Invited presenters
Mireia Ingla
Mireia Ingla i Mas, Mayoress of Sant Cugat del Vallès. Graduated in Law through the University of Barcelona, she also has a postgraduate degree in Family Mediation and is specialized in Housing Law and Family Law. She has collaborated with Caritas and its Housing Mediation Service, and during her youth she worked in a law firm specialized in the defence of human rights, with which travelled to Geneva and the United Nations. She came to live in Sant Cugat 25 years ago, where has raised her two sons and daughter.
Eduard Falcó
Eduard Falcó, MSc in Telecommunications Engineering, is strategic consultant at the Catalan Government, working in the development of the information society in Catalonia, the digitalization of the Administration, the digital transformation of the country, and managing innovative projects in digital area. In different EU projects has worked in many different areas (FP7, 8 and 9). He has been facing with rollout projects of optical fibre and 5G or AI and Living Labs projects, trying to bring innovation throughout the territory and not just of metropolitan areas. He has also collaborated with Cooperation and Development Agency of Catalan Government to introduce the digital component in their programs (Tunisia, Mozambique, Senegal, others.).
J. Ignasi Bonet
Ignasi Bonet is a Digital Innovation Manager at CTTI, public company from the Government of Catalunya. From a global education and eclectic interests, he is a connector, a social linker who put in contact challenges with solutions, supply with demand, in a creative and innovative way. He began his career as a technical sales support for a Global Operator, strategic consultant and project manager for public administration. Former Director of Innovation at Sant Cugat City Hall, nowadays is in the Digital Innovation Department of the provider of digital solutions of the Government of Catalunya. He is living in Sant Cugat since 2011, with his wife and two daughters and son.
Paul D. Williams
Dr Paul Williams is Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, UK. Educated in physics to PhD level at Oxford, he specialises in meteorology, with a focus on weather-sensitive applications including aviation. He has published two books and over 60 scientific papers in leading journals, including Nature. He is a consultant to Guinness World Records on extreme atmospheric events. He is also an award-winning science communicator, regularly giving public lectures and appearing in the media.
NEANIAS Presenters
Mema Dimitra-Isidora Roussopoulou
Mema Dimitra-Isidora Roussopoulou is a Professor of Computer Science and head of the Distributed Systems Research Group in the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications at the University of Athens. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. She was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science on the Gordon McKay Endowment at Harvard University. She was also a faculty member at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Crete and an Associated Researcher at the Institute of Computer Science at FORTH, where she headed the Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Systems Group. Her interests are in the areas of distributed systems, networking, mobile computing, and digital preservation. Her work has been published in prestigious conferences and journals in computer systems and networking. She served as Chair of the Working Group on Privacy and Technology of ENISA, the European Network and Information Security Agency in 2007-2008. She is currently Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions in Cloud Computing. Finally, she is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, the ERC Starting Grant Award from the European Research Council, and the Best Paper Award at ACM SOSP 2003.
Eleni Petra
Eleni Petra holds a Diploma in Computer Engineering and Informatics, Technical University of Patras, Greece, and a Master of Science in Computation, University of Manchester, Institute of Science and Technology. Over the past 32 years she is working as a Scientific consultant and Project Manager for a number of Research Centres, companies, government agencies, and the EU. She has served as a Project Manager and Technical Coordinator for the technical and management support and consulting of 6.800 ICT development projects for Greece in the framework of the Sectoral Operational Programme “Information Society” of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) as Deloitte senior manager, as Project Manager and Technical Coordinator of over 65 industrial areas development projects of PIRAEUS BANK and ETVA, as Project Manager and Technical Coordinator for the MIS in the Greek Ministries of Public Works and Industry.
Daniel Martinez Sala
Daniel Martinez Sala is a Business and Innovation Consulting Manager at Ricoh Digital Services. He holds a degree in engineering in Electronics and later a degree in engineering in Telecommunications, both from Ramon Llull University (Barcelona). He also has an MBA from LaSalle Business Engineering School (Barcelona & San Francisco, California) and a postgraduate degree in telecommunications networks and services. He is an experienced consulting manager and team leader in strategic and business consultancy as well as in technological innovation in the information and communication technologies field, working in the development of the information society and digital transformation. He has more than 20 years of experience working on innovative projects, both in the private and public sector, including innovation programmes of the European Union. He complements his experience through the collaboration in publications of a scientific/informative nature and teaching, being a professor at Ramon LLull University since 1999.
George Papastefanatos
George Papastefanatos is a principal researcher at Athena Research Center. He holds a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering and PhD in Computer Science from the National Technical University of Athens. George has more than 20 years of active involvement as a researcher and technical and project manager in several RTD projects, including projects related to Big Data engineering, big data visualization and analytics and the European Open Science Cloud activities. George participates as a technical manager and researcher in a series of research projects which are developing EOSC (he is the product owner of the EOSC Service catalogue in EOSC Future, EOSC-ENHANCE, and eInfraCentral projects which develop component in the EOSC Portal, CatRIS, which builds the catalogue of services of Research Infrastructures and NEANIAS). George's expertise is in the areas of big data management, data services on the cloud and data analytics and specifically in issues related to data integration information visualization and visual analytics. He has co-authored more than 80 papers in these areas, 1 book and 3 chapters in books, and 3 of his articles have been awarded best paper prizes in conferences.
Eva Sciacca
Eva Sciacca is an Information Technology researcher at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF). Her recent research activities are related to: big-data and visual analytic, computing and data systems exploiting Cloud and HPC infrastructures. She has been engaged in the last 5 years in several European funded projects (such as VIALACTEA, INDIGO-DataCloud, AENEAS, EOSC-Pilot) and she is actually leader of the SPACE Research Services WP of the H2020 NEANIAS Project. She is actively involved within the IT activities of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and their precursors/pathfinders. She is Chair of the EOSC Association Task Force on Technical Interoperability of Data and Services.
Nikos Chondros
Nikos Chondros is a Senior Researcher and Software Engineer working the Distributed Systems Group at the Department of Informatics & Telecommunications at the University of Athens. He received his Master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Athens. He has founded and run his own software development and IT consulting company and has over twenty years of experience in leading and managing projects involved in the analysis, design, development, deployment, and maintenance of information systems for several major companies including Citibank NY, Citibank London, IKEA, Vodafone, IBM, and several banks in the Middle East. He also has several years of experience working in research and development projects at the national and European level.
Paraskevi Nomikou
Paraskevi Nomikou received a PhD from UoA in 2004 and has participated in more than 80 oceanographic cruises that have focused on the study of submarine volcanism, mud volcanoes, landslides and slope stability and the exploration of seafloor mineral deposits in Med Sea, Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. She has developed a unique understanding of the new-technological methods for deep-sea exploration and successfully integrated them into international research programs. She played a leading role in the evaluation of the potential hazards associated with renewed volcanic activity at Santorini volcano in Greece in 2011. Her studies of the underwater area of the volcano where new earthquakes and deformation have been taking place are critical to the on-going evaluation of future eruption scenarios. She has been a key-person for both local civil officials and the general population to understand the geological processes that might occur and what would be appropriate. She has also been involved in the study of economically important seafloor mineral deposits within the crater of the submarine volcano Kolumbo, off the coast of Santorini. Paraskevi is focused in forming key research alliances between scientists in different disciplines thus creating powerful interdisciplinary synergies.
Georgios Papanikos
Georgios Papanikos, is a senior software engineer with long experience in distributed processing, data and metadata management, visualization, Service Oriented Architectures, security etc. He has been engaged in several eInfrastructure projects and has long experience with geospatial data management and visualization approaches as well as platforms such as condor HPC, Hadoop, Apache Spark etc. He is also a backend developer quite experienced in well-known stacks of major ecosystems.
Ioannis Neokosmidis
Ioannis Neokosmidis is the CEO of Incites Consulting. He holds a Physics degree, a M.Sc. in Radioelectrology and Electronics and Ph.D diploma in optical nonlinear networks from the University of Athens. He has more than 15 years of experience working with operators, regulators and enterprises across Europe. His primary areas of specialisation include consulting on investment and strategy decision making in the telecoms sector. He has considerable expertise in the areas of next-generation access networks (NGAN) and both fixed and mobile termination rates having participated in respective projects assigned by the Greek NRA. Dr. Neokosmidis has also worked on business planning and market assessment projects. He has more than 35 publications with two best paper awards and more than 250 citations. His research interests include System of Systems, Deep Uncertainties, Advanced forecasting techniques and Technoeconomics. He serves as reviewer in leading IEEE/OSA Journals and conferences.
Konstantinos Karantzalos
Konstantinos Karantzalos received his engineering diploma from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA, Greece) and his PhD (2007, NTUA) in collaboration with Ecole Nationale de Ponts et Chaussees (ENPC, France). In 2007, he joined the Department of Applied Mathematics at Ecole Centrale de Paris (ECP, France) as a postdoc. He is currently an Associate Professor of Remote Sensing at the National Technical University of Athens. His teaching and research interests include geoscience and remote sensing, big data, hyperspectral image analysis, computer vision and pattern recognition, environmental monitoring and precision agriculture. Several of his publications have been featured in top-ranking international journals and conferences. He has more than 19 years of research experience and has been involved with more than 28 EU and national excellence/ competitive research projects. He is the Scientific Coordinator of NEANIAS EU project.
Katalin Kovács
Katalin Kovács, senior consultant at innomine. She has 10 years of experience in the field of international innovation and project development both from industry, university and innovation agencies. She has a PhD degree from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, research area is innovation management, specialization is living labs. During her professional work, she started to work at the Central Hungarian Innovation Agency and focused on EU financed innovation project management. Later on she worked for the Zoltan Bay research institute (major research institute in Hungary) with a specialization of international EU funded projects. Before joining innomine she worked in Graz for the European Sustainable Energy Innovation Alliance. Currently she is senior consultant at innomine. She is author of 10+ articles and is an experienced speaker at international conferences.
Attila Farkas
Attila Farkas is a research associate at the Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems (LPDS) at the Institute for Computer Science and Control (SZTAKI), Eötvös Loránd Research Network (ELKH). He received his Computer Science Engineering BSc and MSc degrees from the Óbuda University, John von Neumann Faculty of Informatics. Since 2020, he has been pursuing his PhD research on the topic of distributed deep learning. He has been involved in COLA and NEANIAS European H2020 projects. His research interests focus on parallel computing, clouds, container technologies and machine learning.
Simone Mantovani
Mantovani Simone – senior project manager – has more than 18 of experience in EO system developments and implementation in the framework of ESA, FP7, H2020 projects. Simone is the team leader of the technical team responsible of all the implementations of ADAM platform.
Robert Lovas
Robert Lovas is the deputy head of the Laboratory of the Parallel and Distributed Systems at the Institute for Computer Science and Control, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI). He received his MSc degree in Electrical Engineering and PhD degree in Informatics from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and currently acts as a habilitated associate professor at the John von Neumann Faculty of Informatics, Óbuda University. His solid experience in wide range of research and development fields of computational chemistry, numerical meteorological modeling, bioinformatics, precision agriculture, connected Cars, and Industry 4.0 has been gained in various global, European and national ICT collaborations with academic organizations, universities, and enterprises. He coordinated two e-infrastructure projects in the EU 7th Framework Programme to build and integrate computing services for research communities. More than 75 scientific papers and book chapters on software engineering for Grid, Cloud, Big Data computing platforms particularly from workflow-oriented design, orchestration, debugging, and application aspects are included in his publication records.
Rafael Garcia
Rafael Garcia, PhD in Computer Engineering. His research activity is mainly focused on underwater robotics in topics such as large-scale seafloor mapping, sensor fusion, 3D reconstruction and semantic representation of video imagery. He provides support in the research activities of the company and is the director of the Underwater Vision Lab of the University of Girona. He has been visiting researcher at the Universität der Bundeswehr (Germany), University College Cork (Ireland), IRISA-INRIA (France), and the University of Miami (USA). Dr. Garcia has published three books, 47 JCR journals and more than 100 papers in peer review international conferences and he has directed 9 PhDs thesis.
Ricardo Vitorino
Ricardo Vitorino is the Smart Cities R&I Manager at Ubiwhere. Ricardo holds an MSc. Degree in Computer Science from the University of Coimbra, having started working in 2011, in the Smart Cities and Mobility area, where he helped creating an open-data platform for urban mobility called One.Stop.Transport (OST). Since then, he has worked on projects related to the smart cities context and had some experience with FIWARE technology, mainly in the FIWARE Lisbon pilot, where he helped publishing data from OST into CKAN, FIWARE’s open data portal. He joined Ubiwhere in early 2015 to work on its Smart Cities solutions (Citibrain), mainly the backend services (REST APIs) regarding mobility. Ricardo is currently responsible for the technical team working on Smart Cities software solutions.
Georgios Kakaletris
Georgios Kakaletris, MSc is a senior software architect, CTO of CITE, with more than 20 years of experience in commercial and research projects with roles that spanned from software engineer and researcher to workpackage and technical leader. Since early 2000 he has been engaged in Geospatial data management and visualization and distributed processing and metadata federation / information retrieval and several large scale applications for various sectors such as finance, human resource management, infrastructure management, culture etc. He is member of the EOSC Association Task Force Technical Interoperability of Data and Services Board.
Giuseppe Vizzari
Giuseppe Vizzari has been working on analysis, modelling and simulation of complex systems, employing approaches from Artificial Intelligence, for over 15 years. He published more than 120 papers on international journals and conferences (H-index: 20 – Google Scholar, 14 – Scopus). He has participated several Italian and international research projects (most of them of interdisciplinary nature, for instance in collaboration with researchers from civil engineering, urban planning, psychology, cultural heritage), in addition to some collaborations with industrial partners.
Angelo Pio Rossi
Angelo Pio Rossi, geologist by background, is professor of Earth and Planetary Science at Jacobs University. He has been involved in several planetary mapping and data exploitation activities, in addition to various scientific coordination roles (e.g. 2009 ASI/USGS geological mapping workshop). He is lead for the Planetary Service (http://planetserver.eu) as well as coordinator of the H2020 EarthServer project. He is deputy coordinator of the EuroPlanet VESPA activity (http://europlanet-vespa.eu/) and H2020 Space Planmap (http://planmap.eu) He has organized major sessions, workshops and conferences, as well as edited a variety of journal special issues and books, and he is associate editor of Planetary and Space Science. He co-founded the OpenPlanetary initiative (http://openplaneatry.org) and he serves as editor-in-chief of Planetary and Space Science.
Paul Wintersteller
Paul Wintersteller, M.Sc. Geology, is a senior research associate at Teledyne. While he focused on the analysis of remote sensing data during his studies, he gained his experiences and skills in hydrography when participating on more than 70 expedition cruises within the last 18 years, mainly with focus to hydrographic support. Within the last years he led the quality management of the INTERREG IV project “Tiefenschärfe – High resolution mapping of Lake Constance” and participates the EU funded EMODNet Bathymetry project as well as the Helmholtz Initiative and Networking Fund Project “MaNIDA - Marine Network for Integrated Data Access”. His scientific interests lie in habitat mapping, high-resolution AUV-born bathymetry and investigations around cold seeps, mud volcanos and cold-water corals.
Claudio Pisa
Claudio Pisa is a Computer Science engineer who received the PhD degree in Microelectronics and Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” in 2013. Before joining GARR's Distributed Cloud and Storage department in 2018, he worked in Research and Development in both the academic and industrial domains, addressing, especially through EU-funded projects, topics such as Cloud Computing Infrastructures, Network function Virtualisation (NFV), Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Attribute-based Security. His activities have extensively relied on open platforms and focussed on practical applications.
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