Director General of Eurostat & President of Statistics Poland:
Mariana Kotzeva was appointed Director General of Eurostat by the European Commission
on 1 March 2018. She is the first woman at the helm of Eurostat.
Ms Kotzeva joined Eurostat as an Adviser Hors Classe to the Director General in 2012. Two years later, in 2014, she was appointed Deputy Director-General.
Prior to joining the European Commission, Ms Kotzeva was the Head of Bulgaria’s National
Statistical Institute. She also held a number of high-level consulting posts in the Bulgarian
and foreign administrations, and led international projects for the United Nations and the
World Bank.
Ms Kotzeva has a Master's degree in economics and a PhD in statistics and econometrics.
She also has an Executive Education training at Harvard Kennedy School.
Ms Kotzeva is an Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of National and World Economy in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Dominik Rozkrut has been the President of Statistics Poland since 2016. Dr. Rozkrut is a member of the European Statistical System Committee (ESSC). He is the Chair of the European Statistical System Partnership Group (PG) for 2020-2021; currently, he is also chairing the PG TF on access to privately-held data. He is a member of the OECD's Committee on Statistics and Statistics Policy (CSSP) and serves as CSSP Bureau Vice-Chair since 2020. Moreover, he is a member of the UNECE Conference of European Statisticians (CES) and holds a Conference Bureau Vice-Chair function. At the UN level, he represents Poland in the UN Statistical Commission and the UN Friends of the Chair Group on the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics, the UN Global Working Group on Big Data for Official Statistics, UNECE High-Level Group on Modernisation of Official Statistics. In March 2021, he was appointed a member of the European Commission expert group on Facilitating the Use of New Data Sources for Official Statistics. Starting from 2021 he became a member of the ISI-Committee on Agricultural Statistics (ISI-CAS) and a member of UN High-level Group for Partnership, Coordination and Capacity-Building for statistics for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (HLG-PCCB).
He is an adjunct professor at the University of Szczecin, where he received his Ph.D. in statistics and econometrics. Dr. Rozkrut is a member of the Main Council of the Polish Statistical Association.
Chairs:
Pádraig Dalton was appointed Director General of the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in May 2012.
Pádraig joined the CSO in November 1991, working in Structural Business Statistics, Statistical Methodology and Balance of Payments. He was appointed Senior Statistician to the Labour Market and Social Inclusion Division in 2001. From 2007-2010, he was Director of Statistical Support & Innovation and, Assistant Director General, Social & Demographic Statistics from 2010-2012.
Pádraig was elected Chair of the CES Bureau in June 2021.
Pádraig is a member of the:
- European Statistical System Committee (ESSC)
- UNECE High Level Group for the Modernisation of Official Statistics, serving as Chair from November 2013 to March 2018;
- Bureau of the Conference of European Statisticians (CES);
- National Statistics Board;
- Civil Service Management Board;
- ESRI Council.
Dr. Viveka Palm is the Director for the Department of sectoral and regional statistics, Eurostat, since 2021. For the years 2013-2021, she worked as Deputy Head of Department for regions and environment, Statistics Sweden. At the same time, she has been employed as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Sustainable development, Environmental science and Engineering (SEED) at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH. She received her PhD and her Master of Science in Engineering Physics from KTH and worked for eight years at IVL the Swedish environmental institute.
Dr Palm has been the co-chair of the UN Inter-Agency and Expert Group for the Sustainable Development Goal Indicators (IAEG-SDG) in the group for North America and Northern and Western Europe between the years 2019-2021.
Dr. Juan Manuel Rodríguez Poo was appointed as the President of the National Statistical Institute of Spain (INE) as of October 2018.
He holds a PhD in Economics from the Catholic University of Louvain, and previously he graduated in Economics and Business Administration at the University of the Basque Country.
Dr. Rodríguez is Professor in Econometrics, first at the University of Zaragoza and currently at the University of Cantabria, where he has been Director of the Department of Economics.
He has lectured at the University of the Basque Country, and has made academic visits at the London School of Economics, the Catholic University of Louvain, the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Carlos III University of Madrid, the Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse and the University of Genève.
Mr. Rodríguez also has numerous publications in different specialized journals of international prestige (Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Econometric Theory, among others).
From 2004 to 2011, Dr. Rodríguez was the Director of the Cantabrian Statistics Institute (ICANE).
Mr Tomaž Smrekar has been employed by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia for over thirty years. At the beginning of his career, he worked as a subject-matter specialist in labour market statistics. Later on, he became head of the Labour Market Statistics Section, followed by the Demography and Social Statistics Division and the Data Dissemination Division. In 2020, he was appointed as Director-General of the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia.
As regards international cooperation, Mr Smrekar was involved in the preparation of the European statistical legislation, and acted as a peer reviewer of the European Statistical System reviewing national statistical systems in six EU Member States. As an independent expert, he reviewed and prepared development plans and conducted training in various fields of statistics in different countries in Europe and Asia. Mr Smrekar cooperated with Eurostat, the International Labour Organisation, the OECD, the World Bank, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe and the IMF.
From 1 July 2021, Slovenia took over the presidency of the Council of the European Union. Mr Smrekar is presiding over the Council Working Party on Statistics.
Athanasios C. Thanopoulos holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Pittsburgh, a DEA and a DEEQA in Mathematical Economics and Econometrics from the Toulouse School of Economics, and a Ptychio in Economics from the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens.
During his tenure with the Council of Economic Advisers of the Greek Ministry of Finance, Dr. Thanopoulos dealt with a wide range of topics, notably: statistical governance; quality of official statistics; design of bank recapitalization and resolution schemes; social security/pension design; and design of optimal reimbursement schemes for pharmaceuticals. He participated for several years as a head of delegation and national expert in the respective EU Committees and Working Groups, including the EFC Sub-Committee on Statistics and the Council WP on Statistics.
He taught courses in various areas of Economics, Econometrics and Statistics at the undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels in Greece, USA and France. His research has been published in international refereed journals and focuses on behavioral public finance, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, social insurance design, public debt sustainability, and quantitative analyses of taxation.
On January 2016, following an international selection procedure, the ad hoc international Committee of Experts unanimously recommended his appointment as President of the Hellenic Statistical Authority.
Speakers:
Jasmin Arnold holds a degree in geography and has been working with the Federal Statistical Office since 2018. In the unit on "Crop Production and Land Use", she deals with the use of satellite-based yield estimates in agricultural statistics.
Michał Bis is head of the Data Engineering Center at Statistics Poland (Regional Statistical Office in Szczecin).
He is leading a team of developers responsible for conducting work on the use of new technologies and data sources to improve the production of statistics, development and implementation of IT systems for the purpose of statistical surveys in the fields of what the Statistical Office is focused on (i.e. maritime economy, transport, science and technology).
He has been involved in several national and international projects on data integration and Big Data.
Beatrice Eiselt works in Eurostat since 2007 and in 2013 she joined the Eurostat LUCAS team. LUCAS stands for land use and land cover area frame survey, a survey that Eurostat runs every 3-4 years. In the last years she was particularly involved in the development of the new modules on “LUCAS for Copernicus”, on grassland biodiversity and on landscape features.
Beatrice Eiselt holds a university degree in Environmental sciences and in Geographic Information Systems.
Head of Unit Copernicus, the European Earth Observation programme. European Commission
Mauro Facchini is Italian and has an engineering background with a PhD in Mechanical Engineering. Before joining the European Commission he has worked in Italy, UK and Switzerland, mostly in the academic and research environment.
He joined the European Commission in 2002 where he was initially involved in the management of research projects funded by the EU.
Mauro Facchini has been involved in Space aspects and participated to the definition of the European Space Policy from its early days in concluding the Framework agreement with ESA and in drafting and including article 189 (EU Space Competence) in the Lisbon Treaty.
He was actively involved in the development of Earth Observation capacities at the European Commission in the programme initially known as GMES. He was then appointed Head of the Space Research Unit and led the preparation of the space related part of Horizon 2020. He is since 2014 the head of Copernicus, the European Earth Observation programme.
Graduated in Political Sciences form LUISS University in Rome, She has over fifteen years of experience in research, public affairs and communications. At Eurisy, She implemented an extensive analysis on the uses of satellite applications by European public administrations before launching the Space for Cities and Space for Culture initiative. She has a long experience in satellite applications in various sectors and facilitates good practice exchanges among confirmed and potential institutional users of satellite-based services through workshops and conferences. Since 2021 she is Head of Programmes at Eurisy, coordinating the implementation of the association’s thematic activities.
She was previously Research Officer within the UNDP REDIVU project, aimed at fostering university social responsibility in Latin America, and Project Manager at the European Public Law Organization, managing EU-funded projects in the fields of rule of law and human rights.
Claudio Facchinetti is a research associate in the Geoinformation unit of the Swiss Federal Statistical Office, Territory and Environment Division, in charge of the project "Methodenrevision Arealstatistik 2020" which includes the ADELE pilot project. He was previously an enterprise architect in the IT division of the customs administration and led a career in IT development in industry, notably as an IT systems manager in the R&D department of Philip Morris International. He holds a university degree in applied physics, a degree in IT project management and an MBA.
Nicolaus Hanowski holds a Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Sciences. He started as a researcher in the US and then transferred to Mission Operations at the German Space Operations Centre. In 2009 he joined ESA and became responsible for the development of Science Ground Segments for missions, such Rosetta, Gaia, JWST, Solar Orbiter and Euclid in the Science Directorate. Since 2014 he is responsible for the Operations and Ground Segments of the ESA Earth Observation Missions and the Copernicus Sentinel satellites and the corresponding data management aspects at ESA. He is coordinating the Copernicus Long Term Scenario of Copernicus and the Destination Earth activities within ESA.
Nina Hofer is a geographer and geoinformation scientist by education with several years of experience in geospatial technologies. She has worked in various international projects as a GIS and remote sensing consultant, ranging from archaeological applications and research to environmental monitoring.
She has been working for Statistics Austria since 2019 as a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Earth Observation (EO) expert and her activities revolve around the integration of EO data into official statistics.
Her passion is to explore new solutions – currently she is establishing processes for harnessing remote sensing data within the statistical production process, ranging from land cover-, agricultural-, forestry- and environmental statistics to data generation for the building register.
Daniel Marton Kovacs is a geographer, currently specializing in the field of processing and analyzing InSAR data. He received his degree of M.Sc. in 2019, focused on landscape and environmental research and land cover type classification, utilizing optical satellite imagery. Today, he is a PhD-student at the Doctoral School of Earth Sciences in the University of Pecs; his research project is InSAR based infrastructure and natural process monitoring. He is fascinated by new solutions and possibilities, and throughout his studies he always kept his interest close to monitoring solutions at the intersection of anthropogenic and natural processes.
Jens Hollberg is a member of the Competence Center Geoinformation within the Office of Statistics of the federal state of Hesse, Germany. During the past three years he has been working on the estimation of crop yields using remote sensing technology to support the data collection in the agricultural statistics.
He holds a Master degree in Geography and a PhD in remote sensing. With more than ten years of experience in the academic community and administration he is passionate about implementing modern remote sensing technology into official statistics.
Bert Kroese is Deputy Director-General and CIO of Statistics Netherlands. He is responsible for IT and innovation and member of the strategy board of the National Dutch AI Coalition. Internationally he is chair of the UN Committee of experts on Environmental-Economic Accounting and member of a number of innovation oriented committees (EU and UN).
Maciej Krzyżanowski is the CEO of CloudFerro, which is a provider of cutting-edge cloud computing services. He has over 25 years of experience in high-tech and telecommunication industry, where he held executive positions, recently at ATM S.A. Maciej is also a Director of the Board in the European Association of Remote Sensing Companies (EARSC). He holds a PhD degree in particle physics. He worked in Warsaw University, Poland, and Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron Hamburg, Germany.
José Rosero is the Director of the Statistics Division in FAO based in Rome-Italy. He is a trained economist and holds a master´s degree in economics of development and a Ph.D. in economics from Amsterdam University. He has served as Executive Director of the National Institute of Censuses and Statistics of Ecuador, as a former President of the Statistical Conference of the Americas and as member of the High Level for Partnership, Coordination and Capacity-Building for statistics for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In addition he also served as Vice Minister of Social Development, as Technical Secretary of the Social Front and as Coordinator of the Integrated System of Social Indicators in his home country Ecuador. Dr. Rosero has wide experience in research, social policy design and international statistics.
Tim Linehan is a Statistician in the Methodology Division of Central Statistics Office (Ireland).
He joined the CSO in 2007 and has worked in areas including Crime Statistics, Seasonal Adjustment and Satellite Imagery.
He began work on Satellite Imagery in late 2018 and led the CSO work on producing "How Dark is your Sky - Estimating Artificial Light in Ireland from Satellite Imagery 2015-2019
He has studied in UCC (B.Eng) and Southampton (MSc. Official Statistics).
Sergio MANCHEÑO LOSA holds a degree in Environmental Sciences from the University of Alcalá and a Master's degree in Applied Statistics from the UNED. He began his professional career in the field of official statistics at the Spanish National Statistics Institute in 2004, where he initially participated in the production of various statistical operations on the environment related to water use and waste generation, and subsequently in Annual Spanish National Accounts.
He is currently Head of the Agrifood Statistics Area in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, and coordinates statistics related to agricultural and livestock production. He participates in several working groups of Eurostat, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, as well as inter-ministerial working groups.
Jerker Moström is a geographer working as a geospatial analyst in Statistics Sweden. Since 2012, he has been involved in the development of a new national land cover database together with colleagues from eight other government agencies. Jerker is also responsible for production of official statistics on urban green space and green areas based on the new national land cover database.
Marek Moszyński, graduated with MScEE in 1988, PhD in 1997, DSc. in 2006, all in Telecommunications at Gdańsk University of Technology. He is currently Vice President for Science at Polish Space Agency.
Previously and in a chronologic way, he was Professor at Gdansk University of Technology since 2007, Vice Dean for Development of the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics (2008-2016). He was also author and co-author of over 120 scientific papers.
He has conducted over 10 years of direct cooperation with Biosonics, Inc. (1995-2006) in the field of processing of underwater acoustic data and its usage in Earth Observation systems; two international projects as leader and organized in the frame of European Space Agency (SafeCityGis, DPCTM) and several national programs ICT application in business including “Fleet++: The Application of Multicriteria Vehicle Routing Algorithms in the Fleet Logistics” funded by the National Centre for Research and Innovation, 2014-2016, with a Better Solution SME as a subcontractor).
Due his experience, he has developed a strong expertise mainly in the fields of signal processing, embedded systems, computer architectures, software programming, Geographic Information Systems and its implementations, geo-informatics systems, remote sensing systems, methods of feature classification and data exploitation systems
Alessandra Palmieri - Eurostat - E4 - LUCAS Team Leader. Joined LUCAS survey (Land Use and land Cover Area frame Survey) in 2008. Coordinates LUCAS survey and Land Cover and Land Use statistics.
Corinne Prost is Head of the Department of Statistics and Foresight Analysis at the Ministry of Agriculture and Food since 2020. Before joining the Ministry of Agriculture, she was Deputy Director of Research, Statistics and Economic Studies Directorate at the Ministry of Labour. Previously, she was head of the Labour Unit and then head of the Studies Department at INSEE. In the United States from 2004 to 2007, she conducted research in economics at Cornell University as a research associate at the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (Ciser).
Črt Šuštar has been working at the Statistical office of the Republic of Slovenia (SURS) for almost four years. His first introduction to the area of earth observation and GIS occurred during his studies of forestry engineering in Ljubljana and in Freiburg. After graduation, he migrated to data science field working as a trainee in the data unit of European Food Safety Agency.
After employing at SURS, a project team (with him as a team leader), conducted an internal feasibility study on the applications of remote sensing data for official statistics. Since then his work focus is on integration of spatial and administrative data in the statistics production process, prioritizing exploitation of readily available data. As an extension, he is participating in the development of methods for automatic detection and classification of the satellite imagery.
Maria Yli-Heikkilä is a research scientist at the Natural Resources Institute Finland applying machine learning and satellite remote sensing technologies in developing new methods for statistical production. She received the degree of M.Sc. (Tech.) in Industrial Engineering and Management in 2003 from Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland, and MA (Humanities) in 2013 from the University of Helsinki. She has worked previously in the field of bioinformatics. Currently, she is a doctoral student in the Doctoral Programme of Atmospheric Sciences in the University of Helsinki. Her research interests lie in environmental indicators, knowledge discovery from data fusion, and Earth observation for agricultural monitoring.
Head of Crisis Information Centre, Space Research Centre PAS.
Jakub Ryzenko is a space policy and crisis management expert. He is actively involved in several research and development activities and he advises the Polish government and the Polish parliament on space policy matters.
In 2004-2008 he was the Head of the Polish Space Office. In 2011-2013 he was involved in the accession of Poland to the European Space Agency. Since then he has regularly acted as a space policy advisor for different governmental institutions and the Polish parliament. Currently he is actively involved in definition of the Polish national space programme.
In safety and security domain, he focuses on effective use of space-related solutions for international security, civil protection and humanitarian operations. Since 2013 he heads the Crisis Information Centre at Space Research Centre PAS, which develops space-related innovative solutions as well as provides operational support for crisis management institutions in Poland. He has coordinated or overseen over 40 operational activations of satellite and UAVs information support for crisis situations.
