Keynote Speakers

Dr. JOAO SCHWARZ DASILVA received a PhD on the Performance Analysis of Mobile Packet Radio Systems from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada in 1981 and a Master and Bachelors degree on Electrical Engineering from the Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal, Canada in 1971 and 1970. He is currently a Research Fellow with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Security, Reliability and Trust with the University of Luxembourg.

After numerous positions in Canada with the Communications Research Centre and Switzerland with the International Telecommunications Union, he joined the European Commission in 1991. In 2004 he was appointed Director of the Network and Communication and further on Director of Converged Networks and Services, where he had the overall responsibility for all the R&D work relating to mobile communications, broadband networks including satellite communications, audio-visual and home networks; trust and security, software engineering and ICT for business applications.

In 2005 he initiated a major European R&D drive toward the Future Internet, which has led to the establishment of the Future Internet Assembly and the Future Internet Forum and of a European Future Internet Public-Private-Partnership . He retired from the European Commission in 2010.

He is the recipient of the first UMTS award by the UMTS Forum. He is a Fellow member of the Wireless World Research Forum. He is the author of some 100 technical and scientific papers and books and has been invited as guest editor of IEEE Communications and Personal Communications Magazine. He is member of the Consultative Committee of the Portuguese Telecommunications Competitiveness Pole, the Advisory Board of the European Alliance for Innovation and the Scientific Council of France Telecom.

Since the early days of mankind, networks have grown and evolved. Over time we have witnessed a number of civilization disruptions brought about by a rapid change in the networking fabric. The explosive growth of digital networks in recent years has now made possible to connect all human beings through a plethora of devices capable to sense, capture, search, discover and transmit structured or unstructured data, with or without human intervention. Moreover, what used to be dumb networks are now being transformed into smart networks catering for human needs in transportation, energy distribution, environmental protection or health protection. A new civilization disruption is around the corner. The size of the digital data universe increases exponentially and doubles each 18 months. Under the expressions big data and open data, lay an immense data mine, waiting to be exploited. Being able to economically extract value from it, will offer unprecedented opportunities for progress and for abuse. We have reached the point where modelling and analytical tools can help Internet corporations and commercial institutions to anticipate future individual behaviour, while government agencies have the means to predict social unrest, political crisis or disease outbreaks. While engineers in general tend to look at the enormous societal changes that Internet has and will make possible, as simply part of a commonly shared belief in an utopian technological dream, lately others, in particular social scientists and policy makers, have been questioning the limits of the increasingly globalized power of information handlers. Indeed raising security and privacy concerns are routinely expressed regarding the substantial power, unparalleled in human history, which is exerted by large cyber powers. Masters in the exploration of huge databases of information about individual’s interests and behaviour, their undisputed power is frightening.

Michael Gould is Esri’s (http://www.esri.com/) Global Education Manager, focusing primarily on the regions of Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Michael studied Geographic Information Systems at the University of Massachusetts and NCGIA - State University of New York at Buffalo (PhD 1994). Between Masters and PhD studies he was research programmer at the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis (funded by The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture), and then GIS specialist at an environmental consulting firm in South Carolina, USA, where he helped create oil spill response applications for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency. In September 1991 he moved to Spain to take a position as director of technology transfer at Esri-Spain, where he worked closely with university users and organized and taught several short courses and seminars. In 1993 he moved to academia and was visiting professor (GIS) at the universities Complutense (Madrid), Extremadura, and Valencia, before taking in 1998 a tenured position in Information Systems at the University Jaume I in Castellon, Spain. He spent the 2000-2001 school year on sabbatical at the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Wayland Massachusetts, working on international activities and managing the documentation subcommittee. During the past decade he has directed several research projects funded by regional, national and European Union agencies, primarily in the areas of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI), interoperability and web services. Recently he co-founded the Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies degree program, run jointly with the universities of Muenster (Germany) and Nova de Lisboa (Portugal) which includes students from around the world. In 2008 Gould joined Esri (California) and he works with universities and education and ICT ministries to help build geospatial education and entrepreneurship programs. He has served on multiple committees including the management committees of the Spain SDI, the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE) including 2 years as chair, GSDI technical committee, INSPIRE European Union directive committee for metadata implementation rules, more than 50 conference program committees, has been active in the UN Spatial Data Infrastructure (UNSDI). Over the years he has published a GIS textbook (in Spanish), edited books on GIS applications and on advances in the Spain SDI, as well as more than 150 journal articles and international conference papers.

For centuries maps were the property only of rulers, for the primary purposes of war or taxation. Today a wide collection of ubiquitous geotechnologies allow not only governments but also citizens and students to geo-enable their decision-making processes. This involves geolocation --putting a dot on the map to show where we are or where we have been—which is necessary but not sufficient. Add to this IT innovations such as open web service standards, global imagery and other official data sources, powerful mobile devices and then geoprocessing algorithms previously found only inside complex GIS workstations, and the result is a geographic platform. On top of the platform are being built an ecosystem of applications for collecting, publishing and sharing intelligent web maps that are embedded into all forms of decision-making. Governments are using the platform to build smart cities, citizens are using the platform to help change behavior and to improve stewardship of the fragile environment, and students are using the platform for project-based learning and then to fuel service-based startup businesses. A wide range of examples are shown.