H.E. Philippe Guex, Ambassador of Switzerland to Serbia emphasized at the opening ceremony that the innovative nature of the Science Technology Park Belgrade, makes it the perfect location to host this kind of conference, as it provides a good basis for further development and promotion of Industry 4.0 in Serbia and of innovation in general.
Ambassador Guex stressed that the Industry 4.0 describes the current trend, which is characterized by the fusion of technologies, blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. This trend brings a lot of opportunities, but also new challenges and open questions.
The first speaker of the conference was Ivar Jacobson, the “father” of software engineering, whose lecture “50 years of Software Engineering, now what?” draw significant attention of the audience. The key message of this speaker was the need to develop a standardized, easy to use language for programing the different systems. Katherine Foster spoke about how the Industry, government and startups can collaborate to fully capture Blockchain innovation. Her presentation focused on sharing some insights from the successful approach, initiatives and pilots that her organization BLOC (Blockchain Labs for Open Collaboration) has developed. Till the end of the first conference day the participants had the opportunity to hear Harry Cheung, founder and chairman of BVL (Hong Kong), Martina Ferracane, one of 30 innovators under 30 years on Forbes list, Alexander Bruner, author of the first book on Swiss ” Crypto Valley “ and Mirko Ross, founder and CEO of Digital Worx.
Heinrich Frontzek from Festo was speaking about human-robot collaboration with artificial intelligence, while the FESTO Bionic product “BionicCobot” demonstrated how machines can work directly and safely together with humans.
The first day of the conference was closed with the panel Journey to the future of tech. The second day was reserved for different workshops for deepening the knowledge on topics, which were presented during the first day, with active contributions of participants.
The inspiring conference gathered about 200 participants, representatives of large and small companies, startups, as well as representatives of the state administration.
The Science Technology Park Belgrade organized the Conference with the support of the Swiss Government, through the project Science Technology Park Belgrade – the new export instrument of Serbia.
