Marco Mingione is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Sciences, Roma Tre University, Italy. His fields of interest are Bayesian hierarchical modeling, hidden semi-Markov models, official statistics and R programming. He is also an elected member of the board of Y-SIS, the Young group of the Italian Statistical Society.

Maurizio Vichi is a Professor of Statistics and Chair of the Department of Statistical Sciences at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. He teaches on multivariate statistics and data analysis and statistical modeling. His research interests include statistical models for clustering, classification, dimensionality reduction, composite indicators, PLS, SEM and new methods for official statistics based on smart statistics and big data analysis. He is a member of the European Statistical Advisory Committee of the European Union and the Coordinating Editor of the international journal Advances in Data Analysis and Classification. He has authored more than 150 papers, mainly published in peer-reviewed international statistics journals.

Giorgia Zaccaria is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Statistics and Quantitative Methods, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. Her fields of interest are hierarchical and latent variable models, dimensionality reduction, model-based clustering, ultrametric models, robust statistics, and composite indicators. She is also an elected member of the board of Y-SIS, the Young group of the Italian Statistical Society.