During his visit, Professor Makridakis had research meetings with Professor Robert Fildes, Professor Mike Pidd, Dr David Worthington, Dr Nikolaos Kourentzes and Dr Fotios Petropoulos, where the grounds of future research collaborations were set. Moreover, he presented a seminar entitled "Forecasting Life Expectancy and Medical Decision Making". The summary of his speech is presented below:

‌Summary of presentation

Good health and longevity are desirable goals for human beings. Doctors suggest an array of preventive measures for improving one’s health and increasing life expectancy. This talk considers the effectiveness of such measures while discussing the costs involved. It argues that the ability of medicine to predict improvements in health and life expectancy is limited or non-existent and always associated with a cost. The specific case of high blood pressure is used to show the limitations of medical research and why the recommendations based on such research must be questioned. In addition, the costs (both monetary and in terms of undesirable side effects) are documented so that an objective decision can be made by patients taking into account both the potential benefits as well as the substantial costs.

Short biography

Following the attainment of a place in the Greek Sailing Team in the Olympics of 1960, Spyros Makridakis set sail for New York University where he obtained a PhD in 1969. Since then he has advised numerous international organisations and government agencies and consulted worldwide. Professor Makridakis has held teaching and research positions with several European and American institutions: as a research fellow with IIM Berlin, an ICAME fellow at Stanford University and a visiting scholar at MIT and Harvard. He is now a Research Professor at INSEAD which he joined in 1970.

In addition to teaching and consulting expertise, he has also authored, or co-authored, twenty books including Forecasting, Planning and Strategy for the 21st Century (The Free Press, Forecasting: Methods and Applications (Wiley, now in its 3rd Edition, and Forecasting Methods for Management (Wiley), which reached its 5th edition and sold more than 120,000 copies in twelve languages. He has also published more than 120 articles and book chapters. His paper on "The Accuracy of Extrapolative (Time Series) Methods: Results of a Forecasting Competition" was voted the best paper published in the field of forecasting during the last 25 years. In addition Spyros was the founding chief editor of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting. He has won twice the 'Best Teacher Award' at INSEAD. 

Professor Makridakis' current interests centre around how future technologies, and in particular the Internet, will affect business firms (and societies in general) and what kind of organisations and strategies will be required in order to anticipate, and exploit, emerging opportunities while steering clear of the dangers associated with such technologies.