The United Nations’ leading platform on Artificial Intelligence to solve global challenges
Secretary-General
, International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
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.
<div>Ms Bogdan-Martin is a strategic leader with more than 30 years’ high-level experience in international and inter-governmental relations and a long history of success advising governments around the world on policy and regulatory issues.</div>
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<div>From 2008-2018, she led ITU’s Strategic Planning & Membership Department. She was instrumental in establishing the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, on which she has served as Executive Director for more than a decade, and was an architect of the annual Global Symposium for Regulators, the pre-eminent global event for digital policymakers, as well as director of ITU’s first global youth summit, #BYND. She pioneered and oversees ITU’s ongoing contribution to the EQUALS Global Partnership for Gender Equality in the Digital Age, and is leading ITU’s collaboration with UNICEF on the Giga project to connect all the world’s schools.</div>
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<div>Ms Bogdan-Martin is a frequent speaker at top-level international policy events and has spearheaded ITU’s new Youth Strategy to more actively engage with the young people who are driving the next wave of digital transformation.</div>
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<div>During her tenure as Director of BDT, she has led the implementation of a Results-Based Management system, improved internal accountability frameworks, and initiated a comprehensive review of reporting mechanisms across BDT’s global network of field and area offices, with a view to creating a more dynamic, responsive and fit-for-purpose organization.</div>
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<div>Ms Bogdan-Martin holds a Master’s degree in International Communications Policy from American University in Washington, DC, post-graduate certification in Strategies for Leadership from the Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland, and is certified in Accountability and Ethics by the United Nations Leaders Programme.</div>
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<div>She is an affiliate of the Harvard University Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, a Generation Unlimited Champion, and a Champion of the EDISON Alliance led by the World Economic Forum. She serves on a number of advisory bodies, including the Geneva-Tsinghua Initiative, the SDG Lab Advisory Board, the UN Technology Innovation Labs, and the Alumni Expert Council of the Internet Governance Lab of American University in Washington D.C. She is also a qualified amateur radio operator.</div>
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<div>Ms Bogdan-Martin is married with four children.</div>
Chair and CEO
, Salesforce
State Secretary for Education
, Research and Innovation, Switzerland
Doctorate in Technical Sciences, ETH Zurich (ETHZ) 1997; Postgraduate degree in Business Economics, ETHZ. Head, Polymer Chemistry Group, ETHZ. Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, start-up in new coating technologies. 2003, Lecturer at Zurich University of Applied Sciences ZHAW. 2007-10, developed ZHAW’s Institute of Materials and Process Engineering. 2011-18, Director, ZHAW School of Engineering. 2012-18, President of the Board, Federal Institute of Metrology; 2011-18, Vice-President of the Board, Innosuisse; 2016-18, Member of the Board, Swiss National Science Foundation. Expert for the European Commission. Since 2019, Director of the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation, Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research.
Chief Technology Officer and Vice President
, Amazon
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.
Director-General
, World Trade Organization (WTO)
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is the Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the first woman and first African to hold the position in the 80-year history of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the WTO.
Dr Okonjo-Iweala is an economist and international development expert with more than 40 years of experience. She was Chair of the Board of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (2016–2020), the African Union's African Risk Capacity Group (2014–2020), and Co-Chair of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate with Lord Nicholas Stern (2014-2020). She was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Rockefeller Foundation. She co-chaired the G20 High Level Independent Panel on Financing for Pandemic Preparedness and was one of the founders of the COVAX Facility, designed to get affordable vaccines to Low and Low Middle-Income Countries. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum and is co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water. She is also a member of the G30 Group of top 30 people in International Finance and a council member of the Prince of Wales's Earthshot Prize.
Dr Okonjo-Iweala holds the distinction of being the first woman to serve as Nigeria’s Finance Minister, a post she held for seven years in two terms. She also served briefly as the first female Foreign Affairs Minister. As Finance Minister, she implemented policy and institutional reforms to help fight corruption and she spearheaded the complete write off by the Paris Club of $30 billion of Nigeria’s debt. She spent a 25-year career at the World Bank, rising to the number two position of Managing Director, Operations. Previously Dr Okonjo-Iweala, among other duties, served as Senior Advisor at Lazard Ltd. and sat on the boards of Standard Chartered Bank PLC and Twitter Inc. She served in 2020 as African Union COVID-19 Special Envoy as well as World Health Organization COVID 19 Special Envoy.
Dr Okonjo-Iweala is the recipient of numerous honors and accolades. In 2023, she was awarded the Lord Byron International Prize from the Society for Hellenism and Philhellenism and the Global Economy Prize from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. In 2022, she obtained the Global Leadership Award by the American Academy of Achievement. In 2021, she received a Global Leadership Award from the United Nations Foundation as a “Champion for Global Change”. She was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and featured in the Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2011 and 2012. She has also been listed among 73 “brilliant” business influencers in the world by Condé Nast International. Dr Okonjo-Iweala was named in 2014 and again in 2021, one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the world. She was also featured on the TIME magazine cover page in 2021. She has been named seven times by Forbes as one of the Top 100 Most Powerful Women in the World and in 2020, was named Forbes African of the Year. In 2021, she was named by Financial Times as one of the 25 Most Influential Women in the World and in 2015 she was ranked by Fortune as one of the 50 Greatest World Leaders.
Dr Okonjo-Iweala is also the recipient of Nigeria's second highest National Honor Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger (GCON)-2022. She was awarded national honours by the governments of the Republic of Liberia and the Republic of Cote d'Ivoire in 2016. She also received the Grand Cross of the Order of Rio Branco from the Federative Republic of Brazil in 2023. In 2024, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala was honored with the Collar of the Order of Timor Leste, the country's second highest honor.
Dr Okonjo-Iweala is the recipient of 21 honorary degrees from some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, including Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Trinity College - Dublin, University of Amsterdam, Luiss University - Italy, American University - USA, Nyenrode Business University, Obafemi Awolowo University and Nile University of Nigeria. She is distinguished visiting fellow at Brookings and a Global Public Leader at Harvard Kennedy School.
Dr Okonjo-Iweala is the author of several books, including Women and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons co-authored with Julia Gillard (Penguin Random House, July 2020), Fighting Corruption is Dangerous: The Story Behind the Headlines (MIT Press, 2018), Reforming the UnReformable: Lessons from Nigeria, (MIT Press, 2012), and The Debt Trap in Nigeria: Towards a Sustainable Debt Strategy (Africa World Press, 2003). She also co-authored with Tijan Sallah the book Chinua Achebe: Teacher of Light (Africa World Press, 2003). She has also published numerous articles including, Why the World Still Needs Trade (Foreign Affairs, August 2023, Editors' Top Pick 2023), Finding A Vaccine is Only the First Step (Foreign Affairs, April 2020), Mobilizing Finance for Education in the Commonwealth (Commonwealth Education Report 2019), Shine a Light on the Gaps — an essay on financial inclusion for African Small Holder Farmers (Foreign Affairs, 2015), Funding the SDGs: Licit and Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries (Horizons Magazine, 2016).
Dr Okonjo-Iweala holds a Bachelor’s in Economics (Magna Cum Laude) from Harvard University and a PhD in Regional Economics and Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Turing Award & Nobel Laureate | AI Pioneer & Deep Learning Visionary
*Joining remotely
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 <a href="http://www.cs.toronto.edu/">Department of Computer Science</a> at the University of Toronto. He spent three years from 1998 until 2001 setting up the <a href="http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/">Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit</a> 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 <a href="http://www.ciar.ca/">Canadian Institute for Advanced Research</a>. 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 <a href="http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/">the Royal Society</a>, <a href="http://www.rsc.ca/">the Royal Society of Canada</a>, <a href="hhttp://www.aaai.org/">the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence</a> and a former president of <a href="http://www.cognitivesciencesociety.org/">the Cognitive Science Society</a>. He is an honorary foreign member of <a href="http://www.amacad.org/">the American Academy of Arts and Sciences</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/derprize/announce2001.html">David E. Rumelhart prize</a>, the <a href="http://ijcai.org/awards/">IJCAI award for research excellence</a>, the <a href="http://www.canadacouncil.ca/prizes/killam/">Killam prize for Engineering </a>, The <a href="http://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/Prizes-Prix/Index_eng.asp">NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal</a>, 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 <a href="https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/backprop.html">back-propagation</a> algorithm and the first to use backpropagation for learning word embeddings. His other contributions to neural network research include <a href="https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/boltzmann.html">Boltzmann machines,</a> <a href="https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/distrep.html">distributed representations</a>, time-delay neural nets, <a href="https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/mixex.html">mixtures of experts</a>, <a href="https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/helmholtz.html">variational learning</a>, <a href="https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/poe.html">products of experts</a> and deep belief nets. His research group in Toronto made major breakthroughs in deep learning that have revolutionized speech recognition and object classification.
President
, Signal
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<p class="body1">Meredith Whittaker is Signal's President and a member of the Signal Foundation Board of Directors.</p>
<p class="body1">She has over 17 years of experience in tech, spanning industry, academia, and government. Before joining Signal as President, she was the Minderoo Research Professor at NYU, and served as the Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute which she co-founded. Her research and scholarly work helped shape global AI policy and shift the public narrative on AI to better recognize the surveillance business practices and concentration of industrial resources that modern AI requires. Prior to NYU, she worked at Google for over a decade, where she led product and engineering teams, founded Google's Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab, a globally distributed network measurement platform that now provides the world's largest source of open data on internet performance. She also helped lead organizing at Google. She was one of the core organizers pushing back against the company's insufficient response to concerns about AI and its harms, and was a central organizer of the Google Walkout. She has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations on privacy, security, artificial intelligence, internet policy, and measurement. And she recently completed a term as Senior Advisor on AI to the Chair at the US Federal Trade Commission.</p>
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Distinguished Professor and Dean
, Schwarzman College Tsinghua University
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.
AI & Climate Lead
, Hugging Face
TIME100 AI
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<p>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.</p>
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(*Joining remotely) Turing Award Laureate | AI Research Leader | Scientific Director
, Mila
Yoshua <span class="marko6l4q15we" data-markjs="true" data-ogac="" data-ogab="" data-ogsc="" data-ogsb="">Bengio</span> 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 <span class="marko6l4q15we" data-markjs="true" data-ogac="" data-ogab="" data-ogsc="" data-ogsb="">Bengio</span> 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.
Special Envoy for the Paris AI Action Summit, Chairperson
, Ecole Normale Supérieure
Chair, Global Board of Directors
, Deloitte
<span lang="en-AE" data-olk-copy-source="MessageBody">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.</span>
<span lang="en-AE">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.</span>
<span lang="en-AE">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. </span><span lang="en-GB">Anna is also a fellow and former board member of the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in the UK. </span><span lang="en-AE">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.</span>
Secretary-General
, UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD)
Rebeca Grynspan, economist and former Vice-President of Costa Rica, was named Secretary-General of United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in September 2021. She is the first woman to hold this position in the institution’s 60-year history.
Prior to her appointment, she was the Secretary-General of the Ibero-American Conference, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Associate Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, as well as Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean.
She was elected Vice-President of Costa Rica from 1994 to 1998 and held the positions of Minister of Housing, Minister Coordinator of Economic and Social Affairs and Deputy Finance Minister.
A renowned advocate of human development, she has helped to focus the world’s attention on the reduction of inequality and poverty, gender equality and multilateralism. She currently coordinates the task team of the Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy and Finance created by the United Nations Secretary-General and on whose behalf she leads negotiations to reintegrate food and fertilizers from Ukraine and the Russian Federation to global markets.
Chief AI Scientist
, Meta
*Joining remotely
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<p class="_8w6f _8w61 _8w6h _9sdh">Yann is Chief AI Scientist for Facebook AI Research (FAIR), joining Facebook in December 2013. He is also a Silver Professor at New York University on a part time basis, mainly affiliated with the NYU Center for Data Science, and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.</p>
<p class="_8w6f _8w61 _8w6h _9sdh">He received the EE Diploma from Ecole Supérieure d’Ingénieurs en Electrotechnique et Electronique (ESIEE Paris), and a PhD in CS from Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris) in 1987. After a postdoc at the University of Toronto, he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ in 1988. He became head of the Image Processing Research Department at AT&T Labs-Research in 1996, and joined NYU as a professor in 2003, after a brief period as a Fellow of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton. From 2012 to 2014 he was the founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science. Yann is the co-director of the CIFAR program on Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception Program with Yoshua Bengio.</p>
<p class="_8w6f _8w61 _8w6h _9sdh">He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, a fellow of AAAI, the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award, the 2015 IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Distinguished Researcher Award, the 2016 Lovie Award for Lifetime Achievement, the University of Pennsylvania Pender Award, and received honorary doctorates from IPN, Mexico and EPFL.</p>
<p class="_8w6f _8w61 _8w6h _9sdh">He is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Turing Award (with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio) for "conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing."</p>
<p class="_8w6f _8w61 _8w6h _9sdh">His research interests include machine learning and artificial intelligence, with applications to computer vision, natural language understanding, robotics, and computational neuroscience. He is best known for his work in deep learning and the invention of the convolutional network method which is widely used for image, video and speech recognition.</p>
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Founder & CEO
, Amini
Time 100 AI
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.
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Baroness Jones of Whitchurch, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Future Digital Economy and Online Safety
, United Kingdom
Augmented Food
Augmented Food Studio
Augmented Food is a design-led vision for rethinking how we grow, experience, and connect with food in a technologically enriched future
SORA4Wellbeing
Cambridge Affective Intelligence and Robotics Lab
SORA4Wellbeing uses a child-sized robot, Nao, to assess mental well-being in kids aged 8–13
Thymio
Mobsya
Thymio is a versatile educational robot that introduces children to programming and robotics through interactive, hands-on learning.
PASSENGER
Real Life Robotics
AI platform connecting robots and sensors to optimize real-world operations
CyRo
CynLr SA
General-purpose visual robotics platform for dual arm dexterous manipulation and assembly
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Celebrates exceptional achievements in the field of AI, recognizing innovative and impactful AI solutions that contribute to global progress, across three categories: AI for People, AI for Planet, and AI for Prosperity. Each category features both a Main Award and a Pro Bono Collaboration Award, honoring outstanding individual efforts and powerful partnerships between tech companies and changemakers.
Innovation Factory
Recognizes AI-driven solutions that improve human well-being, advance education, promote equality, and enhance public health. From healthcare innovations and inclusive learning tools to AI applications that support marginalized communities, this category honors technologies that create meaningful, positive change in people’s lives.
Canvas of the Future
The second edition of Canvas of the Future celebrates ITU’s 160 year legacy, inviting artists and AI innovators to showcase their talents and contribute to the global dialogue on the role of technology in shaping the future of digital connectivity, bridging divides, and a more connected and sustainable world.
AI for Good Film Festival
The goal of this international competition is to show how AI can enrich what is possible in storytelling and visual art, with a positive message on sustainability. The competition invites all creatives interested in exploring the possibilities offered by AI in the creation of scripts, storyboards, images, digital effects, and more to submit their original works, generated or improved through AI tools.
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What I’ve really seen is the fact that we can really effect amazing change, but we have to do this together […] and that’s what makes me so excited about what AI for Good is all about.
HRH Princess Beatrice
United Kingdom
