This year’s International Symposium on Forecasting has been a great success. Very exciting talks and large attendance from both academics and practitioners. I really enjoy conferences that the two groups interact organically: only this way research is both relevant and adopted fast, so that it makes a difference!
This year I was invited by Haiyan Song to present my paper with George Athanasopoulos on tourism forecast. Many thanks to both Haiyan for the invitation and the session he organised, but also to George for putting together a terrific conference.
You can find my presentation here, and the paper is available here. I plan to release some reusable code for this as soon as possible, as I see the potential of cross-temporal hierarchical forecasting for many areas of business forecasting. The beauty of this work is that it is quite easy to work into the existing forecasting processes of organisations and it is complimented by a lot of current work on hierarchical forecasting – very interesting advances presented in the last ISF2019.
I was also invited to a panel to talk to Early Career Researchers (ERC) about life in academia. My thanks to Shari De Baets, Michał Chojnowski and Anna Sroginis for inviting me and arranging the sessions for ERCs. All three of them are very promising researchers; keep an eye for their work. Great initiative and absolutely necessary for having a thriving research community! Having been a young researcher myself not so many years ago, here is my question: is it the strands of grey hair that now qualify me as senior enough to advice ERCs? Never got a straight answer on that!
The jolly panel! From left to right: Hayan Song, me, Tanya Garcia and Rob Hyndman.
And my view for ERCs (or any colleague actually): choose your university/employer carefully! The negotiating power is with you. Research is now an international environment and there is large demand for talented people. A good environment will propel your career. Have supportive colleagues and a work place that respects your ideas and your life. Only when these are in balance you can be happy and inspired to really make a difference with your research and teaching! As to my peers (given the white strands): let us support ERCs as much as we can, it is our responsibility as educators and researchers. We need to use our weight as seniors to make sure they can meet their potential.