Mr. James Clarke, MSc, BE EE, EU Programme Manager and Strategic EU Liaison Manager, Walton Institute for Information and Communication Systems Science at South East Technological University, Ireland.

Mr. Clarke has long experience in leading EU funded projects in areas related to International Cooperation and Next Generation Internet (NGI) and cybersecurity, privacy and trust.

These include TRACK-STAR, an EU – US project running from January 2021 – December 2022 supported by the Delegation of the European Union to the United States of America.  TRACK-STAR is facilitating Transatlantic Civil Society Dialogues between civil society organisations (CSOs) from both Europe and the United States of America. The main purpose of the project is to bring together key civil society organisations and policy experts into Workgroups in seven priority areas, split across three themes: Environment, Governance and Economy.

Since 2020, Mr. Clarke is coordinator of the H2020 NGI’s  NGIatlantic.eu project and previous coordinator of the SpeakNGI.eu project, both of which fall within the EU’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative’s (http://ngi.eu) portfolio of projects funded in Horizon 2020. Within NGIatlantic.eu, the research and innovation project is funding open calls for EU – US twin teams to carry out transatlantic projects in relation to NGI topics to realise the creation of a more human-centric Internet.

From 2014 – 2020, Mr. Clarke coordinated the EU – India FI-MEDIA project funded by the Delegation of the EU to India, along with IIT Delhi and Beyond Evolution Tech Solutions, which set up number of successful cluster to cluster (C2C) partnerships between researchers and industry in EU and India in a number of topics related to smart villages and smart agriculture. This has led to the creation of a Centre of Cooperation on Smart Villages being developed in a number of rural regions in India.

Mr. Clarke was one of the Government-nominated Irish members of the H2020 Future Internet Forum (H2020 FIF) of Member States and Associated Countries and one of the national NGI Contact points for Ireland.

Prior to this, between 2011 and 2013, Mr. Clarke coordinated the successful FP7 BIC project, which stands for Building International Cooperation for Trustworthy ICT: Security, Privacy and Trust in Global Networks & Services.

Mr. Clarke has been a member from the very start of the Network Information Security Platform (NIS Platform) Working Group no. 3, Secure ICT research and innovation, having a role of steering committee and co-author of the Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) chapter 4 entitled Resilient Digital Civilisation (collective layer). In addition, Mr. Clarke is actively involved in the research community for many years, having served in various international conference committees as program committee member.

In 2011, 2013 2015, and 2018, Mr. Clarke has been four times elected on four consecutive two year duration terms as Steering board member of the European Networked and Electronic Media (NEM) Technology Platform.