Henrique Madeira's Bio

Vice-Rector of the University of Coimbra, Portugal

Innovative Experimentation

Experimentation has been a remarkable source of scienti c progress and innovation. But an experiment (online or not) is not per se a source of relevant information that may lead to new knowledge. An experiment should try to answer to well de ned and well-thought que ions. Otherwise, an experiment is ju a wa e of time and money. e value of an experiment is dire ly related to the signi cance of the que ions addressed by the experiment. If the answer is obvious the experiment cannot do more than ju con rm the obvious. If the answer is totally unknown then the potential value of the experiment is higher. e art of experimentation is the art of asking que ions. And good que ions come from allenging problems.
Are we really addressing allenging problems? Are we doing the right experiments (doing the experiments right is not enough; the key issue is to conceive the right experiments)? Why aren’t our experiments more innovative?
We are the mo quali ed generation ever (to put it in the favorite cat phrase of both politicians and pundits). We have good engineers, good lawyers, good do ors, good professionals in a wide variety of elds. We love new te nologies. We are the ampions of mobile phone use. We have ipads, iphones, smart phones, tablets and lots of pages on Facebook. And we call them by those exa names, their original names, because we have ma ered others’ languages. We also tend to be good at teamwork. And we see ourselves as creative. Very creative. Why, then, aren’t we more innovative?

Where are the marks of our innovation? On our scale, because scale does matter. Where are they? Depending on our mood, one moment everything is a national innovation, from the Age of Discovery in the een hundreds to the pa el de nata, and the next we feel a disheartening la of signs of colle ive icons that might allow us to and apart by virtue of an idea, a thought, an innovative artifa that is at once Portuguese and unmi akably universal.
How, then, can we be more innovative? How can a region, a city, be more innovative? How is a university to induce more innovation around it? Is innovation deserting our universities? How can we ask the right que ions and to the right experiments?
ere are the proverbial reasons for the scarcity of imprints le by our innovation – those reasons we are so fond of belaboring: because we’re not as organized as we should be; because we haven’t built the right infra ru ure; because we’re too small. But there are other reasons. And therein, I think, lies the key to the answer.

Denis Gillet's Bio

School of Engineering
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Lausanne, Switzerland

Online Engineering and Business Processes

A er decades of trailing, online engineering approa es and te nologies are becoming mature enough for prime time. e convergence of the Internet of ings and the Web of People enables to exploit remote laboratory at s ool and at the workplace as part of everyday a ivities and business processes. In this talk, the vision and the obje ives of the new Go-Lab European proje will be presented. is proje aims at promoting Science, Te nology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) udy at s ool using online laboratories facilities in order to prepare the next generation of European entrepreneurs and creators. e exploitation of ubiquitous and social media te nologies to rea broad adoption will be highlighted. e importance of rengthening the collaboration between academy or indu ry outrea services and s ools will also be underlined. Finally, experiences in deploying social media platforms in indu rial settings and their potential for enabling a swi convergence of lifelong learning a ivities, knowledge management and business processes will be discussed.

Pedro Veiga's Bio

University of Lisbon, Portugal

The Impact of IT in Universities

e Internet has anged many a e s of our daily life, in the way how companies do their business and also new companies have ourished with new o erings of services or new ways of delivering old produ s. Also universities have experienced signi cant anges to the way how to intera with udents and also in the way how resear is done.
In the presentation we will describe our per e ive on what e-Science, e-Learning or e-Infra ru ures are and how they are shaping the new dimensions of learning and resear ing in universities.
To nalize we will also focus the new allenges that convergence is placing in areas as the Life Sciences, the Physical Sciences and Engineering.