powered by
powered by
Octavian Palade is the Content Strategy Manager for Internet Corp, one of the most important publishers in the Romanian online media market. He's also a seasoned tech & business journalist, with over 11 years of experience, writing about startups and innovation for start-up.ro, the leading local startup news website. Pasionate about video, Octavian is also the Project Manager for VideoCorp, Internet Corp's multimedia department.
Octavian Oprea is the acting President of the Authority for the Digitalization of Romania since January 11th 2021. In his current role, he oversaw the development of the public platform dedicated to online payments - Ghișeul.ro - that reached over 1 million users and collected over 200 million euros this year. Mr. Oprea was formerly the Vice President in charge of managing the digitalization projects of the Authority. During 2010-2016, he attended the courses of the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest, specializing in economics and management. After graduating, Mr. Oprea became a business consultant, promoting efficient management techniques to plan company resources allocation through the use of software solutions. Using data-driven decision-making tools, Mr. Oprea generated excellent results in a variety of industries – from financial and human resource management to production, trade and sales. From 2017 until February 2020, when he became Vice President of ADR, Mr. Oprea worked for a global software company as Interfaces Country Lead & Project Manager. His duties covered all stages of project implementation, from business analysis and user software training, to Go-live support and post-implementation support. He was involved in managing the interoperability process of the systems of a top multinational corporation in the FMCG industry, by interconnecting platforms such as ERP, CRM, EDI, etc.
-
Mr. Sărmaș has developed his professional career in public and private organizations, always linked to the digital sector and the governance of the information and knowledge society. He is currently serving as member of the Romanian Parliament while acting as Chairman of the IT&C Commission within the Chamber of Deputies. Mr. Sabin Sărmaș has been nominated Designated President to Plenipotentiary Conference 2022 of The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) by the Government of Romania. Prior to these engagements, he was President of the National Authority for Digitalization between 2019 – 2021, being responsible for the coordination and implementation of national policies, strategies, and projects in the field of the information technology, communications, and digitalization of public services. His cross-sector activities were also linked to the private sector, as software engineer and business developer within various companies located in the city of Cluj-Napoca. Therefore, Mr. Sărmaș has acknowledged and tackled the challenges of the sector from a multi-stakeholder perspective, becoming known as transformational and visionary expert. Mr. Sabin Sărmaș graduated the Telecommunications Faculty within the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca as Diplomate Engineer, followed by academic fellowships at Vrije University of Brussels and Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (as PhD).
Razvan Sighinas joined ING Bank Romania management Board in March as CIO. Răzvan is active in the IT field for more than 18 years, having started as a software engineer and moving on to operations and senior management roles in US and Europe for major players including Oracle, Vodafone and Electronic Arts. He holds an engineer’s degree from the Bucharest Polytechnic University, an MBA from HEC France and several major certifications in software and project management. Prior to his joining ING he operated as Senior Director for Electronic Arts, running an organization spanning across US, Canada, Romania, Ireland and India in charge of providing technology solutions and services such as game engines, big data and real time analytics solutions running behind all Electronic Arts’ digital offerings. For 10 years, he also headed the IT Operations for Vodafone Romania and created the IT Shared Service Center in Bucharest for Vodafone Group. Travelling, tennis and water sports are his main hobbies and he takes great pride in his two boys that share this passion for sports and technology.
Razvan Sighinas joined ING Bank Romania management Board in March as CIO. Răzvan is active in the IT field for more than 18 years, having started as a software engineer and moving on to operations and senior management roles in US and Europe for major players including Oracle, Vodafone and Electronic Arts. He holds an engineer’s degree from the Bucharest Polytechnic University, an MBA from HEC France and several major certifications in software and project management. Prior to his joining ING he operated as Senior Director for Electronic Arts, running an organization spanning across US, Canada, Romania, Ireland and India in charge of providing technology solutions and services such as game engines, big data and real time analytics solutions running behind all Electronic Arts’ digital offerings. For 10 years, he also headed the IT Operations for Vodafone Romania and created the IT Shared Service Center in Bucharest for Vodafone Group. Travelling, tennis and water sports are his main hobbies and he takes great pride in his two boys that share this passion for sports and technology.
Charlie has 10 years of experience in startups and Technology M&A, during which time he raised more than €1bn in funding for SMEs.
After completing his MBA, Charlie implemented the world’s first stroke rehabilitation system based on embodiment in Virtual Reality in a clinical setting and has since successfully completed projects related to Diversity and Inclusion at Google Jigsaw and the World Bank.
Steve Jarrett as Senior Vice President of Data and Artificial Intelligence Steve Jarrett has taken responsibility for a new Data and AI Department defining the Group's data strategy. This new organisation consolidates key skills to help the company develop use cases, enrich services, improve processes based on data and artificial intelligence, as well as enhance the value of this data externally. Steve has been a product leader and entrepreneur in AI and mobile for over 25 years, including building one of Facebook’s first strategic machine learning programs in 2013, working with Apple on the original iPod, and product managing the first mobile browser at General Magic. He has also been founding CEO of three software companies in the US and UK.
Emmanuel Viale is the Managing Director of the Accenture Technology Innovation organization in Europe: Labs, Ventures, Technology Incubation and the Liquid Studios. He is based in Sophia Antipolis, France where He leads the different R&D activities of the Labs nodes in Europe (Dublin, Tel Aviv and Sophia Antipolis) with a particular focus on identifying, incubating, applying and delivering applications of innovative and emerging technologies. He also leads the Liquid Studios in Europe. Recent Technology areas of focus have been around: Blockchain, Extended Reality (VR, AR, MR, 3D scanning and rendering, wearable devices, etc.), Quantum Computing and Communication, smart materials, etc. where the evolutions of the technology domains are identified, partnerships with universities and startups established and first proof--of-technology and proof-of-concepts are designed, developed and tested. Emmanuel holds a degree in Signal Processing and Computer Science from the Ecole Centrale de Marseille, France. He joined Accenture in 1997 and lives in the South of France with his wife and five children.
At Nestle, Katja is heading Sustainability across the region with the objective to embed sustainability in the Business across all categories and countries to support the transformation of food systems. Katja is part of the Executive Team of Nestle Europe, Middle East and North Africa. She has substantial strategic and operational experience with more than 23 years in global, regional and national business management, marketing, business development, innovation and sales both at Nestle and Henkel, with a proven track record including Business Executive Officer/ Managing Director with P&L responsibility for regional and national business Units. Katja holds an MBA from the University of Kiel and Executive Programs from Harvard University and IMD Business School.
Dr. Newton Howard is the founder of ni2o, Inc., a biotechnology company developing a novel, artificial-intelligence driven brain-computer interface to treat a wide range of debilitating neurological disorders and to improve cognitive and athletic performance. His career spans academia, the U.S. military and the private sector. A prolific scientific author and inventor, he is highly skilled in moving research from the lab to military and commercial applications, including technology you may use daily such as wireless hot spots, Google Earth and Google Translate. Dr. Howard holds advanced degrees in Mathematics (Oxford), Cognitive Informatics (Sorbonne), Neurosurgery (Oxford), and psychiatry (Sorbonne). He has made significant contributions to the fields of neuroscience, linguistics and national defense, including the Physics of Cognition (a mathematical framework for modeling complex medical, economic and security equilibriums), Intention Awareness (a theory for predictive modeling of naturalistic systems), Mood State Indicators (an algorithm to model mental processes involved in human speech to predict emotional states), ADAMA (a method of autonomously identifying and contextually understanding metaphors in language), the Functional Code Unit (a method for translating neurological signaling t logical data structures) and most recently, the Brain Code (a multivariate analytical model designed to extract emergent properties of the brain’s neuronal system).
Dr. Howard is a professor at Oxford University and Georgetown. He currently directs the Computational Neurosciences Lab at Oxford and is the former director of the MIT Mind Machine Project and the MIT Synthetic Intelligence Lab. He founded and sits on the Board of two nonprofits: the Howard Brain Sciences Foundation, which funds innovative research initiatives to improve our understanding of the human brain and advance the diagnosis and treatment of neurological conditions; and C4ADS, which is dedicated to providing data-driven analysis and evidence-based reporting on global conflict and transnational security issues.
Dr. Wieger Wamelink works as ecologist at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) in the Netherlands. As senior researcher he works on the effects of nitrogen deposition and climate change on biodiversity, especially on plant species. He is also one of the caretakers of the nature gardens on the Wageningen campus and as campus ecologist responsible for the management of the green areas on the campus. In 2013 Wieger started Food For Mars and Moon with as goal to crow crops on Mars and the moon applying the regoliths present at the planets. The research includes the effects of heavy metals present in the regoliths on the growth, effect of cosmic radiation on the plant growth, the application of human faeces as manure and the need to bring worms, bacteria and pollinators to create a sustainable closed agricultural ecosystem. To boldly grow where no plant has grown before.
Haiyan Zhang is a designer, engineer and maker of things. Haiyan is Chief of Staff for Xbox, Microsoft’s Gaming division. She was formerly Senior Director of Innovation at Microsoft Research Cambridge. She has also served as an inventor and TV host on the BBC series, Big Life Fix, inventing cutting-edge technology in support of people and communities in need. Previous roles include Innovation Director at Xbox Games Studio and Co-Founder, Design & Development Lead for the SaaS platform, OpenIDEO. Working at the design consultancy IDEO, Haiyan created innovative tech experiences for clients including Mattel, Electronic Arts, HBO, Citibank, France Telecom, Alcatel, Cisco, and AT&T. Haiyan holds a Masters degree with Distinction in Interaction Design from the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea and a Bachelor of Computer Science (1st-Class Honours) from Monash University, Australia. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the British Academy of Film & Television Arts.