Dr. Mohamed Eldessouki is an accomplished researcher, academic, and entrepreneur specialising in smart materials and digital innovation. He is the Founder and Director of Digital Innovation Centre (DigInnoCent s.r.o.) in Liberec, Czech Republic, and served as an Associate Professor at both the Technical University of Liberec (Czech Republic) and Mansoura University (Egypt).

He previously worked as a Scientist and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Empa – The Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology in Switzerland. Dr. Eldessouki holds a PhD in Polymer and Fibre Engineering from Auburn University (USA), where he also earned two Master’s degrees in Chemical Engineering and Polymer and Fibre Engineering.

His research focuses on scientific computation and sustainable solutions. His areas of expertise include materials-informatics, smart and functional materials, multi-scale modelling, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and X-ray computed tomography.

Raúl Gracia is a Senior Principal Research Scientist at Dell Technologies, where he conducts research in edge computing, cloud analytics, data management, and storage technologies. Raúl holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering (2015, Outstanding Thesis Award) from Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain) and has completed a research internship at IBM Research and Tel Aviv University.

Raúl has over a decade of experience in both academic and industrial R&D. He has authored over 30 publications, holds multiple patents, and received awards from top venues like ACM IMC’15 (Best Dataset) and ACM/IFIP Middleware’23 (Best Paper).

Raúl spent five years at Dell Technologies as a member of the engineering team for the Pravega project—a novel distributed storage system for data streams at the core of the Dell Streaming Data Platform, a new product launched in 2020. He is currently leading the participation of Dell Technologies in EU research projects (e.g., NearData, CloudSkin).