Speaker Biographies

Confirmed Speakers

Moderators

Neelie Kroes

Vice President and EU Commissioner for Digital Agenda, European Commission **

Neelie Kroes is currently Vice President of the European Commission and European Digital Agenda Commissioner. She was born 1941 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, where she also attended school and helped to build her family’s transport business. She studied economics at Erasmus University, before working there for six years as an Assistant Professor. Her political career started on the Rotterdam Municipal Council, and in 1971 she was elected as a Member of the Dutch Parliament for the liberal VVD party. From 1982-1989 she served as Minister for Transport, Public Works and Telecommunication in the Netherlands. After politics she was appointed President of Nyenrode University from 1991-2000, and served on various company boards, including Lucent Technologies, Volvo, P&O Nedlloyd. Prior to serving as European Commissioner for Competition from 2004-2009, her charity work included advising the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund and World Cancer Research Fund, and she has an ongoing interest in mental health issues.

Victoria Espinel

President & CEO, BSA | The Software Alliance

Victoria A. Espinel is President and CEO of BSA | The Software Alliance, the leading advocate for the global software industry before governments and in the international marketplace. Prior to heading BSA, Espinel served in the White House as the first US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. She was charged with developing and implementing the Administration's overall strategy for enforcement of intellectual property. Espinel previously was a professor at the George Mason University School of Law, teaching intellectual property and international trade law. While at George Mason, she acted as an advisor on intellectual property issues to the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Finance Committee, House Judiciary Committee and House Ways and Means Committee.

In 2009, Espinel founded Bridging the Innovation Divide, a not-for-profit foundation focused on addressing the "innovation divide" and empowering all Americans to obtain the full benefit of their creativity and ingenuity. In 2001, Espinel joined the Office of the US Trade Representative as the senior counsel for intellectual property issues. In 2005, Espinel was asked to serve as the first Assistant United States Trade Representative for Intellectual Property and Innovation at the Office of the US Trade Representative, creating the office of Intellectual Property and Innovation at USTR and serving as the chief US trade negotiator for intellectual property and innovation. While at USTR, she testified on numerous occasions before the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Espinel holds an LLM from the London School of Economics, a JD from Georgetown University Law School, and a BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. - See more at: http://www.bsa.org/about-bsa/bsa-staff/victoriaespinel?sc_lang=en-US#sthash.iU80xbMs.dpuf

Udo Helmbrecht

Executive Director, European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA)

Udo Helmbrecht has more than 30 years of professional management experience in the IT sector.

 Udo Helmbrecht was born in 1955, in Castrop-Rauxel, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
He studied Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science. In 1984 he was awarded a PhD in Theoretical Physics. In 2010 Helmbrecht was appointed honorary professor at the Universität der Bundeswehr Munich, Germany.

His experience in the field of security has been acquired through various sectors of society, which include: energy industry, insurance, engineering, aviation, defence, and space industry. He became the president of the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) in 2003.

 Helmbrecht took office as executive director of the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) in October 2009.

Helmut Fallmann

CEO and Member of The Managing Board, Fabasoft AG

Helmut Fallmann (born 1966) graduated with a Masters degree in Computer Sciences from the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria.

In 1988, whilst still at university, he founded the Fabasoft Group together with fellow student Leopold Bauernfeind.

In 1999 the Fabasoft AG was floated on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

The company, with its head office in Linz, currently consists of approximately 200 employees.

Paraskevi Michou

Director, Civil Justice, DG Justice, European Commission

Ms Michou is Director of the Civil Justice Directorate in the Directorate-General Justice of the European Commission since January 2011. This Directorate deals with civil justice policy, contract law, consumer and marketing law and all financial programs of DG Justice.

Previously, Ms Michou was heading different units in the Directorate-General for Communication Networks, Content and Technology. In the European Commission she has also worked in the Directorate-General of Enterprise and in the Directorate-General of Internal Market.

Emmanuel Darmois

Vice-Chairman of the Board, ETSI

Emmanuel has over thirty years of experience in various positions in academics and in the ICT industry. He first has been a Computer Science professor and researcher in Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, a major French School of Engineering. 

He has been an entrepreneur in the early days of networking in France around the ‘Minitel’ ecosystem in the domain of network gaming.


For over 20 years, he has been working with Alcatel-Lucent in many (largely technical) positions in Research, R&D and operational business. During that period, he has also worked in the USA as Technical Director for the TINA Consortium, a standards making organization. 

In his last position, he has been as VP Standards in Bell Labs, supervising standardization worldwide. This is where he caught the ‘standards virus’ that turns any reasonable engineer into a standards propagandist. 



He is also actively involved in ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute) where he is Vice-Chairman of the Board, chairing the Operational Coordination Group. He is currently very active in Smart Grids, Cloud and now Smart Cities. In 2012, he has co-founded CommLedge.

Bob Jones

Head of Openlab Project, CERN

Bob Jones is head of the CERN openlab project (openlab.cern.ch) which is a unique public-private partnership between CERN and leading ICT companies. Its mission is to accelerate the development of cutting-edge solutions to be used by the worldwide LHC community.
Bob is a member of the management team of the Helix Nebula – the Science Cloud initiative (http://www.helix-nebula.eu/), a public private partnership to explore the use of commercial cloud services for science applications supported by the EC under grant 312301, for which he is the project coordinator. Bob also participates in the EIROforum IT Working Group (http://www.eiroforum.org/) and is the editor of the recently published series of e-infrastructure documents (http://zenodo.org/record/7592). His experience in the distributed computing arena includes mandates as the technical director and then project director of the EGEE projects (2004-2010).

Ken Ducatel

Head of Unit Software and Services, Cloud, DG CONNECT, European Commission

Ken Ducatel, British, aged 55, holds a PhD in economic geography from Bristol University and an MSc in transport policy from Cranfield University in the UK. He has worked on information society policy for twenty years. He was a member of the Faculty of University of Manchester for 14 years. From 1997 to 2003, he worked at the European Commission's Institute for Prospective Technological Studies in Seville, where he led the Institute's flagship "Futures Project." From 2004 to 2008 he was a member of Commissioner Reding's Cabinet responsible for Lisbon Strategy & Policies for the Information Society . In January 2009 he became Head of Unit for the "Digital Agenda: Policy Coordination" in DG Information Society. Since July 2012 he leads the "Software and Service, Cloud Computing Unit" in the newly formed DG CONNECT.

Xavier Poisson Gouyou Beauchamps

EMEA Vice President of Cloud Computing, HP

Xavier Poisson Gouyou Beauchamps is the HP Converged Cloud Vice President for Europe, Middle-East and Africa. Since 2010 he has built and led the company’s cloud strategy, sales and marketing efforts cross all HP business units in the EMEA region. He is also a recognized keynote speaker at Cloud Computing conferences and events.

Mr Poisson has held various sales management positions in the IT industry, including 15 years at HP. During his tenure at HP he managed the CME vertical, Storage and Alliances business in France and has been driving the HP CloudSystems business, HP/Microsoft Infrastructure to Application business and the High Performance Computing business in the EMEA region.

Mr Poisson has graduated ESCP Europe Management School.

Abdellatif Benjelloun Touimi

Senior Standards Manager, Huawei

Abdellatif Benjelloun Touimi is a Senior Standards Manager within the Corporate Standards & Industry Department at Huawei Technologies, based in the UK, where he is responsible for Cloud Computing and Multimedia areas. He has been involved in a number of Cloud standards activities and initiatives, including DMTF, ETSI TC Cloud. Most recently, he was participating as a co-convener for Interoperability and Data Portability task group, in the ETSI Cloud Standards Coordination initiative aiming to provide an analysis and recommendations report on Cloud Standards to the European Commission.

In his previous career, Abdellatif was with Orange Labs, first in France and then in the UK, where he conducted researches on several Multimedia Communication topics and also Mobile Cloud Computing. He was responsible for Open Innovation within the UK research ecosystem and was active in standardization since 2001, specifically in MPEG and 3GPP. During his career, Abdellatif also participated in different collaborative research projects at the national (in France and the UK) and European levels, notably with leadership responsibilities.

Abdellatif received a Ph.D. in Signal & Image Processing from Télécom ParisTech, France, in 2001, and an M.B.A. from The University of Chicago - Booth School of Business, USA, in 2011. He holds 14 issued or pending patents and he is the author of a number of publications. He is a member of IEEE, ACM, and IET.

Frank van den Belt

CEO, ASP4all

Frank van den Belt studied business economics at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. After his study he held various (international) positions at IBM. He also was stationed at the European headquarters of this company in Paris, France. As a board member of IBM Netherlands, he was responsible for IT Outsourcing.

Currently, Van den Belt is co-owner and CEO of the Dutch company ASP4all Bitbrains. This company was founded in January 2014, after a merger between two Dutch private cloud specialists: ASP4all and Bitbrains. ASP4all provides customized services in the field of infrastructure management (Iaas), 7x24 full-service application hosting (PaaS) and online workplace services. For its service portfolio ASP4all aims at maximum availability and the management of mission-critical applications in a reliable, secured private cloud environment. Bitbrains designs, builds and supports advanced cloud computing solutions for companies with high demands on their complex and mission-critical IT applications. The brand has gained extensive expertise in the field of High-Performance Computing - a technology that is playing an increasingly important role in analyzing and processing large amounts of data.

Customers of ASP4all Bitbrains are, among others, Aegon, Ahold, DBC Onderhoud, Municipality of Amsterdam, ICS Cards, ING, KPMG, Ministry of Justice, Mirabeau, Oxyma, Rabobank, TNO, TransLink Systems and Verint Systems.

Rita Balogh

Senior Manager, Policy - EMEA, BSA | The Software Alliance

Rita Balogh is responsible for software policy in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. She advises BSA members on public policy and legal developments and advocates the views of the ICT sector with both European and national policy makers. A Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP/E), Balogh has particular expertise in data protection policy. She also focuses on cyber-security issues as well as on policies that promote technology innovation in new areas such as cloud computing.

Prior to joining BSA, Balogh worked in APCO Worldwide's Brussels office, leading public affairs support to clients in various policy sectors, including ICT, security and transport. She also worked as policy advisor in the legal and corporate affairs department of Microsoft in Brussels.

Balogh holds a Master of International Relations from the Corvinus University of Budapest and a Master of Politics and Societies in Europe from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. A Hungarian national, she speaks fluent English and has a good knowledge of French. She is based in BSA's Brussels office.

Juan González

Director of Strategy and New Offer Monitoring, Indra

Juan González joined Indra in 2008. He has been active in the development of the international operations and the launch of new business lines in areas such as cloud computing and big data.

Before joining Indra, he was a partner with the Boston Consulting Group, specialized in Technology, Media and Telecommunications and led BCG’s European practice. During his stay at BCG he also had a significant involvement with Latin American clients.

He is a Telecom Engineer and got his MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1992.

Along his career he has frequently been involved in advisory groups to the Government of Spain on matters regarding regulation and policies to leverage information technologies to create value for the economy.

Michel Catinat

Head of Unit ICT for Competitiveness and Industrial Innovation, DG Enterprise and Industry, European Commission

Michel CATINAT is a civil servant with the Commission of the European Union, having joined in 1986. Since the 1st of October 2010, Michel CATINAT is Head of Unit "ICT for Competitiveness and Industrial Innovation", Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry. Amongst other duties, he is currently in charge of the European policy on “Key Enabling Technologies”.

For two years, Mr CATINAT has been adviser and published a report on critical raw materials in the European Union.

Previously, Mr CATINAT was Head of Unit “Sustainable development, climate change and competitiveness”. His unit’s mission was to ensure the implementation of Sustainable Development Strategy and that the most cost-effective solutions for environmental, energy and transport objectives were adopted.

Mr CATINAT has also been Head of Unit responsible for the Information Society and the Information Technologies. He has been involved in the definition and implementation of measures to support the emergence of the Information Society in Europe. From 1986 to 1989, he has been appointed as Economic Adviser in the Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs, European Commission. He carried out the economic analysis of the European Single Market Policy.

Before joining the Commission, Mr CATINAT held a number of posts as economist in the French administration services in the Economic Planning Office (Prime Minister) and in the National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs).

Mr CATINAT attended the “Ecole Polytechnique” in Paris where he graduated with a Master of Science in Engineering. He is also graduated with a Master in Economics. He is former Fellow at the Centre for International Affairs at Harvard University (USA) and was professor at the College of Europe in Bruges, teaching “Information and Communication Technologies: Impact and Structure”.

Alexander Tettenborn

Head of Unit “Development of Convergent ICT, German Federal Minister of Economics and Energy

After he finished his studies of law in Mainz, Germany, and Charlottesville, Virginia (USA), Alexander Tettenborn first worked as lawyer in a law firm in Cologne. In 1990, he entered civil service for the Federal government of Germany. After having served several posts in the field of Education and Technology at the Federal Ministry of Education and Science (BMBF) until 1998, he was transferred to Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, now Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi). There, he had served several posts in the field of administration, foreign trade (MENA-Region) and ICT/Media-law. In addition, he is co-publisher of several publications on internet-law. Since March 2012, Alexander Tettenborn is head of unit "Development of Convergent ICT“ at the BMWi. There, he is responsible for R&D in the fields of Internet of services (Cloud, Big Data), internet of things (Autonomik and Industry 4.0), internet of energy (E-Energy, IT2Green) as well as for the area of ICT-Start ups (start-up contest).

Achim Klabunde

Head of Sector IT policy, European Data Protection Supervisor

Achim Klabunde is the head of the IT Policy Sector at the secretariat of the European Data Protection Supervisor. Before joining the EDPS, he was a policy officer at the European Commission, in the data protection unit of the Directorate General for Justice and before that in DG Information Society and Media where he led the team in charge of privacy and trust policy for electronic communications for the 2009 Telecom Reform process. Before joining the EU administration, he had worked in the private sector for 15 years. Achim Klabunde has a master's degree in Computer Science and Communications Research from Bonn University. He has worked in data management, network planning, data protection and IT security.

Nitan Pathak

Investment Manager, Venture Capital, European Investment Fund

French, born in 1974, Oxford graduate with degrees in Mechanical Engineering (BEng, MSc) and Business Studies (MBA)

Nitan started his career as an engineer in the Aerospace and Defense sector at EADS Astrium. Later, he gained in-depth industry knowledge during five years at Texas Instruments in both Europe and the US, where he acted as Head of Business Development.

After obtaining his MBA from Oxford University in 2006, Nitan joined Mummert & Company, an international financial advisory firm based in Germany, where he was involved in a significant number of M&A transactions in the Telecom, Media and Technology (TMT) sector.

Nitan joined the European Investment Fund (EIF) in 2010. He works as Investment Manager within the Venture Capital team and is currently responsible for investments in venture capital funds focusing mainly on German-based, high-tech early and development stage companies. He is also leading the effort within the Smart Things compartment of EIF’s Corporate Innovation Platform (CoriP).

Dirk van Rooy

Head of Sector, European Cloud Partnership, DG CONNECT, European Commission

Dirk van Rooy has been working for the European Commission since 1993, in the Directorate-General CONNECT and its predecessors. Dirk van Rooy’s main area of responsibility is the coordination of activities related to the European Cloud Partnership. Earlier areas of work have included IT for trust and security, software and services and the application of information technology to transport and environmental control.

Prior to joining the Commission, Dirk van Rooy worked in the software industry in several international companies. Dirk van Rooy holds a Ph.D. from the Technical University of Denmark, where he worked on stochastic simulation and applied mathematical modelling techniques.

Freddy Van den Wyngaert

CIO, Agfa-Gevaert

-22 years with ExxonMobil Chemical
Various Management positions in IT (Infrastructure, Applications) and business (Knowledge Management, Process re-engineering, Business Analyst)
In Belgium, France, Europe HQ and US HQ

-13 years with Agfa-Gevaert Group (since 09/2000)
Vice President and CIO with responsibility for Global Shared Services “Agfa ICS” (Information and Communication Services)

-Chairman of CIOforum Belgian Business (since 2009) and Board Member of ADM (Business/IT network in Belgium)

-Board member of EuroCIO (European network of CIO’s) since 2011

Stefano Bertolo

Scientific Project Officer, Data Value Chain, DG CONNECT, European Commission

Stefano Bertolo received a joint Philosophy Ph.D. and Cognitive Science diploma from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey with a dissertation on formal learning theory and human language acquisition. During three years as post-doctoral associate at the Brain and Cognitive Science department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he published a book and several papers on language acquisition. In 1998 he joined Cycorp, Inc. in Austin, Texas where he developed various components of the Cyc system and managed several research and development projects at the intersection between formal knowledge representation, natural language processing and information retrieval and extraction. Since 2004 he has been working as a scientific project officer for the European Commission where he oversees the progress of several research projects in data processing and contributes to the definition of future EU research directions.

Paul Adamson

Senior European Policy Advisor, Covington & Burling and Editor-in-Chief, E!Sharp

Paul Adamson is the editor-in-chief and founding publisher of E!Sharp, an on-line magazine on Europe and Europe’s place in the world. He is also Senior European Policy Advisor at Covington and Burling.

He is a member of Rand Europe’s Council of Advisors and is on the advisory board of the polling/think tank YouGov-Cambridge, the Washington European Society and the American Security Project. He is also a member of the advisory group of British Influence, a new organization promoting the UK's role in the European Union and chairs the Trans-Atlantic Business Council working group on communications and public outreach.

He is a trustee of the Citizenship Foundation, a patron of the University Association of Contemporary European Studies (UACES) and a member of the UK Academy of Social Sciences.

Earlier in his career he founded the consulting firm Adamson Associates, which was sold to WeberShandwick and the "think-do tank" The Centre, which was sold to Edelman.

In 2012 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) ”for services to promoting understanding of the European Union”.

Frances Robinson

Eu Correspondent, Wall Street Journal / Dow Jones

Frances Robinson covers EU affairs for the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, a role which involves everything from interviewing Prime Ministers to taking part in a beer-pouring competition at Belgium’s biggest brewery. She studied languages at Cambridge University, worked in Paris as a freelance journalist and translator, then moved to AFX in Brussels where she covered a range of issues as deputy bureau chief. She covers technology and telecoms, the Eurozone crisis and the fascinatingly complex world of Belgian politics. Frances has appeared on Sky News, BBC News Channel, RTL, RTBF and Europe 1

Andrea Renda

Senior Research Fellow, Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS)

Dr. Andrea Renda is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), where he started and currently manages the Regulatory Policy Unit and the CEPS Digital Forum. He is Professor of Economic Analysis of Law, Antitrust and EU policymaking at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, as well as Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute. Andrea sits in the Scientific Board of the International Telecommunications Society and of the European Communications Policy research (EuroCPR), as well as in the Editorial Board of "Telecommunications Policy". He is the author of several publications and expert reports in the field of telecommunications and Internet policy.

Linda Strick

Business Developer, Fraunhofer FOKUS - Institute for Open Communication Systems

Linda Strick is more than 25 years with the Fraunhofer-Institute FOKUS in Berlin and works in the application domain of eGovernment. Her main areas of work are: distributed systems, telecommunications, Service Oriented Architectures and Cloud Computing with focus on security. She is in charge of the eGovernment Cloud Computing Lab at FOKUS, which pilots secure and interoperable cloud scenarios for the public sector usage. She has been working with national and international projects, in standardization organizations and published several papers, amongst other Cloud Computing for the public sector (2010). Since June 2013 she is coordinator of the Cloud for Europe project funded by the European Commission under its 7th Framework Programme.