Review of the SMART4ALL Special Session and pitching event on the 6th SEEDA-CECNSM 2021

A successful special session and the first SMART4ALL pitching event were held on 24th September in the context of the 6th SEEDA-CECNSM 2021, which was jointly organized by the Department of Electrical & Computer EngineeringUniversity of Western Macedonia, Greece and the Departments of Informatics & Telecommunications and Accounting & Finance, University of Ioannina and technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.

The online event, which was attended by almost 40 people from different countries and coordinated by SMART4ALL technical manager, Mr. Christos Antonopoulos, opened with an inspiring keynote speech by Mr. Nikolaos Lambrogeorgos, Senior Account Manager of the Public Sector in Greece at Cisco Hellas S.A, who, among else, introduced the Cisco International Center for Digital Transformation and Digital Skills (DT&S) in his speech entitled “Advancing Innovation through digital transformation acceleration and promotion of digital skills”.

During the morning session, which was open to all attendees with free registration, 7 of the funded experiments of the first round of SMART4ALL Open Calls (EmbDevOps KTE, APIARY and EDIoT FTTEs, FlexCLEC, RADIUS, ReAsssure and TONI-AI) were presented, while SMART4ALL Task Forces representatives Prof. Cornelia Weltzien and assistant professor Tanya Politi, offered insightful comments on the Digitized Agriculture and Digitized Environment verticals respectively.

On the second part of the special session, the first SMART4ALL pitching event for selected funded projects was held as a contest among 5 PAEs (APIARY, EDIoT, FlexCLEC, RADIUS, TONI-AI) who made brief targeted presentations to be evaluated by a board of four evaluators: Mr. Nikitas Georgiadis, Sales Account manager at Cisco, Mr. Miguel Raposo entrepreneur and investor, Mr. Konstantinos Karvounakis,  Investment Associate at Metavallon.vc and Mr. Georgios Keramidas, Assistant professor in Computer Architecture, technical manager of SMART4ALL and CSO at Think Silicon S.A.. TONI-AI CTTE, represented by Marko Petkovic, data scientist at 5M ICT, gained the first place in the pitching and the award, a.k.a. a CCNA voucher offered by Cisco.

All the presentations from the first part of the special session have been uploaded to SMART4ALL YouTube channel.

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