Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America.
He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the Industry Advisory Board within the Future Directions Committee and chairs the Symbiotic Autonomous Systems Initiative. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento.
He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.
He writes a daily blog with commentary on innovation in various technology and market areas.
Keynote Speech Title: Augmented Machines and Augmented Humans converging on Transhumanism
Summary: We have experienced a significant evolution in the capabilities of machines (artifacts) over the last 250 years with an incredible acceleration in the last 50 years, thanks to electronics and software. This evolution is going to continue, and accelerate, in the coming two decades leading to machines as smart as humans.
At the same time, the human species has augmented its capability in various areas, more than doubling life expectation over the last 100 years and individuals have learnt to leveraging on machines as never before to improve their life and extend their knowledge. This is also bound to progress in the coming two decades to the point that the boundary between humans and machines will become, in many instances, fuzzier and fuzzier, partly thanks to the growing use of digital twins.
The IEEE Future Direction Committee has an Initiative, Symbiotic Autonomous Systems, focusing on this.
The talk will be presenting the goals and results so far of this initiative, exploring a broad set of technologies and their evolution showing how that is fueling the augmentation of machines and humans, creating symbioses and leading to transhumanism.