Speakers
Luc Frieden, Prime Minister of Luxembourg
Following the legislative elections of 8 October 2023, Luc Frieden was appointed Prime Minister by HRH the Grand Duke on 17 November 2023. He currently leads the coalition government between his party, the Christian Democrats (CSV/EPP), and the Liberals (DP/Renew Europe).
Luc Frieden was a member of the Luxembourg government from 1998 to 2013 in various governments under Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker. He served as Minister of Justice, Minister of Defence, Minister of the Treasury and Budget and Minister of Finance.
John Abel, Technical Director in the office of the CTO at Google Cloud
John leads the EMEA Office of the CTO team for Google Cloud engaging on emerging themes like AI and Google Distributed Cloud. Blending engineering and customer engagement is an important part of the role.
John works within a diverse team drawn from multiple backgrounds and skill sets to ensure synergies of various perspectives working together comes to the fore. John also supports a number of STEM projects that are aimed at enhancing participation overall but particularly from a wider range of backgrounds. John is also very proud of being an ambassador for British Dyslexia Association.
Marie-Hélène Jobin, Vice Rector for Partnerships and International Relations
Prof. Marie-Hélène Jobin is a Canadian national and was previously Vice-Rector (Director) for International Relations and Partnerships at HEC Montréal, a French-speaking academic institution with internationally renowned teaching programmes and research in management. Her area of expertise is operations management and logistics and her research includes activities in the optimisation of public health sector operations.
Yves Le Traon, Director of SnT
Prof. Dr. Yves Le Traon joined SnT as a professor in 2009. He co-founded DataThings, a successful spin-off from the University of Luxembourg. The company offers advanced AI software for scalable decision-making in real-time. Le Traon started in France. He got his engineering degree and PhD in Computer Science from the Institut National Polytechnique in Grenoble in 1997. He was an associate professor at the University of Rennes. Then, he became an expert at France Télécom R&D. Later, he returned to research as a full professor at Telecom Bretagne. There, he pioneered software testing techniques to find security flaws.
Carlo Duprel, Head of SnT Technology Transfer Office
Carlo Duprel holds a PhD in Physics, from RWTH Aachen (Germany). He worked for more than 13 years for the National Research Fund in Luxembourg where he was responsible for Programme Development and International Relations. Then he served Deloitte Luxembourg as Director in the Advisory & Consulting Group. He held several functions from this position, such as leading the FinTech activity and managing the BOOST programme providing professional services to startups. Furthermore, he led the Policy team specialised on providing policy advice to European institutions, agencies and bodies, as well as the Luxembourg Government.
Flashtalk Speakers
Citlali Bruce Rosete
Doctoral Researcher at the Space Systems Engineering Research Group (Spasys)
Always looking up
Citlali Bruce Rosete studied Mechatronics Engineering and Avionics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Then she flew to Sweden and received a Master’s Degree in Aerospace Engineering at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Citlali joined SnT in August 2022 and became Doctoral Researcher at SpaSys research group.
Her research focuses on miniaturised spacecraft technology and space systems, and more specifically picosatellite swarms, where multiple very small satellites work together, and their potential in distributed beamforming missions.
Shiva Hanifi
Doctoral researcher at Ubiquitous and Intelligent Systems (UBIX) research group
Research serving industry
Shiva Hanifi studied Control Engineering at the University of Tabriz, in Iran. Then she studied a Master in Control Engineering at the Sapienza University of Rome.
She was a researcher at the Instituto Italiano di Tecnologia. She joined SnT last year as Doctoral Researcher in Robotic Vision. She works together with SolarCleano to deepen the knowledge in computer vision and robotics. The company is specialized in cleaning robots for photovoltaic panels. The robots are now able to do more than a cleaning: they detect and report defects to enhance the efficiency of the electricity production.
Nesryne Mejri
Doctoral Researcher at Computer Vision, Imaging and Machine Intelligence (CVI2) research group
A real expertise in deepfakes
Nesryne Mejri earned her engineering degree in Industrial Computing and Control Systems in 2018. She graduated from the National Institute of Applied Sciences of Tunis. She earned her Master in Information and Computer Science from the University of Luxembourg in 2021. The same year, she joined CVI2 research group at SnT.
Her research interests include Computer Vision and Deep Learning. She focuses on media forensics and visual forgery detection like deepfake. Nesryne joined the CVI2 research group, which focuses on Computer Vision, Imaging, and Machine Intelligence. Prof. Djamila Aouada leads the group and is her advisor.
Fred Philippy
PhD Candidate at the Trustworthy Software Engineering (Trux) group, and a Data Scientist at Zortify
When research meets working life
Fred Philippy studied Economics and Mathematics at the University of Strasbourg, in France. He studied a Master in Applied Mathematics (statistics) in the same university.
Zortify provides AI-based employee diagnostics tools for HR. He joined the young company Zortify in 2021 as Data scientist. Two years later he started a PhD at SnT. He studies Natural Language Processing (NLP). His work focuses on multilingual language models and cross-lingual NLP. He especially focuses on low-resource languages.
Grégory Nain
Chief Operating Officer at DataThings
From research to entrepreneurship
Grégory Nain studied Software Design and Development at Bordeaux University. He earned a Master’s in Electronics and a PhD in Computer Science. His focus was Software Engineering for the Internet of Things at the University of Rennes. He joined SnT in 2012 and became Research Associate.
His research focused on Machine Learning and Big Data. His curiosity for those topics boosted his entrepreneurial mind. Gregory co-founded Datathings in 2017. This start-up provides machine learning and live data analytics to many businesses. The start-up worked with the University of Luxembourg to create GreyCat. It’s a tool for machine learning and data analytics. This toolset develops customised operational decision-making tools.