1920x1280-images-join-us

UTA Board Members

Meet the members of the UTA board

Dr. Levent Gürgen

President
Dr. Levent Gürgenis the president of the Urban Technology Alliance. He is also the founder and president of the startup company Kentyou, which provides open innovation enabler for smarter cities. Before creating Kentyou, he was researcher at CEA-LETI for more than 10 years. He has coordinated and been involved in numerous collaborative smart city projects involving various cities in Europe and in Asia. His involvement in those projects has been awarded in 2016 by the French Ministry of Research and Education as one of the 12 “Stars of Europe”.

Dr. Rodger Lea

Technical Director
Currently CEO of Internet of Things startup, Sense Tecnic, Dr. Rodger Lea has over 25 years experience spanning academia, large corporations and startups. For the last 10 years, he has started or helped start 4 new companies while managing an active research program (University of British Columbia, Canada and Lancaster University, UK) into distributed and ubiquitous computing with a focus on Smart Cities. Prior to his startups, Dr. Lea spent over 15 years in industrial research in France, Japan and the USA, most recently as Vice President and Director of Sony’s US distributed system lab, located in Silicon Valley, CA.

Laurent Deslattes

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.

Dr. Hiroaki Nishi

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).

Dr. Daeyoung Kim

Dr. Daeyoung Kim is a Professor of School of Computing at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), South Korea. He has co-authored more than 270 academic papers in Internet of Things, Wireless Sensor Networks, Cloud Computing, Deep Learning, and Block Chain since 1990. He is the Director of Auto-ID Labs at KAIST (http://autoidlabs.org) and leading the Oliot Open Source IoT Platform Project (http://oliot.org) which implements GS1 EPCglobal international standards and beyond. He is actively collaborating with industry in the fields of food service, agriculture, healthcare, connected cars, smart factory, and smart city. Dr. Kim is a member of Korean Open Data Strategy Council and a board member of GS1 Korea and Urban Technology Alliance (UTA). He is also leading a city platform experts group of Busan Eco Delta Smart City Project.

Dr. Takuro Yonezawa

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).