Frans Anton Vermast

Senior Strategy Advisor & International Smart City Ambassador
Amsterdam InChange
“I am on a mission to improve the quality of life of citizens” Frans Anton Vermast MBA (1969) is a Dutch senior strategy advisor and internationally recognized expert in smart cities and urban and regional development. He has served as Senior Strategy Advisor and International Smart City Ambassador for Amsterdam InChange (formerly Amsterdam Smart City) and Amsterdam Chief Technology Office Innovation Team, contributing to Amsterdam’s identity as a “metropole at a human scale”. With over twenty years of experience, Vermast specialises in citizen-centric urban innovation, governance and financing models, and multi-level collaboration among public, private, academic, and civic stakeholders. His work starts from the question of what kind of city people want to live in, helping cities pursue inclusive digital and societal transitions through open innovation platforms and ecosystem thinking rather than siloed “”ego-systems.””
WEBSITE: faco@vermast.net
Internationally, Vermast has contributed as a consultant to World Bank policy teams and global expert on inclusive, habitable cities for UNIDO and Metropolis His expertise spans urban and regional development, accessibility, smart mobility, digital infrastructure, and spatial inequality, bridging strategic policy design with practical implementation. Ethics, trust, and data ownership are central to his approach: he promotes human-centric and social innovation, responsible use of public data, open AI and algorithms, and rebuilding of trust, guided by the principle that innovation means learning by doing. Vermast has extensive experience facilitating government participation across Europe, Middle East, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, and Australia. He advises international organisations and private-sector, has served as a jury member for the European Commission and has been a jury member for GO SMART and the Taiwan Presidential Hackathon since 2018. He is also a guest-lecturer at European and international universities and works as a facilitator, moderator, and day chair for conferences and strategy sessions

All session by Frans Anton Vermast

AI & Digital Twins for Smart Cities and Industrial Corridors
Future Cities
This panel asks how it actually gets run day to day — not with more dashboards, but with digital twins: live, continuously updated virtual models of a city or corridor that let planners simulate, predict and intervene before problems happen rather than after. It’s not hypothetical for Sarawak — the state is already piloting exactly this approach in its own water supply sector, and this panel scales that same thinking up to the smart cities and industrial corridors the rest of the track has been building toward. It also sets up the natural next question: once intelligence is built into the infrastructure, what does that unlock for the utilities running underneath it — the subject the closing panel picks up.

Day 1

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