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Martine Delannoy is Chief Foresight Officer at Digipolis in Ghent. She leads a team that inspires, engages and co-creates the digital future of the city of Ghent (in Belgium). Constantly scanning for trends, signals and disruptions. Making sense of these, to extract the implications, possibilities and challenges they entail. Inspiring decision makers and civil servants to adopt a futures mindset. Engaging with thematic experts to work out their desired futures and the paths to achieve these.

She is the initiator and chair of a taskforce within Eurocities sharing knowledge, experiences and advancing the practice of foresight in cities across Europe.

Through ‘Cities of People’ she also helps governments shift towards a new open collaborative model of city making.  This is already possible today through involving stakeholders from the government, academic, market and especially citizens in each city.

She is passionate about the futures of cities and how they can be brought to be. She is a firm believer that our future is not fixed and should be co-created. This demands effort, but is worth it!

Openness, divergent thinking, linking ideas and people are her strengths that she has built on in a 20 years career in the ICT sector, among which 14 years in the public sector.

In the past she also worked in the fields of e-inclusion initiating a program uniting all the actors in Ghent.

In her free time she enjoys catching up on reading, visualizing ideas and learning.

Professor Dr. Panos Fitsilis is full Professor at University of Thessaly, Greece.  Previously Prof. Fitsilis was Professor at University of Applied Sciences of Thessaly (UAST), visiting professor at Innopolis University, Kazan, Russian Federation, and Lecturer at Hellenic Open University (HOU).  

Prof. P. Fitsilis has extensive project management experience with the development and deployment of large IT systems and extensive management experience in various senior management positions such as:  Director of School of Business and Economics at UAST, Vice President of UAST Research Committee, Head of Project Management department at UAST, Director of Research Laboratory «Business Information Systems and eCommerce»,  Head of Business Unit (BU) at Intrasoft International, a large international IT company, etc. During his work as BU manager at Intrasoft International he was responsible for the development, deployment and operation of a number of prestigious IT systems for European Commission, (CORDIS, and Electronic Proposal Submission System – EPSS), European Parliament, European Central Bank, etc. 

He has worked in more than 60 research or commercial IT projects, in various roles (programmer, project manager, quality engineer, BU manager, consultant). He is the author of four books: “Contemporary Business Information Systems, 2^nd edition”, “A practical guide to entrepreneurship – case studies”, “Software Project Management”, “Object Oriented Development using UML” and author of more than 100 papers published at scientific journals and international conferences. His research interests include Smart Cities, Business Information Systems, Social Media Applications, Internet of Things, Software Project Management, etc.

Currently, he is a member of the working group for “Smart and Viable Cities” at Hellenic Standardization Organization ELOT, member of ITU initiative “United for Smart Sustainable Cities” (U4SSC), member of Regional Board for “Research and Innovation” for the Region of Sterea Ellada, Greece, evaluator at European Commission Horizon 2020, etc. 

His research interests include smart cities and factories, business information systems, software project management, software engineering, etc.

Nikolaos Kontinakis works as an acting project director EUROCITIES, the network of major European cities, coordinating a portfolio of more than 20 EU-funded projects.

He has been a senior projects’ coordinator in EUROCITIES’ knowledge society and smart cities projects and has led the international cooperation work and the network’s contribution to the EU-China innovation platform on sustainable urbanisation. Among others, he has coordinated the Green Digital Charter initiative and EUROCITIES’ work for the development of a performance measurement framework for smart cities under the CITYkeys project, the promotion of green ICT via the ICTfootprint.eu project and the Smart Cities Information System.

For the last 16 years, he has worked as a project coordinator and researcher in the areas of smart cities, climate change mitigation and adaptation, energy efficiency and energy transition, energy markets, and the sustainable development of local authorities.

Panagiotis Lambetidis is a results driven IT & Security Manager with a CISSP® Certification in good standing, providing hands-on experience in Security expertise as well as IT Systems Administration.

Panagiotis has a background in Information Technology, Security engineering principles and methodologies as well as DevOps practices for large projects within the European Commission and National Administrations.

His experience resides in the management, configuration, monitoring and maintaining large Enterprise IT Infrastructure for complex IT projects with a mix in technologies both on-premise and in cloud.

Davor Meersman is CEO of Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC), a not-for-profit network that addresses global societal challenges by uniting cities and communities around a set of Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms (MIMs). MIMs are lightweight mechanisms based on open standards that enable cities across the world to share each others’ solutions, services, and data to solve common problems. OASC counts 150+ cities in 30+ countries and has partnerships with the European Commission, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum and other leading organisations. Davor is a global change maker with more than 15 years of international experience in setting up leading infrastructures and organisations on the forefront of technological innovation. He is a member of the United Nations SDG 11 Global Council, member of the European Commission’s Steering Committee on Advanced Technologies for Industry, member of the Advisory Board of the ETSI Task Force on Citizen-Centric Standards, Ambassador of ISSIP, and a judge and mentor for Belgium’s largest start-up incubator programme Start-It KBC (500+ startups). He holds a PhD in Information Systems from Curtin University, Australia.

Kasper van Hout is a European Programmes and International Relations Expert working for the Municipality of Murcia, Spain. Adopting different roles in a variety of projects pertaining to the Horizon 2020, Urbact, International Urban Cooperation, Erasmus+, etc. frameworks, his fields of expertise include urban revitalisation and regeneration, governance and policy, innovation, citizen participation and engagement, communication and strategy development.

Other tasks include the coordination of the Digital Citizenship Taskforce on behalf of the City of Murcia, co-chair, within the Eurocities Knowledge Society Forum, and the municipalities participation in the Urban Agenda for the EU Partnership on Culture and Cultural Heritage as a technical expert.