CSS parallel sessions intend to demonstrate how digital transformation can contribute to the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The objective of this sessions was not to debate current days but contribute to understanding better how a digital transformation will support our quality of life, for example enhancing the main unmet needs that should drive the science agenda in the next ten years. Therefore, the parallel sessions aimed to deliver to our participants the contribution of key technologies within the sectors of Health, Agrifood, Manufacturing & Sustainable cities towards the implementation of SDGs as well as some examples of best practices!

Everything was live! In case you weren’t there, take a look at the recordings below and learn something new from our great speakers!

The first parallel session “Health Solutions” is moderated by António Cunha, Executive Director of Automatics Lab at Instituto Pedro Nunes (IPN). António Cunha introduced the participants with the vision of the CSS, ecosystem, and goals to inspire innovative approaches, foster new partnerships, and deliver better value out of the Summit as week as with the objective of this particular session.

Our first speaker, Mr. Miguel Amador opened the Health session. He is the current President of EIT Health Alumni, which aims to be the largest community of health innovators around Europe. He is also the founder of Pi Ventures, a Company Builder supporting innovation in Digital Health, from which he is building several ventures ranging from diagnostics, telemedicine to regulatory technology.

Mr. Bodo Wiegand, our second speaker continued the session. Bodo is a Senior Director and Global Head of Market Access and Reimbursement at Philips. Health Care Expert with a detailed understanding of Health Care Systems’ needs and requirements. Demonstrated expertise in developing and implementing solutions to critical business enterprises. Over 13 years of practice leading health projects and cross-cultural teams in Germany, The Netherlands, Australia, USA, and Brazil.

And last but not the least, Mr. Jan-Olov Hoog closed the session as our third speaker. He is a professor of Medical Chemistry and a former Dean for Higher Education at Karolinska Institutet. His research interest focuses on proteomics and bioinformatics for detoxification systems. He has been involved in e-learning projects both within Europe and globally. He is engaged in the EIT Health consortium where he is a member of the Supervisory Board.

The second parallel session “Agrifood Solutions” is moderated by Stavros Tsitouras, a Senior Project Manager at BioSense Institute. Stavros introduced the participants with the vision of the CSS, ecosystem, and goals to inspire innovative approaches, foster new partnerships, and deliver better value out of the Summit as week as with the objective of this particular session.

Our first speaker, Dr. Oskar Marko opened the Agrifood session. He is an Assistant Director also at the BioSense Institute. Oskar is a researcher highly interested in the application of data analytics in agriculture. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, but he also spent the 3rd year of undergraduate studies at City University London, where he did his final BEng project in signal processing. Since then, he has been working in the field of advanced machine learning algorithms, deep neural networks, and multi-objective evolutionary algorithms applied in agriculture.

Mr. Filippos Papadopoulos, our second speaker continued the session. He holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and is currently the Director of the Strategic Project Management Office of the American Farm School (AFS). In this capacity, he is responsible for the Agrifood Entrepreneurship Centres run by AFS in the cities of Thessaloniki and Kalamata and oversees training and consultancy projects in over thirty locations throughout Greece.

And last but not the least, Mr. Carlos Oliveira closed the session as our third speaker. Carlos is a seasoned Product Leader and Consultant who has led Innovation at Ubiwhere, Product teams across 2 European Unicorns, Skyscanner and Farfetch, and is now focused on helping organizations create products of global relevance. He is acting Head of Product at Zenithwings, scaling the GREENPACT product line, so that by 2030, every Food Beverage and Consumer Goods company in Europe can become sustainable

The third parallel session “Manufacturing Solutions” is moderated by Mr. Jens Strüker. At the same time, he was also one of the speakers therefore he opened the session. He is a Professor for Energy Management and Managing Director of the Institute of Energy Economics. Jens introduced the participants with the vision of the CSS, ecosystem, and goals to inspire innovative approaches, foster new partnerships, and deliver better value out of the Summit as week as with the objective of this particular session.

Mr. Stefan Büttner, our second speaker continued the session. He is Director of Global Strategy & Impact at the Institute for Energy Efficiency in Production (EEP) and chairs the newly established UNECE Task Force on Industrial Energy Efficiency. As an initiator of global policy & industry benchmark, called ‘The Energy Efficiency Barometer of the Industry’ he facilitates demand-side informed efficiency action and delivered over 100 speeches in 30+ countries. He is a Vice-Chair of the Bureau of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Group of Experts on Energy Efficiency and a member of the Energy Efficiency Financial Institutions Group (EEFIG) of the European Commission & UNEP FI.

Mr. Daniel Stock was our third speaker. Daniel is a senior scientist and leads the group “IT Architectures for Digital Production” at the ”Competence Center DigITools for Manufacturing” at Fraunhofer IPA. He is active in the field of IT-based manufacturing systems, including research activities regarding the topics of dynamic manufacturing networks, cloud-based manufacturing, Industry 4.0, and smart production with the help of cyber-physical systems. He holds a diploma in environmental engineering and due to his interdisciplinary experience he is able to interlink the fields of manufacturing IT and engineering. He has managed and worked on various national and EU research projects with an emphasis on novel approaches for manufacturing IT solutions as the technical lead and software architect.

And last but not the least, Mr. Giorgos Papapanagiotakis closed the session as our fourth speaker. Giorgos is a CEO at Emphasis DigiWorld SA. His trajectory has evolved across industrial engineering, computer science, and business requirements in order to extract business information, knowledge and intelligence from field visibility based on sensor data. His goal is to innovate and drive the industry change.

The fourth parallel session “Sustainable Solutions” is moderated by Mr. Pedro Roseiro, Executive Board Member at TICE.PT and Innovation Advisor. Pedro introduced the participants with the vision of the CSS, ecosystem, and goals to inspire innovative approaches, foster new partnerships, and deliver better value out of the Summit as week as with the objective of this particular session.

Mr. Ricardo Vitorino was our first speaker. He is a Smart Cities R&I Manager at Ubiwhere. He has worked on projects very focused on robust software architectures, related to the smart cities context and had some experience with interoperability and FIWARE technology, mainly in the FIWARE Lisbon pilot, where he helped publishing data from OST into CKAN, FIWARE’s open data portal and giving technical support to companies applying to SOUL-FI, the FIWARE accelerator. He joined Ubiwhere in early 2015 to work on its Smart Cities solutions (Citibrain), mainly the implementation, testing, and validation of backend services (REST APIs) regarding mobility.

Ms. Ivana Podnar Žarko, our second speaker continued the session. She is a Full Professor at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing. Her main research interests are on large-scale distributed systems and real-time data stream processing. She has co-authored more than 60 scientific journal and conference papers and has served as a program committee member for a number of international conferences and workshops. She has experience of participating in projects funded by the EU Framework Programme.

And last but not the least, Mr. Mathieu Gallissot closed the session as our fourth speaker. He is a system architect holding a PhD from the University of Grenoble 1. After an experience in the field of petroleum SCADA, then in commissioning systems for residential and small tertiary installations, he joined CEA in 2012 to conduct technological research actions on the theme of smart homes and smart cities. Attached to the Electronic Systems and Components Security Service, he leads the security home security research activities in order to develop new security solutions and uses for interconnected systems.

The presentations were followed by a Q&A session between our participants and the CSS panelists including everyone in the conversation using the Poll Everywhere through pollev.com interactive concept, which led to fruitful discussions and useful conclusions on the relevant topics to our CSS participants.

In the end, all parallel session included their separated Brokerage sessions which were the period where all participants who have registered for this opportunity had 2 minutes to in brief present themselves, their organization, and what are they looking for. The Brokerage session was a chance for the participants to network as well as business opportunities within their industries and sectors that go beyond CSS. This is one of the key aspects of such events because it provided our participants with a great opportunity to interact by facilitating quality networking and raising the potential for new business deals and ventures.