Keynote Speakers

Dimitris Kyritsis, EPFL, Switzerland.

Prof. Dr. Dimitris Kyritsis (Kiritsis) is leading the ICT for Sustainable Manufacturing group at the Institute of Mechanical Engineering of EPFL, Switzerland. His research interests are Closed-Loop Lifecycle Management, Sustainable Manufacturing, Cognitive Digital Twins, Industrial Ontologies and Industrial Data Analytics. He has more than 250 publications. Dimitris served as Director of the Doctoral Program on Robotics, Control and Intelligent Systems of EPFL from 2019 to 2021. From 2013 to 2019, Dimitris was the Chair of IFIP WG5.7-Advances in Production Management Systems. He is founding member of the International Society for Engineering Asset Management and co-founder of the Industrial Ontologies Foundry. Since 2019 Dimitris is member of the WEF Global Future Council on Advanced Manufacturing and Value Chains.

Cognitive Digital Twins: connecting the dots of Closed-Loop Lifecycle Management

As a key enabling technology of Industry 4.0, Digital Twin (DT) has started to being applied to various industrial domains covering different lifecycle phases of products and systems. To fully realize the Industry 4.0 vision, it is necessary to integrate multiple relevant DTs of a system according to a specific mission. This requires integrating all available data, information and knowledge related to the system across its entire lifecycle. It is a challenging task due to the high complexity of modern industrial systems. Semantic technologies such as ontology and knowledge graphs provide potential solutions by empowering DTs with augmented cognitive capabilities.

    The Cognitive Digital Twin (CDT) concept has been recently proposed which reveals a promising evolution of the current DT concept towards a more intelligent, comprehensive, and full lifecycle representation of complex systems. To explain the CDT vision and facilitate its development, we designed a three-dimensional CDT reference architecture based on the RAMI4.0 architecture. This reference architecture contains the key elements of the CDT vision including full lifecycle phases, system hierarchical level and multi-layer functions. Moreover, we introduce the main enabling technologies for CDT development and implementation directly correlated with the CDT characteristics, including semantic technologies, MBSE, PLM etc. The couplings of these technologies is another challenging task of CDT applications. From cyber-physical system perspective, it is critical to interconnect subsystems across different domains and lifecycle phases using adapters, brokers and other types of middleware mechanisms.

    In this keynote lecture, the concept of CDT will be presented together with a use-case developed recently in collaboration with a major European industry of the aerospace sector with focus on the design phase of an aircraft manufacturing system including an architecture of the proposed solution and a toolchain for a proof-of-concept implementation.

Massimiliano Luca Dragoni, European Commission

Senior Officer with a solid professional track record at the European Commission. Competences span from European Innovation Policy, technology and innovation programs, to international cooperation, digital innovation, and digital entrepreneurship. Responsible for the Startup Europe program and Digital transition. Expert in Policy implementation, project negotiation, Budgeting, Business Planning, International Relations, Deep Techs, Blockchain and start-up ecosystems. Works proficiently in five European languages. Visiting Lecturer at Vreij Universiteit in Brussels (VUB), Bocconi University in Milan and Politecnico in Turin. Reserve Army Officer of the Italian Special Reserve, graduated from Scuola di Applicazione in Turin and completed a master on strategic studies at Istituto Alti Studi Difesa in Rome. He is married and has two sons.

Collaborative Potential of AI and Human Ingenuity in Co-creating Value in Society 5.0

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, blockchain technology, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are slowly and steadily becoming an integral part of our daily lives. In the future, humans will collaborate with machines to exchange and share information, work towards a common goal to fulfill individual and organizational needs. AI-driven robots and tools are predicted to replace humans in organizations to ensure agility in business operations. But the question is not whether deep learning will replace humans in offices, the real question is when. Assuming that technology will keep its pace of evolution, it is a matter of years, not decades.

    But society must be ready for this ‘step jump’ towards Society 5.0. The public administration as well as the SMEs are still staggering in adjusting to Society 4.0. the impact may be dramatic, not only in terms of loss of new job creation but also in the way the citizens will perceive the threat of the machines. Not least, how will organizations reshape and optimize their business strategies to integrate human ingenuity and artificial neural networks?

    Today the AI-driven revolution is transforming machines into intellectual collaborators. The potential advantages of a sensor-guided, robot-human collaboration are massive. The scientific community and the business community should be aware there might be certain disadvantages to this collaboration as well. Appropriate regulation and guidelines are needed both to ensure a smooth transition and to reassure that nobody will be left behind.

Salvatore Ammirato, University of Calabria, Italy.

Ass. Prof. Salvatore Ammirato acts at the Department of Mechanical, Energy and Management Engineering at University of Calabria (ITALY), where he teaches courses for undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD students in the fields of Business process management, Knowledge management and Business organization. After gaining his PhD, in 2008 he was appointed as External Researcher at the Centre for Research in Transnational Education, Leadership and Performance, University of Canberra (AUSTRALIA). In the period 2013-2016 he was Visiting Professor at Tampere University of Technology in Pori (FINLAND) where he held the Master level course of “Knowledge management and Decision Making”. Salvatore Ammirato has demonstrated leadership in various academic positions. He was charged as principal investigator of research and industrial projects and member of the steering committees of other international projects of significance addressing organization change and digitization. During its career he is continuously deepening the understanding of the diverse aspects of learning, leadership and human resource management e.g., see his Springer book on leadership (2013), titled Adaptive Decision Making and Intellectual Style. Overall, he is the author of more than 70 papers published in international journals and conference proceedings. His main research interests include business process management, digital entrepreneurship and sustainable development.

Is resilience enough? Collaborative Networks towards antifragility

For a long time, scholars dealt with the concept of resilience as the way systems, people and societies are good at maintaining their current operation or returning to their previous condition if disturbed. In the business environments, a way to improving resilience (and robustness) is to set-up collaborative networks (CNs) among actors. The literature is replete with cases of CNs that have proven to be an effective means to gain sustainable development for single actors and the system overall. The proper mechanisms of the CNs paradigm enable a protective “shield” for the business actors that would be too fragile to react in a solitary fashion to external “shocks”.

    Unfortunately, the surprising and unexpected large scale disruptive events are always more frequent, strongly affecting the vulnerability of both local networks and the global business environment.

    Given the current milieu, the keynote question addressed in the talk can be formulated as: ‘Is resilience of itself sufficient for gaining long-term sustainability of collaborative networks?’

    Our analysis is sufficiently robust to conclude confidently in the negative. The talk will show that antifragility should become the higher-level goal of CNs. According to Taleb (2013), the resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the anti-fragile gets better.