Programme

Tugrul Daim is a Professor of Engineering and Technology Management at Portland State University and the former Editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. Professor Daim is a senior advisor and consultant specializing in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and technology risk governance. He advises boards, executives, and public-sector leaders on evaluating, governing, and investing in emerging technologies amid uncertainty, regulation, and systemic risk. Dr. Daim brings over 25 years of experience spanning industry, government, and academia, including senior management roles at Intel Corporation, advisory work for U.S. federal and state agencies, and international consulting engagements across energy, cybersecurity, digital infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing sectors. His work focuses on cybersecurity readiness, AI strategy and governance, technology roadmapping, and R&D portfolio decision-making, with particular emphasis on critical infrastructure and regulated industries. He currently serves as Associate Director of the Mark O. Hatfield Cybersecurity & Cyber Defense Policy Center and as Senior Personnel on the $10 million Oregon Cybersecurity Center of Excellence initiative, where he works closely with government, industry, and academic partners on cybersecurity strategy, policy, and ecosystem development. He has also served on R&D advisory boards and provided independent expert advice to utilities, multinational corporations, and international technology observatories. Dr. Daim is widely published, with 300+ peer-reviewed articles, and is internationally recognized for his work in technology forecasting, innovation systems, and strategic decision models. He is known for translating complex cybersecurity and AI issues into clear, decision-ready insights for senior leaders and boards.

In a world that is transforming digitally, cybersecurity is both a line of defense and a vulnerability for many organizations. While big corporations can afford to be protected, smaller organizations and the public sector, which make up the majority of the economies of the world, are becoming extremely vulnerable every passing day. Artificial intelligence is rattling the battlefield, providing ammunition to both sides. We at the Oregon Cybersecurity Center of Excellence focus our efforts on educating and creating awareness in sectors ranging from energy to health. We have worked closely with the US Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and other national and local agencies to identify technological gaps and R&D opportunities in the cybersecurity field through technology roadmaps. This talk will provide insight to these efforts.

Prof. Dimitrios I. Fotiadis, received the Diploma degree in chemical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece, and the Ph.D. degree in chemical engineering and materials science from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He is currently a Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece, where he is also the Director of the Unit of Medical Technology and Intelligent Information Systems, an Affiliated Member of Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas, Biomedical Research Institute and Director MSc in Digital Health. He is member of the board of Michailideion Cardiac Center. He was a Visiting Researcher at the RWTH, Aachen, Germany, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston. He has coordinated and participated in more than 250 R&D funded projects (in FP6, FP7, H2020, Horizon Europe and national Projects), being the coordinator (e.g. INSILC, TAXINOMISIS, HOLOBALANCE, CARDIOCARE, DECODE, etc.) and/or Technical coordinator (e.g. SMARTOOL, KARDIATOOL, TO_AITION, etc.). He is the author or coauthor of more than 500 papers in scientific journals, more than 600 papers in peer-reviewed conference proceedings, and more than 50 chapters in books. He is also the author/editor of 30 books. His work has received more than 37,800 citations (h-index=87). He served as Editor in Chief of IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics from 2017-2024 and he is IEEE EMBS Fellow, EAMBES Fellow, Fellow of IAMBE, Fellow of AIAA, member of the IEEE Technical Committee of Biomedical Health Informatics, Editor in Chief of IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology, Member of the Editorial Board in IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering, member of the Editorial Board of Health Information Science and Systems (HISC), member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and member of the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence (NAAI). His research interests include multiscale modelling of human tissues and organs, intelligent wearable/implantable devices for automated diagnosis, processing of big medical data, machine learning, sensor informatics, image informatics, and bioinformatics. He is the recipient of many scientific awards including the one by the Academy of Athens. He is the co-founder of PD Neurotechnology Ltd, UK, Intelligence4Rehab and SYNTHAINA AI.

As AI increasingly shapes decisions across a variety of  sectors such as healthcare, transport, and education, ensuring transparency and fairness in automated systems is no longer optional - it is a fundamental requirement. This talk will introduce the concept of Data and AI model passports as structured mechanisms for documenting and communicating the provenance, behaviour, and limitations of AI-based systems across their entire lifecycle. It will explore how the passport-based concepts from the FAITH EU flagship project can be capitalized to provide practitioners with an operational playbook for assessing and continuously measuring AI trustworthiness. Key themes will include traceability, accountability, and the role of data governance in reducing bias and promoting equitable AI outcomes.

• Tal Soffer, Tel Aviv University
• Ricardo Gonçalves, NOVA FCT | UNINOVA-CTS
• Luca Canetta, IEEE TEMS

• Georg Dorffner, Medical University of Vienna
• Dimitrios Fotiadis, University of Ioannina | BRI - FORTH
• Sivia Barnoy, Tel Aviv University
• Ricardo Gonçalves, NOVA FCT | UNINOVA-CTS

• João Sarraipa, NOVA FCT
• Mary Corbett, TFC Research and Innovation Limited

• Elsa Marques, Diretora da Gestão do Parque Habitacional da Domus Social, Câmara Municipal do Porto
• Ricardo Teixeira, Diretor do Departamento Municipal de Obras e Conservação, Câmara Municipal de Matosinhos

• Alessia Boscarato, POLIMI

• Aikaterini-Georgia Mavroeidi, PRV (3D-Circular)
• Ahn Dao, ECircular (CIRPASS-2)
• Ilias Spais, AEGIS IT Research (SYMBIOTIK)
• Giorgos Demetriou, EPBS (SharedGreenDeal)
• Alessia Boscarato, POLIMI (CERES)
• Kristijan Brglez, UM (BAS4SC)
• Orestis Mavropoulos, UPRC (EU-INSPIRE)

• Davide Matteri, SUPSI
• Luca Canetta, SUPSI

• Kristijan Brglez, UM

• Achilleas Marinakis, OTE (CSRN Cluster)
• Christian Wolff & Ioannis Basdekis, ATB & CEF (PSS-PASS)
• Antri Constantinou, EPBS (ReScore)
• Maria Jose Nuñez, AIDIMME (Cir4Fun)
• Panagiotis Psomos, UAEGEAN (GDPrApp)
• Manuela Azevedo, PRODUTECH - UNINOVA (PRODUTECH EDIH)

Dr. Alex F. DeNoble is Professor Emeritus of Entrepreneurship at San Diego State University and former Executive Director of the Lavin Entrepreneurship Center (2012–2023). His work focuses on technology development, commercialization strategy, corporate innovation, and entrepreneurial capability building. He has published in leading journals including the Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and the Journal of Small Business Management, and has worked with global organizations such as Qualcomm, Siemens, LG Corporation, and NEC.
Dr. DeNoble is the co-author of Technology Development and Commercialization: Concepts, Cases and Practices (2026), which examines how organizations translate technological innovation into market impact. He is also the author of The Entrepreneur Within, a book that explores how individuals can drive innovation and create value from within established organizations. A former President of the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE), he continues to engage internationally with universities and professional audiences on entrepreneurship and commercialization strategy.

Drawing on real-world cases in technology development and commercialization, Dr. Alex F. DeNoble, Professor Emeritus of Entrepreneurship at San Diego State University, will explore why many promising technologies struggle to achieve market impact. Through engaging stories of innovators navigating commercialization challenges, he will highlight key lessons about identifying meaningful problems, adapting to changing market opportunities, and creating value for customers and stakeholders.
Based on insights from his recent book, Technology Development and Commercialization: Tools, Concepts and Best Practices, the session will provide practical principles to help engineers, researchers, and innovation leaders more effectively bridge the gap between technical innovation and real-world impact.

With over 20 years of experience, Karina worked in the digital industry and in the last years contributed to managing the EU funding of several projects in telecommunications and e-health, and collaboration actions in the COST programme.
Currently, as a Project Adviser at the Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA) of the European Commission, Karina follows closely the implementation of several projects research and innovation projects benefiting from Horizon Europe grants. Karina holds a PhD degree in Applied Mathematics from Université Joseph Fourier, France.

The European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA) of the European Commission (EC) supports the implementation of EU actions across health, food safety, digital technologies, networks, industrial capacity and space. Its work focuses on delivering high-quality support for projects that strengthen Europe’s resilience, competitiveness and fairness. By funding and managing initiatives with measurable impact, HaDEA helps generate concrete benefits for EU citizens while providing evidence and strategic insight to inform EC policy.

As AI moves from research into practice, questions of robustness, reliability, transparency, fairness, safety, and user trust become increasingly important. Yet these challenges do not look the same in every domain: each project faces different technical constraints, risk profiles, stakeholders, and regulatory expectations.
This panel brings together representatives from a range of AI research projects to discuss how they are addressing robustness and trustworthiness in the design, implementation, and evaluation of their systems. By comparing diverse use cases, the session will highlight both shared challenges and domain-specific approaches, from handling failures and uncertainty to building confidence among users and stakeholders.
The discussion will offer a unique opportunity to hear how different projects translate high-level principles of trustworthy AI into concrete methods, tools, and decisions in practice. Attendees will gain insight into the trade-offs involved, the lessons learned from real implementations, and the opportunities for collaboration across projects and application areas.
Whether you are a researcher, developer, policymaker, or practitioner, this session will provide a valuable overview of how robust and trustworthy AI can be developed and assessed in real-world settings.

• Karina Marcus, HaDEA

• Christos Emmanouilidis, FEB, University of Groningen (AIXPERT and HumAIne)
• Pawel Andrzej Herman, KTH Royal Institute of Technology (EXTRA-BRAIN)
• Dimitrios I. Fotiadis, Medlab, University of Ioannina, (FAITH)
• Adamantios Ntanis, PD Neurotechnology Ltd, (TRUMAN)
• Ioannis Kontopoulos, ECE, National Technical University of Athens (TURING)

Antonio L. Flores-Galea has an M.Sc. in Telecommunications Engineering and an M.Sc. in Electronics Engineering from the University of Seville and an MBA from IESE Business School. He is a professor of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data at Francisco de Vitoria University. Antonio has been an advisor to the European Commission on AI, robotics, and other digital technologies since 2019. He is also a member of several IEEE standards committees and a Distinguished Lecturer at the Technology Engineering Management Society. He is the author of the “Innovation Frontiers” section at Libertad Digital in Spain, and he runs his international consulting firm, GIA Institute, focused on innovation management. Antonio has been an IDC analyst and is the author of nine books, including “Una mente infinita” on AI, published in 2024 and “Un mundo virtual”, in 2025, by Tusquets Editores (Planeta Group), and “Journey to the Metaverse”, published in 2023 by Business Expert Press in the US. He has also published over 150 articles, including five scientific papers, and has given over 100 keynote presentations.

The current AI debate is dominated by promises of exponential productivity, but its material conditions are becoming harder to ignore. As organizations accelerate adoption, much of the required data center capacity is arriving late, and existing infrastructure faces growing pressure from electricity demand, cooling needs, grid constraints, and greenhouse gas emissions. Sustainable AI must move beyond the hype cycle and address AI as an operational long-term infrastructure problem.
The contribution is twofold. First, it frames the environmental challenge of AI across three operational phases: training, inference, and maintenance. While public debate often concentrates on model training, production-scale inference and recurrent model updates may become dominant sources of cumulative electricity consumption. Second, it introduces a decision-support model for measuring the environmental footprint of AI systems. The model combines a parameter taxonomy with an empirical estimator to link energy demand and CO₂e emissions to design and operation variables.
The goal of this framework is to support ex ante assessment before organizations commit to a model, hardware architecture, cloud region, or deployment strategy. The proposed approach integrates energy and emissions into AI design, procurement, governance, and lifecycle management. The central claim is that the future of AI will be determined by both algorithmic capability and the capacity to deploy models within realistic energy, infrastructure, and climate constraints. Sustainable AI therefore requires a new scenario: less speculative, more measurable, and grounded in operational accountability.

Yngvar is a well-known technology leader and holds the role Innovatoin and Science Fellow in DNB. As one of Norway's biggest technology influencers, he was recently named Nordic AI Professional of the Year. Yngvar is a co-author of several books and has been Industry Professor II at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) in Bergen. He is also currently pursuing an Industry PhD in artificial intelligence at NTNU and recently published the bestselling book The Moonshots Method

We have never known as much as we do today about how little we know about tomorrow.
The world is changing, but the biggest changes have yet to happen. This applies to all industries, including banking and finance, but in no way limited to it.
When the future is uncertain and everything changes faster than ever, look for what does not change. In certain societies that non-changing element is TRUST.
In this talk we look at how to navigate in uncertainty and strategies founded in cutting edge research on how to preserve trust in a world where AI is getting smarter than human beings.

Citizen participation has become a cornerstone of Smart City development. Across Europe and beyond, cities increasingly engage residents through co-creation workshops, living labs, digital engagement platforms, and other participatory approaches to address challenges such as climate adaptation, sustainable mobility, and digital transformation. While these approaches have strengthened collaboration and community involvement, many urban challenges involve uncertainty, competing interests, and difficult societal trade-offs that require more than the collection of public opinions or preferences.

This interactive workshop explores how deliberative approaches can complement existing participation practices and support more socially acceptable, legitimate, and adaptive futures. Drawing on experiences from the Horizon Europe AntifragiCity project and its Citizens’ Forums in Bratislava, Larissa, and Thessaloniki, participants will examine how deliberative methods have been applied to questions of sustainable mobility and antifragile urban futures. Building on these examples, the workshop will explore the wider relevance of deliberative approaches across governance domains where policymakers and communities must navigate complexity, uncertainty, and competing priorities.

Participants will:

• Examine the relationship between participation, deliberation, and Smart City governance;
• Explore how deliberative approaches can help navigate uncertainty, complexity, and societal trade-offs;
• Learn from the design, implementation, and outcomes of the AntifragiCity Citizens’ Forums;
• Share experiences, challenges, and best practices for citizen engagement;
• Identify how deliberative approaches can be adapted across different governance, policy, research and innovation contexts;
• Reflect on ways to strengthen the social acceptability, legitimacy, resilience, and adaptability of innovation and decision-making processes.

The workshop is open to students, researchers, practitioners, policymakers, city representatives, innovation stakeholders, and anyone interested in citizen-centered governance and decision-making. No prior experience with deliberative methods is required. Whether participants are already familiar with participatory and deliberative approaches or are encountering them for the first time, the session provides an accessible and engaging environment for learning, discussion, and exchange.

• Marc Pallot, IEEE TEMS, Co-Chair of the TC on Smart Cities
• Yacine Rezgui, Cardiff University

• Lisa Verhasselt, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)

This workshop is designed to engage participants for testing how much citizen voice can be transformed into actionable urban governance intelligence. This exercise is based on a flooding scenario and follows a four-step chain: Listen → Classify → Rank → Act.

Participants start from eight fictional citizen statements and progressively transform them into governance outputs:

• Listen: extract who is affected, what happened, which service or place is involved, what concern is expressed, and whose voice may be missing.
• Classify: use a taxonomy to organise the statements into shared categories and create concern cards.
• Rank: use a mini-Delphi process to prioritise the concerns while checking that minority or vulnerable voices are not erased.
• Act: convert the ranked priorities into action cards, identifying what should be done now, who should act, and what the city should learn for next time.

At the end, the workshop returns to the three research questions: representativeness, inclusion, and governance use while participants test the full chain: citizen statements → listening board → taxonomy matrix → concern cards → Delphi priority list → action cards → feedback to citizens.

• Marc Pallot, IEEE TEMS, Co-Chair of the TC on Smart Cities
• Yacine Rezgui, Cardiff University

• Cristina De Nardi, Cardiff University