Michel Ballings is an associate professor, a James and Joanne Ford Faculty Research Fellow and the director of the JTV Center Intelligence Lab at the Department of Business Analytics and Statistics in Haslam College of Business, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the president-emeritus of the INFORMS Social Media Analytics Section and a research scientist at Amazon through the Amazon Visiting Academics program. Ballings holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Leuven University College, a master’s degree in business economics from VLEKHO Business School Brussels and a doctorate in applied economic sciences from Ghent University. He has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and Decision Sciences. His research agenda focuses on improving long-term financial business outcomes through the development of end-to-end machine learning systems for large-scale data. Ballings teaches data engineering, deep learning and deep reinforcement learning. He has been awarded multiple excellence in teaching awards and has a successful track record raising research funds from industry.