PLENARY SPEECH 1

Talk title: Advanced Low-Cost Materials & Devices for Sustainable Energy Generation 

We are currently witnessing the widest worldwide environmental disasters and it is now imperative for the future of humanity to transition to novel societies where environmental, energy, and economic policies are no longer based on endless-growth financial models and fossil fuel technologies to decrease our environmental footprint. The origin of this strong imbalance between human activities and the environment is found in the endless-growth economic systems in place in major countries worldwide as it inherently requires the use of endless cheap energy to be sustained, hence the massive use of coal and fossil fuels as energy sources for a more profitable energy return on energy invested, which might be good for the economy but not for our environment, health, and sustainable future. Technological innovations have always helped boost the economy numerous times throughout civilizations yet it must involve large-scale, clean, and cost-effective fabrication techniques and be based on efficient earth-abundant and easily recyclable materials.

A transition to hydrogen-based energy and economy is ideal as it produces zero carbon emission and hydrogen fuel cell and forthcoming hydrogen combustion transportation are available worldwide. However, most of the hydrogen produced comes from nonrenewable sources, i.e. by steam reforming of methane which produces very large amount of carbon mono/dioxide. The most natural, cleanest and sustainable way to produce hydrogen at large scale is by solar seawater splitting ^[1].

Our strategy is to fabricate earth-abundant and non-toxic devices consisting of oriented arrays of quantum rods/dots of high purity synthesized by aqueous chemical growth at low temperature without surfactant and with controlled dimensionalities and surface chemistry^[2] with intermediate bands for high visible-light conversion, band structure edges optimized for stability against photocorrosion and operation conditions at neutral pH, low bias and no sacrificial agent. Such characteristics, combined with the in-depth investigation of their size dependent and interfacial electronic structure^[3] and electrical properties^[4] provide better fundamental understanding and structure-efficiency relationships for a cost-effective and sustainable generation of hydrogen from the two most abundant and geographically-balanced free resources available, the sun and seawater.
An overview of such a strategy is presented for oxides, nitrides, sulfides as well as semiconductor-molecular catalysts hybrids^[5], their low-cost and large scale fabrication, physical characterization, photogenerated charge dynamics, dopant segregation and thermal processing effects ^[1].

[1] K.C. Bedin et al J. Am. Ceram. Soc. 2023, 106, 79; I. Rodriguez-Gutierrez et al ECS J. Solid State Sci. Tech. 2022, 11, 043001; J. B. Souza Jr et al Appl. Phys. Lett. 2021, 119, 200501; Y. Chen et al J. Mater. Chem. C 2021, 9, 3726; A. Tofanello et al J. Appl. Phys. 2020, 128, 063103; APL Mater. 2020, 8, 040905; Y. Wei et al Sol. Energy Mater. Sol. Cells 2019, 201, 110083; X. Guan et al ACS Energy Lett. 2018, 3, 2230; J. Phys. Chem. C 2018, 122, 13797; J. Su et al J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2017, 8, 5228; ACS Energy Lett. 2016, 1, 121; Y. Tachibana et al Nat. Photon. 2012, 6, 511; C.X. Kronawitter et al Energy Environ. Sci. 2011, 4, 3889

[2] L.Vayssieres, Adv. Mater. 2003, 15, 464; Int. J. Nanotechnol. 2004, 1, 1; Int. J. Nanotechnol. 2005, 2, 411; J. Phys. Chem. C 2009, 113, 4733; J. Lützenkirchen et al Colloids Interfaces 2020, 4, 39

[3] L.Vayssieres et al Appl. Phys. Lett. 2011 99, 183101; Adv. Mater., 2005, 17, 2320; C.X. Kronawitter et al Phys. Rev. B 2012, 85, 125109; Energy Environ. Sci. 2014, 7, 3100; Nano Lett. 2011, 11, 3855; J. Phys. Chem. C 2012, 116, 22780; PhysChemChemPhys 2013, 15, 13483; M.G. Kibria et al Adv. Mater. 2016, 28, 8388; K. Nie et al Nano Energy 2018, 53, 493; C.L. Dong et al Chem. Eur. J. 2018, 24, 18356

[4] J. Wang et al ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2019, 11, 2031; J. Engel et al Adv. Func. Mater. 2014, 24, 4952; I. Rodriguez-Gutierrez et al Electrochim. Acta 2019, 308, 317; Appl. Phys. Lett. 2021, 119, 071602; K. C. Bedin et al Chin. J. Catal. 2022, 43, 1247

[5] T. Benko et al Catal. Sci. Technol. 2021, 11, 6411; Y. Wei et al Nano Res. 2016, 9, 156.

Speaker

Prof. Lionel Vayssieres  International Research Center for Renewable Energy,  Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China  Email: Lionelv@xjtu.edu.cn  ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5085-5806

Lionel received BSc and MSc in Physical-Chemistry and a PhD in Chemistry (1995) from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France. Thereafter, he joined Uppsala University, Sweden as a researcher for the Swedish Materials Consortium on Clusters & Ultrafine Particles to develop the concept of purpose-built metal oxide nanomaterials and study their electronic structure by x-ray spectroscopies at synchrotron facilities. He was a visiting scientist at: UT Austin; UNESCO Centre for Macromolecules & Materials, Stellenbosch Univ. and iThemba LABS, South Africa; Chemical Sciences Division and Advanced Light Source, LBNL; EPFL, Switzerland; NTU, Singapore; LNNANO, Brazil and an independent scientist at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Japan for 8 years. He has (co-)authored 100+ publications cited 16500+ times; Top 1% scientist in Materials Science. All-time 8 ESI hot/highly cited papers (5 as first-author). He gave 430+ lectures in 33 different countries at international conferences, universities, governmental and industrial institutes and acted as organizer, chairman, program committee member for major international projects worldwide. Since 2012, he’s a full time 1000-talent scholar Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University, China, co-founder & scientific director of IRCRE-International Research Center for Renewable Energy (878+ research articles, 46000+ citations, 42 ESI Highly Cited Papers since 2011). He is, since 2003, the founding editor-in-chief of the Int. J. Nanotechnol., a referee for 100+ SCI journals as well as for major funding agencies worldwide, a recipient of the 2014 Sanqin provincial & the 2016 National Chinese Government Friendship Awards, a Most Cited Researchers in China in Materials Science & Engineering (Scopus/Elsevier) yearly since 2014, a 2016 Global Ambassador for the American Ceramic Society, and ranked in the 2020-2023 Top 2% World Scientists Ranking (Stanford University study) as Top 0.19% in Nanoscience & Nanotechnology.

PLENARY SPEECH 1

Talk title: Computational Collective Intelligence and Applications in Social Media

In this talk a general framework for building intelligent collectives will be presented. A concrete task of prediction market will be described as an example. It will be shown that two aspects (diversity and independency ) play an important role in making proper decisions. I will show that the positive impact of diversity and independence on collective performance. With some restrictions, the hypothesis "The more diverse the collective, the higher the collective performance" is formally proved. The second part of this presentation will concern the application of collective intelligent methods for sentiment analysis. It will be shown that the set of user opinions (sentiments) can be treated as a collective and choosing a proper integration mechanism is important for achieving high quality of the analysis.

Speaker

Prof. Ngoc Thanh Nguyen Head of Department of Applied Informatics Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Poland Chair of IEEE SMC TC on Computational Collective Intelligence Homepage: http://staff-ksi.pwr.edu.pl/nguyen/

Prof. Ngoc-Thanh Nguyen is currently a full Professor of Wroclaw University of Science and Technology in Poland and the Head of Department of Applied Informatics. He is now a member of the State Council of Scientific Excellence of Poland and a member of the Committee on Informatics of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He was an invited and visiting professor in many universities, such as Friedrich-Alexander University (Germany), Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (Netherlands), Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Japan), Yeungnam University (Korea), University of Technology Sydney (Australia), National Kaohsiung University (Taiwan) and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). He is the Chair of IEEE SMC Technical Committee on Computational Collective Intelligence, he received the title of Distinguished Scientist and Distinguished Speaker of ACM, and Distinguished Visitor of IEEE. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Vietnam Journal of Computer Science (World Scientific) and Journal of Information and Telecommunication (Taylor&Francis). Prof. Ngoc Thanh Nguyen is an author of 2 European patents in information systems. He has headed a number of research projects funded by EU programs like COST, DAAD, Polonor and National Foundation of Research and Development. He serves as an expert of National Center of Research and Development and of European Commission in evaluating research projects in such programs as MSCA-IF, REA-FET, EUREKA and COST. He has given 24 plenary and keynote speeches for international conferences, and more than 45 invited lectures in many countries. He has published 46 books and more than 500 journal and conference papers. Prof. Nguyen is on the TOP 2% list of scientists whose publications are most cited by other authors, compiled by Stanford University and Elsevier. He is a recipient of the Gold Cross of Merit awarded by the President of Poland in 2022.