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>
Deputy Secretary-General
, Executive Office of the Secretary-General (EOSG)
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Ms. Amina J. Mohammed is the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations and Chair of the United Nations Sustainable Development Group.
Prior to her appointment, Ms. Mohammed served as Minister of Environment of the Federal Republic of Nigeria where she steered the country’s efforts on climate action and efforts to protect the natural environment.
Ms. Mohammed first joined the United Nations in 2012 as Special Adviser to former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon with the responsibility for post-2015 development planning. She led the process that resulted in global agreement around the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the creation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Ms. Mohammed began her career working on the design of schools and hospitals in Nigeria. She served as an advocate focused on increasing access to education and other social services, before moving into the public sector, where she rose to the position of adviser to four successive Presidents on poverty, public sector reform, and sustainable development.
Ms. Mohammed has been conferred several honorary doctorates and has served as an adjunct professor, lecturing on international development. The recipient of various global awards, Ms. Mohammed has served on numerous international advisory boards and panels. She is the mother of six children and has four grandchildren.
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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.
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).
Professor of Genetics
, Harvard Medical School
Aging & Longevity Expert | Bestselling Author of "Lifespan"
<span data-teams="true">David A. Sinclair, A.O., Ph.D. is considered one of the world’s most influential scientists and a leading figure in the study of human longevity. He is a tenured Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA, USA) and Co- Founder & Co-Chief Editor of the scientific journal Aging.
Professor Sinclair’s pioneering work in genetics and aging biology has fundamentally shaped the world’s understanding of mechanisms of aging and agerelated diseases. He is best known for his research on the molecular biology of aging, particularly the role of sirtuins, NAD+ metabolism, and epigenetic changes in regulating the aging process. In 2020, the Sinclair Lab reported successful use of cellular reprogramming to safely reverse aging in mammals, which they showed could cure blindness in animal models.
Professor Sinclair served as Founding Director of the Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School from 2004 – 2023 and has published over 400 articles that have been cited ~100,000 times. He is the inventor on more than 50 patents and has co-founded over a dozen successful companies including MetroBiotech, EdenRoc Sciences, Fully Aligned Company, and Life Biosciences.
Professor Sinclair is the New York Times bestselling author of Lifespan: Why We Age-And Why We Don’t Have To and the host of the Lifespan with Dr. David Sinclair podcast, a #1 show on Apple that provides health and science education.
Among over 35 career awards, Professor Sinclair has been recognized as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People In The World, one of TIME’s 50 Most Influential People In Health Care, received the Pioneer Award from the Director of the NIH, The Noble Genius Prize from The World Forum, and was appointed by Queen Elizabeth’s representative as Officer of the Order of Australia (A.O.) for his contributions to scientific research, science communication, and national security.</span>
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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CEO
, Cognizant
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Ravi Kumar S was appointed CEO of Cognizant in January 2023. In his role as CEO, Ravi sets the strategic direction of the company, promotes Cognizant’s client-first culture, and focuses on ensuring sustainable growth and driving long-term shareholder value.
He is a highly accomplished services industry executive with experience across digital transformation, traditional technology and engineering services, data and analytics, cloud and infrastructure, and consulting.
Prior to Cognizant, Ravi served as President of Infosys from 2016 to 2022, where he led the global services organization across all industry segments and served as Chairman of the Board of Infosys BPM Ltd. Previously, he was the Group Head for the Insurance, Healthcare, and Cards and Payments unit, and led the Global Delivery organization where he built the Oracle and CRM practices.
Before joining Infosys, Ravi served in positions of increasing responsibility at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Cambridge Technology Partners, Oracle and Sapient (now Publicis Sapient). The early part of his career was spent as a nuclear scientist at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center of India.
Ravi is a member of the board of directors of TransUnion and served on the board of directors for Digimarc Corporation from 2021 to 2023. He is also on the board of governors of New York Academy of Sciences and the board of directors for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In 2024, Ravi joined the board of directors for the US‑India Strategic Partnership Forum.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Shivaji University and an MBA from Xavier Institute of Management, India.
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Turing Award Laureate | AI Research Leader | Scientific Director
, Mila
*Joining remotely
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.
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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Chief Executive Officer
, Raspberry Pi Foundation
Philip is chief executive of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, an educational charity with a global mission to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies.
Philip was previously a non-executive director of the Foundation's commercial business, Raspberry Pi Ltd and part of the team that led the successful IPO of the business on the London Stock Exchange in June 2024.
Prior to joining Raspberry Pi, Philip was the Deputy Chief Executive of the UK's innovation foundation, Nesta, where he built programmes and ventures to address social problems through innovation.
He was a non-executive director of the Behavioural Insights Team (the Nudge Unit) and a founding trustee of the Centre for London. He served as an adviser on social innovation to the UK government, and has advised municipal and national governments, charities, and social enterprises all over the world.
Earlier in his career, Philip was a chief officer at the London Borough of Camden and a senior civil servant in the Home Office.
Philip has a degree in law from the University of Liverpool and qualifications in management and finance.
Outside of work he is a dad, craft cider maker, and a slow cyclist. He is an active member of the local community, having served as a scout volunteer, a school governor, and trustee of a local arts organisation.
Special Envoy for the Paris AI Action Summit, Chairperson
, Ecole Normale Supérieure
24 April 2025
• 16:00 - 17:00
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CST - Beijing
PST - Los Angeles
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Step into the world where quantum computing meets creative expression....
25 April 2025
• 09:00 - 18:00
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CST - Beijing
PST - Los Angeles
AWST - Perth, Australia
The Robotics for Good Youth Challenge South Africa is the...
26 April 2025
• 10:00 - 16:00
EST - New York
CST - Beijing
PST - Los Angeles
AWST - Perth, Australia
The Robotics for Good Youth Challenge The Gambia is the Qualifying Tournament of...
29 April 2025
• 11:00 - 12:00
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CST - Beijing
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AWST - Perth, Australia
Recent advancements in large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Large Language...
Co-Convener
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This Summit can help ensure that Artificial Intelligence charts the course that benefits humanity and bolsters our shared values. The United Nations stands ready to be a universal platform for discussion together let us make sure we use AI to enhance human dignity and serve the global goods.
António Guterres
Secretary-General, United Nations
