Spyros Makridakis (born 22 April 1941) is a professor at the University of Nicosia where he is the Director of the Institute for the Future (IFF) and an Emeritus Professor of Decision Sciences at INSEAD as well as the University of Piraeus and one of the world's leading experts on forecasting, with many journal articles and books on the subject.
Makridakis's current interest centers on the uses and limitations of forecasting and what we can do with the resulting uncertainty and risk given our inability to accurately predict a wide range of future events (e.g. the 2000 burst of the Internet bubble or the 2007-2009 major financial crisis).
These and similar issues are dealt with in the book Dance with Chance: Making Luck Work for You (co-authored with Robin Hogarth and Anil Gaba) and in a special issue of the International Journal of Forecasting on “Decision Making and Planning Under Low Levels of Predictability” (co-edited with Nassim Taleb).
(Wiley) has been translated in twelve languages and sold more than 120,000 copies while his book Forecasting: Methods and Applications, 3rd ed.
His article “Statistical and Machine Learning Forecasting Methods: Concerns and ways forwards” has been viewed/downloaded more than 123,000 times in PLOS ONE where it was published in March 2018 while his paper “The forthcoming Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution: Its impact on society and firms” (Futures, March 2017) is the most downloaded one of the journal:[2] Makridakis, Hogarth, and Gaba (authors of the ‘’Dance with Chance’’ book) also co-authored an article for the Winter 2010 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.