Keynote Speakers

Prof. Vera Hummel

Reutlingen University

Prof. Dr. -Ing. Vera Hummel has been a Professor at Reutlingen University, since 2010. Beginning of March 2025, she was elected as founding dean of the School NXT, Sustainability and Technology, Reutlingen University. Her research work focuses on the design of smart factories with use of innovative technologies and approaches that increase efficiency of production and logistics systems as well as on learning factories as innovative methods for education and training. She is presently researching approaches and methods to support SMEs on the journey towards circular economy and sustainability. Prof. Hummel is currently the head of the Reutlingen Zentrum Industrie 4.0 as well as the initiator and director of the Werk150, the factory on the Campus of Reutlingen University. Since May 2023 she is elected president of the International Association on Learning Factories IALF.

Prof. Wilfried Sihn

Fraunhofer Austria / TU Wien

In September 2004 Univ. Prof. Dr. Ing. DI Prof eh. Dr. h.c. Wilfried Sihn joined the TU Wien as a professor for industrial and system engineering at the Institute of Management Sciences and has since been head of this Institute twice, according to rotation. In November 2008, he was appointed Managing Director of the newly founded Fraunhofer Austria Research GmbH and manages the Division Production and Logistics Management in Vienna. He has been active in the field of applied research for more than 30 years now, taking part in more than 300 industrial projects. His areas of expertise include production management, corporate organization, enterprise logistics, factory planning, order management, life-cycle management, maintenance, modelling and simulation, and business process reengineering. His current focus is on implementing Industry 4.0 concepts, such as Smart Maintenance. Besides being part of advisory and administrative boards, he also holds several positions in various organizations, e.g. board member of the International Federation of Production Research (IFPR) as well as the German Chamber of Commerce (DHK) in Vienna, member of the European Academy for Industrial Management (AIM) and Fellow Member of the International Academy for Production Engineering (CIRP).

Dr. Febe de Wet

Lesedi PFS, BMW (South Africa)

Febe de Wet is currently a member of the Conversational AI team at BMW SA’s IT Hub. She is also an extraordinary associate professor at Stellenbosch University's Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Before the assignment at BMW SA, she held various positions in academia and spent 10 years at the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) where she led numerous projects on the development of language resources and speech technology for South Africa's indigenous languages. Her research interests include statistical pattern recognition, automatic speech recognition and, more recently, the automotive industry. She is especially interested in developing chatbots, speech recognition systems for children and educational applications of language technology. Febe has a B.Eng (1993, Stellenbosch University, South Africa) and an M.Eng (1998, University of Pretoria, South Africa) in Electronic Engineering and holds a PhD degree from the Radboud University in the Netherlands.

Jonas Barth

PTW TU Darmstadt

Jonas Barth is a dedicated researcher in the field of production management and circular production. He holds a Master of Science (M.Sc.) from PTW at the Technical University of Darmstadt and is affiliated with the Institute for Applied Logistics and Finance (IALF). With a passion for advancing the circular economy, Jonas focuses on empowering individuals for sustainable and circular production through competency development in learning factories. His work aims to drive the integration of sustainable practices into production systems and foster a circular future.