List of Nominees 2021

Nominated by PKN - Polish Committee for Standardization

The implementation of uniform and harmonized quality standards across Polish Biobanking Network aims to create a real and effective area of collaboration for the biomedical research sectors. Biobanks are becoming entities that respond to the real needs of science and innovative industry. Leading centers developing, guaranteeing the development of biobanking in Poland with appropriate quality standards. The unification of standards for biobanking of biological material improves the conditions for the development of biobanking in Poland. Moreover, the attractiveness and activity of Polish biobanks in national and international scientific level is increasing rapidly. Finally, this leads to increased use of biobank resources by the public and private sector to create effective solutions to improve population health and advance science.

Implementation of common quality standards is the perfect way to prove that biobanks are competent partners in biomedical research. Biobank's role is to protect and manage the legacy of all participants/donors in the context of valuable samples and data. Biomedical research will be supported by donors but only when they will be sure that their biological material and associated data are safe and are handled with the highest quality standards for the health and well-being of mankind.

Wroclaw Medical University Biobank as one of the Polish Biobanking Network member was created to ensure the enhancement of biological material availability not only for internal cooperation but also for external partners, where the highest quality standards will be accomplished.

The implementation of uniform Quality Standards for Polish Biobanks opened the way for third party certification according to 9001:2015 in the area of biobanking for research development and scientific purposes, as the first Biobank in Poland. Moreover, thanks to QSBP a positive BBMRI-ERIC assessment regarding 20387 requirements for biobanks has been achieved, as the first biobank in BBMRI-ERIC european community.

Nominated by UNI - Ente Italiano di Normazione

In the last years, we are witnessing the increasing implementation of robots and robotic devices in a number of domains besides industry, such as minimally invasive surgery, healthcare, rehabilitation, agriculture and logistics. In the meanwhile, the concept of collaborative applications reached the industrial domain and was elevated to one of the key-enabling technologies of the Industry 4.0 paradigm. It can be nowadays applied to a wide variety of other machines, designed to work closely with humans.

The promotion of cobot technologies in different domains can be slowed down by the unclear path towards safety validation. This is due to both the limited knowledge about relevant standards, relevant in particular for start-ups or companies extending their portfolios with cobot solutions, and the absence of clear testing procedures to prove the compliance in these standards. The COVR project aims at bridging this gap by providing procedures for cobot safety validation, which can be used as an additional supplement to the fulfilment and application of existing standards.

Nominated by ASI - Austrian Standards International - Standardization and Innovation

EFPF – European Connected Factory Platform for Agile Manufacturing – is a project funded by the H2020 Framework Programme of the European Commission under Grant Agreement 825075. It engages 30 partners (Users, Technology Providers, Consultants and Research Institutes) from 11 countries.

To foster the growth of a pan-European platform ecosystem that enables the transition from "analogue-first" mass production, to "digital twins" and lot-size-one manufacturing, the EFPF project will design, build and operate a federated digital manufacturing platform. The platform will be bootstrapped by interlinking four base platforms from FoF-11-2016 cluster funded by the European Commission, early on. This will inform the design of the EFPF Data Spine and the associated toolsets to fully connect the existing user communities of the four base platforms. The federated EFPF platform will also be offered to new users through a unified Portal with value-added features such as single sign-on (SSO), user access management functionalities to hide the complexity of dealing with different platform and solution providers.

The main objectives of EFPF are:

Foster growth of pan-European platform ecosystem that enables digital transition
Unified Portal through which new and existing users can simply and seamlessly access full range of services provided by federated platforms
Support developers to create digital tools/services of direct added value to manufacturers, especially for lot-size-one production, through dynamic collaboration
Demonstrate sustainable value networks and tangible benefits in three pilot industrial areas: Aerospace; Furniture; and Smart Waste Management
Establish standardised, industry-relevant platform architectures
EC's Innovation Radar recognises the EFPF federated platform as business ready.

Nominated by UNE - Asociación Española de Normalización

FormPlanet is one of European Union’s Open Innovation Test Beds (OITBs) for characterisation, aiming at increasing the productivity of the sheet metal forming industries through the development of new experimental and modelling methodologies to assure zero-defects production and optimise sheet material development, production and performance. This Test Bed, to be constituted at the end of 2021, is a long-term industrial ecosystem providing one-stop-shop services to industries and especially SMEs in different end-use sectors (transport, household appliances, construction, packaging, etc.). This boosts a wide usage of high strength sheet materials for high-added value products in different applications, while reducing production costs, productivity losses and time-to-market for the products.

FormPlanet develops the following outcomes, for which the Test Bed provides related services:

New multi-scale material characterisation techniques
Novel tests to predict part performance and formability
Quality control and material integrity by novel non-destructive techniques
Novel finite element modelling to predict part manufacturing and performance, and to shorten part design phase
Creation & analysis of a complete material database
Contribution to the setting of future standards
Creation of a certification methodology to ensure quality levels
FormPlanet is an H2020 innovation action (IA) under the topic ‘Open Innovation Test Beds for Characterisation’. It started in January 2019 and will finish in December 2021. It is coordinated by Eurecat Technology Center in Spain and integrated by 16 partners from 8 European countries.

Nominated by BSI - British Standards Institution

HEALINT and HEALINT4ALL are apple research projects funded by ERASMUS+ KA2 Strategic Partnerships Grants for innovation in Education. Both projects are committed to creating internationally agreed protocols for the audit and support of practice learning environments for healthcare students.

Currently, the world relies upon students to graduate as registered professionals in nursing, midwifery, medicine and allied professions to assure high quality healthcare in future. The qualified healthcare workforce is essential globally in order to reduce patient mortality and enhance the quality of patient outcomes as well as advance the frontiers of healthcare knowledge and evidence for future populations. However, there are insufficient numbers of qualified professionals, with current predictions suggesting a shortfall of 18 million in the world’s healthcare workforce by 2030. Further, distribution of skilled workforce across the world is variable.

Many practice settings create situations where healthcare students gain excellent clinical learning internationally and where these exist, they can enable best use of skills attained and facilitate safe practice and future movement of future professionals. International experience can additionally enhance cultural sensitivity and global awareness for those returning to work in their own localities, when working with patients or with colleagues who have chosen to migrate.

However, agreed and common standards that offer confidence to students, practice settings and education providers remain elusive and, in some settings, do not exist at all. HEALINT and HEALINT4ALL are EU funded projects with a global mission - to facilitate common conversations and actions around the support of mobility of healthcare students through assuring excellence in education within learning placement settings.

Nominated by PKN - Polish Committee for Standardization

Designing a street or road lighting is a compromise between safety of vehicles and pedestrians, and energy spent on actual lighting. To identify all parameters of lighting infrastructure (pole height, overhang, mounting angles, luminaire type and power etc.) for a single street human designer intuition is used since it is virtually impossible to analyze all their combinations which reaches easily 10^22. It results in a suboptimal design with poor energy efficiency. The main goal of the project was to provide an Artificial Intelligence based system which generates energy efficient designs compliant with the lighting standards. As a result a multi-agent AI system was created which uses parallel graph transformations. Such optimal designs are 10-38% better in terms of energy efficiency than those provided by human designers. They can also be delivered much quicker since the design preparation time has been shorten 33 times.

Nominated by UNE - Asociación Española de Normalización

The SEA-TITAN project fosters a step change in the marine wave energy sector by designing, building, testing and validating a crosscutting and innovative Direct Drive Power Take-Off (PTO) solution to be used with multiple types of wave energy converters.
The PTO comprises the electric generator, power electronic converters, control devices and additional mechanical devices. Design is based on a previous Wedge Global prototype and focus on augmenting its specific force density and efficiency to levels which significantly increase the energy capture in many types of Wave Energy Converters. In addition, the developed technology is open source to promote update and accelerate innovation.

The performance and reliability demanded by wave energy systems exceeds the normal capabilities of commercial components commonly used in other industries. Currently each original equipment manufacturer has different requirements, so pursuing the development of bespoke components not only limits the utility of the end product but also multiplies the development costs, causing a barrier to establish a dedicated supply chain and fully deploy this renewable energy technology in practice.

SEA-TITAN is an H2020 research and innovation action (RIA) under the topic ‘Developing the next generation technologies of renewable electricity and heating/cooling’. It started in April 2018 and will finish in September 2021. It is coordinated by Wedge Global S.L. in Spain and integrated by 7 partners from 6 European countries.

WINNER STANDARDS+INNOVATION 2021

Nominated by DIN - Deutsches Institut für Normung

Molecular in vitro diagnostics and biomedical research have allowed great progress in personalised medicine but further progress is limited by insufficient guidelines for pre-analytical workflow steps (sample collection, preservation, storage, transport, processing etc.) as well as by insufficient quality assurance of diagnostic practice. This allows using compromised patients’ samples with post collection changes in cellular and extra-cellular biomolecules’ profiles thus often making diagnostic test results unreliable or even impossible.
To tackle this, SPIDA4P generated and implemented a comprehensive portfolio of pre-analytical CEN Technical Specifications and ISO International Standards, addressing the important pre-analytical workflows applied to personalized medicine. These will also be applicable to biomarker discovery, development and validation as well as to biobanks.

Corresponding External Quality Assurance (EQA) Schemes were developed and implemented as well, aiming to survey the resulting quality of samples and diagnostic practice. SPIDIA4P ensured stakeholder organisations involvements as well as training, education, and counselling as additional major foci of the project.

SPIDIA4P consisted of 19 highly experienced partners and closely coordinated with large European public research consortia to obtain access to research and validation studies data serving as evidence for the new standards developments and achieved improvements of diagnosis, patient stratification and prognosis of disease outcome.

Nominated by IPQ - Instituto Português da Qualidade

VET21001 is an applied research project, designed to respond to the problem of the low European Quality Assurance Framework for Vocational Education and Training (EQAVET) adoption since 2009 and is funded by the ERASMUS+ Programme, in the framework of the European priorities for vocational education and training.

VET21001 has the Mission to:

• contribute to a self-sustainable market dynamic, conducive to a widen adoption of the EQAVET criteria
  and the Vision to
• contribute to the continuous improvement of European VET and HVET services and its worldwide recognition as a brand of excellence

To accomplish its mission and achieve its vision, the project includes five intellectual outputs. The relationship between these is illustrated in the diagram:

The VET21001 project aims, therefore, to develop a capacity building programme, an accredited certification scheme and an implementation toolkit to motivate a wider EQAVET adoption. The VET21001 toolkit will use a standardized approach based on the recently published ISO 21001:2018, capitalizing on its already internationally consensually approved content and expecting that, by associating the ISO brand to EQAVET, all players in the market, including those of the standardization, accreditation and certification worlds, will become more curious about it, as well as willing to contribute to its dissemination and assuring its sustainability.

Nominated by OVE - Austrian Electrotechnical Association

Daniel HERBST has been a member of OVE since 2008, actively supported its platform for students and young professionals OVE Young Engineers (formerly youngOVE) for several years and has now been active in standardization for the last few years. Professionally and in the context of electrotechnical standarization, he deals on the one hand with various topics at the low-voltage level (including protection against electric shock, protective measures, electrical systems, testing/verification) and on the other hand with charging infrastructure for electric vehicles. In this context, personal protection is an extremely important concern for him, which is why he is committed professionally and in the sense of standarization in particular to promoting a national technical specification for the periodic verification of DC charging stations (among other things, he is the chairman of OVE’s working group responsible for this). In line with this, he initiated a national multi-year research project together with the OVE and other partners from science and industry under the title "Protection, Safety and Efficiency of Electric Vehicle Charging Stations" (ProSafE²).

Nominated by NSAI - National Standards Authority of Ireland

Creating a demand for and ensuring the adoption of standards for electronic health records (EHRs) and digital health can be difficult. This Horizon Europe 2020 Marie Curie research and development innovation is funded through the EliteS scholarship and grounded in developing leadership to advance technology and standardisation within Europe.

Focusing on key pillars and EU policy to advance standards adoption for digitalisation in Europe; quality, security, and interoperability, Dr Hussey and Dr Das are using Innovative methods to translate research on how they use and adopt standards through RD&I development. The approach adopted links to an evolving innovation laboratory using real world case studies and demonstrators which showcases EU standards in use.

The research provides explicit relationships between healthcare service providers and users so that the technology can share important health and social information to support care delivery across and between the citizen and those individuals engaged in the citizen’s care. Entitled The Interoperability Lab Sandpit the resource provides practical examples of how standards are deployed on an open digital platform, the innovation platform uses demonstrators freely available to view and use which will assist in accelerating knowledge transfer and diffusion of standards to advance digital health within EU member states.

In the midst of challenging times with national cyber security breaches and societal disruption caused by the global pandemic, the need for health and social care providers to commit to, and deliver on, agile, resilient integrated patient-centered care services is important. Practical examples of purposefully designed digital innovation hubs which offer both public and private sector users insight on how standard based solutions are being used in RD&I centres will be key to build capacity and capability across local regional and national level EU member states.

Integral to this progression of digital innovation hubs is the need to promote and commit to standards-based approaches and to provide practical citizen specific use cases to support sustainable enterprise wide trustworthy services. Translation and use of CEN Health Informatics standards for collation of clean and trustworthy data sharing to progress value-based health social care for public and private services.

The Centre for eIntegrated Care (CeIC) in Dublin City University is invested in promoting standards and is working as part of a health and social care ecosystem. Building online guidance resources, underpinned with standards for cloud based electronic health record service delivery. The design and initial resource content are available to view from <csdm> and supported by EU H2020 Marie Curie Elite S Fellowship in a national RDI centre in Ireland (SFI Adapt).

Nominated by NSAI - National Standards Authority of Ireland

The development of a standard on community face coverings in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic - for general use by European (and global) citizens, which is a new category of product. It is inevitably that there is a wide variety of levels of performance on the market including innovate designs. Steven led and facilitated research in fast track at the early stages of the standards development process in order to establish the benchmark level of performance that is suitable of the intended use of the product and protection of consumers. The CEN/TS (17553), currently under development, aims to cater for a diverse group of stakeholders including children, older persons and persons with disabilities and is informed by research conducted by Steven since the publication of the CWA.

Steven led early stage research to support the development of the Irish standard ‘SWIFT 19’ (FastTrack document ~equivalent to a CWA) on ‘barrier masks / face coverings’ to inform performance requirements. Innovate methods of testing were used by Steven and those he collaborated with in University College Dublin (UCD), University Limerick (UL) and National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG) during the research. Examples include using imaging systems to test different mask designs, on faces of a wider diversity of faces than often used. Transparent face coverings (to enable lip-reading by hearing impaired citizens) were also included as this type of mask currently has no standardised test. Steven also conducted measurements of nose bridge designs to inform the performance requirements in the CEN/TS community face coverings, and he also helped develop a new test methodology for mask design in determining outward and inward leakage specifications. Steven also worked with other researchers to develop design criteria to take into account the diversity of facial anthropometrics of the human population to inform the sizing requirements of the new CEN TS on community face coverings.

Steven Darby has a PhD in atmospheric chemistry and worked for several years in viral diagnostics. Currently he works in the Research Centre for Advanced Photonics and Process Analysis, Munster Technological University, where he conducts contract research for industry. He led the technical group in 2020 which informed the NSAI SWiFT-19 (FastTrack document ~equivalent to a CWA) and he was nominated to CEN for the development of the CEN/CWA 17553 on community face coverings. He is presently the Chair of NSAI Technical Committee 67 on Face coverings that contributes to CEN/TC248/WG38 “Community face coverings”

As a recipient of Science Foundation Ireland Rapid Response Covid Funding he conducted research into masks, leading to the award of SFI research image of the year 2020. His research continues to contribute to CEN TS 17553 (CEN/TC248/WG38).

Nominated by NEN - Nederlands Normalisatie-instituut

The energy transition in the Netherlands to sustainable heating and cooling energy is in full swing. The geotechnical community is also searching hard for innovative technologies that can contribute to this global issue. In recent years many international initiatives and developments have taken place to thermally activate geostructures that focus on storage and extraction of thermal energy from the subsurface but the potential of open water (aquatic energy) has been left mostly unexplored.

As waterways form a large part of the Dutch landscape. Quay walls and sheet piling are used to protect the banks. In Amsterdam alone, there is approximately 600 km of quay walls, 200 km of which are in dire need of renovation. When heat exchangers are mounted on these steel sheet piles, energy can be extracted from the water and the soil which in turn can be used to heat and cool houses and buildings.

CRUX Engineering, in close cooperation with Gooimeer, Groep Duurzame Energie, Delft University of Technology and Eindhoven University of Technology, has set up a full-scale energy sheet pile wall trial in the small village of De Zweth, near Delft. Here the energy sheet pile wall will be extensively tested for a period of two years to validate the theoretical analyses as well as a starting point for the development of Dutch standards dealing with these types of systems.

WINNER STANDARDS+INNOVATION 2021

Nominated by NEN - Nederlands Normalisatie-instituut

Irene’s PhD research examined standards as an instrument contributing to the protection of personal data, as a fundamental right. Legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) faces inevitable limitations: it is bound by geographical borders of jurisdictions and it is imposed top-down. Standardisation on the other hand has made a significant shift moving from what was originally destined for ‘nuts and bolts’ to developing in areas such as the environment, safety, quality management, and privacy. The innovative research shows that standards do have a role to play in data protection, sketches the functions of standardisation, framework and boundaries, to achieve such a role.

Further, Irene’s research is focused on identifying common areas for standardisation across different types of EU law, and the overarching conformity assessment requirements, such as the 2019 Cybersecurity Act, the upcoming AI Regulation, and the General Data Protection Regulation.

Nominated by UNI - Ente Italiano di Normazione

Laura BLASO is a Researcher at ENEA and the Scientific representative of PELL (Public Energy Living Lab) Project.

Laura Blaso actively participates to the national standardisation activities in the field of light, lighting and energy efficiency. She coordinates a specific working group at national level, the UNI/CT 023/GL 10 “Energy saving in buildings”. She is also a member of CEN/TC 169/WG 9 “Energy performance of buildings”.

Based on the EN 15193-1:2017, she promoted the development of the LENICALC tool and of the relevant national pre-normative document, UNI/PdR 77:2020 “Guidelines for computerized calculation for the determination of LENI according to the complete calculation method of UNI EN 15193-1:2017”.

Nominated by UNI - Ente Italiano di Normazione

During the last years, the achieved results turned out to be extremely successful making him today an expert in the research fields of thin film technologies, residual stress analysis in nanostructured or amorphous materials and nano-mechanical characterization of small-scale structures and micro-devices.

His major research efforts are in the fields of surface engineering, micro-device development, thin films and small scale mechanical behaviour, and can be briefly summarized as follows:

1. Micron-scale residual stress analysis, through the development of innovative micron-scale methods for residual stress analysis by a focused ion beam (FIB) approach. He has contributed to the pre-standardisation of this method through the coordination of the large European project ISTRESS: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/604646/it
2. Nano-mechanical characterization of advanced materials and devices by the use of nanoindentation testing, to discover the microstructure/properties correlations in thin films and small-scale devices. The specific focus of recent activities was on surface energy, interfacial adhesion and fracture toughness analysis of nanostructured materials, though the coordination of the large European project OYSTER: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/760827/it
3. Thin film modelling and production. Design, production and characterization of complex multi-layered thin films for wear resistant and functional applications, with specific focus on coatings produced by Physcal Vapor Deposition (PVD) and Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD).
   In 2016 he contributed to the foundation of the European Materials Characterisation Council (EMCC), which has now become a reference community of materials characterisation experts that interacts continuously with the European Commission to define and update the strategic roadmaps for industrial exploitation of advanced materials characterisation methods in Europe.

Within EMCC and the European project OYSTER (www.oyster-project.eu), he contributed to the formulation and development of a novel metadata structure for materials characterisation data, called “CHADA”, which is now the main subject of a CEN/WS agreement on “Materials characterisation - Terminology, classification and metadata”.

More that forty (40) experts and ten (10) large European H2020 projects participated to the development of this CEN/WS, under coordination of Dr. SEBASTIANI, and the document was eventually published for public consultation on June 23rd 2021. More information on this workshop is available here.

Nominated by DKE - German Commission for Electrical, Electronic and Information Technologies of DIN and VDE

The principles of the reversible reference process structure are used to investigate and improve the energy efficiency of "Power-to-Gas" technologies based on H2 and synthetic hydrocarbons as CH4 for large-scale electricity storage with the use of CO2 as a raw material in Closed Carbon Cycles (CCC) without any CO2 release to the environment. Two main effects lead to the reported low efficiencies of these processes: the electricity demand to evaporate liquid H2O supplied to electrolyzers and the separation of CH4 and O2 by oxidation of additional produced H2. Based on a reversible process structure of an H2 based electricity storage can be shown that the evaporation loss of H2O electrolysis that causes an extra demand on electric work can be avoided by using a steam accumulator as H2O storage supplied with steam by a fuel cell connected via a H2 and an O2 storage with the electrolyzer. Electrolyzer and fuel cell are necessarily operating in turns. Consequently, if only H2 production is needed the fuel cell can be replaced by any other heat source as waste heat combined with heat pumps or solar heating. The thermodynamic benefit is that the dissipation of electric work is replaced by solar or low grade heat with a small amount of work needed to operate the heat pump. Another option is the use of an exothermic chemical reaction as heater for the steam accumulator or the integration in an industrial steam net with the purpose of replacing or minimizing electric work by heat with low exergy. An interesting option is also to use a methanation reactor as a heat source. Electrochemical reactors with oxygen-ion conducting electrolytes minimize the H2 demand and improve the conversion efficiency because an extra H2 production is needed to separate O2, formed during methanation. Depending on application and entire system integration these here presented design options allow a clear improvement of efficiency. The implementation of a Closed-Carbon-Cycle (CCC) for storing high energy quantities is simultaneously also a step forward to a sustainable industry because the cycle can also be used to supply industry with sustainable hydrocarbons and take their waste CO2 as valuable resource for new hydrocarbon production.

Nominated by AFNOR - AFNOR-Comité Electronique Français

Founded in 2010, ART-Fi devises innovative testing solutions for Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) measurement to accelerate the development of innovation in the wireless industry with high precision solutions and contributes to protect the consumer health.
As a customer-centric and health-conscious company, ART-Fi brings the wireless industry in new directions with the aim to reduce the RF (radiofrequencies) exposure in daily life by improving EMF (ElectroMagnetic field) measurement methods.

In 2014, ART-Fi revolutionized the SAR testing industry as the first to offer instant and absolute SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) testing solutions. ART-Fi’s core business revolves around ART-MAN, a broadband system that performs direct measurements in the time domain. ART-MAN uses a powerful, patented vector probe-array technology (D-Phase) to precisely measure the phase and amplitude of the electromagnetic field absorbed by human tissue.

Nominated by ASI - Austrian Standards International - Standardization and Innovation

Benedikt HUFNAGL is co-founder and CTO of Purency GmbH (founded 2020). Due to his studies (technical chemistry, process engineering and PhD study in the field of chemometrics at the Technical University of Vienna) and his years of experience in programming, he is not only able to put himself in the position of the user and identify problems in the market, but also to find solutions quickly. Benedikt Hufnagl develops product solutions and aligns them with the strategy and vision of Purency. At the same time, he takes an active role as an ISO-delegate where he is working to develop an International standard for microplastic analysis. Benedikt Hufnagl is the calm soul of the Purency team and, when things are going well, brings a musical accompaniment to significant meetings.

Nominated by ILNAS - Organisme Luxembourgeois de Normalisation

Nader S. LABIB received his B.Sc. in Mechatronics Engineering from GUC in 2012. In 2014, Nader received a M.Sc. in Space Technology from Luleå University of Technology, Sweden and later received a M.Sc. in Space Techniques and Instrumentation from the University of Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France. During his graduate studies, Nader worked on various international projects in collaboration with Airbus Defence and Space in France; the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) in Kiruna, Sweden; the Research Institute of Astrophysics and Planetary Science (IRAP) in Toulouse, France; and the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt (DLR) in Germany.

Nader joined the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) in October 2017, as a PhD candidate on a joint research program between ILNAS (NSB) and University of Luxembourg.

Mr. LABIB's current research focus is on distributed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) traffic management systems; additionally, as a Luxembourgish delegate in standardisation at multiple technical committees, Nader is continuously involved in IoT and UAV technical standardisation.

WINNER STANDARDS+INNOVATION 2021

Nominated by ILNAS - Organisme Luxembourgeois de Normalisation

Saharnaz DILMAGHANI has received her BSc in Information Technology Engineering in 2014 from Tabriz University. She achieved her MSc. degree in Computer Engineering from University of Bilkent in Turkey in 2017. She then joined the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) of University of Luxembourg in 2018 to peruse her PhD under the supervision of Dr. Matthias Brust, in the frame of a joint research program between ILNAS (NSB) and the University of Luxembourg. Her expertise is developed in Data Analysis, Machine Learning, AI, Data Protection and Security domains.

Mrs. DILMAGHANI's main focus during her PhD is on developing algorithms for clustering network data such as in social networks. She also investigates on the data protection and trustworthiness of AI by collaborating in different technical standardization committees. Mrs. Dilmaghani is also focused on the tools, measures and strategies that could be used for assessment of AI systems.

Nominated by NEN - Nederlands Normalisatie-instituut

Exporting companies face differences in technical requirements per country. As a student at the Rotterdam School of management, Erasmus University, Stijn VEENSTRA studied this in six cases of European companies in the machine industry that export to the US. Which differences do they encounter? How do they cope with these? Based on these experiences he moves to possible improvements in the systems: Which problems need to be solved? What can be done to do so? Findings show that better alignment between the European and American systems for standardisation, conformity assessment and technical regulation is possible but full alignment is not realistic and seeking compromises might make the situation worse rather than better. The current European system is flexible, and makes it easier for businesses to innovate and export. American companies would benefit from using the European approach, also for trade within the US.

Nominated by DIN - Deutsches Institut für Normung

Tobias LEITING (FIR e.V. at RWTH Aachen University) actively supported the link between standardization and research within the last years. He summarized some of the results in the research paper “Bridging the gap between research and standardization – the success story of the project MeProLI supporting maintenance processes”, which has been accepted for publication at the EURAS conference in September 2021. This resulted in a flexible use case for the application of the DIN SPEC for the dissemination of research and innovation results.

Furthermore, he has been advising the BRIDGIT2 project and the “Standards+Innovation” initiative by participating in the Advisory Board and being speaker on the “Boosting innovation through standards” conference 2019 in Brussels.

Nominated by NSAI - National Standards Authority of Ireland

Elizabeth O’FERRALL, an engineer by profession, has held a number of roles at European and national level. Elizabeth’s mantra is the promotion of the inclusion of and the diversity of stakeholders in the standards development process.

Elizabeth promotes the integration of RDI and standards – enabling the development of products that are sustainable, usable and can be developed in large scale production.

Nominated by BSI - British Standards Institution, IPQ - Instituto Português da Qualidade and DIN - Deutsches Institut für Normung

Francisco has acted as Chairman of CEN/TC 256/SC 1 “Railway application - Infrastructure” for more than 20 years. During this time, he has overseen the development of over 100 published standards and currently has 40 active work items. His sub-committee has 14 working groups, some of which have such a large work programme that they are themselves divided into subgroups.

Nominated by BSI - British Standards Institution

Geoff first engaged with British Standards in 1992 and very soon joined CEN working groups, becoming chair of CEN/TC 256/SC 2 in 1998, a role which he still holds and cherishes. Geoff’s extensive experience in the railway industry coupled with his enthusiasm, attention to detail and inter-personal skills are key to the success of many projects that his sub-committee and associated working groups have published. To date his sub-committee have published over 70 standards and have a current work programme of 35 active work items

Nominated by OVE - Austrian Electrotechnical Association

The Austrian National Committee nominates Mr. Josef FEICHTINGER because of his many years of activity as a TC officer in the field of electric welding. A number of innovations have been incorporated into standardization in this area in recent years. Josef FEICHTINGER is a driving force in the standardization of electric welding, and it is a constant concern of his to include innovation in standardization.

Nominated by IPQ - Instituto Português da Qualidade

Sandra FELICIANO is a lecturer at Porto Polytechnic and a researcher at the Knowledge Innovation Centre, who has been building bridges between the worlds of academia and standardization for over a decade. During this period, she has been actively participating in national, regional and international standardization and taking several leadership roles, such as Chair (IPQ/CTA 25, IPQ/CT 187) and Convenor (ISO/PC 288/WG 1, IWA 35, ISO CASCO/TC 232/JWG 58, ISO/TC 232/WG 8).