Galina Ilieva graduated with honors in computer engineering from the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria, and obtained her Ph.D. from Plovdiv University Paisii Hilendarski (PU), specialising in agent-based negotiations in e-commerce auctions. Since 2008, she has been a lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at PU. In 2011, she successfully defended her habilitation and now holds the position of a professor in business informatics at the Management and Quantitative Methods in Economics Department, PU. Currently, she is serving as a member of the Supervisory Board at Plovdiv University for a four-year term (2023–2027). As a senior member of international scientific societies, including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), she has co-authored approximately 100 scientific publications with an h-index of 14 (Google Scholar). Her current research focuses on synthesising intelligent systems for decision making and machine learning.

Tania Yankova is an associate professor of quantitative methods and modelling at the University of Plovdiv “Paisii Hilendarski.” She received her Ph.D. from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in the field of automation and automated design systems. Her research focuses on mathematical modelling and spans various scientific areas, including econometrics, big data analysis, optimization techniques, and operations research. Recently, she has concentrated on tackling challenges in decision-making, predictive modelling, data mining techniques for uncovering hidden patterns and relationships, and business Intelligence.