The Future of Work and digitalisation of the European Innovation Area

Speakers for this event

• Barbara Kauffmann

  Barbara Kauffmann

  Director, DG Employment, European Commission

  Barbara Kauffmann is Director for employment and social governance at the European Commission (DG for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion) since 2015. Her current responsibilities include the coordination of EU country surveillance in employment, skills and social matters (European Semester, European Pillar of Social Rights), analysis (Joint Employment Report, Employment and Social Developments in Europe, etc.), Social Dialogue as well as the EU legislative initiative on minimum wages. Barbara Kauffmann is member of the Employment Committee, chairs the Social Dialogue Committee, and is deputy governor of the EU Agency Eurofound. She is also in charge of the support of Greece and Cyprus notably through the European Social Fund. Previously she worked at DG for Economic and Financial Affairs notably on macro-economic programmes for countries outside and inside the EU, and the coordination of EU economic and fiscal policy surveillance. Barbara Kauffmann studied economics at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Florida (Ph.D.). After her studies she worked at the Kiel Institute of World Economics and the German Ministry of Finance before joining the Commission.

  Director, DG Employment, European Commission

• Catholijn Jonker

  Catholijn Jonker

  Full Professor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Department of Intelligent Systems, TU Delft

  Prof. dr. Catholijn Jonker is head of the Interactive Intelligence group of the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science, TU Delft. Jonker is also full professor of Explainable Artificial Intelligence at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science of Leiden University. She is president of IFAAMAS, board member and a Fellow of EurAI, member of the Academia Europaea, president of ICT Platform of the Netherlands, member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, member of the CLAIRE National Advisory Board for The Netherlands. Current projects: EU HumaneAINet, EU TAILOR, NL Gravtiation project Hybrid Intelligence, Gravitation project Ethics of Disruptive Technologies.In the past she was chair of the Dutch Network of Female Full Professors and of De Jonge Akademie of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is co-PI of the 20 million Euro ten-year research programme on Hybrid Intelligence (starting 1.1.2020).

  Full Professor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Department of Intelligent Systems, TU Delft

• David Abbink

  David Abbink

  Full Professor Human-Robot Interaction, TUDelft

  Prof. dr. ir. David A. Abbink received his MSc. degree (2002) and PhD degree (2006) in Mechanical Engineering from Delft University of Technology. He is a full Professor there, leading the section of Human-Robot Interaction in the department of Cognitive Robotics. Research His PhD thesis on haptic assistance for car-following was awarded the best Dutch dissertation in movement sciences (2006), and contributed to the market release of Nissan’s Distance Control Assist system. David received two prestigious personal grants - VENI (2010) and VIDI (2015) and led large interdisciplinary research programmes on human-centered robotics. His research has received funding from major industry partners such as Nissan, Renault, Boeing. He currently leads an interdisciplinary community of ethnographers, psychologists, designers, philosophers and engineers to study and shape the interactions between humans and robots at work. Education David was voted best teacher of his department for seven consecutive years, best teacher of his faculty twice, and received an international open courseware award for his course “The Human Controller”. Private Life David has always worked 4 days a week, to ensure enough time for the other pleasures in life, such as drumming in rock bands, cooking, traveling and being present as a dad, husband and friend. His PhD thesis (2006) on haptic support for car-following was awarded the best Ph.D. dissertation in the Netherlands, and contributed to the market release of Nissan’s Distance Control Assist system. David’s research on human control over intelligent vehicles and other robots has been funded by personal grants - VENI (2010) and VIDI (2015) – as well as by industry (e.g., Boeing, Nissan, Renault). David was awarded best teacher of his department for seven years in a row, and best teacher of his Faculty twice.

  Full Professor Human-Robot Interaction, TUDelft

• Filippo Santoni de Sio

  Filippo Santoni de Sio

  Assistant Professor, Policy and Management, Department of Values, Technologies and Innovation, TU Delft

  I have a PhD in Moral Philosophy from the University of Torino (Italy). IN 2012 I joined TU Delft (NL), where I am currently Associate Professor in Ethics of Technology at the Section Ethics/Philosophy of Technology. Since 2017, I am also an adjunct professor in Ethics of Transportation at the Politecnico di Milano. I am Associate Editor at the Journal of Ethics, co-coordinator of the TU Delft Vision Team Robotics and in the Management Team of Tu Delft TBM AI Lab and 4TU.Ethics. From June 2019-2020 I have been Rapporteur of the EU Commission Independent Expert Group to advise on ethical issues raised by driverless mobility (E03659) and from 2017-2020 co-director of the NWO-funded interdisciplinary project Meaningful Human Control over Automated Driving Systems. I passionately teach moral philosophy to engineering students.

  Assistant Professor, Policy and Management, Department of Values, Technologies and Innovation, TU Delft

• Jens Kober

  Jens Kober

  Assistant Professor, Cognitive Robotics department, TU Delft

  Jens Kober is an associate professor at the TU Delft, Netherlands. He worked as a postdoctoral scholar jointly at the CoR-Lab, Bielefeld University, Germany and at the Honda Research Institute Europe, Germany. He graduated in 2012 with a PhD Degree in Engineering from TU Darmstadt and the MPI for Intelligent Systems. For his research he received the annually awarded Georges Giralt PhD Award for the best PhD thesis in robotics in Europe, the 2018 IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award, and has received an ERC Starting grant. He is chair of the IEEE-RAS TC Robot Learning and program chair of the Conference on Robot Learning 2020. His research interests include motor skill learning, (deep) reinforcement learning, imitation learning, interactive learning, and machine learning for control.

  Assistant Professor, Cognitive Robotics department, TU Delft

• Juha Heikkilä

  Juha Heikkilä

  Head of Unit Robotics and Artificial Intelligencem DG CONNECT

  Since 2014 Juha Heikkilä has been the Head of the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence unit in the European Commission Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, which develops the Commission policy and activities in Artificial Intelligence. The Commission has been funding a multidisciplinary programme on Cognitive Systems, Robotics and AI since 2004, focusing on smart robots and artificial systems, and in 2014 it set up a Public-Private Partnership in Robotics. Previously, Juha Heikkilä was involved in computational and corpus linguistic research at the University of Helsinki, and he has a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge.

  Head of Unit Robotics and Artificial Intelligencem DG CONNECT

• Lina Gálvez Muñoz

  Lina Gálvez Muñoz

  Member of the European Parliament, S&D, Spain

  Lina Gálvez Muñoz is a Member of the European Parliament since July 2019. In the EP, she is Vice-chair of the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy and member of the Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA). She also belongs to the committees on Employment and Social Affairs and Women's Rights and Gender Equality. Lina Gálvez Muñoz PhD, European University Institute (Florence) is Economic History and Institutions Full Professor at the Economics Department at Pablo Olavide University (Seville). She has also been professor at the Universities of Reading (Reading), Carlos III (Madrid), and as a visiting professor at Centre for time use research at Oxford University (Oxford). She has more than hundred scientific publications and she has also been Vice-Rector of her university from 2007 to 2012 and served as Regional Minister of Knowledge, Research and University of the Government of Andalusia from 2018 to 2019.

  Member of the European Parliament, S&D, Spain

• Tim van der Hagen

  Tim van der Hagen

  Rector Magnificus / President Executive Board, TU Delft

  Tim van der Hagen (born 1959) has been President of Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) since May 2016 and also Rector Magnificus since January 2018. He studied Applied Physics at Eindhoven University of Technology. After taking his doctorate in 1989 at TU Delft, he stayed on at the Reactor Institute Delft, which conducts radiation-related research into energy, materials and health. He was director of the Institute between 2005 and 2012. In 1999 he was appointed professor of Reactor Physics. Between September 2010 and May 2016 he was Dean of the Applied Sciences faculty at TU Delft. During this latter period Tim was one of the instigators of the Delft Plan, published in 2015, which set out TU Delft’s vision on how the Netherlands could play a leading role in the European energy market. In 2015, he was also the co-author of an advisory report ‘A prosperous nation without CO2: Towards a sustainable energy supply by 2050’ produced by the Dutch Council for the Environment and Infrastructure (Rli). Van der Hagen has broad managerial experience in the field of energy, including as a former member of the Dutch Energy Council and the Top team of the Top Sector Energy in the Netherlands. Both bodies advise the government on the implementation of energy policy. In addition to this he is a member of the national Advisory Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (AWTI) which was established by the Dutch government to advise the government and parliament on policy in the areas of scientific research, technological development and innovation. Furthermore, Tim is a Board member of the Royal Netherlands Society of Engineers (KIvI), a member of the Board of the Netherlands Energy Research Alliance (NERA) and of GROW (Growth through Research, Development and Demonstration in Offshore Wind), member of the Supervisory Board of Central Organisation for Radioactive Waste (COVRA) and Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN), the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) Strategic Advisory Board on Energy and the Supervisory Board of Advanced Dutch Energy Materials (ADEM). He also holds a chair in the General board of the 4TU Federation, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) and the Steering Committee of Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Alliance (LDE). Between May 2014 and May 2016 he was Chair of the Supervisory Board of HollandPTC (Holland Particle Therapy Centre) jointly built on the Delft campus by the Erasmus and Leiden University Medical Centres and the TU Delft . In May 2016, Tim van der Hagen was appointed a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion. In his free time, he plays in a pop cover band and he enjoys going to jazz concerts, the theatre and museums.

  Rector Magnificus / President Executive Board, TU Delft

• Victor Negrescu

  Victor Negrescu

  Member of the European Parliament, S&D, Romania

  Victor Negrescu is the vice-chair of the Culture and Education Committee and rapporteur on the shaping of an European digital education policy. He is an emerging leader, active in the field of education, digital innovation, entrepreneurship, European financing, citizens' rights, and institutional affairs. His latest success was to promote in the European Parliament a resolution on education and to introduce in the Recovery and Resilience Facility a recommendation to Member States to allocate 10% for education and 2% for the culture and creative sector. Former Romanian Minister for EU Affairs in charge with the preparation of the EU Council Presidency, he was in the past a digital innovator and a professor before holding the position of MEP. Victor Negrescu is an active promoter of EU values, chairing the PES activists Romania and European Movement Romania organizations. He won in 2015 the MEP of the Year Award for the digital agenda and got recently an award from the Romanian digital industry for his efforts in promoting digital skills and education. As a civic activist, he managed to promote several European petitions calling for citizens and social rights at EU level. MEP Victor Negrescu is a strong advocate for a fair social Europe, based on common policies in the field of education, innovation & digital sector, protection of the environment, healthcare and infrastructure.

  Member of the European Parliament, S&D, Romania