convenor

CEN/TC251 Health Informatics is a standards delivery organisation, meaning that it approves standards in Europe, but the standards do not have to be created in Europe. In fact, many of them come from the global health informatics committee ISO/TC215. For this reason, it is important to monitor and contribute to the standards prepared in ISO/TC215. This is what the purpose of this fellowship was about.
ISO/TC215 has around 10 working groups (WGs) and CEN/TC251 has two. I am the convener of the second one and I try to follow those ISO/TC215 WGs that operate within the scope of my WG in CEN/TC251. This is not always easy because the ISO/TC215 WG meetings take place at the same time. In ISO/TC215 I participate mainly in interoperability, information security, and health software development areas.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is coming to healthcare, too. As I have AI experience through my doctoral studies and projects that followed, it has been natural for me to follow AI standardisation, too. The ISO/TC215 meeting in Toronto in October 2025 made it clear that the number of AI related work items is increasing in ISO/TC215. ISO/TC215 has a joint working group 3 (JWG3) with JTC1/SC42 Artificial Intelligence. The idea is that the ISO/TC215 AI work items are developed in this JWG3. Attendance in JWG3 is important also because I am a member of the CEN Strategic Advisory Group on AI in healthcare.
During the ISO/TC215 Toronto meetings in October 2025, SC42 held its meetings in Sydney, Australia. After the working day was over in Toronto, work began in Sydney in Toronto evening time. I participated in particularly the healthcare AI standards development JWG3 and SC42/WG4 Use Cases meetings virtually in Sydney. Attendance in JWG3 meetings was important to motivate the ISO/TC215 initiated standardisation projects to the SC42 leadership. Through my participation, the other parties became more aware of European values in AI standardisation.
 

This fellowship supports my role as a convener of ISO TCC307 WG3. The priority is to organise the appropriate ballots and meetings to allow the experts to discuss and reach a consensus based on the comments received for the projects in ISO TC 307 WG3. Another priority is to complete the norms with the attendance list and verify that all experts in the meeting were duly registered in the portal and authorised to participate in the meetings.

One of the main challenges of this work has been overcoming the cultural barriers and language differences encountered during this period, particularly through various meetings and ad hoc meetings for the three projects, which are ongoing in preparation for the final stage to publication. 

In the framework of this fellowship, I worked on a Technical Report (TR) that addresses critical gaps and challenges in the international standards landscape for digital content identification and binding mechanisms.
The absence of a common terminology across standardisation communities poses a major challenge. Different communities use inconsistent language when describing how content is connected with its metadata or other associated information. Whereas the C2PA initiative uses its own distinct terminology, other standardisation communities (e.g. W3C or OAIS) have different interpretations of what bindings mean. This terminological divergence leads to interoperability and mutual understanding barriers. The TR is establishing a comprehensive taxonomy that provides a neutral reference framework for multiple standardisation efforts, facilitating clearer communication across standardisation communities.
A gap the TR is addressing, is the limited comprehension of how binding mechanisms respond to content transformations. Digital content undergoes frequent alterations through compression, format conversion, and editing. Traditional identifier systems often fail when these changes occur, particularly when embedded metadata is stripped. The Working Group systematically analyses characteristics and limitations of different binding approaches, from cryptographic hashing to robust fingerprinting to watermarking techniques. This analysis will help stakeholders to make informed architectural decisions tailored to their specific requirements.
Moreover, the fellowship further contributes to positioning the recently published ISCC standard (ISO 24138:2024) within a broader global context. The TR serves as an educational resource, helping stakeholders understand how similarity-preserving identification methods complement established identification systems and address emerging needs in content provenance and authenticity verification, particularly relevant with current growth of AI-generated content.
 

This was a short-term fellowship supporting my convernorship. During the period, I contributed to the following activities: 
Ensuring the sustainability of the standards developed within the IEC/JTC1/SC7/WG19 working group,
Identifying existing difficulties and proposing solutions to resolve them,
Raising awareness among the various members of the working group of the need to use OSD in future standards development,
Coordinating actions with the WG19 secretary and reporting to the SC7 secretariat.
 

Local Digital Twins will be a fundamental building block for CitiVerse. It will also play a crucial role for anyone in the public sector who wants to fully utilize the usage of AI.
Today, cities, regions and countries all over the world are building Local Digital Twins using various tools and approaches. Game engines, CAD tools, GIS, AR/VR/XR tools, Urban Digital Platforms, CIM and other visualisation tools are used. Thus a wide spread of technologies and standards. 
Interoperability for Local Digital Twins (LTD) is crucial. They need to fit horizontally and vertically. Horizontally is to put a LDT of one city next to a LDT of another city and make them align. Vertically, by example, a LDT produced by a city must fit LDT from public transportation and LDT by the energy company for the same geographical area, etc. 

European CitiVerse will be built upon Local Digital Twins. If separate Local Digital Twins in Europe don't fit together it will be impossible to create a seamless CitiVerse. It will also be difficult with interoperability between LDT:s. The LDT also needs interoperability versus dataspaces and IoT. For a LDT:s to be useful for officials and others, LDT:s need interoperability with the business operating systems used by officials on a daily basis. 

In this sense, in the framework of my fellowship, my JWG has sent a survey to many major LDT projects around the world, and we are now gathering the results and statistics.  The result will be a gap analysis and a technical report, which will enable advice to all relevant major SDO:s on how to develop or change their standards to fit better together. 

The priority aims to support the development of European and international standards for DLT/blockchain technologies to ensure transparency in sustainable financing. This contribution brings together the financial, reporting and new technologies to address the gaps between these three sectors.
The challenge for sustainable finance is to minimise the risk of 'greenwashing’ and provide better reporting for the Sustainability sector, ESG investment and Net Zero climate goals and new EU Reporting regulations.
It includes standards development to combine blockchain/DLT Use Cases reflecting sustainable solutions, while the sustainable finance standards cover Terminology and reporting guidelines, and the financial services consider digital currencies and tokenisation.

This contribution aligns with the European Standardisation initiatives, including the effective delivery of ESG investment strategy and Net Zero climate goals, along with the new EU Climate and Sustainable Reporting legislation in 2024 /2025.
 

In this fellowship the original objective is to start to prepare a NWI to address the age approriate topic and start the standard development. The aim is to improve the benefits and reduce the risks in the digital world for young users up to the age of 18. The solution is to adapt the content delivered by online products and services according to the age of users. Moreover, the process requires establishing the age/capacity of users, including age verification and age estimation. The CWA does NOT define age estimation and verification processes (Out of scope) but requires to select an appropriate age assurance tools/approach in conformity with established standards and official guidance.

 It aims to develop technical specifications and standards to efficiently manage terminology work ensuring seamless information exchange, minimizing misunderstandings, and enhancing both human-human and human-AI interactions.

The gaps that this fellowship enables me to address has been to dedicate solid time first for the ECMA meetings that I convened, but also for the community background work that needs support and attention. The priorities are to users the creation of the core specifications for ECMA approval, which has been challenging because of the influx of attention on PURL for SBOM and CRA compliance. The challenge from PURL getting increased attention meant needing to cater to new contributors and supporting long debates and addressing objections, in particular on topics like character encoding.