Doreen Bogdan-Martin took office as Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) on 1 January 2023. Ms Bogdan-Martin was elected as ITU’s first-ever female Secretary-General by Member States at the Union’s Plenipotentiary Conference in Bucharest, Romania.

Ms Bogdan-Martin was previously the Director of the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau. She took office on 1 January 2019, becoming the first woman in ITU history to hold one of the organization’s top elected management positions.

President Alar Karis was born on 26 March 1958 in Tartu.

President Karis graduated from the Estonian Agricultural Academy (now the Estonian University of Life Sciences) in 1981. He earned a Master of Science degree in parasitology in 1987, with his later research focussing on molecular genetics and developmental biology.

President Karis worked at the Estonian Research Institute of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Science and later at the Estonian Biocentre of the Academy of Sciences. He has also worked at universities in Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, and joined the University of Tartu as a professor in 1999. His research has been among the most widely cited internationally of any Estonian scientist of his generation.

In 1999 President Karis founded the University of Tartu-spawned Visgenyx with Professor Eero Vasar, serving as a member of the management board until 2005. The company was involved in the development of transgene organisms for European biotech companies and universities.

President Karis has served as the rector of both the Estonian University of Life Sciences and the University of Tartu. He has led the work of Universities Estonia (the national council of university rectors) a number of times.

President Karis has served as the Auditor-General of the Republic of Estonia and as the head of the EUROSAI Working Group on Environmental Auditing (EUROSAI WGEA).

President Karis was also the director of the Estonian National Museum.

President Karis has previously been a member of the Academic Council and Academic Advisory Board of the President of the Republic and of the Research and Development Council; a member of the supervisory boards of the Estonian Fund for Nature, the European University Association, the Entrepreneurship & Living Environment Development Division of Enterprise Estonia, the International Council of Archives, the International Council of Museums and the museums of the University of Tartu and the Estonian Literary Museum; and the chairman of the supervisory boards of the Estonian Development Fund and the Estonian University of Life Sciences. He has also been a member of the World Cultural Council since 2011.

Prior to becoming the head of state, President Karis served as the honorary consul to the Republic of Chile in Estonia for 10 years. He is a member of the Estonian Students Society and the Tartu Rotary Club.

President Karis is married to Sirje Karis. They have three children.

As a creative artist, tech entrepreneur, the Founder & CEO of FYI, and a Goodwill Ambassador, AI Skills Coalition for the United Nations International Telecommunications Union, will.i.am has been recognized by a CLIO Award, an Emmy Award, nine Grammy Awards, the James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award, a TIME 100 Impact Award, the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award, and an Honorary Fellowship by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET – UK).

He is simultaneously a creative innovation advisor, futurist, multi-platinum Grammy-winning music artist, producer, entertainer and a tech entrepreneur as part of his cross-disciplinary career. He invests in and develops businesses in a range of sectors including the FYI Web 3.0 creativity & productivity tool, automotive, consumer-tech, fashion, food & beverage, software (AI, Natural Language Understanding, Voice Computing) and telecom.

His early work as Futurist and market opportunity spotter was with Beats Electronics. As a founding equity stakeholder in the company, will.i.am was instrumental in helping to transform Beats By Dre™ into a global consumer electronics brand. Beats Electronics was purchased by Apple in 2014 for US$3 billion.

will.i.am teams with the world’s leading companies helping them to embrace future technologies, what’s next in cultural trends and develop new business initiatives. Organizations he has collaborated with include Apple, Arizona State University, Coca-Cola, Deutsche Telekom, Formula 1, Honeywell, Intel, LG, Marvel Comics, Mercedes-AMG, Microsoft, Pepsi, Salesforce, SiriusXM and UPROXX Studios.

In philanthropy will.i.am established his i.am Angel Foundation in 2009 to transform lives through education, inspiration and opportunity incorporating STEAM (science, tech, engineering, arts and mathematics) education resources and robotics clubs in schools. i.am Angel Foundation programs also include after-school tutoring and scholarship aid for university-bound students in underserved areas. With a 99% graduation rate, participating students are often the first in their families to attend a four-year college or university.

Through a private-public partnership with Los Angeles Unified schools, the foundation has helped establish hundreds of after-school robotics clubs in high schools across the city. In collaboration with Arizona State University, his FYI.AI platform is being adapted to offer university-level courses, tutoring tools and student life resources.

As an education advocate, will.i.am serves on the boards of advisors and directors of College Track, FIRST Global (student robotics), Smithsonian Science Education Center Advisory Committee, and the Iovine-Young Academy at University of Southern California. In recognition of his work in Artificial Intelligence and education, will.i.am was appointed Goodwill Ambassador, AI Skills Coalition, United Nations International Telecommunications Union in 2025.

Dr. Werner Vogels is Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s customer-centric technology vision.

As one of the forces behind Amazon’s approach to cloud computing, he is passionate about helping young businesses reach global scale, and transforming enterprises into fast-moving digital organizations.

Vogels joined Amazon in 2004 from Cornell University where he was a distributed systems researcher. He has held technology leadership positions in companies that handle the transition of academic technology into industry. Vogels holds a PhD from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.

Kate Kallot is a world-class technologist who has received sustained global acclaim in tech for social impact, most notably for her work advancing technology access across Africa. She has received multiple accolades for her work, including being named TIME 100 most influential people in AI 2023. Kate is the Founder & CEO of Amini, an impact-driven AI startup solving Africa’s environmental data scarcity to support regenerating natural capital at scale. With over a decade of experience in leading AI innovation at global tech companies such as NVIDIA, Intel, and Arm, she has a proven track record of delivering cutting-edge technology solutions that drive social impact and transform communities. Kate is a recognized expert and influencer in the AI field, advising international organizations and governments on the potential and challenges of AI for good.

Geoffrey Hinton received his BA in Experimental Psychology from Cambridge in 1970 and his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh in 1978.  He did postdoctoral work at Sussex University and the University of California San Diego and spent five years as a faculty member in the Computer Science department at Carnegie-Mellon University. He then became a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and moved to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He spent three years from 1998 until 2001 setting up the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London and then returned to the University of Toronto where he is now an emeritus distinguished professor. From 2004 until 2013 he was the director of the program on “Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception” which is funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. From 2013 to 2023 he worked half-time at Google where he became a Vice President and Engineering Fellow.

Geoffrey Hinton is a fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Canada, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and a former president of the Cognitive Science Society. He is an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the US National Academy of Engineering and the US National Academy of Science. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Sussex, the University of Sherbrooke and the University of Toronto. His awards include the David E. Rumelhart prize, the IJCAI award for research excellence, the Killam prize for Engineering , The NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal, the IEEE Frank Rosenblatt medal, the IEEE James Clerk Maxwell Gold medal, the NEC C&C award, the BBVA award, the Honda Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award and the ACM Turing Award.

Geoffrey Hinton designs machine learning algorithms. His aim is to discover a learning procedure that is efficient at finding complex structure in large, high-dimensional datasets and to show that this is how the brain learns to see. He was one of the researchers who introduced the back-propagation algorithm and the first to use backpropagation for learning word embeddings. His other contributions to neural network research include Boltzmann machines, distributed representations, time-delay neural nets, mixtures of experts, variational learning, products of experts and deep belief nets.    His research group in Toronto made major breakthroughs in deep learning that have revolutionized speech recognition and object classification.

Dr. Lan Xue is a Distinguished Professor and Dean at Schwarzman College Tsinghua University. His teaching and research interests include global governance, crisis management, and science, technology and innovation policy. From 2000 to 2018, he served as Associate Dean, Executive Associate Dean and Dean of the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University.  He also holds adjunct positions at Carnegie Mellon University and the Brookings Institution. Dr. Xue advises the State Council, chairs China’s National Expert Committee on Next Generation AI governance, and is a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese Association of Science and Technology. Internationally, he serves on the UN Sustainable Development Solution Network board, UN Committee of Experts on Public Administration, and UN Internet Governance Forum Leadership Panel.

Dr. Xue is a recipient of Distinguished Young Scholar Award from National Natural Science Foundation of China, Cheung Kong Chair Distinguished Professor of the Ministry of Education, the Fudan Distinguished Contribution Award for Management Science, the Distinguished Contribution Award from Chinese Association for Science of Science and S&T Policy, and the Second National Award for Excellence in Innovation in China. He holds a PhD in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University.

Alexandra (Sasha) Luccioni is a Postdoctoral Researcher working on AI for Humanity initiatives at Mila – Quebec AI Institute, under the supervision of Yoshua Bengio. She obtained her PhD in Cognitive Computing from UQÀM in 2018 and spent two years working in applied ML, specifically in applying deep learning and NLP to different industrial applications. She is highly involved in community initiatives, serving on the Research and Policy Committee of Women in Machine Learning (WiML) and on the Advisory board of Kids Code Jeunesse.

Yoshua Bengio is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in artificial intelligence and a pioneer in deep learning. Since 1993, he has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operational Research at the Université de Montréal. He is the founder and scientific director of Mila, the Quebec Institute of Artificial Intelligence, the world’s largest university-based research group in deep learning. He is a member of the NeurIPS board and co-founder and general chair for the ICLR conference, as well as program director of the CIFAR program on Learning in Machines and Brains and is Fellow of the same institution. In 2018, Yoshua Bengio ranked as the computer scientist with the most new citations, worldwide, thanks to his many publications. In 2019, he received the ACM A.M. Turing Award, “the Nobel Prize of Computing”, jointly with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing. In 2020 he was nominated Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Anna Marks is Chair of the Deloitte Global Board of Directors, responsible for leading the Deloitte Global Board in its role to govern and oversee the most significant matters that influence the strategic priorities and operations for Deloitte globally.

Anna is dedicated to driving responsible growth and positive societal impact through collaboration, effective governance and ethical leadership. She is passionate about the role of boards in building trust and resilience in a changing world – by providing constructive oversight and collaborating across their ecosystems to create long-term value for all.  She is a thought leader on topics including board performance, impact and organisational resilience.

Anna is also an active member of several advisory boards including the B20 International Advisory Caucus, the British American Business International Advisory Board and the World Economic Forum Community of Chairpersons. Anna is also a fellow and former board member of the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in the UK. Prior to becoming the Deloitte Global Chair, Anna held leadership, board and executive roles for Deloitte North & South Europe (NSE) and Deloitte UK. She also has 20 years’ experience as a practicing audit partner.

Dawn Song is a Professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley and Co-Director of Berkeley Center on Responsible Decentralized Intelligence. Her research interest lies in AI, AI Safety, deep learning, security and privacy. She is the recipient of various awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award, and more than 10 Test-of-Time Awards and Best Paper Awards from top conferences in Computer Security and Deep Learning. She has been recognized as Most Influential Scholar (AMiner Award), for being the most cited scholar in computer security. She is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. She obtained her Ph.D. degree from UC Berkeley. She is also a serial entrepreneur and has been named on the Female Founder 100 List by Inc. and Wired25 List of Innovators.