Dr. Veselina Yankova, speaker at CONNEXUS 2026

Smart City

Dr. Veselina Yankova

Academic Program Chair, BSc Innovation and Entrepreneurship @ Higher Colleges of Technology (UAE)

Talk TopicThe City You Stop Noticing

About the speaker

Dr. Veselina Yankova was born in Varna, where she began her professional career at the Technical University of Varna. She has over 20 years of academic experience, the last eleven of them at the Higher Colleges of Technology (HCT) - the largest higher education institution in the United Arab Emirates, with over 23,000 students across seven campuses - where she is Academic Program Chair of the BSc Innovation and Entrepreneurship program.

Her current areas of work include entrepreneurship as a practice, with a focus on student startups; partnership with industry, through courses co-designed and co-delivered with practitioners, joint projects and student internships; and the integration of artificial intelligence into academic courses.

Dr. Yankova is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK (FHEA) and a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, UK. Among her professional qualifications are Microsoft Certified Educator, Digital Teaching and Learning (eTeacher) of Blackboard Academy, USA, and Competency Based Education of The Ohio State University, USA. She has received numerous international and national awards, among them the ACBSP Teaching Excellence Award from the American accreditation body for business education, the Curriculum Innovation Award for AI integration, and the Empowerment Leader Award.

About the talk

Talk DescriptionThe best proof that a city is smart is that its residents stop noticing it. Dr. Yankova has two views of Dubai: she has researched its smart city framework, and she has lived inside it for over a decade - and as a resident she stopped counting platforms and apps long ago. What she measures instead is what has quietly disappeared from everyday life: the queue, the trip across town, the folder of paper documents kept in case someone asks for them. Almost everything she needs from the city she now does from a phone, and she argues that this was never mainly a technological achievement - the technology was available to many cities - but a matter of deciding quickly and carrying it through at scale. What she brings to the discussion is not a prescription for other cities, having lived away from Bulgaria for eleven years, but a resident's account of what actually changes when this works, and what it asks of the people living in it.

Key TakeawaysA resident's measure of a smart city: not the number of platforms and apps, but what has disappeared from everyday life - the queue, the trip across town, the folder of documents kept in case someone asks. Why Dubai's result was less a technological achievement than one of deciding quickly and carrying it through at scale - the technology was available to many cities. What a working smart city asks of the people living inside it, and what changes for them in practice.

Dr. Veselina Yankova