Global CIO Perspectives – Robotics

AGENDA

18.00 Registration and welcome drink

18.30 Welcome by CIOforum

Koen De Maere, Manager Business and IT collaboration at BASF, Researcher ‘Digital Business and IT’ at University of Antwerp, Antwerp Management School

18.35 Robots do create jobs!

Paul Peeters, lead expert and Factory of the Future program manager at Agoria

Belgian factories of the future invested more than € 500 million in robotization and automation while at the same time creating 13% extra jobs. Eager to know how they did it? We’ll tell you.

19.00 Industrial Service Robotics: save costs and increase safety!

Dr. Ing. Ekkehard Zwicker, GE Inspection Robotics, Co Founder, CEO & Member of the Board

In our journey to explore how robots will change modern life, Ekkehard will shed light on how to turn leading edge robotics research into practical industrial applications. His keynote will present an excursion in Industrial Service Robotics, including an overview of technologies, systems and applications, and industrial show cases. Ekkehard was awarded with the euRobotics Technology Transfer Award, the IEEE-IFR Invention and Entrepreneurship in Robotics and Automation Award and with several ALSTOM innovation awards. Ekkehard acts as a robotics expert supporting the European Commission in the evaluation of innovation and research projects in the Horizon 2020 framework program. Furthermore he is head of the topic group “Inspection and Maintenance Robotics” within euRobotics and act as the European Coordinator of SPRINT Robotics.

19.25 How to start with a cobot implementation?

Filiep Vincent, Project engineer Smart & Digital Factory

Filiep will explain the concept of ‘cobots’. His keynote will address a process to conduct a feasibility study to decide whether cobots are suitable to automate production tasks. This is then illustrated with a case study done for a Flemish SME.

19.50 Robotics Process Automation: a hype or a technology with a proven track record?

Mathias Fransen, Managing Partner at RoboRana

Tired of repetitive and manual tasks in your organization? Need more hands to process high volume transactions across various applications? Ever heard of a virtual workforce that can take over these repetitive actions? In this inspiring session, we will introduce the Robotics Process Automation (or RPA) technology with its facts & myths and prove that the technology is mature and irreplaceable for the digitalization of the workforce. We will also prove the power of intelligent automation by combining RPA with AI technology like chatbots and intelligent OCR.

20.15 Robots powered by deep learning. Ready or not?

Jonathan Berte, founder and CEO at Robovision

Deep learning is making rapid progress to be the next big thing in AI. This technology is coming from an academic environment and cannot be used without caution in an industrial setting. Robovision is industrializing deep learning and has proven that robots can be steered by this new AI architectures. Use cases will be shown, as well as do’s and donts when deploying such a system.

20.35 Wrap up, introduction of our next event and acknowledging our partners

20.40 Networking opportunity accompanied by food and drinks