DSI Symposium Robotics

Sandy Shadana Grishaver-Kalisingh is an expert in a combination of medicine, ICT, (medical) robotics and image processing techniques. Sandy is currently the director of her own management & consultancy agency from which she fulfills assignments for the European Commission, Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, ASML, TU Eindhoven, VU, Medical Delta and many more. In addition, she is a board member of Foundation ICT4Handicap, which looks at current IT solutions and how they can be deployed in a smarter way for the elderly, people with disabilities and the chronically ill.

Sandy also organizes "Kalymero, the Robot Challenge" together with the Edwin van der Sar Foundation and she is the author and editor-in-chief of "Handbook Endoscopic Surgery" together with prof. Ivo Broeders.

Very recently Sandy was invited to attend the Gong ceremony of the AEX to promote the role models of women in Tech and last year Sandy ended up at the second place among Tech women in the top 100 influential women from Opzij.

Alin Albu-Schäffer received his M.S. in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Timisoara, Romania in 1993 and his Ph.D. in automatic control from the Technical University of Munich in 2002. Since 2012 he is the head of the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), which he joined in 1995 as a Ph.D. candidate. Moreover, he is a professor at the Technical University of Munich, holding the Chair for "Sensor Based Robotic Systems and Intelligent Assistance Systems" at the Computer Science Department. His personal research interests include robot design, modeling and control, nonlinear control, flexible joint and variable compliance robots, impedance and force control, physical human-robot interaction, bio-inspired robot design and control. He received several awards, including the IEEE King-Sun Fu Best Paper Award of the Transactions on Robotics in 2012 and 2014; several ICRA and IROS Best Paper Awards as well as the DLR Science Award. He was strongly involved in the development of the DLR light-weight robot and its commercialization through technology transfer to KUKA.

Alain le Loux MSc. MBA

General Partner – Cottonwood Technology Fund

 Alain le Loux is General Partner at Cottonwood Technology Fund. Cottonwood Technology Fund is a top-decile performing venture capital fund: pre-seed / seed investments with focus on hard science IP-driven companies. Geographical focus: Northern Europe & Southwest USA.
Alain has 25 years’ experience in Technology on board level positions and as CEO of startups. He graduated in 1994 with a double Master's degree at Twente University. Alain graduated in 2001 cum laude for an Executive MBA degree. In the past Alain worked on executive level at a corporate, as CEO of startups, as startup coach (coached 200+ companies in Europe) and he acts as angel investor before he joins Cottonwood Technology Fund. 

Iddo received his M.Sc. in 1986 and he attended international training courses in Management (1987/1988), Industrial Patents (1988), Business Marketing Research (1990), Effective Presentation Skills (1991), Industrial Marketing for Technicians (1992/1993) and Personal Leadership, Change Management and Talent Management (2011). In the years 1987-1990, Iddo has successfully set up a new research group in the agro-biotechnology domain at the chemical multinational DSM. After his appointed as Business Director of the ‘Research Institute for BioMedical Technology’ at the University of Twente in 1995, he successfully implemented a complete repositioning of the research themes. He was also coordinator of three European Research Training Networks with 9-10 participants from universities, industry and healthcare organizations (‘Human Resource Potential’ RTN ‘Neural Prosthesis’, ‘Human Resources and Mobility’ RTN ‘Neuromuscular Sensing & Stimulation’, and ‘Human Capacity and Mobility’ RTN ‘Artificial Neuromuscular Sensing & Control’). Since 2001, Iddo is Business Director of the research institute DSI (Digital Society Institute, formerly known as CTIT) at the UT. DSI is the largest academic ICT research institute in the Netherlands. Its focus is on the development of new technology and the adaptation of this technology by society. Since 2016, Iddo is also coordinator of the robotics research activities at the UT, in which both technical research groups (mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science) and research groups from behavioral, management and social sciences participate.

Next to these main jobs, Iddo was Business Director of the national public private partnership BrainGain, Acting Business Director of DesignLab Twente (a creative and cross-disciplinary eco-system connecting science and society through design), and co-founder of two SME’s in the service sector. Iddo has a proven track record in valorization and the creation of innovation ecosystems. He was involved in the startup phase of more than 100 spin-off companies. He was one of the architects of the European ICT innovation eco-system EIT Digital; during its starting-up phase Iddo was responsible for the Action Line ‘New Business Creation’: defining, setting-up and running an integrated set of activities supporting entrepreneurs in the commercializing of their innovative ideas. From 2010-2012 he was Manager Business Innovation and MT member of EIT Digital Eindhoven, and since 2015 member of the ‘Dutch Strategic Node Committee’ of EIT Digital. In 2014, Iddo was member of the ‘Impact Committee’ of the Science Foundation Ireland which has selected five SFI Research Centers (PPPs) together receiving 245 mln Euro investment. As member of the MT of the ‘ICT2Business’ CSA (2013-2016), Iddo was chairman of the Industrial Board and member of the Organizing Team and Business Coach during the ‘Innovation Runway Event’ in Germany and the ‘Venture Academy’ in Greece. Iddo has been invited many times as speaker at workshops and conferences for plenary speeches about innovation, commercialization, and ICT. Iddo is a.o. member of the Advisory Board of the ‘Foundation Technology Circle Twente’ (regional network of more than 190 high-tech SME’s), member of the ‘Industry and Business Committee’ ICEIRD (International Conference for Entrepreneurship, Innovation & Regional Development), Board member of the Dutch Platform Agri-Food-Tech, and Board member (from 1-1-2018 chairman) of the LEO robotics center in Twente.

Manu Penubaku obtained his M.Sc. from TU Delft in Mechanical Engineering specializing in Biorobotics. He currently works as a biomechanical engineer for Reboocon Bionics a company that develops transfemoral prostheses in collaboration with the University of Twente. His main area of interest is intelligent control of bionic limbs.

Roeland Ordelman (PhD, 2003) is a technology innovation expert in the area of audiovisual archiving and especially, optimizing access to and re-use of it in many different use scenarios. He has a background in academic research, audiovisual archiving and ICT industry. He is technology innovation manager at Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, one of the largest audiovisual archives in Europe, and principal investigator Speech and Language Technology in the area of Multimedia Retrieval at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. He received his PhD on the use of speech recognition technology to improve access to audiovisual archives and worked on a wide range of national and international projects in the area of multimedia retrieval. Next to more fundamental research topics, such as spoken conversational search and audiovisual (hyper)linking, research topics that address aspects related to the uptake of access technology in realistic, industrial use cases have his special interest. In that context, he has been involved in organizing benchmark evaluations in the MediaEval Benchmark Evaluation Series and TRECVid. His current work in this area focuses on the integration of (user) evaluation and benchmarking in the context of ‘living labs’: research infrastructures that involve industry, research and user communities for mutual benefit.

René Fluit is a postdoctoral researcher at the Dept. of Biomechanical Engineering at the University of Twente, working on the control and clinical evaluation of the IntelLeg Knee developed by Reboocon Bionics. At the University of Twente, he also did his PhD in musculoskeletal simulations and predictive gait models. He also worked in industry as a mechanical engineering consultant for 3 years.

Douwe Dresscher received his B.Sc. in electrical engineering from the Hanze University of Applied sciences in 2008. After obtaining his B.Sc. degree, he obtained his M.Sc. in Systems and Control from the University of Twente in 2011. Right after, he continued with his Ph.D. research in the Robotics and Mechatronics group at the University of Twente. His Ph.D. research was on an alternative drive mechanism for robotics based on a continuously variable transmission and a mechanical storage element.

After obtaining his Ph.D, Douwe worked as a postdoc and
university teacher at the University of Twente for 1.5 years. In this position, he shaped the activities at the UT and the collaboration between the UT and TNO in the newly founded i-Botics joint innovation center in the field oftelerobotics. Currently, Douwe continues the work he started in i-Botics in the role of assistant professor. The main focus of his research is on creating telerobotic systems that are, in addition to being stable, task-effective under a wide range of time-delays and other disturbances.

Philip Brey is full professor of philosophy and ethics of technology at the department of philosophy, University of Twente, the Netherlands. He is also president of the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology (INSEIT).  Brey’s work focuses on the ethical and social implications of emerging technology, particularly information technology, robotics, biomedical technology and sustainable technology.  He currently leads a European Union Horizon 2020 project, SIENNA (2017-2021, budget € 4.0 million), involving 13 international partners, on the ethical and human rights aspects of emerging technologies, in which one of the central goals is to develop ethical codes and research ethics protocols for robotics and artificial intelligence.  He also leads the NWO Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies Gravitation programme (budget € 27 million), a large, ten-year project on ethical dimensions of emerging technologies, including robotics.