ECSS brings together leading voices in Informatics to share insights on emerging trends, challenges, and strategic priorities in research and education. The 2025 edition continues this tradition, showcasing thought leaders driving change across Europe.
Click on a speaker’s photo to learn more. Additional names and details will be announced soon.
Keynotes Session
Manuel Wimmer
Johannes Kepler University Linz (Austria)
Manuel Wimmer
Keynote Speech on "Integrating Quantum Technologies into European Informatics Departments"Short Bio
Manuel Wimmer is Full Professor and Head of the Department of Business Informatics – Software Engineering at JKU Linz, Austria. Since 2019, he is also the Program Director of the Business Informatics master study at JKU Linz.
He received his Ph.D. and his Habilitation from TU Wien. He has been a research associate at the University of Malaga, Spain, a visiting professor at the University of Marburg, Germany and at TU Munich, Germany, and an assistant professor at the Business Informatics Group (BIG), TU Wien, Austria.
From 2017-2023 he was leading the Christian Doppler Laboratory on Model-Integrated Smart Production (CDL-MINT). In this context, Manuel has developed different engineering approaches for digital twins.
He is the JKU Linz representative in the AutomationML society. He is co-author of the book Model-driven Software Engineering in Practice (Morgan & Claypool, 2nd edition, 2017).
For a list of scientific publications see the entries in DBLP and Google Scholar.
Manuel Wimmer is currently involved in the organization of the following scientific events:
4th IEEE International Conference on Quantum Software (QSW)
2nd International Conference on Engineering Digital Twins (EDTconf)
Moore’s Law Calls for the Next-Generation UniversityAbstract
The exponential pace of computing power, as predicted by Moore’s Law, is driving rapid advancements in sensor technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and mobility. Cars are evolving into iPads on wheels. Our robots are world champions robot-soccer, and surgical robots may soon outperform human surgeons.
But are we prepared to harness this wave of innovation? Can we keep pace—or even accelerate?
This changing landscape demands a new kind of academic institution: the *4th Generation University*. More than a place of learning and linear research, it is a dynamic hub of open innovation, actively engaging industry, government, and society. It fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and co-creation to tackle global challenges and generate sustainable value. By seamlessly integrating academia with real-world partners, the 4th Generation University becomes both a catalyst and connector—bridging knowledge, practice, and impact. It emphasizes both global reach and local relevance, uniting diverse stakeholders in a shared commitment to collaboration, innovation, and societal progress.
Short Bio
Maarten Steinbuch is a high-tech systems scientist, entrepreneur and communicator. He holds the chair of Systems & Control at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), where he is Distinguished University Professor. He is also Scientific Director of Eindhoven Engine. The research of his group spans from automotive engineering to mechatronics, motion control, and fusion plasma control. He is most known for his work in the field of advanced motion control and mechatronics, as well as in surgical robotics. Steinbuch is a prolific blogger and a key opinion leader on the influence of new technologies on society. He is (co)-founder of 8 start-ups, of which three on surgical robotics.
Hans-Joachim Bungartz will be one of the Leaders Workshop panellists.Short Bio
Professor Bungartz (* 1963) and his team conduct research on aspects of informatics in scientific computing along the entire simulation pipeline – from modeling to numerical algorithms and their efficient parallel implementation to HPC software and data analytics. The spectrum of applications for their research ranges from fluid mechanics, plasma physics and molecular dynamics to algorithms for quantum mechanical simulations.
His studies of mathematics, informatics and economics at TUM were followed by his doctorate (1992) and post-doctoral teaching qualification (Habilitation, 1998), after which he held a professorship in mathematics in Augsburg and an informatics Chair in Stuttgart before returning to TUM in 2004. He is a member of the board of directors of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, a member of the advisory board of several HPC centers and institutions, speaker of the BGCE elite study program and director of the Ferienakademie Sarntal. Professor Bungartz chaired the DFG Commission for IT Infrastructure for seven years, has been Chairman of the Executive Board of the German Research and Education Network from 2011 to 2020 and is a member of the Steering Committee of the Council for Doctoral Education of the European University Association since 2016.
Nicola Gatti will be one of the Leaders Workshop panellists.Short Bio
Nicola Gatti is a full professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. His research activities are grounded in the Artificial Intelligence area. His main achievements come from algorithmic game theory, allocation problems and incentives, algorithmic social choice theory, multi-agent learning, and online learning. His contributions to these fields range from new algorithms and theoretical results to experimental analyses, implemented systems, and innovative real-world applications of AI techniques. He published more than 170 peer-reviewed archival research papers. He received several awards, including the 2011 AIxIA Marco Somalvico Award as the best Italian young researcher in AI, and the best paper award in several conferences, including the prestigious NeurIPS 2020 and Cooperative AI 2021 funded by Google Deepmind. He was elected as a EurAi Fellow (top <3% of the European AI scientists) in 2021 and awarded at IJCAI 2022.
Guillaume Gravier will be one of the Leaders Workshop panellists.Short Bio
Guillaume Gravier is senior research scientist of CNRS (the French national research agency) at IRISA, of which he is the director. His research activities within the Linkmedia research group, common to IRISA and Inria Rennes, focus on content-based media analysis, indexing and linking. He has a background in probabilistic modeling for speech and language processing applied to multimedia content, and multimodal modeling. His current research interests are in media analytics, multimedia collection modeling, deep learning and multimodality, graph-based methods for multimedia content representation.
Dimka Karastoyanova will be one of the Leaders Workshop panellists.Short Bio
Dimka Karastoyanova joined the Computer Science Department of the RUG in January 2018 as a full professor of Information Systems and a head of the Information Systems Group. Dimka is a Rosalind Franklin Fellow. Since June 1st 2020 she is the Head of the Computer Science Department and a member of the Bernulli Institute Board.
Since January 1st 2023, Dimka is a member of the Board of Informatics Europe.
Before joining the Bernoulli Institute she had a joint appointment as an associate professor of Data Science at The KLU (Kühne Logistics University) in Hamburg and as a Senior Researcher at HPI (Hasso Plattner Institut), University of Potsdam, Germany.
Dimka was a junior professor at the Excellence Cluster SimTech and at the Institute of Architecture of Application Systems (IAAS) at the Computer Science Department of the University of Stuttgart from 2008 to 2016.
She received her doctoral degree in Computer Science in 2006 from the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, where she was a member of the Databases and Distributed Systems Group and of the Graduate School “Enabling Technologies for the E-Commerce”.
She holds an MSc degree in Computational Engineering from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and an MSc and BSc in Industrial Engineering for the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria.
Dimka’s current research is in the field of data-driven, service-based, runtime process automation and performance improvement, trusted and flexible cross-organizational collaboration and abstractions, techniques and middleware systems for flexible choreographies finding application in fields like logistics, supply chain management, eScience, Data Science, healthcare and others.