ERA Mobility and Career Day

City, Country

Vienna, Austria

Title of the talk

Trends and Opportunities in Innovation

Abstract

The rapid pace of technological change along with the massive adoption of the internet are creating amazing opportunities for organizations. However, these opportunities will only be available to those that can shift the ways in which they think and apply these new technologies.  

Intro to the Speaker

Shawn has worked the last 15 in the tech industry directly in Silicon Valley for companies like Cisco Systems and has spent the last 6 years embedding and implementing strategy and cultures of innovation for companies like Intel and Carhartt. He currently works with organizations to build leadership capacity to navigate the complex and uncertain future.

Keywords

Innovation

Fields of Interest

machine learning, data mining, computational scientific discovery, artificial intelligence

Institution

University of Trento

Position

...

City, Country

Trento, Italy

Title of the talk

Innovation and Entrepreneurship Skills: a Nowaday’s Opportunity but a Tomorrow’s Must

Abstract

This intervention presents the UNITN’s developed methodology, which combines ICT technical courses with didactic modules dedicated to innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E). The objective is to offer to the labor market not just ICT engineers but entrepreneurs with ICT capacities. In a constantly evolving labor market, it’s complex to foresee its mid-long term needs so our students need the appropriate capacities to be constantly innovative and orientated to market needs. Integrated in the academic curricula, I&E courses contribute to root in students’ vision the following concept: any technological solution is not only technically doable but also business feasible.  

Intro to the Speaker

Dr. Gert Guri’s activities at the University of Trento (UNITN) are principally focused on coordinating the implementation of education programs integrated in the European Institute of Technology (EIT Digital) initiative which introduce a new academic curriculum combining ICT with innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E). He is also in charge of drafting extra-curricular international programmes such as winter schools & workshops, harmonizing technical and I&E modules to promote – drawing upon this practice - the development of new I&E approaches as well as best-practices/recommendations for implementation of new methodologies.

Keywords

ICT, Innovation, Enterpreneurship

Fields of Interest

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Institution

British Council

Position

Science Advisor

City, Country

London, United Kingdom

Title of the talk

New Career Development Services available through EURAXESS

Abstract

Over the last few years various institutions with expertise in researcher career development have worked together to expand on the services available through the EURAXESS network. The network now offers services that provide researchers with knowledge of how to plan their career in different sectors; training on associated transferable skills; and useful on-line information and tools. Many researchers throughout Europe are still unaware of the depth and range of support that is literally at their fingertips. This talk will explain how existing and forthcoming services can help you make use of the opportunities available to you and take control of your career trajectory.  

Intro to the Speaker

Dr Shaun Holmes is currently Science Adviser for Research and Partnerships at the British Council where he advises work designed to build and maintain relationships between UK and overseas researchers across academia and industry. The British Council is the BHO for the UK EURAXESS network and Shaun has played a key role in developing the researcher career development services provided through the network. Prior to switching to the public sector Shaun has had experience of both academic and industrial research at Cambridge University and Rolls-Royce respectively.

Keywords

EURAXESS, Career Development

Fields of Interest

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Institution

Tel Aviv University, Sagol School of Neuroscience

Position

Professor

City, Country

Tel Aviv, Israel

Title of the talk

Reading in the Brain

Abstract

BrainReading is a complex skill. It requires the brain to perform multiple processes such as graphical pattern recognition, visual to auditory con-version, extraction of meaning, word production and more, all in parallel and in strikingly short time. Reading these words, neural networks in your brain are performing all these challenging computational tasks, at this very moment. This talk will describe the rich phenomena known from cognitive research on reading, and discuss how biological and artificial neural network can carry such complex tasks.  

Intro to the Speaker

Teaching and Research Professor at Tel Aviv University. PhD from the Sagol School of Neuroscience in the field of Computational Neuroscience with application in linguistics - Grapheme to Phoneme Conversion in Reading.

Keywords

Computational Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Fields of Interest

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Institution

Department of Systemic Cell Biology, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology

Position

...

City, Country

Dortmund, Germany

Title of the talk

The interdependence of epidermal growth factor receptor with tyrosine phosphatases determines signaling response

Abstract

The proto-oncogenic epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) is a trans-membrane receptor tyrosine kinase whose responsiveness to growth factors and duration of its signaling activity determines cellular behavior. These dynamic features of EGFR however have to be controlled by interactions with protein tyrosine phosphatases (PTPs) at distinct cellular locations. To elicit how these spatially confined interactions generate regions of coordinated but different actions over space, we identified the major phosphatases that control EGFR activation and signaling dynamics by quantitative imaging of EGFR phosphorylation profiles in response to genetic PTP perturbations. Deriving the spatial-temporal PTP reactivity maps revealed how the activity of the receptor regulates the PTP activity in time to ensure its own robust activation, whereas the phosphatase activity determines in space the duration of the EGFR signal. The concerted action of the differentially localized phosphatases thereby constitutes a spatially distributed EGFR-PTP network with specific architecture that not only senses, but also determines signaling response to growth factors.  

Intro to the Speaker

Aneta's research interests are centered on the understanding, modeling (both deterministically and stochastically) and analysis of fundamental processes in Biology, by applying concepts of complex systems theory and nonlinear dynamics. In particular, she is interested in the characterization of the background physical mechanisms of cellular differentiation and cellular decision-making processes, as well as the design and construction of synthetic gene-regulatory networks.

Additionally, she also develops methods for reconstruction of directed networks from short time series, with applications to biology and networks of coupled chaotic oscillators.

Keywords

...

Fields of Interest

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Institution

Innaxis Foundation and Research Institute, Spain

Position

Researcher at the Centre for Biomedical Technology, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

City, Country

Madrid, Spain

Title of the talk

Complex networks and data mining: two communities too far apart?

Abstract

Complex networks theory and data mining share much more characteristics that what may prima facie appear. Not only do both share the same general goal, that of extracting information from complex systems to ultimately create a new compact quantifiable representation; but they also often address similar problems too. In the face of that, a surprisingly low number of researchers turn out to resort to both methodologies. If one may be tempted to conclude that these two fields are either largely redundant or totally antithetic, the truth is much simpler: most researchers do not use the other field’s techniques just because they are unaware of them. In this talk, I will review some of the recent achievements obtained at the intersection of both fields, and leverage on them to discuss on the general problem of scientific cross-fertilization.  

Intro to the Speaker

Principal Researcher at the Innaxis Foundation & Research Institute, Madrid, Spain & Researcher at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. His interest is mainly focus on the application of modelling tools (and especially complex networks theory and data mining) to a wide range of problems, from the air transport to the interactions within cells.

Keywords

Complex Networks, Data Mining

Fields of Interest

...

City, Country

Skopje, Macedonia

Title of the talk

Innovation’s links to Research – Inverted Pyramid in Macedonia’s practice

Abstract

In the last few years Macedonia try to promote trend of Investments in Innovation but are we are really ready to absorb its? Sharing Statistical facts about infrastructure for Scientific Research on Universities and R&D departments within business in Macedonia it will be shown that we have to create first ecosystem which will support and lead to Innovation. Investments should start in research laboratories within universities, technological parks and R&D laboratories within businesses  

Intro to the Speaker

Vesna is a serial entrepreneur with experience of almost 20 years with local and international footprints. One of the rare examples in Macedonian economy for selling local private company to a big international corporation. Mainly focused on Market research and Innovation management worked for clients as: TMobile, Twitter, Facebook, Nestle, Heineken, Coca Cola and especially proud of cooperation with local companies as Alkaloid, Tikves, Prilepska Pivarnica. Actively involved in the last few years of setting up and developing eco system for entrepreneurship. (start up community)

Keywords

Vesna is a serial entrepreneur with experience of almost 20 years with local and international footprints. One of the rare examples in Macedonian economy for selling local private company to a big international corporation. Mainly focused on Market research and Innovation management worked for clients as: TMobile, Twitter, Facebook, Nestle, Heineken, Coca Cola and especially proud of cooperation with local companies as Alkaloid, Tikves, Prilepska Pivarnica. Actively involved in the last few years of setting up and developing eco system for entrepreneurship.

Fields of Interest

Market research, Innovation management

Institution

Augsburg University

Position

Professor

City, Country

Munich, Germany

Title of the talk

Empowering Multimodal Behavior Analysis by Interactive Machine Learning

Abstract

Well described corpora that are rich of human multimodal behavior are needed in a number of disciplines, such as Health Monitoring or Behavioral Psychology. However, populating captured user data with adequate descriptions can be an extremely exhausting and time-consuming task. In my talk, I will present an approach that facilitates the acquisition of annotated data sets by involving end users directly in the machine learning process. I will demonstrate how the combination of active learning and cooperative learning helps speed up annotation of human behavioral signals in large multi-modal databases collected in various European projects. I will also discuss ideas of how to adapt the approach in such a way that it enables end users to collect and label behavioral data in the wild, for example, to keep track of factors that influence their fitness and wellbeing.  

Intro to the Speaker

Elisabeth André is a full professor of Computer Science and Founding Chair of Human-Centered Multimedia at Augsburg University in Germany where she has been since 2001. She has multiple degrees in computer science from Saarland University, including a doctorate. Previously, she was a principal researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) in Saarbrücken. Elisabeth André has a long track record in multimodal human-machine interaction, embodied conversational agents, social robotics, affective computing and social signal processing. She has served as a General and Program Co-Chair of major scientific conferences including ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) and ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI). In 2010, Elisabeth André was elected a member of the prestigious Academy of Europe, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and AcademiaNet. To honor her achievements in bringing Artificial Intelligence techniques to HCI, she was awarded a EurAI fellowship (European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence) in 2013. Most recently, she was elected to the CHI Academy, an honorary group of leaders in the field of human-computer interaction.

Keywords

Intelligent User Interfaces, Affective Computing, Social Robotics, Virtual Humans

Fields of Interest

...

Institution

Department of Administrative Sciences; MET, Boston University US

Position

Researcher

City, Country

Boston, USA

Title of the talk

Innovative Modeling of Cascading Failures in Global Financial Networks

Abstract

Stability of the banking system and macro-prudential regulation are essential forhealthy economic growth. Bank networks are not isolated by national boundaries, but are rather globaleither through ownership or operations. Interconnectivity among banks contributes to increasedvulnerability of the entire financial institution network. It is important to understand the financialsystem susceptibility to distress, because of high level of leverage, interconnectivity of system's entities,similar risk exposure of financial institutions, and possibility of systemic crisis propagation through thenetwork. Current bank stress tests, conducted by central banks, do not take in consideration theconnectivity of the banks and the potential for a one bank’s financial risk spilling over to the rest of thesystem. To address this, we create a bipartite network model for cascading bank failures with banknodes on one side and asset nodes on the other with weighted links between the two layers.We propose a model for systemic risk propagation based on common bank exposures to specificasset classes. After stressing the bank network, we find that while the system is able to withstandshocks for a wide range of parameters, we identify a critical threshold for asset risk beyond whichthe system transitions from stable to unstable. We also identify asset classes that increase bankvulnerabilities under given stress scenarios.

Intro to the Speaker

Dr. Vodenska is an expert in international finance and investments, with morethan fifteen years of hands-on experience in financial analysis and securities trading on Wall Street andEuropean markets. She is a Chartered Financial Analyst with experience in creating and actively managinghedge funds, specializing in risk arbitrage and convertible fixed-income securities. Vodenska has broadexperience in academic teaching and corporate training, and her research focuses on network theory andcomplexity science applications in economics.

Institution

Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Eötvös University Pázmány

Position

Professor

City, Country

Budapest, Hungary

Title of the talk

Video Pandemics: Worldwide Viral Spreading of Psy’s Gangnam Style Video

Abstract

Viral videos can reach global penetration traveling through international channels of communication similarly to real diseases starting from a well-localized source. In past centuries, disease fronts propagated in a concentric spatial fashion from the source of the outbreak via the short range human contact network. The emergence of longdistance air-travel changed these ancient patterns. However, recently, Brockmann and Helbing have shown that concentric propagation waves can be reinstated if propagation time and distance is measured in the flight-time and travel volume weighted underlying air-travel network. Here, we adopt this method for the analysis of viral meme propagation in Twitter messages, and define a similar weighted network distance in the communication network connecting countries and states of the World. We recover a wave-like behavior on average and assess the randomizing effect of non-locality of spreading. We show that similar result can be recovered from Google Trends data as well.  

Intro to the Speaker

Gabor Vattay is a full professor at the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest. He is Head of the Department of Physics and Complex Systems. He is teaching complex systems, networks, statistical physics, etc. His research interests circle round Quantum Biology, Computing and Consciousness.

Keywords

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Fields of Interest

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Institution

Boston University Metropolitan College

Position

Researcher

City, Country

Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Title of the talk

Internet Of Things (IOT): Protocol Commonality Based on Rina Principles

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is a global infrastructure that enables advanced services by providingconnections of physical and virtual entities based on existing and developing communication technologies.The scope of IoT is neither easy to define nor predict as the applications seem endless - from industry andhealthcare, transportation and shipping to smart homes and cities. Along with the explosion of the numberof IoT devices and application there has been lately a significant proliferation of IoT protocols to control orretrieve information. Because IoT applications have limited functionality and they operate under very tightconstraints of cost, bandwidth, power, tight resources on computing and memory, there is a tendency toinclude only the functionality absolutely necessary. Consequently, IoT protocols try to be as minimal as possibleand cut every possible corner. To try to understand them all and why they should be used in particularsituations is a daunting task. The question arises whether all of different IoT protocols are necessary andcould IoT be simpler. We apply the fundamental networking principles embodied in the Recursive InterNetArchitecture (RINA) to IoT protocols and demonstrate the possibilities and advantages of commonality in thisemerging area.

Intro to the Speaker

Dr. Chitkushev has served on several IEEE conference committees and as a NSFreview panelist. He is cofounder and associate director of Boston University’s Center for Reliable InformationSystems & Cyber Security, and played a role in initiatives that led to Boston University’s designation as aCenter of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance by the National Security Agency. Chitkushev teachesdata communications, computer networks, advanced Internet technologies, medical informatics, and networksecurity.

Keywords

Internet of Things

Fields of Interest

Medical informatics, network security, computer networks