SnT experts talk FinTech and Space at ICT Spring 2021

ICT Spring 2021 took place on 14-15 September at the European Convention Center Luxembourg, as well as online. The tech conference gathers business decision makers, innovation managers, startups, researchers and venture capitalists from all over Europe. The event was structured in various summits and side events, such as the FinTech Summit and the Space Forum, and it featured current and former SnT experts as speakers.

On Day 1, Prof. Andreas Hein, Head of the Space Systems Engineering (SpaSys) research group, held a session in the framework of the Space Forum titled “Back to the future - How space resources can save the Earth”, in which he provided an overview of the possibilities and challenges offered by space resource utilisation. Starting from the data monitoring capabilities offered by small satellites – such as FloodCube, a CubeSat for flood monitoring being developed by SpaSys researchers – to other projects currently in the works, Hein gave the audience a taste of what’s yet to come in the field of space resources, and how they can help us save the Earth.

Later in the day, former SnT researcher Beltran Fiz, CEO of digitalUs and head of the team aiming to be the next SnT spin-off held a session at the FinTech Summit about “Open Intelligence: KYC and AI”, providing a glimpse of the wealth of personal information which can be found online, and how this can be used – in compliance with GDPR – by financial institutions. This kind of information, which is much more than that we can obtain from a simple online search, is already being used by intelligence and security services, and it can also be leveraged for Know Your Customer (KYC) purposes. 

On Day 2, Prof. Yves Le Traon, Deputy Director of SnT and Head of the Security Design and Validation (SerVal) research group, held a session at the Fintech Summit. Le Traon’s achievements have recently been recently acknowledged by an international survey (JSS) ranking him among the top 20 most impactful experienced researchers worldwide on software engineering for the past decade. In his talk on "Building a Data Science Lab in a Financial Company", Le Traon explained what financial companies are looking for, what data science is capable of offering, and specifically how machine learning can improve processes in key financial areas such as fraud detection. In fact, through a robust and continuous integration process in a company setting, data science technologies can considerably improve processes and increase security and reliability.