Plenary Speakers

Christian Bettstetter is professor of mobile systems at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, where he heads the Institute of Networked and Embedded Systems. He also serves as scientific director of Lakeside Labs, a research and innovation company. He earned his doctoral degree (summa cum laude) in electrical engineering and information technology from Technische Universität München, Germany. His research group focuses on wireless communications and self-organization in networked systems, with applications spanning telecommunications, robotics, and drones. Bettstetter has received several scientific awards, including best paper awards at IEEE ACSOS and SASO. His dedication to teaching was recently honored with the excellence in teaching award of his university.

Stefano Ferretti is a full professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Bologna. He is the director of the AnaNSi (Analysis of Networks, Security and Simulation) Research Group. His current research interests include distributed systems, information security, trustworthy AI, complex networks, data science and blockchain technologies.
 

Sebastian Lobentanzer is a principal investigator at Helmholtz Munich and a Helmholtz AI Young Investigator, where he leads research on the governance, evaluation, and open-source infrastructure of agentic AI systems. He also heads Computational Biology at the German Diabetes Research Centre (DZD), is a TUM Junior Fellow at the Technical University of Munich, and serves as a guest principal investigator at Open Targets, EMBL-EBI (Cambridge, UK). He earned his doctoral degree (summa cum laude) in pharmacology from Goethe University Frankfurt.

His research centres on structured frameworks for the design and empirical evaluation of agentic and multi-agent systems, including the Agentic Automation Canvas for prospective governance of AI deployments and work on quantifying the expectation–realisation gap in agentic AI. He created BioCypher, an open-source knowledge graph platform used by over 50 institutions, and BioChatter, a platform for biomedical large language model applications, both published in Nature Biotechnology. He is a member of the European Commission’s Expert Forum on Frontier AI, advises German federal agencies on AI strategy, and leads agentic AI initiatives across the Helmholtz Association and ELIXIR Europe.

Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Salamanca (Spain), he holds a PhD in Computer Engineering.

He currently leads the “DeepTech” Knowledge Transfer Group at the University of Salamanca, specializing in Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Blockchain, and Cybersecurity, and serves as Principal Investigator of the Bioinformatics and Intelligent Systems Group at IBSAL. He is also Director of the MSc in Cybersecurity and teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programs in Computer Engineering, Data Science, Biology, and Cybersecurity.

Since joining the University of Salamanca in 2011, he has provided technical leadership in the design and execution of more than 100 national and international R&D projects in areas such as Smart Cities, Robotics, Visual Analytics, Medical Applications, and Applied Artificial Intelligence, including large-scale initiatives like the TRUST project. His research is particularly focused on multi-agent systems and their application to complex, distributed, and intelligent environments.

He has been a visiting lecturer at universities across Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and actively collaborates with international research and innovation ecosystems.