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Speakers
Tech-X Speakers
Ulrich Ahle
CEO, Gaia-X
Ulrich is a reputed executive in the IT sector, formerly Vice President and leader of the Manufacturing and Industrie 4.0 System Integration business at Atos in Germany. He is also the founder and member of the Board of the International Data Spaces Association in Germany and served 16 years on the Board of the Prostep IVIP organization until April 2018. After an apprenticeship as a toolmaker at Hella KG, he studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Paderborn. In his career, Ahle held several positions as a development engineer, Director of PLM services, sales director and Vice President. He has been part of Nixdorf Computer AG, Siemens and Atos. From January 2017 to November 2023, Ulrich Ahle was Chief Executive Officer of the FIWARE Foundation headquartered in Berlin, Germany.
Carlos Aparicio
UPM researcher and Phd candidate researching on data access control and data usage control.
Frédéric Bellaiche
VP Technology & Research, Dawex
Frédéric Bellaiche, PhD and Vice President of Technology and Research at Dawex – Data Exchange Technology, is a recognized expert in Data Exchange architecture and security. Frédéric leads the Gaia-X Data Exchange Services Working Group, is the Data Exchange lead at Gaia-X Federated Services French Hub, and a member of the Data Spaces Support Center expert group.
Alberto Berreteaga
IDSA Ambassador, Senior Researcher, DIGITAL/CORES TECNALIA
Jean Brangé
President, AFNeT Services
President of AFNeT Services, after a career as architect (building and engineering) is strongly involved in cross sectorial standardisation activities. He is working with the CSTB to Analyse and recommend options to interconnect NGSI-LD based information systems with Building Information Management considering interoperating with Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and CityGML specification.
Valérie Bruna
Program Director (Gaia-X), Decaposte
José Antonio Chica Páez
Head of Digital Transformation at the Energy, Climatic and Urban Transition Unit, TECNALIA
Jose A. Chica. is Head of Digital Transformation at the Energy, Climatic and Urban Transition Unit TECNALIA. Member of the European Commission and member of the Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, “High Level Construction Forum initiative” previously, Thematic Group 1 “Stimulating Investment in Building Renovation, Infrastructure and Innovation”.
Francisco de la Vega
Co-Founder & CTO, FICODES
Ewann Gavard
Technical Leader, Gaia-X
Ewann is one of the developers in the Gaia-x CTO Team. He helps implement the specifications created by the Working Groups to ensure their viability and propose new specifications or changes through Gaia-X Lab. He’s been working as a professional software developer since 2013, mainly in the North of France before joining Gaia-X beginning of 2023. He worked in big retail companies as well as in startups and emerging companies. He worked mainly as a full-stack developer, but also as the technical leader and backend lead developer. He also loves being able to follow the software lifecycle, from business needs to production deployment and maintenance.
Pierre Gronlier
CTO of Gaia-X
Pierre Gronlier has been working in the IT industry for the last twelve years, with a particular focus on operationalising and scaling systems in the field of real-time communication and cloud services. With a penchant for science and an academic background in embedded real-time systems and applied mathematics in signal processing and machine learning, he started as a research engineer in video compression before joining Skype and Microsoft in Estonia. He then moved to OVHcloud in France as a Cloud Solution Architect.
Yuji Hagiwara
Platform Engineer, NTT DATA
Yuji Hagiwara is a platform engineer working for NTT DATA. He was involved in the research and development projects related to Open Source Software and the distributed parallel processing. Currently he is in charge of research and development of technologies to promote data collaboration between enterprises.
Ralf Hustadt
Special Advisor, LUXINNOVATION GIE
Ralf Hustadt is part of the Digital Transformation team at Luxinnovation where he is working on data economy topics. As such he’s leading the National Competence Center (NCC) for Supercomputing and acting as national coordinator for the Luxembourgish Gaia-X hub, in charge of coordinating Luxembourg’s participation in Gaia-X. In both roles, he supports organisations in their digital journey in general, and focuses in particular on helping them get involved in the EU’s ambition to build a sovereign digital economy. An engineer by education, ICT expert and advisor by profession and innovator by passion, Ralf has more than 25 years of experience from the digital field. After starting his career at a spin-off from Fraunhofer Institute, he has held various roles including Head of IT and Chief Technologist at for a consulting company (P3 Group) and Digital Acceleration Lead at Telindus Luxembourg prior to joining Luxinnovation. Ralf holds a Master’s in mechanical engineering from RWTH Aachen University. He has won two hackathons and is passionate about design thinking.
Miki Kanno
Manger, NTT DATA
Miki Kanno is a manger working for NTT DATA and recently in charge of research and development related to data exchange and collaboration for data spaces.
Frédéric Lé
President, Youragileway
President of Youragileway, is an AFNeT expert who represents the association on the Gaia-X Architecture Working Group. He is contributing alongside the other speakers to the Specialist Task Force STF 676 (Usage domains mappings) of ETSI. He is specifying how to both establish and maintain the number of connections between NGSI-LD entities and their geographical 2D/3D representations. His areas of expertise cover dataspace design, the smart city, software architecture and agile methods.
Sylvain le Bon
Co Founder, Startin’blox
Sylvain is the co-founder of Startin’blox, a data search engine for data spaces. He has worked on decentralized architecture, including Solid and the data spaces for more than 10 years and is involved in the deployment of several data spaces at the European level.
Koki Mitani
Senior Research Engineer, NTT
Koki Mitani is Senior Research Engineer of Social Informatics Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), where he leads open and collaborative innovation for building global infrastructure for data sharing between businesses.
Michael Mulquin
MiMs Ambassador, Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC)
MIMs Ambassador with Open & Agile Smart Cities & Communities is working with ITU-T to standardize Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms as a methodology for facilitating interoperability between different ecosystems of data standards. As part of the work of the ETSI Specialist Task Force STF 676, he is gathering evidence of how Smart Communities are using OGC standards and what methodologies they are using to align OGC standards with NGSI-LD.
Jose Andres Muñoz
Assistant Professor (‘23) in the Telematics System Department and a Senior Researcher in the Next Generation Internet Research Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Andres Munoz-Arcentales is an Assistant Professor (‘23) in the Telematics System Department and a Senior Researcher in the Next Generation Internet Research Group at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid since 2017 his research interests are focused on the fields of Data Engineering, Data Fusion, Data Spaces, Smart Spaces, Digital Twins, Cloud and Edge Computing and Big Data infrastructure.
Alexandre Nicaise
Blockchain Engineer, Docaposte
Fawad Qureshi
Global Field CTO, Platform Adoption, Snowflake
Fawad is a results-driven technology leader with 20+ years of experience across 50+ countries. He excels in enterprise data warehouses, big data analytics, and shared economy business models. As Global Industry Field CTO, Fawad advises C-level executives across diverse sectors on leveraging data and technology to drive success. His expertise in data monetization, data as a service, and data products enable him to develop innovative strategies that fuel revenue growth. Fawad is passionate about sustainability and utilizes data and analytics to achieve impactful business outcomes and foster positive environmental change. By unlocking the strategic value of data assets, he empowers organizations to thrive in the data-driven economy.
Aleksandar Kelecevic
Product and Technology Lead – Data Economy, T-Systems International
Meet Aleksandar Kelecevic, an endlessly curious Product and Technology Lead responsible for overseeing both the development of innovative data-driven products within the Telekom Data Intelligence Hub and the technological infrastructure supporting them. His role allows him to drive the entire product lifecycle from ideation to implementation, ensuring that products meet market demands through direct customer interactions while leveraging cutting-edge technologies, and developing a few along the way.
He is currently engaged in shaping the visions and interplay between all T-Systems’ Data Economy product offerings, making sure that Connect and Integrate, Living Lab, Digital.ID and Motion Data work seamlessly together. Prior to his work in the Telekom Data Intelligence Hub, he lead the development of the data analytics tooling for the new statistical environment of European Central Bank, as well as the follow-up migration of business processes to the new system. He finished his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he spent years tutoring curious students.
Damion Rose
Strategic Partnerships Lead, BICS
Damion has been active in the telecommunications world for almost 20 years, spanning the US, Caribbean and Europe. He believes in the power of data science to create opportunities for innovation, drive growth and to push the boundaries of the potential of communications in the digital era. In his role at the global communications platform company BICS, Damion established the company’s data-as-a-service product portfolio and spearheads the organization’s advanced analytics solutions. Damion is passionate about unlocking the potential of data and is a seasoned contributor to industry discussions on topics of Advanced Analytics, User-centred Design Thinking, IoT and 5G nextgen services.
Guillaume Rouyer
Founder, Virtual Assembly
Guillaume Rouyer is the founder of Virtual Assembly, a non-profit organization that works for more than 10 years on SOLID and web decentralization. He is currently working on a doctoral thesis at the Techcico laboratory (Troyes University of Technology) and the French Agency for Ecological Transition (ADEME), on SOLID applied to the challenges of cooperation between players in the ecological transition.
Alina Rubina
Project Manager in Products and Research, DE-CIX
Alina Rubina holds two master’s degrees in communications and Signal Processing from Technical University of Ilmenau and Riga Technical University. Before joining DE-CIX, she worked as a research assistant, supervising students and actively participating in the teaching process. Her research primarily focused on developing efficient trajectories for drones to enhance smartphone localization. After her studies, she joined DE-CIX, the operator of the largest Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in the world in Frankfurt. She is a member of the DE-CIX products and research team and works as a project manager for Gaia-X and Tellus.
Joaquín Salvachúa
Associated Professor, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid
Associated professor in ETSIT UPM. Teaching about Cloud infrastructure, cloud native applications and big data and Data engineering. FIWARE distinguished member and contributor. Gaia-X and Gaia-X Spain UPM representative. Researching in DataVerse, Data spaces, Cloud-edge continuous native apps and infractructure, DLT infrastructure and consensus protocols and Formal methods.
Jesus Maria Santamaria
CTO Digital Unit in Tecnalia Research & Innovation
Jesus is Chief Technology Officer of the Digital Unit in TECNALIA Research & Innovation, and member of the Board of Directors of Gaia-X Spain. With over 35 years of R&D international projects management experience, Jesus has participated in more than 50 European projects in the last EC Framework Programmes (FP7, H2020 and Horizon Europe) leading the TECNALIA working teams related to future internet, digital platforms, and ICT enabling technologies (as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and DLT, cloud-edge-IoT or extended reality) for digital solutions. From 2020 Jesus was one of the initial members of the supporting group for the adoption of Gaia-X in Spain, and currently he is leading the Technology Working Group of the Spanish hub, where the data and service ecosystem is fostering the implementation of use cases and data spaces in different application domains (tourism, mobility, industry, agrifood, health).
Yassir works in cooperation with the CTO Office as a Software Developer. His goal is to bring my technical expertise as a software developer in all aspects of a software engineering lifecycle. Yassir has been working lately in the e-commerce and retail industry and is very excited to work on an ambitious and meaningful project Gaia-X. It’s essential for him to constantly learn and broaden perspectives concerning computer science to always have a healthy challenge at hand.
Paul Christian Weißenbach
Lead Cloud Engineer, Posedio GmbH
Paul Weißenbach is a Lead Cloud Engineer at Posedio GmbH and works on EuProGigant, a Gaia-X lighthouse project. His responsibilities include developing software and setting up the necessary cloud infrastructure to create secure, reliable, scalable, cost-efficient, and energy-efficient systems. He strongly focuses on permission systems and authorization in general, helping customers find suitable methods to protect their applications while maintaining upkeep efforts on a desired level. He has extensive experience in designing role hierarchies for RBAC (role-based access control), developing rules for ABAC (attribute-based access control) or policy-based access control, and modeling for ReBAC (relationship-based access control).