EDITOR IN CHIEF: Dr Fridolin Wild
Fridolin is a Senior Research Fellow, leading the Performance Augmentation Lab (PAL) of Oxford Brookes University, located in the Department of Computing and Communications Technologies. With the research and development of the lab, Fridolin seeks to close the dissociative gap between abstract knowledge and its practical application, researching radically new forms of linking directly from knowing something ‘in principle’ to applying that knowledge ‘in practice’ and speeding its refinement and integration into polished performance.
Dr Paul Lefere is director of CCA Research Ltd. He has much experience relevant to Capacity Development, Smart Cities and Factories of the Future (FOF), in such fields as Technology Management, Knowledge Management, Open Innovation, Road Maps and TEL, being principal investigator or work package leader in some 20 RTD projects including the ones listed on this website. His academic experience includes decades as a university researcher, e.g. in the UK OU’s Knowledge Media Institute and at University of Tampere, Finland; and previously at the OU’s Institute of Educational Technology, where he co-founded the JISC IMS Centre. His industry experience includes board-level appointments (e.g., as Director of Innovation at Images, and Executive Director of eLearning for Microsoft in EMEA). He advises globally on commercialization of collaborative research in fields relevant to Sustainable Cities and Innovation in Industry.
Jesse Marsh obtained his BA in Fine Arts at Williams College (USA) in 1975; with the Hubbard Hutchinson Fellowship he moved to Milan to work in the studio of Marco Zanuso, one of the fathers of the Italian school of industrial design, and later as a free-lance designer. In fifteen years of professional activity, he confronted a range of technologies, processes and product sector, from chairs to artificial lungs, and received numerous patents and awards. In the late 1980s his interest shifted to ICT, participating since then in the research teams of over 35 collaborative international projects funded by the European Union. In different consultancy roles first in Milan and since 1995 in Palermo, he worked in learning technologies and teleworking to then broaden his scope to include the relation between the information society and sustainable development, cultural diversity, e-commerce and democratic participation. Recently his interest has further broadened to include issues related to cultural heritage, spatialplanning and local development, working with local authorities in Sicily and with different Departments of the Regional Government, as well as initiatives in areas such as Smart Cities, IoT, Digital Social Innovation, and Open Data. Over the last five years, he has been an active member of the Living Lab movement, proposing a user-driven “co- design” approach to ICT R&D and innovation and regional development policies in general. He is the founder and coordinator of the Territorial Living Lab TLL-Sicily, a member of the ENoLL (European Network of Living Labs) since 2007, and has been Special Advisor to the President of ENoLL since 2009. In that context, he is also an advisor to the City of Palermo for its Open Data and Smart City strategies and to the Sicilian Region (under contract with Formez) for the role of Social Innovation and Open Data in the regional Digital Agenda and Smart Specialisation Strategies 2014-2020.
Paolo Guarnieri got his degree in Electronical Engineering in Florence (IT) in 1995 with a work on digital image processing. Since then he’s been a researcher for more than 10 years with the italian National Research Center (artificial inteligence applications for environmental monitoring, metheorological forecast, air quality, etc), and a manager at research institutes and regional and local public administrations of environmental projects, R&D projects, cultural & creative industry projects, tourism, innovation policies, etc.). He is currently playing the Lead Partner role in several european projects (H2020, Interreg Europe, Interreg MED) along different strands, including development of new business models for the Textile & Clothing sector (TCBL project) , Cultural & Creative drivers for local development in the Mediterranean (CreativeWear project), and applied R&D for European textile industrial districts (RESET project).