European Union: SMARTCities 2018

Alex Mateo, Senior Key Account Manager, Libelium

Alex Mateo is Libelium’s Senior Key Account Manager Smart Cities, focusing on market growth and sustainable development in Europe and North America.
He is in charge of Smart Cities partnerships, airports and Smart Cities market researches in the UK and the USA. He also leads the development of tender documents and proposals.

Mateo studied Environmental Sciences in Alcalá de Henares University in Madrid. After completing his postgraduate degree in Water Resources Engineering, he began his career as an environmental consultant, working with City Councils in sustainable development projects.

He has also moderated important debates involving municipalities, the public, businesses and NGOs and assessed sustainable development management. At Libelium he added technology to this expertise in public sector to carry out Smart Cities projects.

Declan Hadley, Digital Health Lead, Lancashire and Cumbria Change Programme

Declan has worked in the NHS for over twenty years. He started his NHS career as a Psychiatric Nurse, moving quickly into Information Management in the 1990s where he worked in a number of different roles across the North West.

Over the last ten years, Declan has been working as Health Informatics Director at Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust, where he has overseen the development innovative mobile solutions, new clinical applications and technology to support an agile workforce.

Alison Mitchell, Executive Director, Sensor City

Alison Mitchell is executive director at Sensor City, a collaborative venture between Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Liverpool, and a flagship University Enterprise Zone which will drive sensor technology and development across the UK.

Alison, who will lead the venture to establish it as a viable business and a key driver of economic growth for the Liverpool City Region, joined Sensor City from BT Business, where she was Chief Information Officer – a position in which she helped transform the telecom giant’s products and services and technical delivery.

Her career spans 30 years in senior marketing, product development and business leadership roles across a range of small to large companies. Alison has two masters including an MBA from Cranfield University.

Priya Prakash, Founder, D4SC

Priya is founder of London-based award-winning Design for Social Change (D4SC). Her focus is improving public infrastructure planning and development in real time, by combining big data with active citizen engagement.

D4SC’s Changify and Citizen Canvas platforms have been piloted in UK and Europe with plans for rollout in SE Asia. She is on ‘Tech City Insider 100’, IBM’s ‘People for Smarter Cities’.

Before D4SC, Priya led the global design team as Head of Mobile Phone User Experience at Nokia. At the BBC, she was lead-designer and co-inventor of iPlayer with joint patents.

Vishal Chatrath, CEO and co-founder, PROWLER.io

Vishal Chatrath is CEO and co-founder of PROWLER.io, a decision making platform (DMP) that will simplify the future.

PROWLER.io’s team of Cambridge-based, world-class researchers creates Machine Learning technologies to help you understand, guide and optimise the millions of micro-decisions that occur in complex, dynamic environments.

Its platform will transform fields like systems engineering, autonomous vehicles, game design and smart city planning.

Vishal was previously head of automotive at Nokia, founder of Chleon Automotive and Chief Business Officer of VocalIQ, which was acquired by Apple in 2015.

Peter Baeck, Head of Collaborative Economy Research,  Nesta

Peter lead much of Nesta’s research into crowdfunding and P2P lending as an innovative way of financing products and services in the UK, and has co-authored the industry reports Understanding Alternative Finance, Pushing Boundaries and Crowdfunding Good Causes. Alongside this peter has also worked a number of practical tools programmes for those interested in crowdfunding such as Working the Crowd, the online crowdfunding directory, Crowdingin.com and the arts and heritage matched crowdfunding pilot.

Alongside this he has been involved in Nesta research projects on public sector innovation labsand leads Nesta’s research on digital social innovation.

Peter has also delivered research and project management for People Powered Health (PPH) – a one year Nesta programme that, through a partnership with six UK health localities, explored how coproduction for people living with long term health conditions, can be taken to scale within health services. A particular focus of PPH is capturing evidence on the impact on patient outcomes and cost of health services by coproduced solutions.

Richard Woodling, BSC ENG, MIET, APM, Ordnance Survey

Richard Woodling is a Client and Programme Manager currently leading projects within OS’s Smart City practice.  He is a Member of the Institute for Engineering and Technology (IET) and a Registered Project Professional at the Association for Project Management (APM).

Originally an Electronic design engineer, for more than 25 years, Richard is a highly experienced, Project Manager versed in delivering complex projects across many industries where tight cost and change control is important, building efficiencies to ensure that programmes and projects deliver value for money on time.  Richard has a strong technical background and coupled with his project delivery skills, has enabled Richard to be the ideal choice for the recent 5G research project with Met Office and 5GIC to understand the effects of the geo-spatial environment on 5G mmwave signal propagation.

He typically manages project teams of more than 20 people across multiple sites, including across multiple countries, and has been responsible for managing concurrent projects worth over £15m.  Richard has an excellent record of delivery through collaborative working and building trusted relationships with both customers and suppliers.

Nicola Yates OBE, Chief Executive, Future Cities Catapult

Previously, Nicola was Chief Executive at Bristol City Council, Hull City Council and North Shropshire District Council and amongst multiple successes in delivering local economic prosperity, she helped establish the internationally recognised ‘Bristol is Open’ initiative in 2014, working with Nokia, NEC, and Interdigital Ltd.”

She is currently a trustee for the independent policy think tank ‘Centre for Cities’, and is a member of SOLACE – Society for Local Authority Chief Executives and the Chartered Institute of Housing. Nicola received an OBE in 2010 for services to local government.

George Johnston, Founder, Nitrous

George Johnston is passionate about using technology to shape the cities of the future. He believes that this can be achieved through building a self-sustaining innovation ecosystem based on data, knowledge and connections.

He founded Nitrous to fuel effective collaboration between startups and the public sector. Having successfully completed an innovation programme with Transport for London, Nitrous is building upon its transportation expertise to run more programmes with partners, further developing its open data platform and expanding into Asia.

George has provided counsel to the then Department of Business, Innovation and Skills around EU digital policy, and more recently, to the Greater London Authority and Mayor’s Office around London’s digital strategy.

Richard Veal, Managing Director, New Mind tellUS

Richard Veal is UK Managing Director of award-winning, new-media company New Mind tellUs. Founded in 1999, the company has extensive experience in the provision of e-tourism solutions and currently works with over 250 cities and destinations across Europe.

With offices in Liverpool, Bergen and Oslo, Richard heads up a 60+ team of project managers, software developers, designers and digital marketing professionals. Under his stewardship, the company has become globally recognised as a leading supplier to public sector tourism and has now won significant contracts in the UK, Spain, Norway, Sweden and the UAE.

Still retaining a true passion for technology, Richard is constantly striving to find  innovative ways in which destinations can connect their tourism businesses with visitors and the local community through digital means. The websites and apps that New Mind produce receive traffic in excess of 100 million users per year and the company holds an aggregated database of all UK tourism product that can be accessed by their API.

Chris Freeman MIET, IMG Theme Lead – Digital Manufacturing, Augmented Reality Technical Fellow

I am theme lead for Digital Manufacturing and technical fellow for Augmented Reality (AR) at the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre’s (AMRC) Factory 2050. My work focuses on the medium to high TRL (Technology Readiness Level) development and integration of AR, Virtual Reality (VR) and wearable technology in respect of MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul), assembly and digitally connected environments.

With a master’s degree in design & manufacture, I specialise in the area of advanced visualisation, focusing on VR & AR. I have a wide range of experience demonstrating applications for aerospace, construction, civil nuclear, automotive and military sectors. As part of Factory 2050 I lead an exceptionally talented team delivering AMRC Factory 2050’s Digital Manufacturing capability, incorporating Manufacturing Informatics and Digitally Assisted Assembly.

Tasked with driving vertical and horizontal innovation in emerging technologies, my current activities include developing the AMRC digital manufacturing strategy, managing large programmes of work, building consortiums for collaboration, and identifying funding opportunities in the applied use of AR / VR and IoT technologies.