Opening plenary

In his plenary speech, Alf Henryk Wulf will focus on the enormous importance of networks as the single most indispensible element for binding individual societies, industries, economies and humankind in general. Yet as these diverse networks - including communication, information, technical, financial, political, social and commercial - continue to expand their commanding roles in our lives, they will also bring major challenges that must be met and mastered. And among the biggest challenges will be the ability of individual nations as well as economic regions like the European Union to prevail in an ever fiercer competitive networked environment. In the future, it seems clear that those who can most innovatively develop and successfully implement and propagate networks of every kind will be the winners. And this demand, in turn, places a clear and urgent burden on education systems everywhere: Those who want to be among the winners will also have to produce the best and brightest in global competition. Even now, visions of a totally networked world are not all that far from today´s reality in many cases, as the Internet has long since proven. But the realization of other vital networks, such as the proposed electricity supergrids for networking Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East, is still a vision that faces many difficult obstacles down the road. Networks are the future without any doubt; one must question how they will evolve and who will most effectively use them.