Technological Sovereignty in the EU: State of play and recommendations

Technological sovereignty as a core objective of the EU was introduced by the European Commission President’s Von der Leyen in 2019 when she presented her political guidelines. Achieving objectives such as climate and environmental protection, digitalization in the framework of the social market economy and data protection depends on the availability of suitable technologies. Technological sovereignty for Europe took an even bigger scale when the coronavirus pandemic hit severely our European economy, showing how dependent we were from countries outside the EU and how critical it is that the EU gets strategic autonomy in some specific domains.

In 2021 EUREL published a study led by VDE ITG (VDE scientific society on Information Technology) to discuss the concept of technological sovereignty, analyzing which prerequisites are necessary to obtain or recover technological sovereignty, and to define specific recommendations particularly for the essential field of technology "Information and Communications Technology" (ICT). 

The keynote speech will present the findings of the study and give a state of play to open the exchange between our panelists on this highly important topic for the electrotechnical, electronics and ICT industry.

German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)

Hans Schotten is Scientific Director of the Intelligent Networks Research Department at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and holds the Chair for Radio Communication and Navigation at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (TUK). He is chairman of the VDE Informationstechnische Gesellschaft (VDE ITG) and member of the board of the “Verband der Elektrotechnik” (VDE, Association of Electrical Engineering). Within the scope of his research, Professor Schotten deals with mobile communication technologies and radio communication and develops new security technologies and communication infrastructures for industry. He will be the keynote speaker presenting the study led by the German scientific society VDE ITG.

AFNOR advisor on strategy and governance

Patrick Bezombes is co-chair of the CEN-CENELEC Workshop on Digital Sovereignty, vice-chair of the CEN-CENELEC JTC 21 on AI standardization, chair of the AFNOR AI standardization committee, convenor of the JTC 21 Strategic Advisory Group and convenor of the ISO-IEC/SC 42/AG 3 on AI standardization roadmapping. In addition, Patrick Bezombes is developing a French AI standardization strategy for AFNOR.

CEPIS and ITPE Secretary General

Jakub Christoph is the CEPIS and ITPE Secretary General since September 2021. He coordinates the work of both organisations to promote IT professionalism by fostering professional standards and experience sharing among IT professionals; community. He previously held the position of Regional Development Manager for Europe and MENA in ICDL Foundation. His role involved coordinating activities of ECDL/ ICDL Operators, advocacy for digital literacy and its certification in Europe and MENA region. He is a passionate advocate of user digital skills and professional competence development. He’s been a member of ET2020 Working Group DELTA, which is European Commission platform to discuss digital competence in education.
Jakub also participates in works of EURid Strategic Committee. His professional interests include tackling digital social and gender gap as well as modern means of communication.