. Solvers for the invaluable technical assistance.
Dr. Enrico Pisoni from the Joint Research Center for the timely and constructive feedback.
Mr. Ivan Paspaldhziev (Denkstatt) and Ms. Ekaterina Marinova (Telelink) for formulating the research case, supplying the data and helping on so many levels with ideas and words of encouragement.
Mrs. Mielna Yankova - Doseva (Ontotext) for giving us the initial idea for the research topic.

About the team

prof. Boryana Bogdanova, PhD - Senior Researcher

Boryana Bogdanova is Associate Professor at the Department of Statistics and Econometrics, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. She is co-founder of the MSc Program in Business Analytics at the same department and she teaches there core courses such as Data Mining, Supervised and Unsupervised Statistical Learning, Prediction Analytics, etc. Her research interest are in the field of Predictive Modelling, Time Series Analysis, Wavelet Analysis, Empirical Finance, and Behavioral Finance. She has significant experience as team member and team leader of national and international research projects as well as numerous publications in refereed and indexed journals.

Contact: bpelova@feb.uni-sofia.bg

prof. Angel Marchev, PhD - Senior Researcher

Prof. Angel Marchev, Jr. PhD has graduated in finance at the University for National and World Economy as a merit student. He later finished master degree in Corporate finance at the Burgas Free University. He persued a career as a Bank analystist but found it is too formalistic and not enough challenging. Angel is a PhD in applications of computer simulations in business. Marchev Jr. Is at least fourth generation lecturer and it was only natural to choose such career path. He is currently teaching at the UNWE and BFU on „Stock markets and operatons”, „Computer simulation”, „Fundamentals of management” His scientific interests include (the list is far from exhaustive): cybernetics, computer simulation, forecasting, quantitative methods in management, portfolio management, financial markets, simulation and gaming, self-organization, evolutionary algorithms, multi-stage selection procedures, genetic algorithms, neural networks, fuzzy logic, chaos theory.

Contact: angel.marchev@aisolvers.com

Vladimir Zakov - Junior Researcher

Vladimir Zakov is currently a student in the MSc Program in Big Data and Business Analytics at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Warwick. His research interest are in the Predictive analytics, Machine Learning and Empirical Finance. He has experience in the credit scoring, collection and customer retention analytics.

Contact: vzakov@gmail.com

Denis Stefanov - Junior Researcher

Denis Stefanov is currently a student in the MSc Program in Big Data and Business Analytics at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. He loves to analyze almost everything from the surrounding environment. Causal links are the thing he has a great curiosity about. His areas of interests are Business Intelligence, Data Integration, Data Engineering and Predictive Modelling. He has an experience in several BI and Advanced Analytics projects, being responsible for different types of activities.

Contact: denisstefanov2@yahoo.com

Kiril Genov - Junior Researcher

Kiril Genov is currently a student at the MSc Program in Business Analytics at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. He also holds a Master’s Degree in Macroeconomics and a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from the same faculty. His research interests are in the area of Predictive Analytics, Exploratory Analysis and Text Analytics. Kiril has significant experience in financial management and control and recently he’s focused on planning and implementation activities of various IT projects in the field of data analytics, AI and cognitive chat bots.