Marte Andresen is a Senior Consultant in PwC the Netherlands. She provides advisory services within project and process management and analytical analysis and statistics for public sector, and in particular the domains of education and digital transformation. Marte is passionate about public challenges and aims at using her educational background, economics from the University of Oslo, and advisory experience to contribute to a sustainable public sector that can handle current and future challenges. Marte is currently involved in the initiatives ‘High Tech Skills for Europe’, ‘Curriculum Guidelines for Key enabling Technologies and Advanced Manufacturing Technology’ and ‘Promoting Online Training Opportunities for the Workforce in Europe’, all for the European Commission.

Mary Cleary is Deputy CEO of the Irish Computer Society/ICS Foundation and Vice-Chair of the CEN TC 428, “e-Competences and Professionalism”. She oversees ICT professionalism and digital inclusion policy and initiatives for ICS, coordinating the Irish Digital Jobs and Skills Coalition and advising the ICS CIO Forum on professionalism and Continuous Professional Development for all domains, with particular emphasis on eHealth. She holds a Master's Degree in Education, and has extensive experience of ICT professional programme design and implementation.

She has worked on several national education initiatives, promoting ICT as a teaching and learning tool and is an active member of ECDL Foundation Expert Working Group. She manages education outreach initiatives, as well as the professional and advocacy activities of HISI (Healthcare Informatics Society of Ireland), and delivery of 8 national conferences annually. She is a delegate to the NSAI (National Standards Authority of Ireland) ICT SCC, and a committee member of the Irish Expert Group on Future Skills Needs (EGFSN).

Olivier Crouzet got a Master degree as an IT engineer. During scholarship, he acted both as a technical assistant and a teaching assistant. After 2 years as system administrator in the 3rd French Internet service provider, he developed during thirteen years a well-known IT school which became a French major institution. He designed the pedagogical model, and made it evolve. Based on this educational success, a new IT school '42' is created in 2013, along with Nicolas Sadirac, Kwame Yamgnane and Florian Bucher, promoting an even more advanced training methodology, called Peer-Learning. Olivier Crouzet designed this model: 100%-project-based, without any teacher, lecture, nor knowledge transfer. Students debate, exchange ideas, try, fail, try again, to reach the goal, and finally evaluate their peers. Founded and funded by Xavier Niel, owner of one of the four French telecom company, '42' is totally free for the students. In this spirit of social opening, Olivier Crouzet, while still evolving the pedagogical model of the school, is also promoting evolution in the French education system through various conferences.

Peter has been working in the European Commission for more than 20 years in positions including financial control of the Joint Research Centre, enforcement of EU environmental legislation, accession negotiations with Poland and coordination of the environment negotiations with all accession countries, Innovation Policy and European Research Area Policy. He was a Cabinet member of Enlargement Commissioner Günter Verheugen and Head of Cabinet of the Science and Research Commissioner Janez Potočnik.

Since 2010 he is at Directorate-General Research and Innovation where he was first responsible for Innovation and since 2016 for Industrial Technologies.

Before joining the European Commission in 1991, Peter worked as a lawyer in a German law firm. Peter is a lawyer by training with a doctorate degree in German constitutional law and European law.

Anders Flodstrom is the Education Director of EIT Digital. He was a Governing Board (GB) member and vice chair of the first EIT GB. He worked actively in establishing EIT. He is a former University Chancellor of all Swedish Universities and University Colleges. He is a former University President of KTH and Linköping University. He is a former GB member and Secretary General of the Swedish National Foundation for Science and Engineering.

Anders Flodstrom is a Professor in Physics, specializing in surface physics and experimental studies done by synchrotron radiation. He is a cofounder to MAX IV a world leading synchrotron radiation source and at that time he was an internationally recognized surface physicist. Anders Flodstrom started his innovation and research work as a researcher at Xerox PARC Stanford, NIST at Gaithersburg and HASYlab at Hamburg. In a parallel entrepreneurial career during the eighties, he was co-owner and CTO for a high tech company developing thin film technology and products for optical storage. A number of CD and DVD production units were sold on a global market.

He has chaired and been a GB member in many companies; start-ups, scale ups and matures.

Today one of the really interesting one is an American foundation I4J, Innovation for Jobs, where the creation and destruction of jobs due to the digital transformation is analyzed, researched on and debated.

Anders Flodstrom is known in Sweden for his opinions on how academic and impact qualities can be measured. In 2012 he fought his opinions with the liberal minister of Higher Education and Research and resigned when the Government did not accept his proposal.

Manuela Geleng works for the European Commission where she is currently the Director for “Skills” in the Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion. As Director, she is responsible for implementing the Commission's Skills Agenda and the corresponding tools, such as the European Qualification Framework, as well as policy processes related to vocational and educational training (VET).

Alex Hay-Plumb is Director of Partnerships for Generation: You Employed, a global non-profit. Generation trains and places disconnected youth in jobs and, after four years of operation, is live in twelve countries and 100 cities, with 27,000+ graduates and 2,800+ employer partners. Alex leads Generation’s multinational partnerships with employers, funders and other organizations, including IKEA Foundation and Google.org. Previously, Alex led Generation in the United Kingdom, and was a consultant in the McKinsey & Company London office. Alex holds a BA from the University of Cambridge.

Luc Hendrickx is since 2000 Director of Enterprise Policy and External Relations at SMEunited (formerly UEAPME), the European employer's organisation representing the interests of crafts and SMEs at EU level. Across the whole of Europe, SMEunited represents through its 67 member organisations over 12 million enterprises with nearly 55 million employees.

In this function he is responsible for SME policy, better regulation, legal affairs, internal market issues, accounting, retail, tourism, digitalisation, CSR, international trade and standardisation. He has been and still is a member of different European Commission’s expert/stakeholder groups. He is member of the board or EURid the registry manager of the .eu and .ею country code top-level domains.

From 1997 until 2000 he was member of cabinet of the Flemish Minister of Environment and Employment. In 1989 he joined UNIZO, the Belgian SME organisation, as Legal Counsellor. Between 1992 and 1998 he also lectured at the Flemish Economic High School (VLEKHO) in Brussels. He started his career in 1986 as salesman in his sister’s do-it-your self shop.

Luc Hendrickx has a Law degree from the Catholic University of Leuven (B), a Diploma from the Institut Européen des Hautes Etudes Internationales of Nice (F) and a Master in European Studies from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (S).

As a senior research consultant, Tobias Hüsing helps clients understand the changing skills landscape during the digital transformation we see both at macro and micro level. Tobias has been doing and leading research in the area of skills and work for more than 10 years including studies about digital skills and future skills creation, the digital transformation of SMEs, digital entrepreneurship, IT labour market scenarios and forecasts, innovation and knowledge transfer co-operation and policies, and the socio-economic impact of ICT. Tobias’ interest is especially in empirical and quantitative data based research and policy consultancy for clients such as the European Commission, other government and (IT) industry clients.

Tobias has been responsible for developing several large scale cross-country surveys, he is the author of several indices and indicator scoreboards and contributed to a number of observatories. Tobias has repeatedly authored and presented digital labour market forecasts, building on the major technological, social, education, labour market and demographic trends.

He recently finished the service contracts and the project ‘HumanCapital – Skills and Competences’ (2017) for the EIT – European Institute for Innovation and Technology’ and involved in a service contract for the European Commission on ‘Digital Organisational Frameworks and IT Professionalism’ (2016-2019) and is now working on the service contract ‘High-Tech Skills for Europe - Scaling up Best Practices and Re-focusing Funding Programmes and Incentives’ (2017-2019) for the European Commission.

Experienced ecosystem developer and innovation management expert. Currently Ville is the CEO at Demola Global, the forerunner of co-creation facilitation for business renewal. Demola brings together industry experts from leading companies and millennials from our alliance universities around the globe to multidisciplinary co-creation challenges. Prior to Demola, Ville has been running national startup incubation network and co-founded an innovation center in Finland. His work has been recognized with Baltic Sea Region Innovation award and Nokia Foundation award for achievements in facilitating university, industry and regional innovation cooperation.

Kevin E. Kelly has served as Director of AWS Certification and Education Programs for 3 years. He has been at Amazon Web Services for over ten years serving in a variety of roles including Solutions Architect, and Americas Solutions Architect Leader. Leading the global AWS Certification team he manages the global development and delivery of certifications for Developers, Solutions Architecture, Cloud Operations, Machine Learning, Security, and Alexa Skills Building. He also manages several global education and training initiatives focused on closing the IT cloud skills gap by upskilling and training; veterans, transitioning and displaced workers, as well as underrepresented groups in Academia and in Industry. Kevin holds a bachelor’s of science degree in computer science from Mercer University, and master’s degree in information systems from the University of Montana. He is a co-author of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide and holds the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect – Associate, and Solutions Architect – Professional certifications. Kevin lives in Colorado where he hikes and fishes in his free time.

Werner B. Korte was and is responsible for managing many large-scale international research and development and consulting projects in relation to the new forms of work and employment, e-Skills, monitoring and benchmarking the information society, demographic change and ageing, ICT services for energy saving in social housing and public buildings and other topic areas for different DGs of the European Commission (DG INFSO (CNECT), ENTR (GROW), EAC, EMPL), the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency, IPTS, national ministries, federal and regional governments and ministries in Germany, other European countries, in Qatar and global IT industry players like Cisco or Microsoft. In the e-skills domain Werner was the project coordinator of studies on monitoring and forecasting e-skills demand and supply, benchmarking, studies on policies on multi-stakeholder partnerships for e-skills in Europe quality labelling and responsible for the development of several executive briefings for Cisco Systems and another e-skills forecasting project for the ING Belgique Bank, working on the initiatives ‘European Guidelines and Quality Labels for e-Leadership Curricula’ and ‘e-Leadership skills for SMEs’, the service contracts ‘Leadership skills for digital and key enabling technologies in Europe’ all for the European Commission. He has recently completed the eSkills4Diversity project for J.P. Morgan and is currently coordinating the service contract 'High-tech skills for Europe' also for the European Commission.

Brendan is Chairperson of Skillnet Ireland, the National Agency for Workforce Learning in Ireland, with over 65 distinct Learning Networks nationwide supporting over 15000 Companies and over 50,000 trainees. The Skillnet Ireland mission is to facilitate increased participation in enterprise training and workforce learning in Ireland and in doing so to ensure that businesses have the necessary skills to thrive and to maintain a highly skilled workforce. Brendan is passionate about workforce development issues and helping organisations and workers invest in skill development and to prepare for the ‘future of work’ issues that we now face. Brendan is a leading expert in people strategy, employee relations, employment policy, change management and dispute resolution with 30 years of experience backed judgement. At Stratis, Brendan and his colleagues support organisations who want to lead improvements in critical areas of Employee Relations, People Strategy and Workplace Policy. He brings career experience, knowledge and insight to the full advantage of clients in leading people strategies and supporting senior leaders on any sensitive employment and people strategy issues. Brendan worked with Ireland's national business organisation, Ibec until 2013, where as a member of the leadership team he had a successful career as Director of Industrial Relations and Human Resource Services. He engages with trade unions, government, state agencies, with other stakeholders and has an excellent appreciation of National and European employment policy. He is also Deputy Chairman of the Governing Body of the National College of Ireland and previously served as a board member of the Labour Relations Commission until 2015 (now the Workplace Relations Commission). Brendan is a member of the Public Affairs Committee of the World Employment Confederation and previously served on both the Social Affairs Committee of Business Europe and as a member of the Governing Board of Eurofound.

Nicola De Michelis is currently Director for Smart and Sustainable Development and Programme Implementation in Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain, in the Directorate General for regional and urban policy.

He joined the European Commission in 1996. He spent most of his career working on regional policies. In particular, he has been member of the team, which prepared and negotiated the legislative and financial package of cohesion policy for the period 2007-2013. He was the deputy head of cabinet of Johannes Hahn during his full mandate from 2009 until 2014, closely following the reform of cohesion policy for the period 2014-2020. At the end of 2014, he was appointed Director in DG REGIO with responsibility for the intervention of the structural funds in north Europe, for urban and territorial development, and for inclusive growth. From 2015 until 2018, he was the head of the cabinet of Corina Cretu.

Before joining the European institution, he worked for four years in the Territorial Development service of the OECD on issues related to urban energy management, urban transport, and to the relation between information and communication technologies and territorial development.

Nicola De Michelis, of Italian nationality, holds a university degree in economic from the University of Modena (Italy). He is married and has two kids.

Pieter Moerman is program director at the Platform for Science and Technology. He is responsible for programs concerning vocational and higher education, with a strong focus on public private partnerships. He co-initiated the initiative of Katapult, a network of >180 PPPs in vocational and higher education, aimed at improving effectiveness of cooperation. He holds two master degrees on public policy and governance. As an PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, he focuses on problem solving behaviour in public-private partnerships in the context of rapid innovation.

Malin Rosqvist is a senior project manager at RISE, Research Institutes of Sweden, also acting as program strategist for the strategic innovation program PiiA, Process industrial IT & Automation. Previous to these positions, Malin has worked as a project and program manager within software engineering and embedded systems research at Chalmers University of Technology and Mälardalen University, Sweden, and previous to that as marketing manager at ABB, focusing on robotics and automation.

Malin specializes in running projects in cooperation between industry and academia and is passionate about life-long learning and how to improve knowledge exchange and technical transfer from research through education. One of the educational projects in the portfolio is the PROMPT initiative, Professional Master in Software Engineering, which was awarded the European Digital Skills Award 2016. PROMPT is a national educational initiative, run in cooperation with several academic parties and a number of leading Swedish industrial companies. The goal is to enforce and increase advanced software competencies and innovativeness in industry. The PROMPT initiative is offering university courses on advanced level, directed towards professionals. The courses are largely web-based, tailored to fit in combination with work, and free of charge for both the student and the company.

Sebastian-Tim Schmitz-Hertzberg is project manager of the governmental funding program “go-digital” at the EuroNorm Association for Quality Assurance and Innovation Management in Berlin. The program is focused on SME with the potential of digital transformation and offers financial support in three different areas: the digitalization of business processes, digital market development and stabilization of the SME’s IT security measures. Previously Sebastian worked as consultant and reviewer of R&D projects in the field of medical engineering, pharmacy and biotechnology. As quality manager he was furthermore responsible for maintenance of EuroNorm’s own integrated management system. His educational background is based on a Master degree in bioengineering and a Ph.D. in bioanalytics. During his scientific career, which was mainly focused on research in the field of autonomous biosensors, he worked at the National University of Singapore (2007), as well as the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2011) and was later employed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering in Potsdam, Germany until 2014.

Ms Lucilla Sioli is the Director for "Artificial Intelligence and Digital Industry" within Directorate-General CONNECT at the European Commission. She is responsible for the coordination of the European digitisation of industry strategy and for policy development in the area of artificial intelligence (AI). The directorate also supports R&D&I in key digital industrial technologies including microelectronics, photonics, robotics and AI. Lucilla holds a PhD in economics from the University of Southampton (UK) and one from the Catholic University of Milan (Italy) and has been a civil servant with the European Commission since 1997.

Jan is an international strategy consultant, speaker and investor and Member of the Steering Committee of the High-Tech Skills for Industry. He is Founder of Resting - Advise from the Future. A C-suite strategy consulting firm with a focus on: social intelligence and knowledge development, innovation eco systems and leadership development.

Jan is a international speaker and start-up investor in Legal, Tech Social, Tech sector. He also serves in various boards and advisory boards around the globe.

He has clients in the private, not for profit and governmental sector including UN and EU as direct or sub contractor in bigger projects.

Jan served as the global head of government, public and not for profit industry in PwC up to 2015. He has also worked a lot with World Economic Forum (WEF) in the area of future of Urbanization, cities and global governance systems. Some years ago he was awarded by Microsoft as one of 50 most influential persons on smart cities. He lives in Sweden outside the university city Lund.

Slawomir Tokarski obtained PhD degree at the European University Institute in Florence in 1995.

He joined the Polish administration and headed a team coordinating the preparations for the accession negotiations and preparing policy analysis for the Chief Negotiator.

In 2004 he joined the Commission as a Cabinet member of the Commissioner responsible for the regional policy. In 2009 he was nominated Head of Unit dealing with economic policy and co-ordination of EU funding in DG MARE.

In March 2012 he became Head of Defence, Aeronautics and Maritime industries in DG Enterprise.

In February 2016 Mr Tokarski became Director, Dir F "Innovation and Advanced manufacturing" (DG GROW).

Dr. Olle Vogel holds a position as Programme Manager at the Knowledge Foundation with the main responsibility to develop and manage national programs for education/competence development. The programs are based on co-operation between academy and industry and addresses areas such as Software engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Social media and Knowledge intensive production systems. Prior to this position Vogel worked as Project Manager at the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science with responsibility for chiefly Energy issues and Foresight studies. Vogel has also been appointed as a research officer at the Swedish Research Council for Engineering Sciences (today part of the Swedish Research Council), responsible for the areas Engineering Physics, Information Technology, Biotechnology, and Medical Technology. Before that Vogel was a researcher in Atomic physics at University of Uppsala. He holds a degree in Engineering Science from the same university where he also has studied Classical Archaeology and Ancient History. Vogel is on the board of the Tandem Accelerator Laboratory in Uppsala and has been a member of other boards and committees for national laboratories/facilities in physics. He has a broad experience of commissions concerning policy and evaluation regarding efforts in competence development as well as research.