Preliminary List of Speakers

Antonio Collado, Innovalia, Spain
Industrial Engineer at the Politechnical University of Madrid, Masters Degree of Science in Management of Technology, at the University of Texas. Masters Degree in MBA at the University of Barcelona. 
Antonio's main experience is in Innovation Governance and Research-Industry Cooperation. He has been selected by the “Cotec Foundation for Innovation” as member of its Innovation Governance Group of Experts where he supports enhancing trans-national cooperation between consultative innovation policy bodies at regional and national levels. As member of the Innovation Advisory Group Antonio ook part also in the definition of the Innovation Strategic Plan for the Canary Islands in Spain and the Research Strategy for the island of Lanzarote.  
Antonio is part of the teaching group in different programmes related to the management of technology at the University of Las Palmas and the University of La Laguna. He has been Chairman in some National and International Conferences focused on Innovation and Technology.
Antonio  is an evaluator of R&D proposals for the European Commission within the NMP Programme. In addition to that he has been selected as Project Technical Assistant for the Marie Curie Programme.

Samuel Cruz-Lara, LORIA / INRIA Nancy Grand Est, France
Samuel Cruz-Lara got a Master Degree on Computer Science in 1984 (University Henri Poincaré, Nancy 1) and a PhD Degree in Computer Science in 1988 (National Polytechnic Institute of Lorraine). Currently, within ISO’s TC37/SC4 “Linguistic Resources Management”, he is the project leader of MLIF (Multi Lingual Information Framework), a high-level ISO-based abstract model for dealing with multilingual content [ISO FDIS 24616]. Samuel Cruz-Lara is also member of the Synchronized MultiMedia Group of the World Wide Web Consortium and he is co-editor of the SMIL 3.0 specification (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language).

Current research activities : Multilingual Textual Information, Natural Language Processing, Immersive 3D-Environments, Language Learning.

J.H.A. (Jean) Gelissen, Senior Director Strategic Partnerships, Philips Research Lifestyle Program 
Jean Gelissen studied at the Poly Technical School in Venlo, the Netherlands (graduated in Electronics, specialization Computer Technology, in 1977) and did a Post Graduate Course in Utrecht, The Netherlands (graduated in Informatics, 1986). His professional career started in 1977 at Philips Research in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. He started in digital signal processing, both in software and hardware development, and gained large experience in computer networks, formal specification methods, multimedia as well as multimedia processing architectures and embedded software domain with a focus on architectures and methodology. In the context of ISO/IEC MPEG he contributed to MPEG-4, MPEG-21 and has initiated and completed the MPEG-E 'Multimedia Middleware' standard ISO/IEC 23004. Recently he has initiated a new ISO work item that has already resulted in the first version of the MPEG-V 'Media context and control' standard ISO/IEC 23005. Since the beginning of 2011 he has been appointed (part-time) as the Action Line Leader of the action line Health and Wellbeing of the EIT ICTLabs.   
 

Roland Geraerts,Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Roland Geraerts completed his Ph.D. degree in Computer Sciences at Utrecht University in 2006. His dissertation dealt with a comparison and analysis of sampling-based motion planning techniques, in particular variants of the Probabilistic Roadmap Method. In addition, he studied quality aspects of paths and roadmaps. Since 2006, he is continuing his work as Assistant Professor and focuses on path planning and crowd simulation in games and virtual environments.

Philippe Gravez, CEA-List, France
Philippe Gravez has obtained a PhD in Computer Science from Lille University in 1988, working on supervisory control in hostile environment robotics. He has participated in several European projects, coordinating FP6 Nanorac. He was the CEA-List member in the management committee of the Intuition NoE and he currently represents his organisation at the AFRV (French Virtual Reality association) board.

Within CEA-List, the Interactive Simulation Laboratory addresses three main challenges:
• interactive simulation of physical phenomena, with a particular interest in mechanical systems featuring rigid and deformable parts, multi-body systems …
• interactive and/or autonomous virtual humans able both to display realistic behaviours and to interact with their environment
• interactions (motion capture, metaphors, avatar high-level control …).
The lab essentially performs applied research answering industrial needs, especially in the transport (automotive and aerospace), security, energy and construction domains: interaction with digital mock-ups within PLM processes (virtual prototyping, human factor studies of workstations …), preparation of intervention scenarios and training of human workers using virtual and augmented reality (V&AR) techniques.

Alex Juarez, Eindhoven University of Technology, Holland,  
A PhD candidate at the Dept. of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology. His professional experience includes
knowledge creation and management using database and ontology principles, developing algorithms to measure artificial surprise in autonomous systems, and the development of application for artificial intelligence in robotics. His research interests are related to the interoperability of virtual and real devices, in particular the connectivity between virtual worlds and real robots, and the perception of the "common" user of these systems in applications like tele-presence, independent living, and virtual/social presence.


Gustavo Medina del Rosario, Inventiaplus.com, http://www.inventiaplus.com
Entrepreneur and founder of Inventiaplus.com and SingularFactory.com
Births in the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Focusing on innovation in software development and applied research.

 

Dr. David Oyarzun, Head of the 3D Animation and Interactive Virtual Environments department, Vicomtech, Donostia / San Sebastián, Spain
Dr. Oyarzun studied Computer Engineering in the University of the Basque Country. He received his Ph.D. in the field of 3D Virtual Environments standardization from the University of the Basque Country. From 2001 to 2003, he gained experience in topics such as biometric access control systems for networks or Artificial Intelligence. From 2003, he is working in VICOMTech and he is coordinator of the Working Group V of Spanish eNEM platform, which is a working group focused in Virtual Reality and Virtual Worlds research composed by Spanish companies, universities and research centres. He has several publications in topics related with 3D graphics in international conferences and journals.

Victor Shenkar, Founder and CEO, GeoSim Systems, Israel
For more than a decade, GeoSim has specialized in: (i) building complete, precise and photo-realistic 3D-virtual worlds (‘Mirror Worlds’), and (ii) delivering them through the Internet for use for city planning and homeland security, local search and real estate, tourism and entertainment.
Experts from Autodesk, the industry leader in 3D-modeling and animation solutions, have recently described GeoSim’s technology as the best of its kind in the world.
• GeoSim integrated Virtual Cities are mirror replicas of real cities (‘3D-Mirror Worlds’), in which you can navigate, get useful info or network with other users.
• By accomplishing a remarkable 10X reduction in modeling cost and schedule GeoSim defines the leading edge of high-precision, large-scale 3D-modeling.
• GeoSim Virtual Cities are capable of providing a wide range of cost-effective solutions for a variety of professional needs and applications: (i) GeoSim Virtual Cities allow city managers and other city stakeholders to better plan, use and run their cities, offering an ultimate tool to support sustainability, (ii) GeoSim Virtual City can be fully integrated into the existing and future IT systems, creating a new generation of geospatial information and city visualization tools.
 

Sigurd Van Broeck,  Senior Research Engineer, Bell Labs, Antwerp, Belgium
Sigurd  was responsible for the operations and maintenance of all domestic S12 telephone exchanges in the Beijing area. Starting 1989, he was one of the principle engineers of the remote management system for S12 telephone exchanges. In the Application Research Domain since 2002, his first focus was on NFC and ambient media technologies. He is currently project lead of a Flemish funded project with European label where he conducts research together with several Belgium universities on future communication concepts using immersive virtual environments and real-time 3D video. He is Alcatel-Lucent’s representative for W3C since 2003. He is interested in a wide variety of technologies relating to The Singularity and their implications on humanity. He is author or co-author of several technical journal and conference papers.


Vincent Verdot, Researcher, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, France
Vincent Verdot is a member of technical staff in the Hybrid Communication department of the Bell Labs’ Application domain. His work experience includes the study of service delivery mechanisms in next generation architectures such as the feature interactions in IP Multimedia Subsystem, and various other research activities on communication and multimedia protocols. He also worked on application mobility and service continuity issues in distributed systems. His current responsibilities are mainly focused on telecommunication usages and interoperability problems between heterogeneous environments such as fixed, mobile or even virtual. He was graduated in 2005 with a Research Master's degree in Computer Science (Networking) and in 2009 with a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Telecommunications and Electronics, all from the University Pierre and Marie Curie of Paris, France.