Wolfgang Karl Härdle is the Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz Professor of Statistics at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and director of C.A.S.E. (Center for Applied Statistics and Economics), director of the CRC-649 (Collaborative Research Center) “Economic Risk” and director of the IRTG 1792 “High Dimensional Non-stationary Time Series”. He teaches quantitative finance and semi-parametric statistics.  His research focuses on dynamic factor models, multivariate statistics in finance and computational statistics. He is an elected member of the ISI (International Statistical Institute) and advisor to the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University and a senior fellow of Sim Kee Boon Institute of Financial Economics at the Singapore Management University. Sigbert Klinke is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz Chair of Statistics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He received his PhD in computational statistics from the Catholique Uni versity in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. He teaches introductory statistics courses and data analytical courses for bachelor and master students in Economics and Educational Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s School of Business and Economics. His research focuses on computational and multivariate statistics and the teaching of statistics.  Bernd Rönz was a Professor of Statistics at the Institute for Statistics and Econometrics, School of Business and Economics, Humboldt University, Berlin. He taught Statistics, Computational Statistics and Generalized Linear Models. His research focused on multivariate statistics, computational statistics and generalized linear models. He previously worked as Associate Professor of Quantitative Methods for Business Decisions at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania for more than two years. Furthermore, he was a Visiting Lecturer at Hosei-University Tokyo and Ritsumeikan-University Kyoto and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre f or Mathematics and its Applications, School of Mathematical Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra. He retired in 2006.