Keynote Speakers

Ben Hiller is a Senior Policy Officer for Cyber and Hybrid issues at NATO. He developed NATO’s current Cyber Defence Policy and strategic measures to address cyber campaigns below the Article 5 threshold. Following Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine, he developed the Alliance’s concept for enhancing the contribution of cyber defence to NATO’s overall deterrence and defence posture. A key focus of his work is integrating civil-military cyber defence capabilities against malicious cyber campaigns in peacetime, crisis and conflict. Before NATO, he was responsible for international cyber policy at the OSCE, where he guided the development of confidence-building measures to reduce the risk of conflict stemming from cyber capabilities, and earlier worked on counter-terrorism, focusing on technology and biometrics for the secure cross-border movement of people and goods across Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

François Vernadat is a French and Canadian scientist with a background in automation and computer science. He did research in Canada on computer-integrated manufacturing in the ’80s and in France in the ’90s on enterprise modelling, integration and architectures, before becoming Full Professor at the University of Metz. Since 2001 he has focused on performance management and system interoperability, alongside a management career at European institutions: project manager at the European Commission and head of an IT unit at the European Court of Auditors. He has been associate editor of many journals (IJPR, IJCIM, Computers in Industry, EIS, JII) and has published over 300 papers and 7 books.