Netanya Smart City

Director of the International Centre for Local and Regional Development (ICLRD)

Caroline Creamer

Caroline has worked in a research and management capacity on a number of EU funded projects over the past 16 years; namely the Four Cities Project (Urban Regeneration, Planning and Community Participation) with Maynooth University; EQUAL at Work (Inclusive Employment and Recruitment Practices in the Irish Labour Market) with the Dublin Employment Pact; SPAN (Strategic Planning and Multi-level Governance) with Maynooth University; and more recently, CroSPlaN (the Cross-Border Spatial Planning Development and Training Network) with ICLRD.  She has led on various action research programmes, co-designed and delivered capacity building training with Councils across the island of Ireland, and created learning networks for different sectoral interests.  A qualified town planner, her research interests include spatial planning practice and policy, leadership in place-making and place-shaping, regional and local development and regeneration, collaborative and participative decision-making, and inter-territorial and cross-border development.

Caroline holds a Diploma in Environmental Resources Management from Dublin Institute of Technology, an MA in Geography from Maynooth University, an MA in Town and Country Planning from University of the West of England / Open University, and is currently a part-time PhD candidate in Maynooth University.

Director

Professor Markus Helfert

Markus Helfert is the Director of IVI and Professor of Digital Service Innovation at Maynooth University. He is also Director of the Business Informatics Group at Maynooth University. He is a Principle Investigator at Lero – The Irish Software Research Centre and at the Adapt Research Centre. His research is centred on Digital Service Innovation, Smart Cities and IoT based Smart Environments and includes research areas such as Service Innovation, Intelligent Transportation Systems, Smart Services, Building Information Management, FinTech, Data Value, Enterprise Architecture, Technology Adoption, Analytics, Business Process Managem ent. Prof. Helfert is an expert in Data Governance Standards and is involved in European Standardisation initiatives. Markus Helfert has authored more than 200+ academic articles, journal and book contributions and has presented his work at international conferences. Helfert has received national and international grants from agencies such as European Union (FP7; H2020), Science Foundation Ireland and Enterprise Ireland, was project coordinator on EU projects, and is the Project coordinator of the H2020 Projects: PERFORM on Digital Retail.

Dr Viviana Bastidas

Viviana is a post-doctoral researcher in IVI and member of Lero (www.lero.ie), the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software that focuses on working collaboratively with industry partners.

She completed her Ph.D. thesis on Modelling the Alignment of Services and Information in Smart City Architectures at the Department of Computer Science at Maynooth University.

Her career interests are in Business and Digital Transformation at the intersection of Business and Information Systems to assist organisations in implementing their strategies. Viviana’s research has been published in conferences and journals in the domains of the Knowledge Economy, Digital Transformation, Internet of Things, and System Science.