Gerald Fritz, MSc. graduated in computer science at the Technical University of Graz and held positions as researcher in the field of cognitive robotics and computational perception at the institute DIGITAL of the Joanneum Research Forschungsgesellschaft GmbH, key researcher and head of the department on robotics and assistive systems at Profactor GmbH in Austria. He joined TTTech Computertechnik AG as senior coordinator for R&D project 2017 and is concerned with cyber-physical system in the field of digitizing manufacturing and industrial automation. Beside that he participated in several national and European research projects (since FP6), he was coordinating the innovation in various national research projects in the field of assistive system for future manufacturing systems. He finished his MBA at the Vienna University of Economics and Business on Entrepreneurship and Innovation. His research interests include robotics, cognitive systems, embedded systems, computer vision as well as machine learning. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers in the field of computer science conferences leading to more than 268 citations. Gerald Fritz is an IEEE member and serves in different officer roles in the robotic chapter Austria (RAS) and the Technology and Engineering Management Society (TEMS) Austria.

Edge Computing technologies promise to deliver industrial IoT solutions by realizing the IT/OT convergence needed to unlock the benefits of digitalization in the industrial areas. Although edge solutions exist on the market today, no solution exists for industrial automation serving these need. The talk will address the challenges of an edge computing platform, which has to integrate: hypervisors for deterministic virtualization, interoperability solutions based on OPC Unified Architecture, dependable middleware to support both industrial control and dynamic edge applications, runtime configuration techniques that guarantee dependability requirements of virtualized control, resource management and orchestration mechanisms for applications deployed across the edge and cloud, as well as platform services for security, monitoring, and data analytics.