CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

Gonul Colak is a Professor of Accounting and Finance, currently serving as the Head of the Department of Accounting and Finance at the University of Sussex. Between September 2022 and November 2024, he also served as the Director of Research in the same department. Since January 2022, he has held a fractional Professor of Finance position at Hanken School of Economics, where he served as the director of the PhD program in finance. Recently, he was a visiting scholar at Stern School of Business in New York University, Fordham University, and Turkish Central Bank's Istanbul School of Central Banking in Turkey. Previously, he held academic positions at Florida State University and Wichita State University. He also served as the chairman of the Graduate School of Finance (GSF) in Finland and was a member of the board in the Nordic Finance Network (NFN). He was also a member of the international advisory board of Sebelas Maret University in Indonesia for a period of three years. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Financial Stability and The Financial Review.

His past academic work focused on corporate restructurings, equity issuance, political uncertainty, financial econometrics, firm capital structure, and corporate governance. He has publications in high-quality journals such as Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Review of Accounting Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Financial Intermediation, and Journal of Corporate Finance. According to Scopus, his published work has been cited more than 1200 times, some of which are in high-impact journals. His current research interests cover a variety of topics, such as external financing of firms, CEO incentives, financial accounting, exchange delistings, investor relations, ESG/CSR, financial intermediation and banking, and monetary policy transmission.

 Tomas Jandik is Professor of Finance and the Dillard’s Chair in Corporate Finance at the University of Arkansas, Sam M. Walton College of Business, where he has been a faculty member since 2000. He received his PhD in Finance from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh and is a former Fulbright Scholar. 

Dr. Jandik’s research focuses on corporate finance, financial networks, supply chains, and international business. His work has been published in leading finance and business journals, including Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Financial Management, Journal of Corporate Finance, and Journal of International Business Studies. His research has been featured in national newspapers and on National Public Radio, as well as in business and industry outlets such as Dow Jones MarketWatch, Chief Executive, Risk Management, and EnergyBiz. He has also presented his research at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He served as an Associate Editor for The Financial Review (2015–2021).

Kamil Malinka is an associate professor at FIT VUT in Brno and head of the Security@FIT research group, which focuses on information technology security. His research focuses primarily on the security aspects of artificial intelligence, such as the risks associated with the misuse of deepfakes. As part of his teaching activities, he teaches courses in the field of cyber security, where he systematically incorporates new trends and technologies, including AI, into his teaching and monitors how these technologies are changing education and practice.

His talk explores the cybersecurity challenges driven by recent advances in AI—through three lenses: AI as an attacker’s tool, as a defender’s tool, and as a target—with practical demos and a preview of emerging research directions.

Tomáš Pitner is a full professor and head of division in the Department of Informatics at the Faculty of Business and Economics, Mendel University in Brno. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Masaryk University in Brno in 1998, became an associate professor in Informatics at Masaryk University in 2008, and was appointed full professor in Applied Informatics at the University of Economics, Prague in 2022. His academic and leadership roles span research management, curriculum development, and long-term collaboration across academia and industry. His work combines cybersecurity, software engineering, and IoT, with a strong emphasis on innovation in cybersecurity education and on applied research with impact in sectors such as healthcare and power engineering. He has led multiple research initiatives and regularly connects emerging technologies with practice through industry–academia partnerships. More recently, he has also been exploring the use of AI in multimodal data processing, particularly for applications in the agricultural sector.