2025 Elections

Biography: Volodymyr Melnykov received his undergraduate degree in Applied Mathematics from Kharkiv Polytechnic University in Ukraine. He completed an MS degree in Applied Statistics at Bowling Green State University in 2005 and PhD in Statistics at Iowa State University in 2009. Currently, Volodymyr is a Professor of Statistics and Rogers-Spivey Faculty Fellow in the Department of Information Systems, Statistics, and Management Science at the University of Alabama. Volodymyr's research interests include finite mixture models, model-based cluster analysis, data visualization, and statistical software development. He serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Classification and Sankhya Series B.

Statement of interest: With the development of modern computers, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in the popularity and importance of classification procedures. The Classification Society plays a substantial role in contributing to this development in the field. If elected as President of the Society, I would be committed to making contributions in several ways. First, I would like to focus on expanding the Society by raising the awareness of its activities among broad groups of researchers, particularly graduate students, in the areas of classification and cluster analysis. Additionally, I would like to promote the development of publicly available software implementing methodological advances. Despite the intensive research and substantial progress achieved in the area of classification over the past decades, just a small fraction of the developed methods are available to the research community and practitioners in the form of software. I believe that the recognition of the importance of software development may stimulate further growth and innovation in the field.

Biography: Stephen L. France is the Charles and Jane Jordan Fellow Associate Professor of Business Quantitative Analysis at Mississippi State University. He received a BSc in computer science from the University of Durham, an MSc in statistics and management science from the University of the West of England, and a Ph.D. in quantitative marketing and supply chain management from Rutgers University. His areas of research include marketing analytics and research methodology, multidimensional scaling, dimensionality reduction, information visualization, and clustering. His research has been published in a broad range of business and methodological journals including Marketing Science, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Decision Support Systems, Journal of Business Research, Advances in Data Analysis and Classification, and IEEE Transactions in Knowledge and Data Engineering. He is a member of INFORMS, the American Marketing Association, and the Classification Society.

Statement of interest: I have a long association with the Classification Society. The Classification Society conference was my first academic conference, at Rutgers, NJ, in 2006. While my attendance at other conferences has ebbed and flowed, the Classification Society conference has been somewhat of a constant. I hosted the conference in Milwaukee in 2013. I would like to continue being a director of the society, so that I can continue contributing to the society and to give an applied perspective from business school academia.