The day started with encouraging words about the importance of Data Science from Robert-Jan Smits, the President of the Executive Board of TU/e. The audience learned from Tijl De Bie’s inspiring keynote about the challenges of automating data exploration. He showed how this can be dealt with by removing facets known to the human explorer automatically, thereby guiding towards new insights and discoveries.
After the first break we had two very diverse, interesting talks showing the wide scope of our work in the health domain. Volkher Scharnhorst taught us about the value of AI algorithms to improve patient care in clinical settings. Panos Markopoulos took us on a short journey, explaining the possibilities that serious gaming offers for kids and other patient groups.
In the industry block we learned from Jan Post about the possibilities of digital twinning for maintenance planning and zero-defect manufacturing. Geert-Jan van Houtum and Alessandro Di Bucchianico presented an overview of recent and upcoming TU/e projects in this domain. We concluded the plenary program with an interactive panel on responsible data science, with scholars from various domains. This panel clearly showed there are reasons to worry about, e.g., privacy and transparency, but also that there are interesting scientific challenges and ideas to tackle these.
Many of the poster presenters took the opportunity to pitch their posters in the plenary program in a very energetic session. The well over 60 posters attracted much attention, and the central area became a vibrant place to discuss concrete projects in more depth. This was also the place where new contacts were established, hopefully resulting in many new projects that you all can see in next editions of the summit. We, the organizing committee, were very pleased with the program and the positive reactions we received, and we thank all contributors very much for making this a successful event.
The results of the online survey confirm the success of the event. We are especially pleased with a net promotor score of +22. All plenary talks received very positive scores (on average 4 out of 5), with the keynote receiving the highest marks. The poster & demo session was another highlight: the over 60 posters (download 73 MB) also received very high evaluation scores.
--- View the Summit photo book for an impression of the day ---
We look forward to see you again on November 23!