MARVEL MVP Info Day

Elisabetta Farella
Head of Unit at Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Tenured researcher and head of E3DA (Energy Efficient Embedded Digital Architectures) research unit at FBK ICT Center in Trento (Italy), previously a research fellow at DEI, University of Bologna, with which she still cooperates and where she has been adjunct Professor. She has been research supervisor at T3LAB, a technology transfer initiative promoted by Confindustria Bologna. Her research areas of interest include energy-efficient wearable and wireless embedded devices, signal processing and machine learning for embedded systems, smart sensors, and IoT. She has been involved in several European Projects (EU FP6 and FP7, Artemis JU, Eureka Eurostars, EIT Digital activities, Erasmus+ Knowledge Alliance) and cooperations with industrial partners in interdisciplinary fields (STMicroelectronics, NXP, Oberalp group, Think3) and research institutions (IMEC Holst, ETH Zurich, KU Leuven, etc.). She is a TPC member of numerous International conferences in the field of embedded systems and a co-author of over 150 papers in major International conferences and journals.

Marco Pistore
Director at the Digital Society Center, FBK
Director of “Digital Society” a research center formed by a multidisciplinary team of more than 100 researchers, technologists and managers (including PhD students) organized in 13 research units dedicated to specific research areas in the ICT domain and 2 support units focusing on project management and technology maturation. Its mission is to perform advanced research and develop innovative digital technology to address key challenges of the future digital society.

Despina Kopanaki
Project Manager at FORTH
Despina Kopanaki is a project manager at the Institute of Computer Science (ICS) of the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH). She has participated in the project coordination and project management of I-BiDaaS and currently of the MARVEL (Multimodal Extreme Scale Data Analytics for Smart Cities Environments, GA #957337) EU funded projects. Within MARVEL, she is also leading the ethics compliance activities. Before that, she has been involved in more than 20 European and National projects in the area of mobility, data mining, privacy, big data, and data analytics as a researcher, project manager, and financial manager. She holds a Bachelor Degree from the Department of Statistics and an MSc in Applied Economics & Finance from the Department of Economics, both from Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), Greece. She is also a Ph.D. candidate in Informatics at the Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus, Greece. Her research interest is focused on data analytics and privacy-preservation of mobility data.

Giacomo Fioroni
Head of the "Smart City" project of the Municipality of Trento
Responsible for the implementation of the Trento Smart City strategy, coordinator of the European projects in which the Smart City office is involved and of the multi-year project of digitization and simplification of administrative procedures. Team leader of the "Smart City control room to effectively govern the ecological transition of Trento" project and coordinator of the Trento Data Team. Member of the national working groups (Cantieri) of FPA and of the Observatories of the Politecnico di Milano related to innovation and digitization.

Prof. Sotiris Ioannidis
MARVEL Project Coordinator, FORTH
Prof. Sotiris Ioannidis received a BSc degree in Mathematics and an MSc degree in Computer Science from the University of Crete in 1994 and 1996 respectively. In 1998 he received an MSc degree in Computer Science from the University of Rochester and in 2005 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Ioannidis held a Research Scholar position at the Stevens Institute of Technology until 2007 and a Research Director at the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH) until 2020. He is currently Associate Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Technical University of Crete (TUC) and Director of the Microprocessor and Hardware Laboratory. He was a Member of the ENISA Advisory Group (AG) from 2017 to 2020, and is a Member of the National Infrastructures for Research and Technology (GRNET) Advisory Committee (AC).
He is also Chairman of the of the Committee of Ethics and Deontology of Research of FORTH and Member of the Advisory Committee for National Infrastructures for Research and Technology. His research interests are in the area of systems and network security, security policy, privacy, and high-speed networks. Ioannidis has authored more than 200 publications in international conferences and journals, as well as book chapters, and has both chaired and served on numerous program committees in prestigious conferences, such as ACM CCS and IEEE S&P. Ioannidis is a Marie-Curie Fellow and has participated in numerous international and European projects. He has been the PI of 40 European, National and DARPA projects, attracting in excess of 12 million euros for his organization, and has been Project Coordinator in 14 of them.

Dragana Bajovic
MARVEL Scientific and Technical Coordinator, UNS
Dr. Dragana Bajovic received Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, PA, and Instituto de Sistemas e Robótica (ISR), Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Lisbon, Portugal, in 2013. Since 2020, she is an associate professor at the Department of Power, Electronics and Computer Engineering of the Faculty of technical sciences, University of Novi Sad (FTS-UNS). Prior to this position, she was an assistant professor at FTS-UNS in the period 2015-2020 and a postdoctoral researcher at ISR-IST in 2013. Her research interests include statistical signal processing, distributed detection and estimation, distributed optimization, privacy-aware learning and large deviations analysis in wireless IoT and sensor networks. She has published more than a dozen papers in top-tier IEEE journals such as IEEE Trans. Signal Processing and Trans. Automatic Control. She works on several EU funded projects and is the scientific and technical lead for the H2020 project MARVEL. She received the A.G. Milnes award for best PhD thesis at ECE department of CMU in 2014. She also holds a B.M.Ed. degree from the School of Music, University of Belgrade.

Thomas Festi
Project manager of "Smart City" project of the Municipality of Trento
Project manager of the MARVEL and PROTECTOR projects for the Municipality of Trento, in the past he managed courses of the European Social Fund and research projects in the training field funded by the European Commission for the Employment Agency of the Autonomous Province of Trento. Previously he gained experience in the management of development projects in the context of International Cooperation.

Yiming Wang
Researcher at Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Yiming Wang is a Researcher in the Deep Visual Learning (DVL) unit led by Prof. Elisa Ricci in the Digital Society Center, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK). Her research mainly focuses on vision-based scene understanding that facilitates automation for social good, covering diverse topics on static scene modeling, semantic scene understanding and scene dynamic analysis. Currently, she is leading the research and development for privacy-preserving scene analysis in the context of Smart City under the EU Project MARVEL and PROTECTOR. Yiming obtained the PhD in Electric Engineering from Queen Mary University of London (UK) under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Cavallaro in 2018, working on vision-based multi-agent navigation. Since 2018, she worked as a post-doc researcher in the Pattern Analysis and Computer Vision (PAVIS) research line led by Dr. Alessio Del Bue at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), working on topics related to active 3D vision through both research and industrial projects. She is actively serving as reviewers for many top-tier conferences and journals in both the Computer Vision and Robotics domains.

Adrian Muscat
Malta pilot Lead Researcher, Greenroads
Prof. Adrian Muscat received his Ph.D. in Electronics Engineering from Queen Mary University of London in 2002, the M.Sc. Degree in RF and Microwave Engineering from the University of Bradford in 1996, and the B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Malta, 1993. He holds the post of Professor at the Department of Communications and Computer Engineering, University of Malta and is engaged as head of R&D at Greenroads Ltd.  His main academic research interests are in the study and development of multi-modal vision and language artificial intelligence models, with potential applications in visual chat bots, robotics in assisted living and autonomous vehicles. In addition he mentors and supervises on the development of optimisation, machine learning and pattern recognition algorithms applied in the areas of sustainable transport and industrial automation. Throughout his career, he participated in several European and locally funded research projects and European COST actions, either as principle investigator or co-investigator,  and co-authored several papers in international scientific journals and conferences.