After nearly 20 years as marketing and communication consultant for the public and private sector, Laurent Deslattes has joined Grenoble Greater Area. This local authority brings together 49 municipalities in the south east of France. It is located in the center of an urban area of more than half a million people. His primary missions revolve around the issue of facilitating digital access for the public which is a question of broadband networks, IT equipments and digital skills. He is also in charge of animating the Smart City approach which consists in mobilising the opportunities offered by new technologies to accelerate the territory’s transition.

Hiroaki Nishi is a Professor of Keio University since 2014. He is a member of IEEE-SA Smart Grid Vision Project, IEEE802.3, IEEE2030, IEEE 1451, IEEE P1950.1, IEEE P2413, IEEE P2688, and IEEE P2805. He is the chair of the IEEE P1451-1-6 and IEEE P2992 Working Group. He is also a member of ITU-T Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities WG2, Japanese Academic Societies. He was the smart energy working group chief of Nagasaki EV&ITS project, Japan. He has been a member of several committees established by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. He is a sub-chief editor of Smart Grid News Letter of Impress Co. Ltd, and he published several books about the standards and conducted smart city demonstrations. He is a chair of the Smart Community Implementation Committee of Kawasaki City, Musashikosugi Area, and a chair of the Smart City Exploratory Committee of Nasushiobara City. He is also chair of the Smart Community Implementation Committee of Saitama City, Urawamisono Area, and a president of Omotenashi ICT Association. Since 2015, he is a director of Edge Computing Association, Japan. He is a director of Urban Technology Alliance. He is now deputy program director of Intelligent Knowledge Processing Infrastructure Integrating Physical and Virtual Domains, Cross-ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program (SIP).

Gavin Duffy is the Founder and CEO of RealSim, a company specializing in 3D digital twin solutions for Smart City deployments. A geoscientist and virtual reality pioneer, Gavin is passionate about leveraging immersive simulations to address complex urban challenges. With over a decade of experience in airborne and marine geophysics, he transitioned into gaming technology, applying it to solve real-world problems in urban planning and development.His expertise in using advanced game engines enables cities to create digital replicas of their environments, allowing for scenario analysis, infrastructure planning, and efficient decision-making. Gavin has been actively involved in several European Smart City projects, bringing innovation to urban technology through virtual worlds.

Dr. Takuro Yonezawa is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University, Japan. He received a Ph.D. degree in Media and Governance from Keio University in 2010. His research interests are the intersection of the distributed systems, human-computer interaction and sensors/actuators technologies. He led several smart city projects as a technical coordinator, such as FP7/Horizon2020/NICT European-Japanese collaborative research project (ClouT/BigClouT project), NICT social big data project, MIC G-Space city project, and so on. He was awarded IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award (2009) and IPSJ Yamashita SIG Research Award (2013, 2020).