External Stakeholder Group (ESG)

In a career spanning more than 25 years, Afonso Ferreira has held European leadership roles in institutional policy and research. As an expert in the areas of Cybersecurity, Futures, and Policy Making, he recently spent six years seconded to the European Commission working as a policy and programme officer. Thanks to his large knowledge of the Digital Revolution and its widespread impacts, Afonso is advising private and public actors.

In addition to his Institutional experience, he published more than 100 papers in the forefront of scientific research. He has been member of more than 70 Technical Committees for international organisations and events and is an editorial board member for international scientific journals. For detailed information, see www.linkedin.com/in/cyberfuture.

Erwin Schoitsch works for AIT Austrian Institute of Technology for more than 50 years, focusing on development and validation of safety-related systems with high dependability requirements.

He is/was involved in many industrial projects and European research projects of the Framework Programmes FP6, FP7 and Horizon 2020. He contributed to the ARTEMIS projects R3-COP (Robotics), SafeCer, MBAT, CRYSTAL, ARROWHEAD, and EMC², in ECSEL to AMASS, AQUAS, the “lighthouse projects” AutoDrive (Mobility.E) and Productive4.0 (Production.E), where he leads the standardization Work Packages, IoSENSE and SemI40.

He is active in international working groups (EWICS TC7, ERCIM, EPoSS, ARTEMIS, AIOTI (Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation) and euRobotics Standardization WG), (co) organizer of workshops and conferences on Dependable Cyberphysical (embedded) Systems, member of international standardization committees for functional safety and security of safety-related systems in IEC (IEC TC44, IEC TC65, SC 65A for IEC 61508, IEC 61511 and related ad-hoc-groups and standards). In ISO, he is active in ISO TC22 SC 32 WG08 for ISO 26262, and `WG11 for ISO 21434 (Automotive Cybersecurity Engineering) (joint WG with SAE).

His main interest is the holistic approach to system dependability for Cyber-physical (Embedded) Systems and Systems-of-Systems, particularly wrt. safety, security and dependability performance co-engineering.

Gianni A. Di Caro is Associate Teaching Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar campus. He has a degree in Physics, from the University of Bologna (Italy), and a PhD in Applied Sciences, from the Universite’ Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), in Belgium.

His scientific expertise and interests are strongly multi-disciplinary, and include: swarm intelligence and swarm robotics, planning and control in multi-robot systems, human-(multi) robot interaction, artificial intelligence, optimization, mobile networks.

Giovanni Comandè (LLM Harvard Law School USA, Ph.D. Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna) is Full Professor of Private comparative law at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna where he also studied as ordinary student.

Since 1995 he has been a lawyer, included in the special role for university teachers in Pisa and Attorney at law (New York Bar) since 1997. Moreover, he is mediator at Organismo Conciliazione Pisa and mediation trainer. He has taught in and visited numerous universities in the world (Washington and Lee School of Law, USA; Université Laval, Canada; Fordham School of Law, USA; Université Panthéon Assas Paris II, Faculté de Droit ; Hebrew University, Jérusalem; Wake Forrest University School of Law, USA ; University of South Carolina School of Law, USA).

His areas of competence include: civil law in general, tort law, personal injury, European private law, health law, private law of public administration, law and technology, privacy, producer’s liability, A.D.R. (Alternative Dispute Resolution), American law, insurance law, technology regulation; AI and law, algorithms regulation.

Joaquim Bastos received his Bachelors and M.Sc. degree in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Aveiro (Portugal) in 1997 and 2006, respectively. From 1998 to 2002, he was a development manager at Philips Portugal and later at Comverse N. S. France.

In 2003, he became a researcher at Instituto de Telecomunicações – Aveiro, and has participated in multiple international R&D projects, namely as WP leader, e.g. FP7-ICT WHERE and WHERE2, Celtic MOBILIA, CATRENE NewP@ss and H2020-ECSEL SWARMs. He is the author of several journals and conference publications, and his main research interests include energy efficient wireless communication systems, IoT and network security.

Professor, José-Fernán Martínez received his Ph.D. degree in Telematic Engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Spain in 2001. Dr. Martínez is Professor at DTE (Department of Telematics Engineering, and Electronics) of the same University, which is a world-renown division for their excellent work in the field of Information and Communications Technology, participating and directing several competitive research national and International projects.

He has authored several national and international publications included in the Science Citation Index, and he is technical reviser and chair of technical national and international events on Telematics, as well as member of different international and scientific committees. Actually, Dr. Martínez is a guest professor at Mälardalen University (MDH) Sweden since August 2013

Since February 2019, works as a Principal Investigator at TWI-Hellas (Athens, Greece). His responsibilities include technical management, robotic systems design, development and control, and writing of research proposals for grant acquisition. From January 2014 to January 2019, has worked as a Senior Researcher at the R&D and European Projects department at SingularLogic S.A and also at the R&D department of OMEGA Technology, all located in Athens, Greece, where he participated, in EU research projects in construction robotics, in indoor logistic robotics and in robotics for healthcare.

During 2016, has worked as an Adjunct Lecturer (on a contractual basis) at the National Technical University of Athens, where he taught courses related to electrical machines and drives. From 2010 till 2013 worked as a Research Fellow at Harvard and at the Cardiac Surgery Bioengineering Lab at the Children’s Hospital Boston, where he conducted research on Image Guided Minimally Invasive Surgical Robots, under the supervision of Prof. Pierre Dupont. From 2008 till 2010 worked as a researcher at the R&D department of robotics company ZENON S.A. where he contributed to research projects related to medical robotics. Has participated as a researcher in more than ten US funded projects, European Union funded projects and a European Space Agency funded project. His research interests include robotics, mechatronics and embedded control, modeling and control of dynamic systems. Panagiotis Vartholomeos has been the author of more than twenty-five peer reviewed publications in journals and international conference proceedings and has more than two hundred fifty (non-self) citations. Has been nominated four times finalist for the best paper award in the top robotic conferences.

Dr. Pedro Castillejo received his Ph.D. in Telecommunications at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) in 2015, where he works as a Post-doc researcher at GRyS (Group of Next-Generation Networks and Services) research.
He has been involved in different European projects, like SODA, ESNA, DIYSE, LIFEWEAR, DEMANES, E-GOTHAM, I3RES, and SWARMs. His areas of interest include Cyber-Physical Systems, wireless networks, network protocols and security algorithms and embedded middleware solutions. He has co-authored several conference presentations and published scientific papers in indexed journals. He has also participated as an invited lecturer in several master and doctoral courses.