Navigating Tomorrow:​ Urban Mobility's Future Challenges​

4 December 2024 | Brussels, Belgium

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Overview Speakers
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Margriet Van Schijndel-de Nooij

Program Director Responsible Mobility, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands.


Margriet van Schijndel has about 20 years of experience working with research programs and coordination. She is currently the Program Director Responsible Mobility within the Eindhoven Artificial Intelligence Systems Institute (EAISI) at Eindhoven University of Technology. She has also been serving as the EARPA Secretary General for 7 years, representing some 53 member organisations performing R&D activities in the field of road mobility research. Within EARPA, she now is Foresight Group leader on Connectivity, Automation and Safety. Furthermore, she is Cluster leader Key Enabling Technologies within the CCAM Partnership, and co-pillar leader on Innovative concepts, solutions and services.

She has been managing or coordinating several large national and European research projects such as UDRIVE, APROSYS, and several EU tender projects, with focus on e.g. large naturalistic driving study, evaluation and validation methodologies, large scale Field Testing, safety in automotive, vulnerable road user protection, ITS solutions for safer intersections, prevention of truck accidents and human modelling in automotive applications.

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Dr. Stephan Zecha

Head of Integrated Safety Systems, Continental Safety Engineering


Stephan is Head of Active and Integrated Systems at Continental Safety Engineering. Stephan has graduated at the Technical Universities of Munich and Delft in Aerospace Engineering and holds a PhD at the TU Munich.

Before Continental he worked for MT Aerospace, where he was a development engineer and project manager for launcher systems. Since 2001, Stephan joined Continental and had been working in different areas of active, passive and integrated safety development for road vehicles. He had initiated the development of Safe Infrastructure Systems due to his responsibilities in national research projects. Since 2018 he is responsible for active and integrated safety systems.

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Dr. Rajesh Tiwari

Senior Scientist, QinetiQ


Dr. Rajesh Tiwari is a senior scientist at QinetiQ, an Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation, and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Nottingham, UK. He specializes in GNSS signal processing, navigation modelling, and is an expert in attitude determination using multiple GNSS receivers. Dr. Tiwari is proficient in RTK/PPP and developed an innovative integrity prototype for autonomous vehicle Level-5 in ESA NAVISP-El1, IMPACARS project, where he was the technical lead. He also applied short and long baseline (~20 km) RTK algorithms for driverless cars with sensor fusion, utilizing a 6-degree inertial sensor, magnetometer, and LiDAR. Dr. Tiwari was the technical lead of various ESA’s funded project. Dr. Tiwari has 15 years of experience in GNSS signal processing and sensor fusion, including eight years of academic research and six years of industrial research. During his academic career, he supervised four PhDs focused on precise positioning using multi-sensor data fusion for vehicular navigation. In the past six years in the industry, he has technically led various ESA NAVISP projects

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Pierluigi Mancini Ph.D.

Navigation Innovation and Support Program, Head of the NAVISP Program Office (NAV-PN), Directorate of Navigation, ESA – European Space Agency  


Specializing in electrical engineering, Pierluigi has initially graduated cum laudae from Naples University, then was awarded my Master's by the Polytechnic Institute of New York, and subsequently took a PhD at University College London.

He has more than 30 years of experience in the space sector where after several years of R&D activities in the spaceborne radar domain, and has been involved in the definition and implementation of several ESA missions such as ERS, Envisat, Small GeoSat as well as some key strategic developments in the field of space-based applications.

Pierluigi has been responsible for the Strategy and the Feasibility Studies Divisions in ESA’s Directorate of Telecommunications & Integrated Applications and in this capacity he conceptualized the actual creation of the Integrated Applications Program. Currently he is heading the NAVISP Program which aims to further foster European industry’s succeeding in the highly competitive and rapidly-evolving global market for satellite navigation, and more broadly Positioning Navigation Timing (PNT) technologies and services, while supporting the ESA Member States in enhancing their national objectives and capabilities in the sector.

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Rafael Lucas-Rodriguez

Navigation Innovation and Support Program, Head of Technical Program Office, Directorate of Navigation, ESA – European Space Agency 


Rafael Lucas-Rodriguez is a graduate in Telecommunications Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia at Barcelona, Spain. He has a wide experience on satellite navigation systems acquired at the European Space Agency in the frame of the EGNOS, Galileo and GNSS Evolutions programmes at various level of responsability. Rafael is currently the Head of the NAVISP Technical Programme Office, the programme of ESA aiming to support the development of novel position, navigation and time technologies and the competitiveness of industry on this field. From this position, Rafael is interested in fostering the utilization of space technologies leading towards more efficient and safer mobility regardless of the mode of transport envisaged.

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Isabella Panella

Head of AI in Digital Delivery Platform, Jaguar Land Rover, Gaydon, UK


Isabella is currently heading the AI chapter in DPP for JLR. She is an aerospace engineer and achieved first class honors from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

She holds an MBA from Cranfield University, UK and has over 23 years’ experience in applying AI technologies to complex systems.Her career started in aerospace, defense, and she has worked on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for X-listed companies in UK for 14 years. She created solution for Sensors Management Systems and Mission Management systems. Isabella delivered solutions for cloud architectures linked to Internet of Things (IoT) and Digital Twin, capitalizing the value of Big Data within the business she was in, including integration of satellite communication and unmanned aircraft swarm management and has been called as a subject matter expert by the European Commission in intelligent systems since 2016. She has been contributing to the international scientific community by publishing over 20 papers and leading the definition of an operational definition for industry to enable safe AI applications

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Dr Nikos Tsampieris

Head of Transport for Logistics, ERTICO


A Greek national, Nikolaos Tsampieris holds a MEng in Electronics & Computer Engineering, an MSc in Digital Communication Systems and a PhD in Digital Signal Processing Techniques for Communication Systems. He also holds a patent for an Autonomous VSAT System, a patent for an Integrated Security System and a Patent on Content-based Routing. In addition, he is a senior visiting Research Fellow at Cranfield University in the UK.

Nikolaos has over twenty years of experience in Digital Signal Processing for Communication Systems, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), IoT, embedded Security Systems, Cryptography and 5G. Before his engagement at ERTICO, he was leading the INLECOM IoT and security division and was the project manager for SELIS, a flagship EU program in Transport and Logistics. He has served as the International Programs Director at INTRACOM Defence Electronics, and as the General Manager of INFITHEON Technologies, overseeing the development of technologies, products and execution of European R&D and ESA programs and projects. He speaks Greek and English.

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Sanja Bandau

Navigation Innovation and Support Program, Business Development Officer, Directorate of Navigation, ESA – European Space Agency 


Sanja Bandau is the Business Development Officer within ESA’s Navigation Innovation and Support Programme (NAVISP), where she focuses on fostering commercial activities across the downstream segment of the Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) industry. Her work spans various sectors that rely on PNT information, with a particular emphasis on transportation and automotive industries. In these fields, Sanja promotes the development of innovative PNT solutions, advancing areas like autonomous driving, fleet management, and smart transportation systems. She supports market analysis, business intelligence, and partnership development in the PNT sector, expanding the use of PNT products and services across multiple markets.

Sanja graduated in geographical sciences, business economics, and a specialization in Innovation Sciences, where she focused on the Navigation and Earth observation markets. Passionate about PNT technology's impact on societal and economic growth, she is dedicated to fostering market expansion and innovation in these areas.

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Dr. Sven Beiker

Senior Scientist, QinetiQ


Dr. Sven Beiker has spent almost three decades focusing on the future of mobility and automotive safety during a career spanning BMW Group, McKinsey & Company, and Stanford University. Today, he is the Managing Director of Silicon Valley Mobility, a consulting and advisory firm he founded in 2017 specializing in technical diligence, product roadmaps and business models for mobility. Dr. Beiker is also an External Advisor to SAE International where he works with the industry association to further improve safety, efficiency, and convenience of automobiles and automated vehicles in particular. And he serves on advisory boards of several startups in the mobility space, as an advisor to the German American Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco, and as an advisor / co-editor to the Springer Lecture Notes in Mobility.

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