DIGHUM lectures: Drones, Swarm Intelligence, and the Future of Cyber-Physical Societies

Speaker: Franco Accordino, European Commissions
Speaker: Monika Lanzenberger, European Commission
Moderator: George Metakides, Digital Enlightenment Forum

Drones are rapidly evolving from niche flying devices into autonomous, AI-powered components of a broader digital infrastructure connecting airspace, data, networks, cloud-edge computing and intelligent systems. This lecture explores the emerging “drone stack”, from chips, physical platforms and connectivity to onboard AI, distributed intelligence, swarms and autonomous control systems.

We will discuss how drones are transforming sectors such as disaster response, environmental monitoring, smart agriculture, logistics and mobility, while also raising profound societal and ethical questions. We want to explore both, the opportunities and risks associated with this transformation, including sustainability benefits, new public services and industrial innovation, but also challenges related to surveillance, privacy, weaponisation, labour disruption and democratic governance.

The lecture will outline the industrial and geopolitical dimension of drones, including market trends, strategic technologies and Europe’s position in the global ecosystem. Finally, we will also analyse the evolving EU regulatory framework, including the U-space architecture and the European Action Plan on Drone and Counter-Drone Security, together with their interactions with AI, cybersecurity, data and platform regulation.

About the Series
A roughly bi-weekly seminar offers presentations and panels from worldwide thought leaders. It is typically held on Tuesday afternoons at 17:00 CET. The bidt and the TU Wien are cooperation partners for the DIGHUM lecture series. Digital Humanism deals with the complex relationship between man and machine. It acknowledges the potential of Informatics and IT. At the same time, it points to related apparent threats such as privacy violations, ethical concerns with AI, automation, loss of jobs, and the ongoing monopolisation on the Web. For this reason, a new initiative — DIGHUM lectures — started with regular online events to discuss the different aspects of Digital Humanism. We will have one or more speakers on a specific topic followed by a discussion, or panel discussions, depending on the topic and speakers. The exact dates will be announced at least two weeks before.

Participate via Zoom
Zoom | meeting: 9638 9928 143, password: 0dzqxqiy

Participate VIA YouTube
Talk will be live-streamed and recorded via YouTube