The IIF Board of Directors is pleased to announce Stephan Kolassa, Data Science Expert, SAP Switzerland, with the title of IIF Fellow, as a distinguished researcher in the field of forecasting.
Please join us in congratulating Stephan!
Stephan Kolassa has spent most of his professional life in industry, particularly in software companies, most recently in SAP, where he has shown a consistent commitment to integrating academic ideas into practice. This has led him to make continuing commitments to the academic forecasting community (he is a visiting fellows at the Lancaster Centre for Marketing Analytics and Forecasting), attending academic conferences to glean what ideas of practical relevance he can find and presenting his ideas in seminars to both communities. To stimulate good forecasting practice he has been very active on the statistics forum crossvalidated.com, generously helping countless forecasting practitioners. He has answered over 2000 questions in the last 12 years, almost all of them about forecasting.
He has published prolifically in the Institute’s practitioner journal, Foresight, both original articles and commentary, again with the aim of improving practice. But he has also researched deeply into the issues of evaluating predictive densities and the implications for error measures of various forms with associated publications in the International Journal of Forecasting. He has focussed much of this work on retailing, making a major contribution to the recent IJF survey article. He also has a well-regarded practitioner book (with E. Siemsen) Demand Forecasting for Managers, with a revised edition forthcoming. As a side-line he publishes in inferential statistics, applied to various aspects of psycho-neurology.
His contribution has also included and IIF director and secretary (2011-2019), on the programme committee of ISFs (2018 and 2020). But it is his contribution to Foresight from 2007 and his prize winning best paper award, in 2008, ‘Can we obtain valid benchmarks from published surveys of forecast accuracy?’ Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting, 11, 6-14 that we wish to highlight. He is now deputy editor.
To learn more about the IIF Fellow program and the International Institute of Forecasters visit us at https://forecasters.org/