Yoshua Bengio works in computer science, specifically artificial intelligence (machine learning). He is the founder and director of the Institut des algorithmes d’apprentissage de Montréal at Université de Montréal. His current interests include fundamental questions on deep learning, the geometry of generalization in high-dimensional spaces, biologically inspired learning algorithms, and challenging applications of statistical machine learning in artificial intelligence tasks.

Anousheh Ansari is CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation, the world’s leader in designing and operating incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges. Ansari, along with her family, sponsored the organization’s first competition, the Ansari XPRIZE, a $10 million competition that ignited a new era for commercial spaceflight. Since then, she has served on XPRIZE’s Board of Directors.

Prior to being named CEO of XPRIZE, Ansari served as the CEO of Prodea Systems, a leading Internet of Things (IoT) technology firm she co-founded in 2006, and continues to serve as the executive chairwoman. She captured headlines around the world when she embarked upon an 11-day space expedition, accomplishing her childhood dream of becoming the first female private space explorer, first astronaut of Iranian descent, first Muslim woman in space, and fourth private explorer to visit space.

Ansari serves on the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Future Council and has received numerous honors, including the WEF Young Global Leader, Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and STEM Leadership Hall of Fame, among others. She is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and serves on the board of Jabil and Peace First, as well as several other not-for-profit organizations focused on STEM education and youth empowerment.

Ansari also co-founded The Billion Dollar Fund for Women, announced in October 2018 at the Tri Hita Karana (THK) Forum on Sustainable Development in Bali, with a goal of investing $1 billion in women-founded companies by 2020.

She published her memoir, My Dream of Stars, to share her life story as inspiration for young women around the world.

Ansari holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics and computer engineering from George Mason University, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from George Washington University; and honorary doctorates from George Mason University, Utah Valley University, and International Space University.

Stuart Russell received his B.A. with first-class honours in physics from Oxford University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 1986. He then joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he is Professor (and formerly Chair) of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at UC San Francisco and Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Council on AI and Robotics.

Russell is a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, the World Technology Award (Policy category), the Mitchell Prize of the American Statistical Association and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, and the AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator Award. In 1998, he gave the Forsythe Memorial Lectures at Stanford University and from 2012 to 2014 he held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, global seismic monitoring, and philosophical foundations. His books include “The Use of Knowledge in Analogy and Induction”, “Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Rationality” (with Eric Wefald), and “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach” (with Peter Norvig). His current concerns include the threat of autonomous weapons and the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity.

“Banker to the Poor”, Professor Muhammad Yunus established the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983, fuelled by the belief that credit is a fundamental human right. His objective was to help poor people escape from poverty by providing loans on terms suitable to them and by teaching them a few sound financial principles so they could help themselves.

Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006 for their work to “create economic and social development from below”.

Professor Yunus is the recipient of numerous international awards for his ideas and endeavors, including the Seoul Peace Prize Cultural Foundation, Seoul, Korea. He is a member of the board of the United Nations Foundation.

Dr. Lucas Joppa leads sustainability at Microsoft, as the company’s first Chief Environmental Officer. In this role, he works to advance Microsoft’s core commitment to sustainability through ongoing technology innovation, program development, policy advancement, and global operational excellence. With a combined background in both environmental science and data science, Lucas is committed to using the power of advanced technology to help transform how society monitors, models, and ultimately manages Earth’s natural resources. He founded Microsoft’s AI for Earth program in 2017—a five-year, $50-million cross-company effort dedicated to delivering technology-enabled solutions to global environmental challenges.

With a Ph.D. in Ecology from Duke University and extensive publication in leading academic journals, such as Science and Nature, Dr. Joppa is a uniquely accredited voice for sustainability in the tech industry. In addition to formerly serving on the Federal Advisory Committee for the Sustained U.S. National Climate Assessment, Lucas is an Associate Editor in Chief for the Ecological Society of America’s EcoSphere journal and an honorary Fellow at the UN Environment Program World Conservation Monitoring Center (UNEP-WCMC). He serves on the boards of leading scientific organizations, such as NatureServe and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) Director’s Council at UC Santa Barbara.

Prior to his current role, Lucas was Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Scientist and led research programs at the intersection of environmental and computer sciences in Microsoft Research, the company’s blue-sky research division. He remains an active scientist, speaking frequently on issues related to Artificial Intelligence, environmental science, and sustainability. Along with his Ph.D., Lucas holds a B.S. in Wildlife Ecology from the University of Wisconsin and is a former Peace Corps volunteer to Malawi.

Shwetak is currently the Washington Research Foundation Endowed Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, where he directs the Ubicomp Lab. Concurrently, he is also a Director of Health Technologies at Google. His research is in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing, and Sensor-Enabled Embedded Systems, with a particular emphasis on the application of computing to health, sustainability, and interaction. Shwetak received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2008. He is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Sloan Fellowship, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, MIT TR-35 Award, World Economic Forum Young Global Scientist Award, NSF Career Award, Presidential PECASE award, and the ACM Prize in Computing. He is also an ACM Fellow. Shwetak a co-founder of an home energy monitoring company called Zensi (acquired by Belkin in 2010), a low-power home wireless sensing company called SNUPI Technologies (acquired by Sears in 2015), and a mobile health company called Senosis Health (acquired by Google in 2017).

Francesca Rossi is a distinguished research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre and a professor of computer science at the University of Padova, Italy, with focus on artificial intelligence, specifically in constraint reasoning, preferences, multi-agent systems, computational social choice, and collective decision making. She is a AAAI, EurAI and Radcliffe 2015 fellow and has held posts as president of IJCAI and executive councilor of AAAI. She co-chairs the AAAI committee on AI and ethics and she is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Future of Life Institute. Francesca is also in the executive committee of the IEEE global initiative on ethical considerations on the development of autonomous and intelligent systems and she belongs to the World Economic Forum Council on AI and robotics. Watch the ‘AI for Good’ summit interview with Francesca Rossi here.

Peter Heine Nielsen is a Danish chess trainer. He was awarded the title of Grandmaster by FIDE in 1994.

Nielsen became an International Grandmaster in 1994. He won the Danish Chess Championship five times: in 1996, 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2008. He played for Denmark in seven Chess Olympiads, three times on top board.

Nielsen coached World Champion Viswanathan Anand from 2002 until 2012. Anand won the World Championship title in Mexico 2007, and defended it in Bonn 2008, Sofia 2010 and Moscow 2012.

Nielsen has been coaching world number one, Magnus Carlsen, since 2013. Carlsen won the Candidates Tournament 2013, which gave him the right to challenge Anand for the world championship. He defeated Anand, and has since defended the title three times.

Nielsen has previously coached Carlsen in Khanty-Mansiysk 2005, where Carlsen became the youngest player ever to qualify for the candidate matches.

Internet executive with over 12 years of experience, including general management of startups and small to mid size organizations, corporate development, product development, multinational business operations, strategy, sales, partnerships, fundraising, investor relations, communication, and M&A.

Currently COO at the Play Magnus Group, the web’s most powerful chess ecosystem and CEO of several of its subsidiaries, including chess24, the number one chess broadcasting site and digital home to World Champion Magnus Carlsen.

Prior to Play Magnus, I served as CEO at Tradimo Interactive, one of the web’s highest quality education sites for active financial trading, which I co-founded originally on behalf of Etruvian and later moved to Denmark following an investment by the CFH Group.

Previously learned from a number of leaders in diverse industries such as online education, marketing, price management, management consulting and HR consulting.

Kenneth Cukier is a Senior Editor at The Economist, and host of its weekly podcast on technology. He is also an associate fellow at Said Business School at Oxford, researching artificial intelligence.
Kenn is the coauthor of “Big Data: A Revolution That Transforms How We Live, Work, and Think” with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger. It was a NYT Bestseller translated in over 20 languages, and sold over 1 million copies worldwide. It won the National Library of China’s Wenjin Book Award and was a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year. Kenn coauthored a follow-on book, “Learning with Big Data: The Future of Education”
Previously Kenn was a foreign correspondent for two decades in Europe, Asia and America. In 2002-04 he was a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Kenn’s writings have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times and Foreign Affairs, among others. He has been a frequent commentator on CBS, CNN, NPR, the BBC and was a member of the World Economic Forum’s global council on data-driven development.

Bernhard Kowatsch is founder and head of the Innovation Accelerator at the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). The WFP Innovation Accelerator was named by Fast Company as one of the 10 Most Innovative Companies of 2017 in Food for its work in identifying, nurturing and scaling disruptive startups that accelerate innovations to address global hunger. Innovations include blockchain, agri-tech, supply chain and new businesses to end hunger. Most recently, the Accelerator runs programmes for external partners such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Prior to founding the Accelerator, Bernhard co-founded the award-winning ShareTheMeal app that crowdsources funding for hungry children, and built-up WFP’s Business Innovation team. Bernhard was previously a Project Leader at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) for global tech and industrial goods companies, and holds three Masters degrees from HEC Paris and Vienna University of Business.

Caroline Kolta comes to the XPRIZE Foundation with over 5 years of experience in development programming in the Middle East and North Africa. As a member of the Global Impact Strategy team, she will contribute to XPRIZE’s prize design and global impact strategies and processes.

Prior to joining XPRIZE, she worked with the Carter Center, UNICEF, and other nonprofits as a researcher, program officer, and policy advisor. She is interested advancing human rights and freedoms, civic engagement, and empowering marginalized populations.

She holds a Bachelor of Political Science from Cairo University and a master’s degree in Sustainable International Development and Conflict Resolution and Coexistence from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.

Andy Coravos is the CEO/co-founder of Elektra Labs, building a digital medicine platform focusing on digital biomarkers for decentralized clinical trials. She serves as a research collaborator at the Harvard-MIT Center for Regulatory Sciences. Formerly, she served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at the FDA working in the Digital Health Unit (DHU), focusing on the Pre-Cert program and policies around software-as-a-medical-device and AI/ML. Previously, Andy worked as a software engineer at Akili Interactive Labs, a leading digital therapeutic company. Before grad school, Andy worked at KKR, a private equity firm, and at McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm, where she focused on the healthcare industry. She serves on the Board of the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe), and she’s an advisor to the Biohacking Village at DEF CON.

Ida Tin is the CEO and Co-Founder of female health app Clue, the free-to-download, free-to-use period tracking app. To date, Clue has more than 12 million active users worldwide and, in 2016, was named the most accurate free period tracking app in an extensive 2016 study published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, a publication of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, Ida is credited with coining the term ‘femtech’ in the autumn of 2016.

Kishau has a deep background in Computer Science, over 25 years of experience leading the development of enterprise technology solutions and more than 15 years of entrepreneurial leadership. She is the Founder & CEO of Time Study, Inc., a high-growth startup offering solutions for using machine learning, advanced natural language processing, and data science to automatically tell a story of how enterprise employees spend their time. The Time Study platform already serves some of the largest health organizations in the US. Time Study recently closed a $1.2M seed round and is backed by Hearst, Newark Venture Partners, Pipeline Angels, and 37 Angels.

As an active & awarded technology leader, Kishau is featured in many national publications including the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Black Enterprise, and NFIB. In her commitment to STEM and leveraging technology for social good, she also serves as an advisor to organizations like Think Of Us, WAAW Foundation, VCU Department of Computer Science, the first U.S. White House Hackathon for Foster Care and SheHacks Africa, a software engineering intensive providing training to women & girls in over three African nations. In 2020, she is scheduled to release her first book covering the intersection of system thinking, machine intelligence, and human intelligence.

Kishau grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Commonwealth University. Kishau splits her time between Richmond, VA and New York, NY with her husband Bernard and their two kids and two dogs.

Pascale Fung is a professor in the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST). She is the director of the newly established, multidisciplinary Centre for AI Research (CAiRE) at HKUST. She is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for her “contributions to human-machine interactions” and an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine interactions”.

She is a member of the Global Future Council on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, a think tank of the World Economic Forum, and blogs for the Forum’s online publication Agenda. She is a member of the Partnership on AI. She has been invited as an AI expert to different government initiatives in China, Japan, the UAE, India, the European Union and the United Nations.

Fung’s publication topics include spoken language systems, natural language processing, and empathetic human-robot interaction. She co-founded the Human Language Technology Center (HLTC) and is an affiliated faculty with the Robotics Institute and the Big Data Institute, both at HKUST. Additionally, she is the founding chair of the Women Faculty Association at HKUST. She is actively involved in encouraging young women into careers in engineering and science.

Burr Settles is the Head of Research & AI at Duolingo, the world’s largest language-learning platform with the mission of making education free and accessible to all. In his role, Burr spearheads the AI strategy for Duolingo’s learning app and the Duolingo English Test. He is the author of Active Learning, the standard text on adaptive machine learning algorithms. His research has been published in Cognitive Science as well as major AI venues such as NuerIPS, ICML, and AAAI, and has been covered by The New York Times, Slate, Forbes, WIRED, and BBC. Previously, Burr was a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon and earned a PhD from UW-Madison.

Emmanuel FABER began his career as a consultant at Bain & Company before working as an investment banker at Baring Brothers. He moved to Legris Industries, where he was named Chief Executive Officer in 1996. Emmanuel joined Danone in 1997 as Vice-President, Chief Financial Officer, Strategy, and became member of the company’s Executive Committee in 2000. In 2005 he took up the position of Vice-President for the Asia- Pacific region. In 2008, Emmanuel was appointed Deputy General Manager and, in 2011, he became Vice- Chairman of the Board of Directors. In October 2014, he became Danone’s Chief Executive Officer. Since December 1, 2017, he is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer.
Since 2019, Emmanuel FABER is Co-Chair of the Consumer Goods Forum.

Brune Louise Sabine Poirson, politician, was born in Washington DC (US) on 1st September, 1982. Originally from Vaucluse, she studied at Sciences Po Aix, then at the London School of Economics (UK), and then at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (US). She began her career in England where she worked as a Project Manager for Nesta (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts). She continued her career in innovation and development in India, and then the United States. She has worked in the public (AFD), private (Veolia), and voluntary (Nesta) sectors. Career Assignment Manager for NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) in London, Project Manager for the AFD (French Development Agency) (2009-2011) in India, Director of Sustainable Development and Social Responsibility for Veolia Water India (2011-2014), Researcher on social innovation and corporate social responsibility in Boston (2014-16), an elected member of the Vaucluse constituency, registered with the La République en Marche group (in 2017), Secretary of State attached to the Minister of State, and Minister of Ecological and Inclusive Transition (since 2017). Elected a member of Vaucluse’s 3rd constituency on 18th June, 2017, Brune Poirson was then appointed Secretary of State attached to the Minister of State, and Minister of Ecological and Inclusive Transition on 21st June, 2017.

Lucas di Grassi is a Brazilian racing driver who competes in the all-electric FIA Formula E Championship for Audi Sport ABT Schaffler and is the CEO of Roborace. In his career, he has won multiple races in single-seaters and sports cars. Di Grassi’s most notable success is winning the 2016–17 Formula E Drivers’ Championship.

Dr. Keirstead is an internationally known stem cell expert and has led therapy development for cancer, immune disorders, motor neuron diseases, spinal cord injury and retinal diseases. He is the Chairman and CEO of AIVITA Biomedical. He was previously CSO of Caladrius which acquired California Stem Cell in 2014. Dr. Keirstead founded California Stem Cell, served as CEO, and led 3 rounds of the investment and sale of the Company. He holds Board positions in several prominent biotechnology companies.

Previously, he founded and served as the CEO of Ability Biomedical, which developed technology later sold to Bristol Myers Squibb. He was a Professor at the University of California, Irvine where he founded and directed the $77 million Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center. As a Full Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology, he was awarded over $16 million in grants during his 15-year tenure. He has mentored over 100 students, published over 100 manuscripts, and granted over 20 patents. He was awarded the Distinguished Award for Research, the UCI Academic Senate’s highest honor, as well as the UCI Innovation Award for innovative research leading to corporate and clinical development. He was a founding advisor of the California Stem Cell Initiative that resulted in a $3 billion stem cell fund (CIRM). He has been a long-time advisor to several governments on biomedical policy.

Dr. Keirstead has been a notable figure in the field of regenerative medicine for over two decades. His work in spinal cord injury earned him the distinction of being one of 100 top scientists of the year in Discover Magazine. He was featured on 60 minutes in a full segment covering his treatment for spinal cord injury. Dr. Keirstead and his research have also appeared in Newsweek, Inc. Magazine, WIRED, Esquire, The NY Times, TIME Magazine, Men’s Vogue, Science and The American Spectator, amongst other national publications. He has given dozens of keynote addresses at industry meetings and events, was a TEDx speaker, and was recently honored as one of 7 thought leaders in Canada at the Seven Wonderer’s event by Beakerhead.

Dr. Keirstead received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of British Columbia, Canada for which he received the Cameron Award for the outstanding Ph.D. thesis in the country. He conducted Post-Doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge. He received the distinct honor of election as Senate Member of the University of Cambridge and Fellow of the Governing Body of Downing College, and was the youngest member to have been elected to those positions.

L. Song Richardson is the Dean and Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law with joint appointments in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and in the Department of Asian American Studies. She received her AB from Harvard College and her JD from Yale Law School. Her interdisciplinary research uses lessons from cognitive and social psychology to study decision-making and judgment in a variety of contexts. Her scholarship has been published by law journals at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Duke and Northwestern, among others. Her article, “Police Efficiency and the Fourth Amendment” was selected as a “Must Read” by the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. Her co-edited book, The Constitution and the Future of Criminal Justice in America, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. She is a co-editor of Criminal Procedure, Cases and Materials published by West Academic Publishing. Currently, she is working on a book that examines the history of race in the U.S. and its implications for law and policy.

Dean Richardson’s legal career has included partnership at a boutique criminal law firm and work as a state and federal public defender in Seattle, Washington. She was also an Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Immediately upon graduation from law school, Dean Richardson was a Skadden Arps Public Interest Fellow with the National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles and the Legal Aid Society’s Immigration Unit in Brooklyn, NY. A leading expert on implicit racial and gender bias, Richardson is frequently invited to speak to law firms, district attorney and public defender offices, police departments, universities, judges, bar associations, and private industry across the nation about the science of implicit bias and its influence on decisions, perceptions, and judgments. She also presents her work at academic symposia and non-academic legal conferences.

She has won numerous awards and recognitions, including the American Association of Law School’s Derrick Bell Award, which recognizes a faculty member’s extraordinary contributions to legal education through mentoring, teaching, and scholarship. She was recently named one of the Top Women Lawyers in California by The Daily Journal, one of the 100 Most Influential business and opinion shapers in Orange County, and one of the two most influential Korean Americans in OC.

Dean Richardson is a member of the American Law Institute. She is also on the Executive Committee of the Association of American Law Schools, an association whose goal is to uphold and advance excellence in legal education, including promoting the core values of excellence in teaching and scholarship, academic freedom, and diversity while seeking to improve the legal profession, to foster justice, and to serve local, national and international communities.

Stefan Germann, CEO Fondation Botnar a foundation in Basel Switzerland focusing on child health, nutrition and education. Stefan is tasked as first CEO to set up the management office and lead the foundation in the next stage of it’s development.

Formerly, Executive Director onegoalglobal.org (an innovative collaborative child nutrition and healthy lifestyle campaign), and Senior Director of World Vision International Sustainable Health Partnership, Innovation and Accountability unit based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. World Vision operates currently in almost 100 countries.

He worked for over 15 years in Africa in various health leadership roles with different agencies in the area of child health related development, relief and advocacy work. His worked included managing a large rural hospital in Zimbabwe.

In 2005 he started to work with World Vision International’s emergency relief team as the director for the integrated technical sector teams in the Asia Tsunami response. This was a complex relief & reconstruction program where he was based in Asia. This program included major health components, including primary health care rehabilitation in Sri Lanka and mHealth projects for midwives in Aceh, Indonesia. He held a number of board and advisory board memberships (Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, UBS Optimus Foundation, REPSSI in Africa) and currently is on the Advisory Board of the Global Health Program, The Graduate Institute – Geneva focusing on the role of NGOs in global health diplomacy. He holds a micro-engineering BSc degree, an MSc degree (Economics) in Social Policy & NGO Management and completed in 2005 a doctoral degree in Development studies focusing on child well-being in urban African context. Stefan finished in 2015 an executive Masters program in Tri Sector Collaboration at Singapore Management University.

BSc, Pennsylvania State University; MA in Economics, University of San Francisco. Over 18 years of automotive original equipment manufacturing (OEM) and internet of things (IoT) experience. Former Vice-President, Global Automotive Strategies and Products, Aeris; Member of the Board, Future of Automotive Security and Technology Research. Was instrumental in the development, launch and operation of Toyota’s telematics products in the US, including Safety Connect, Lexus Enform and Toyota Entune.

Professor Mary (Missy) Cummings received her B.S. in Mathematics from the US Naval Academy in 1988, her M.S. in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2004. A naval officer and military pilot from 1988-1999, she was one of the U.S. Navy’s first female fighter pilots. She is currently a Professor in the Duke University Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and the Director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory. She is an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Fellow and a member of the Defense Innovation Board. Her research interests include human supervisory control, explainable artificial intelligence, human-autonomous system collaboration, human-robot interaction, human-systems engineering, and the ethical and social impact of technology.

Alex Roy is Editor-at-Large at The Drive, founder of Geotegic Consulting and the Human Driving Association. He is also co-founder and host of The Autonocast and author of The Driver. He has set numerous endurance driving records, including the infamous Cannonball Run record.

Ms Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams is the Minister of Department of Communications and Digital Technologies in the Republic of South Africa.

The Minister is well versed on digital transformation issues, understanding that to drive the country’s Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) response; partnerships, skills development and capacity building for the youth, entrepreneurs, government employees and citizens must be at the helm of all interventions. Minister Ndabeni-Abrahams is a digital transformation champion, having served eight years in the ICT industry as a member of the executive. Her academic qualifications include, amongst others, a CTO Diploma in Telecommunications and Management Systems and Project Management Diploma.

Research, postgraduate and general teaching, technical analysis and wider scholarship, policy support and capacity building, dispute settlement, public outreach, and international collaboration on intellectual property, trade and public international law.
Management and administration in international and cross-cultural settings.
Extensive experience in building conceptual, cultural and practical working links between distinct policy and legal domains.
Firm commitment to strengthening and expanding positive links between jurisprudence, ethics, the theory and practice of international relations, the role and governance of multilateral institutions, and concrete public welfare benefits from practical program delivery.

Dr. Mmantsetsa Marope is the Director of UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education (IBE) in Geneva, Switzerland. She holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Chicago, a MA in Education from Pennsylvania State University, and a BA from the University of Botswana and Swaziland. Her professional career includes: 11 years university professorship; 10 years at the World Bank; 11 years in the United Nations; extensive advisory and consultancy services for governments, regional economic communities, regional research networks, ministries of education, bilateral and multilateral agencies; managing international research capacity development networks; and the civil service.
In recent years, she gained eminence as a global thought leader on the future of education and learning; the future of education and jobs; and future competences all global citizens require to thrive in rapidly changing 21st century work and life contexts. She is an avid advocate for closer engagement with the private sector, especially the technology sector, and the science sector in shaping the future of education, and in shaping the future through education. She continues to lead global intellectual dialogue on ensuring that education and learning systems attain and sustain credible scientific underpinning, future development-relevance; agility to adapt; equitable quality; resource efficiency; technology-savvy; and sustainability. She strongly holds that these parameters of education and learning systems are an inescapable foundation for broad-based and future-responsive human resources development, and for the long-term human capital accumulation required to assure every global citizen holistic development, and ultimately, fulfillment.

Dr. Marope calls for stronger private sector engagement in the transformation of education and learning systems into life-long-learning systems in their own right before they can be counted on to develop effective life-long-learners who are ready for unpredictable futures. She holds that such transformation demands 21st century education and learning systems to have capacity for: better use of science, technology, and big data to guide their futures; rigorous systemic diagnostics; research; foresight; and constant self-renewal. The transformation also demands normative and operational tools, as well as enabling institutional landscapes than currently exist. Dr. Marope works relentlessly to develop normative and operational tools required to support the transitioning of education and learning systems into the 21st century. These include systemic diagnostic tools, system prototypes, new global norms and standards, and futuristic models. In future, she seeks to intensify engagement with the private sector, and foundations in convening and mobilizing global talent and intellectual pool; as well as the political, technical, technological, moral, ethical, and financial capital required to create institutions that can enable future transformation of education and learning systems.

Throughout her career, Dr. Marope has built extensive experience at all levels and types of education, learning, and training systems. She is also highly experienced in the knowledge creation, brokerage and management required to underpin system transformation. Her publications cover a wide range of areas including: global norms and standard setting tools; system diagnostic tools; system prototypes; all sub-sectors of education, learning, and training systems; future global competences; education and development; capacity development; and award winning Setswana novels.

Dr. Lee is the Director of the Division of Risk Assessment and International Cooperation at Korean Centers for Disease Control & Prevention under the Ministry of Health & Welfare. She has previously served as the Director of the Jeju Natonal Quarantine Station and the Deputy Director of the Division of Plan & Coordination for the KCDC as well as the Deputy Director of the Divisions of Strategy & Coordination under Health Promotion, Healthcare Technology Development, and Trade Affairs for the Ministry of Health & Welfare.

Dr. Lee received her Ph.D. and M.P.H in Public Health (Health Law & Bioethics), Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea and her B.Sc. in Microbiology & Immunology at McGill University, Canada .

Prof. Chung has been a faculty member of the College of Computing at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) in Korea since 1995. There, he is now the Dean of College of Software and directs Information Management Technology Laboratory. His research interests focus on Information Security, Security & Information Management, Digital Therapeutics, and Services in Next Generation Network environments. His research started as a staff scientist of network technology department at Bolt Beranek & Newman Labs., USA.

He has been the chairman of advisory committee for national cyber safety of National Police Agency, a board member of National Information Agency, the President of Chief Privacy Officers’ Forum, an advisory committee member of Korea e-Government, a member of Information Strategy Planning Committee of Korea, and a news commentator of KBS. He also served as a vice chair of Working Party on Security and Privacy in Digital Economy (formerly Information Security & Privacy), OECD for 10 years, the president of Korea Information Processing Society, a member of Presidential Advisory Committee on e-government of Korea, and an expert member of Presidential Advisory Committee on Science & Technology of Korea.

Former positions include a career with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Norwegian Government and the UN (peacekeeping), research and academia, serving in different capacities in the private sector and for various multilateral organizations in the field and at headquarters. Since 2014, with the World Economic Forum, spearheading the Forum’s work on geopolitics and international security and how to catalyse responses to global, regional and industry challenges. Has published widely on geopolitics, international security affairs and global governance issues. Regular commentator and lecturer.

Andrew is a technical expert on cyber security and advises Darktrace’s strategic customers on advanced threat defense, AI and autonomous response. He has a background in threat analysis and research, and holds a first-class degree in physics from Oxford University and a first-class degree in philosophy from King’s College London. His comments on cyber security and the threat to critical national infrastructure have been reported in international media, including CNBC and the BBC World.

Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau is the CEO and publisher of MIT Technology Review, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s media company. MIT Technology Review’s analysis, features, interviews, and events explain the impact of new technologies on business and society.

Elizabeth is leading the growth, expansion, and modernization of MIT Technology Review’s media platforms and products, including U.S. and international websites, newsletters, events, and an award-winning print magazine. Elizabeth also serves as chair of the global entrepreneurial network MIT Enterprise Forum.

Elizabeth has a 20-year background in building and running teams at world-leading media companies. She maintains a keen focus on new ways to commercialize media content to appeal to discerning, demanding consumers as well as B2B audiences.

Prior to joining MIT Technology Review, Elizabeth was the global managing director of the Economist Corporate Network (whose parent company publishes The Economist magazine), where she led editorial content creation, sales, marketing, and event operations. She also spent a decade working as a consultant.

Elizabeth holds an executive MBA from the London Business School, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College.

Bryn Balcombe is a Founder of the Autonomous Drivers Alliance (ADA) and the Chief Strategy Officer for Roborace, a motorsport competition for human and AI drivers, designed to accelerate the research and development of Vehicle Intelligence and human machine interfaces required for transportation of the future. His previous experience comes from Formula One where he architected and patented vehicle to infrastructure communication systems and developed the F1 Group’s first global media network. He has also consulted on technology strategy for organisations including the BBC and McCann Worldgroup and has a BEng in Mechanical Engineering & Vehicle Design. Balcombe is the chairman of ITU-T Focus Group on AI for Autonomous and Assisted Driving (FG-AI4AD).

Davar Ardalan is the Founder and Storyteller in Chief of IVOW, an early stage startup specializing in AI-driven cultural content, aiming to make navigating the global marketplace easier via cultural analysis. She is also the former Deputy Director of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellowship Program in Washington D.C.

Prior to this, she was a public broadcasting journalist for two decades at NPR News, where she designed stories anchored in multiculturalism and steeped in historical context. In 2015, her last position at NPR was senior producer of the Identity and Culture Unit. Realizing that there is a gaping hole in AI algorithms that will define our future, she created IVOW, bringing together a team of journalists and technologists to design cultural IQ in AI.

At NPR, as a Senior Producer of Weekend Edition and Morning Edition, Ardalan was responsible for editorial and production decisions that required elaborate coordination and planning, such as shaping Morning Edition broadcasts from Baghdad, Kabul and New Orleans. Ardalan has also served as Director of Storytelling at the open innovation agency SecondMuse. There, she helmed storytelling efforts for various campaigns, including NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge and Australian Aid innovation programs in Timor-Leste, Tonga and Fiji.

Ardalan, who has also served as Executive Producer at Hanson Robotics, has been recognized with a 2017 NASA Team Leadership award for Space Apps, a Gracie Award from the American Women in Radio and Television and a shout-out in the popular comic strip Zippy. In May 2014, she was the recipient of a United States Ellis Island Medal of Honor for individual achievement and for promoting cultural unity.

Ardalan began her radio career as a reporter in 1991 at NPR Member Station KUNM in Albuquerque, NM. In 1984, she was an English news anchor at IRIB News broadcasting throughout the Persian Gulf Region.

AIcrowd is a platform for streamlining your AI workflow – internally, or externally, by running AI, machine learning, and other data science challenges. AIcrowd helps organizations – whether businesses, universities, government agencies or NGOs – develop, manage, and promote their challenges. AIcrowd streamlines your machine learning workflow, and connects your problems with machine learning and data science specialists and enthusiasts, who will collaboratively try to find the most accurate, efficient and effective solutions.

Dave Troy is a tech entrepreneur and disinformation researcher. He began studying social media data in 2007, and has been acknowledged as the first developer to use the Twitter API. His data visualization work has been featured in the 2008 exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and at TED. He is also curator of TEDxMidAtlantic in Washington, D.C. since 2009, and is based in Baltimore, Maryland. Dave serves as CEO and product architect at 410 Labs, maker of the popular e-mail management tools Mailstrom.co and Chuck. In the area of disinformation research, his work focuses on the intersection of sociology, network science, and political science. This spring, he curated TEDxMidAtlantic: Info20/20, an event focused on information integrity and cognitive security in partnership with the University of Maryland and The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory.

Sara-Jayne Terp is the founder of Bodacea Light Industries, a company focused the application of information security principles towards countering misinformation, including but limited to information security-based misinformation reporting and response standards. In addition, she serves as the co-chair for the Credibility Coalition’s MisinfoSec Working Group and is leading the effort to develop a framework for understanding organized communication attacks.

Prior to this role, she was involved in the development of an independent disinformation rating system with the Global Disinformation Index, served as the Chief Platform Architect for UN Global Pulse and was an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University teaching Data Science for Development and Social Change among other courses.

Dr Wilson is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Dean (International) at the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. His interests include digital forensics, information retrieval, machine learning and bioinformatics.

Renée DiResta is a Trust and Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and 2019 Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation. She investigates the spread of malign narratives across social networks, and assists policymakers in understanding and responding to the problem. She has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civic, and business organizations, and has studied disinformation and computational propaganda in the context of pseudoscience conspiracies, terrorism, and state-sponsored information warfare.

Renée regularly writes and speaks about the role that tech platforms and curatorial algorithms play in the proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories. She is an Ideas contributor at Wired. Her tech industry writing, analysis, talks, and data visualizations have been featured or covered by numerous media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fast Company, Politico, TechCrunch, Wired, Slate, Forbes, Buzzfeed, The Economist, Journal of Commerce, and more.

Jan Feiling is a passionate cyberneticist and AI expert with an entrepreneurial mindset. The first two and half years at Porsche he pushed innovations in the connected car department on the fast lane by intensively collaborating with start-ups and helped to reinvent Porsche to save its future in our digital world. In parallel he did his PhD in fundamental mathematical optimization and AI research.

He is currently working in a company building unit within Porsche Digital to address untapped business opportunities. He continues to work on the reinvention of Porsche by tackle these opportunities with a beginner mindset and act with the speed of a start-up or even faster.

His personal goals are to develop digital products to make life more efficient, more sustainable or just simpler. Moreover, one of his lifelong goals are to decode the world and understand the complex network dynamics to identify his impact to make the world a better place.

Chamisa is a citizen of the Navajo Nation, Blackfeet and Shoshone-Bannock and resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Indigenous and American Indian Studies, with an emphasis in Tribal Sovereignty, from Haskell Indian Nations University. She is currently working toward a Masters in Computer Science. She is a certified full stack developer and has worked on various web development and robotics projects in her post-baccalaureate career. Chamisa worked for Hanson Robotics as a conversational AI character writer for Sophia the Robot and at CNM Ingenuity as an Assistant Instructor for the Deep Dive Coding Fullstack Bootcamp. In addition to high tech projects, Chamisa is also interested in exploring how North American tribes and Indigenous populations around the world can leverage technology while exercising tribal sovereignty and self-determination.

Tracy Monteith is a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee and Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft. His decades-long work as an innovative technologist and leader have produced unique results on a global scale. Tracy has received a first place finish in world’s largest private hackathon (23K participants, 400 cities world-wide) for AI approach to translating tribal-polymorphic languages and a second place finish for an IoT, cloud-connected beehive-sensor array. His passion for hackathons is shared with thousands of STEM-focussed tribal students across North America as he conducts hackathons for tribal schools. Tracy was the driving force and technical-innovator behind the inclusion of the Cherokee Syllabary in Windows and Office, the first tribal language with that distinction. His work continues with enhancing polymorphic-languages preservation and dissemination through the infusion of appropriate technology into indigenous circles.

Harry Yeff (AKA Reeps One) is a ARS PRIX Electronica nominated artist and musician based in London. Yeff’s expertise in vocal musicianship and creative direction has generated an online global following, rendering over 100 million views and recognition as a pioneer of experimental vocalism.
In 2018 Yeff completed his third artist residency at Harvard University and is currently part of the Experiments in Art and Technology program at Bell Labs.

Yeff produces work as a response to an ongoing investigation into the evolution of the human voice, art, and science. He has exhibited internationally, from the Museum of Art and Design in New York to the Tate Britain in London, as well as Milan, London and Tokyo Design weeks, SXSW, Miami Art Basel, and Sundance film festival. Yeff has become one of the most decorated and progressive lateral thinkers in the world of voice and technology.

In her role as Responsible AI and AI for Good Lead at PwC, Maria advises partners across industry, academia, governments, and more, on how to harness the power of AI in an ethical and responsible manner. She has played a crucial part in the development and set-up of PwC’s UK AI Center of Excellence, the firm’s AI strategy and most recently the development of PwC’s Responsible AI toolkit, firms methodology for embedding ethics in AI. Maria is a globally recognised AI ethics expert, a Advisory Board member of the UK Government All-Party Parliamentary Group on AI, member of BSI/ISO & IEEE AI standard groups, a Fellow of the RSA and an advocate for gender diversity in AI, children and youth rights in the age of AI.

Alex Tsado is passionate about technology, business, and expanding access to the next billion.
Beyond leading go-to-market for Nvidia’s fastest-growing business channel, cloud AI computing, he founded Alliance for Africa’s Intelligence to ensure African innovations get the chance to change millions of lives, and the continent is never again left behind during industrial revolutions.
He spends his time wearing multiple hats to drive change in organizations as small as groups in the grassroots, to engaging with country leaders to drive national and continental transformation.
He has spoken at the UN, top business school programs, multiple podcasts and National AI workshops to inform and evangelize about a future that can ensue when disruptive technologies are used to expand access to improved living in frontier markets.
Find more at www.alextsado.com

Hélène Jacquet is currently Vice-President for Strategy and Development at the University of Bordeaux.

She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Bordeaux 1 University. After an initial period as research assistant, she was tasked with creating and developing a technology transfer office (TTO) in the field of ICT. In 2001, she joined Sony Electronics (San Jose, California) as senior researcher, and contributed to the development and transfer of innovative technologies in the field of digital media.

Back in France in 2004, she joined a consulting firm specialized in industrial innovation in Paris as consultant, and became an associate partner in 2005. She has been a major contributor to several forward studies, such as the ICT chapter for the Forward Technological Studies of the French Ministry of Industry: “2010 Key Technology”. Her regular mission as consultant included evaluations of regional policies in the field of innovation and research, audits of technology transfer offices (TTO), management of large-scale European projects, foresight groups, performance of strategic planning and market research for start-ups, private firms and public organizations.

She joined the research and higher education center, “PRES Université de Bordeaux”, in 2009 where she took charge of development strategy. As such, she contributed to drafting the strategic plan for IdEx Bordeaux that was granted a €700 M endowment, one of the three first projects to be labeled by the French government in 2011 within the framework of the Investments for the Future scheme.

From 2014 to 2017, she was Deputy Executive Director for Research, International, Innovation and Partnerships. In this capacity, she acted as managing director of the University of Bordeaux Initiative of Excellence (IdEx Bordeaux).

David Oehmen leads the work on digital strategies for climate change adaptation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretariat. As such, he oversees the substantive and technical development of new tools and services and advises colleagues in the establishment of new digital solutions in relation to climate resilience. He is also working on fostering private sector engagement in climate resilience.

David has studied International Relations and Communications and has subsequently specialized on how digital solutions can help manage climate change impacts.

Dr Soumya Swaminathan was most recently WHO’s Deputy Director-General for Programmes. A paediatrician from India and a globally recognized researcher on tuberculosis and HIV, she brings with her 30 years of experience in clinical care and research and has worked throughout her career to translate research into impactful programmes. Dr Swaminathan was Secretary to the Government of India for Health Research and Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research from 2015 to 2017. In that position, she focused on bringing science and evidence into health policy making, building research capacity in Indian medical schools and forging south-south partnerships in health sciences. From 2009 to 2011, she also served as Coordinator of the UNICEF/UNDP/World Bank/WHO Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases in Geneva.

She received her academic training in India, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America, and has published more than 350 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters. She is an elected Foreign Fellow of the US National Academy of Medicine and a Fellow of all three science academies in India. She has previously been on several WHO and global advisory bodies and committees, including the WHO Expert Panel to Review Global Strategy and Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property, the Strategic and Technical Advisory Group of the Global TB Department at WHO, and most recently was Co-Chair of the Lancet Commission on TB.

Reader of Information Theory and Information Processing with the Dept. of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at University College London. I was previously with the Dept. of Computer Science, University of Porto, Portugal, rising through the ranks from Assistant to Associate Professor, where I also led the Information Theory and Communications Research Group at Instituto de Telecomunicações – Porto.

I obtained the undergraduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal and the Ph.D. degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from University College London. I have then held postdoctoral positions both at Cambridge University and Princeton University. I have also held visiting research positions at Princeton University, Duke University and Cambridge University.

Thomas Wiegand is a German electrical engineer who substantially contributed to the creation of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and H.265/MPEG-H HEVC video coding standards. For H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, Wiegand was one of the chairmen of the Joint Video Team (JVT) standardization committee that created the standard and was the chief editor of the standard itself. He was also an active technical contributor to both standards. Wiegand also holds a chairmanship position in the ITU-T VCEG and previously in ISO/IEC MPEG standardization organizations. In July 2006, the video coding work of the ITU-T jointly led by Gary J. Sullivan and Wiegand for the preceding six years was voted as the most influential area of the standardization work of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history.

Wiegand is Professor at the Technical University of Berlin and executive director of the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, Germany. He heads research teams working on : Video processing and coding, Multimedia transmission, Machine learning, Mobile Communications (management) and Computer Vision (management).

World-renowned presenter LJ Rich is part of Click, the BBC’s flagship technology show. Since reading music at Oxford, she’s predicted tech trends and monitored emerging concepts in consumer electronics for over a decade, with particular interest in audio, AI and art. Her regular music show #ljtunes now has nearly 800,000 likes on Twitter’s live streaming service Periscope, and she’s performed live at some of the most prestigious venues on the planet. During her recent breast cancer treatment, LJ decided to make a video diary of her own chemo sessions to demystify it for others, which hit the top spot on the BBC website.

Caitlin Kraft-Buchman is CEO/Founder of Women at the Table, a growing global CSO based in Geneva, Switzerland – and the first organization to focus on systems change by helping feminists gain influence in sectors that have key structural impact: economy, democracy and governance, technology, and sustainability.
A serial coalition builder focused on impact, she is the founder of International Gender Champions (IGC) a leadership network of female & male decision-makers that breaks down gender barriers for system change. After four years it includes hubs in Geneva, New York, Vienna, Nairobi, The Hague, and most recently Paris, and counts 300+ Champion heads of organizations including the Secretary General of the UN, heads of the UNHCR, ICRC, IOM, IFRC, WTO, ILO, WHO, WIPO, ISO, ITU, Ambassadors, and Civil Society. As IGC Board Member she is also responsible for IGC’s Trade Impact Group (Buenos Aires Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment, 2017); Disarmament Impact Group (nominated for Arms Control Person/s of the Year, 2018); Standards Impact Group (Gender Responsive Standards Declaration, 2019); International Justice Impact Group (The Hague Principles on Sexual Violence, 2019).
Caitlin also founded and co-leads the new < A+ > Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms with Ciudadania Inteligente, a global coalition of technologists, activists and academics who focus on affirmative action for algorithms and creating gender equality, so that machine learning does not embed an already biased system into our future.

Thomas Vincent Girardi is an attorney and a founder, with Robert Keese, of Girardi & Keese, a downtown Los Angeles law firm.

Widely regarded by his peers as one of the nation’s top trial lawyers and with nearly fifty years of experience representing victims, Thomas V. Girardi has obtained numerous multi-million dollar verdicts and settlements, handling claims involving wrongful death, commercial litigation, products liability, bad faith insurance, and toxic torts. In 2003, he received the most prestigious honor of being inducted into the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame by the California State Bar. Mr. Girardi is a Member of the Board of Directors and former President of the prestigious International Academy of Trial Lawyers, an invitation-only worldwide organization, limited to 500 trial lawyers. Mr. Girardi is also the first trial lawyer to be appointed to the California Judicial Council, the policymaking body of the state courts.

While my background is in mathematics, I am always curious about new technologies, both in the physical and digital world. I like to learn and think about algorithms and the web, and how these will affect science, business and society. When possible and realistic, I try to contribute towards this future.

Examples include: MOOCs, big data, open practices (software, data, science, journalism, government, intelligence), crowdsourcing, semantic technologies, blockchain technology (bitcoin/ethereum),…

Associate Professor of Criminology, Faculty of Arts, Research Affiliate, Monash Data Futures Institute, Monash University, Australia

Asher’s research utilises criminological and socio-legal frameworks to understand, critique and transform legal policy and practice in gendered violence and technology-facilitated abuse, with a particular focus on the role of artificial intelligence in facilitating abuse. This includes serious social and legal problems like image-based sexual abuse, deepfakes and AI-facilitated abuse. Informed by national and international context, her research is interested in how people experience justice, and seeks to develop innovative legal and non-legal responses to violence and abuse in a world increasingly dominated by social media, artificial intelligence and digital technology.

Asher has led and worked on numerous projects in this field, including research funded by the Australian Research Council, the Australian Criminology Research Council and the Office of the eSafety Commissioner. She has published extensively on technology-facilitated abuse, as well as in the related areas of sexual violence, access to justice, plea negotiations and legal reform, and has advised the United Nations and Facebook on issues and policy development related to technology-facilitated abuse.

He is a Tech Entrepreneur with over 20 years’ experience working in new market acquisitions across various technology verticals in Europe, America, Asia and Africa.

John is one of Africa’s leading experts on how businesses can leverage key technology trends, transform organizations and drive competitive advantage for impact in industries including finance, agriculture, health, education, gaming and startup enterprises.

He is a Pan African renowned business leader, entrepreneur, investor, consultant, mentor and public speaker holding multiple roles including Founder Adalabs Kenya – AI and smart tech lab accelerating and training entrepreneurs and developers in east Africa and Founder Afyarekod – AI led consumer driven medical record storage platform for consumers.

Kurt Rohloff is the co-founder and CTO of Duality Technologies, a technology start-up enabling privacy-preserving analytics and collaboration on sensitive data. He leads the development of PALISADE, an open source homomorphic encryption software library that encrypts data so that they can be safely used for predictive analytics while preserving private information. Prior to co-founding Duality he was a professor of computer science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan. He is the recipient of a DARPA Director’s Fellowship.

Erica Tandori is a legally blind artist, researcher and academic, exploring the intersection between art, vision loss and science. She was diagnosed with a form of juvenile macular dystrophy, at the age of 23, while in her first year of art school. Erica holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne. Her research focused on capturing the entoptic effects of macular dystrophy through art, in an attempt to convey an ‘eye-witness’ account of blindness. As Artist in Residence at the Rossjohn Infection and Immunity Program, Monash University, under the guidance and impetus of Prof Jamie Rossjohn (ARC Laureate Fellow), Erica has helped develop the Monash Sensory Science Initiative, creating multi-sensory, multimodal artworks communicating current research in biomedicine to blind and low vision audiences across Australia. The Monash Sensory Science initiative was recognised for its contributions to Inclusion and Diversity, becoming a finalist in the 2019 prestigious Australia Museum Eureka Prize.

I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto (Ontario, Canada) prior to joining HKUST in its founding year in 1992. Other degrees include an Executive MBA from Kellogg (Northwestern University) and HKUST in 2002, and a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of California at San Diego (Revelle College departmental award, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) in 1984. I have been a visiting researcher at Columbia University in 1995-96, Bell Laboratories in 1995, and the Technische Universität München (Munich, Germany) during 1986-87.

In December 2011, I was selected by the Association for Computational Linguistics as one of only 17 scientists worldwide to be awarded the honor of founding ACL Fellow, with a citation for “significant contributions to machine translation and the development of inversion transduction grammar” which pioneered the integration of syntactic and semantic models into statistical machine translation paradigms.

I have served as Associate Editor of Computer Speech and Language, AI Journal, and ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, and on the Editorial Boards of Computational Linguistics, Machine Translation, and Journal of Natural Language Engineering. I also served as Chair of IWSLT 2019, Area Co-Chair for ICLR 2020, ACL 2019, EMNLP 2016, NAACL HLT 2016, IJCAI 2015, ACL 2013, and IJCNLP 2013, Chair of IWSLT 2012, Co-Chair for EMNLP-2004, and the Organizing Committee of ACL-2000 and WVLC-5 (SIGDAT 1997), as well as the Executive Committee of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). In 2007 I initiated the ongoing annual SSST workshop series on Syntax, Semantics, and Structure in Statistical Translation.

South China Morning Post has a nice overview of my accomplishments, activities, and approaches. In 2015 Debrett’s named me as one of the 100 most influential figures of Hong Kong, in the area of science.

In 2019, Google named me as one of eight inaugural members of its AI Ethics council, ATEAC (Advanced Technology External Advisory Council).

Melissa Sassi is the Chief Penguin of IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator. Yes, she created her own penguin title! Melissa works with early stage entrepreneurs on digital and business transformation. Have you heard of Call for Code? It’s an IBM initiative aimed at preparing for and responding to climate change via tech innovation. Melissa is a Judge! Prior IBM, Melissa spent several years at Microsoft where she built internet and energy access networks and introducing digital skills to the newly connected.
Melissa is also the Founder & CEO of MentorNations, a youth-led digital skills movement in Africa that has taught tens of thousands of youth to code across twelve countries. Melissa is Chair of IEEE’s Digital Intelligence Working Group and is on the Steering Committee of the Coalition for Digital Intelligence with the World Economic Forum, OECD, IEEE, and the DQ Institute. She is also a Founding Member of broadbandpolicy.org and holds Board positions with TAKMIL, a nonprofit with 30 informal schools across rural Pakistan, and TechWomen.Asia, a Kabul, Afghanistan-based nonprofit focused on tech skill-building for Afghani women and girls.
Melissa holds two master’s degrees and is working toward her PhD. Her research focuses on the digital inclusion of under-represented communities. Melissa serves on a Round Table within the UN and has been a speaker in more than 100 in topics involving digital inclusion, community building, youth empowerment, imposter syndrome, and personal branding.

Judy Wawira Gichoya, MD, MS, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine. An interventional radiologist, Dr. Gichoya specializes in interventional radiology procedures.
Dr. Gichoya is a member of the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute. She holds professional memberships with Radiological Society of North America, American College of Radiology, Society of Interventional Radiology, Society of Imaging Informatics in Medicine and American Medical Informatics Association.

Naomi Lee is Executive Editor (Digital) for The Lancet. Naomi handles peer review and commissioning for The Lancet with a special interest in surgery, health informatics and medical technology. As part of the marketing and communications team, she also leads digital transformation for The Lancet group. Naomi trained in surgery, specializing in urology and has worked in the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Mexico. She studied medicine at Cambridge University and King’s College London, and is currently studying data science at University College London. Naomi joined The Lancet in 2014.

Berenice Boutin is researcher in international law focusing on international responsibility, security, and new technologies.

Nicole Washington, M.S., has nearly 20 years of systems integration experience, including systems implementation, design and programming from her previous career with Ernst & Young, Whittman Hart and MarchFirst management consulting firms. She is the founder and owner of Micro Biz Coach®, a firm that focuses on educating business owners to leverage various aspects of internet technology in their operations in order to maximize efficiency and to effectively compete with larger businesses. Its clients have been featured on CNBC, Fox Business News, TheStreet.com and a host of Clear Channel radio stations.

Nicole was most recently engaged with Octane, a non-profit organization supported by partners that have a combined revenue of almost $200 billion and together they employ over 800,000 people. She has held two positions with this organization: Director of Innovation & Growth where she focused on creating an ecosystem to help high-growth companies scale and Senior Advisor of Community Engagement where she led philanthropic initiatives to make the Octane network more accessible to underrepresented groups.

Nicole is also the founder of Nicole’s Naturals® Inc. (Est. 2014). Nicole’s Naturals is a gluten free food manufacturing company specializing in the development of gluten free grain products with the texture and taste of traditional gluten products.

She is a member of the Angel Capital Association and the Ohio TechAngel Fund, the 2nd largest Angel Investor Network in the United States, where she served as the due diligence team technology lead for several years. Nicole has served on several boards including the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute and the Samueli Academy Board of Trustees.

Professor Jon McCormack works at the nexus of art, technology and society. His experimental
practice is driven by an enduring interest in computing and incorporates generative art, sound,
evolutionary systems, computer creativity, physical computing, artificial intelligence and
machine learning.

His artworks have been widely exhibited at leading galleries, museums and symposia, including
the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Tate Gallery (Liverpool, UK), ACM SIGGRAPH (USA
and Asia), Prix Ars Electronica (Austria) and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image
(Australia). He is the recipient of 18 awards for new media art and computer science research
including prizes at Ars Electronica (Austria), Nagoya Biennial (Japan), the 2012 Eureka Prize for
Innovation in Computer Science and the 2016 Lumen Prize for digital art (still images). He is
currently undertaking a Future Fellowship, funded by the Australian Research Council, that
investigates new models for the generative design of digitally fabricated materials.
Professor McCormack is also the founder and director of SensiLab, a trans-disciplinary research
space dedicated to the future of creative technology at Monash University in Melbourne,
Australia. SensiLab’s collective research explores the untapped potential of technology, its
impacts on society and the new possibilities it enables. Its dedicated research space – which
opened in late 2017 – encourages enthusiasm, curiosity, seamless collaboration and unrestricted
experimentation.

Christoph Lütge is Full Professor of Business Ethics and Director of the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence at Technical University of Munich (TUM). He has a background in business informatics and philosophy, having taken his PhD at the Technical University of Braunschweig in 1999 and his habilitation at the University of Munich (LMU) in 2005. He was awarded a Heisenberg Fellowship in 2007. His most recent books are: “The Ethics of Competition” (Elgar, 2019) and “Ethik in KI und Robotik” (Hanser, 2020, with coauthors). Lütge has held visiting positions at Harvard, University of Pittsburgh, University of California (San Diego), Taipei, Kyoto and Venice. He is a member of the Scientific Board of the European AI Ethics initiative AI4People as well as of the German Ethics Commission on Automated and Connected Driving. He has also done consulting work for the Singapore Economic Development Board and the Canadian Transport Commission.

Aylin Caliskan is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at George Washington University. Her research interests include the emerging science of bias in artificial intelligence, fairness in machine learning, and privacy. Her work aims to characterize and quantify aspects of natural and artificial intelligence using a multitude of machine learning, language processing, and computer vision techniques. In her recent publication in Science, she demonstrated how semantics derived from language corpora contain human-like biases. Prior to that, she developed novel privacy attacks to de-anonymize programmers using code stylometry. Her presentations on both de-anonymization and bias in machine learning are the recipients of best talk awards. Her work on semi-automated anonymization of writing style furthermore received the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium Best Paper Award. Her research has received extensive press coverage across the globe. Aylin holds a PhD in Computer Science from Drexel University and a Master of Science in Robotics from University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the faculty at George Washington University, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher and a Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

A talent and obsession for classical and electronic music has led the sensitive and scientific mind of Alex Braga to start a journey with his own Artificial Intelligence project (A-MINT), one which surveys the newest territories in music. With an Ethical drive which has anticipated and will guide the evolution of A.I., Alex Braga brings A-MINT to SXSW in 2020 just as his music, the “Spleen Machine” EP is due to be released worldwide in the spring via 7K! / !K7 Music. The show will be a multisensorial(audio-visual), unique, organic and futuristic performance where the artist (Human)  will work interdependently with the Technology (A.I.) to create a series of new musical pathways.

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.

Aimee van Wynsberghe has been working in ICT and robotics since 2004. She began her career as part of a research team investigating the network variables related to surgical robots in Canada at the CSTAR (Canadian Surgical Technologies and Advance Robotics) Institute. She is Assistant Professor in Ethics and Technology and the TU Delft. She is co-founder and co-director of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics and on the board of the Institute for Accountability in a digital age and the Dutch National Alliance on AI (ALLAI). She serves as a member of the European Commission high level expert group on AI. Aimee has been named one of the Netherlands top 400 influential women under 38 by VIVA, was named one of the 25 ‘women in robotics you need to know about’, and is the 2018 winner of the L’oreal/UNESCO ‘Women in Science’. She is author of the book Healthcare Robots: Ethics, Design, and Implementation and has been awarded an NWO personal research grant to study how we can responsibly design service robots. She has been interviewed by BBC, Quartz, Financial Times, and other International news media on the topic of ethics and robots, and is invited to speak at International conferences and summits.

Sandra (Sandy) Westlake is the Head of Global Partnerships; Private Sector Partnerships for the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) based in Rome, Italy. She joined the WFP private sector team soon after its inception nearly fifteen years ago. Ms. Westlake provides strategic direction and guidance to a global team of fundraising and partnership experts to secure multi-million dollar transformational partnerships which deliver resources, expertise, technology and visibility with the aim of creating a world with zero hunger. During these years at WFP, she was responsible for building out the Yum! Brands’ partnership, the world’s largest private sector consumer fundraising campaign around the issue of hunger. In addition to this, she moved the private sector function within WFP from a ‘start up’ to a mature business creating the governance structure and tools needed to lay the foundation for private sector engagement across the organization. Today, WFP is recognized as the humanitarian organization that is uniquely qualified to develop game-changing partnerships that can transform the lives of beneficiaries and provide companies with innovative leadership opportunities.

Ms. Westlake began her career in political fundraising and philanthropic giving. From there, she worked for global brands Esprit de Corps. and Levi’s in marketing and communications with a particular focus on cause-related marketing and corporate social responsibility. Additionally, she created ‘touch the consumer’ or experiential marketing campaigns for a wide array of global consumer brands at the boutique agency Grow Marketing in San Francisco, California. Ms. Westlake has more than twenty plus years of experience working in or with the private sector.

My passion is data science, and its power to solve real-life problems. Most of the projects I’ve been involved in the last 7 years included machine learning, AI, Big Data with R & Python. I love beautiful visualizations, data journalism and storytelling. I’m fully devoted to demonstrate the awesome potential and value of Telefonica data as well as applying Data for Social Good.

Partner and Secretary General International Relations CIONET, a network of over 6500 CIOs and Digital leaders in Europe and South-America. He represents CIONET on a number of European Commission projects in the area of eSkills and eLeadership development. He founded the Global Digital Leaders Alliance, linking the CIO communities from China, India, Europe, Russia, South America and the US to each other and representing over 25.000 Digital Leaders. He is the founder and chair of iPoort a community for the members of the Dutch parliament to discuss the value and role of IT in the Dutch society. He sits on the board of advice of a number of international associations and academic institutions including the Global Industry Council Directors of the IP3, an UNESCO-consultative body, the Assciation for Accountability and Internet Democracy, the ACM Marketing Board, Digital Africa, IPBPM in Portugal, the BPM-Forum and General Council Netherlands. He has helped organize numerous conferences including WCIT2010; WCC2012; the World CIO Forum, Xian; Future of Finance, San Francisco; K.E.Y. Platform, Seoul, and several TEDx events. He is frequently asked to speak at or moderate events. Occasionally, he coaches organizations on collaboration and strategy. He has an MSc from Delft University. His goal is to explore the interaction of Information Technology, Innovation and Impact. ​​

Jan Kleijssen was born in 1958 in Almelo, The Netherlands. He studied International Law at Utrecht State University (LLM in 1981) and International Affairs at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University, Ottawa (MA 1982). He then did his military service as a Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Netherlands Navy.

Jan joined the Council of Europe in 1983 as a Lawyer with the European Commission of Human Rights. In 1987, he was appointed to the Secretariat of the Parliamentary Assembly and was Secretary to the Political Affairs Committee from 1990 to 1999.

Jan then served as the Director of the Secretary General’s Private Office until 2004 and subsequently as Director in the Parliamentary Assembly and Special Advisor to the President.

In 2006, he moved to the Directorate General of Human Rights and was Director of Standard-setting until 2011 when he was appointed to his current function of Director of Information Society – Action against Crime, Directorate General Human Rights and Rule of Law.

Ms. Yuan Zhang is the Rapporteur of ITU-T Q12/16, focusing on standardization on video perception and intelligent analysis. Yuan is the co-chair of MPEG AhG VCM, focusing on video coding for machine vision and hybrid human and machine vision. Yuan is an expert in machine vision standardization and strategy department, China Telecom research institute, responsible for R&D, standards, products of machine vision. She is active in various standards fields and SDOs, including machine vision, VCM, AI, autonomous driving, video perception, video analysis, etc.

Andrew Zolli is the VP of Global Impact at Planet, an space and AI-driven organization known for having deployed the largest constellation of Earth-observing satellites in history. These satellites image the entire surface of the Earth, every day, at 3m/pixel resolution. Andrew works to ensure Planet’s data and capabilities are used to deliver breakthrough sustainable development, climate, public health, humanitarian, and human rights outcomes. He also helps the company design and implement data and AI-related ethics policies and programs. Beyond Planet, Andrew works broadly on issues of foresight, innovation, and systemic and social resilience.

Wolfgang Victor Yarlott is a member of the Native American Crow tribe. Yarlott’s pioneering research took place with the Genesis Story Understanding System at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In collaboration with his Professor Patrick Winston, Yarlott wanted to determine whether the system could understand stories from Crow folklore as well as it understood the works of Shakespeare. At first his “audience” was the program itself — he wanted to instill an understanding.

Isidro is the Deputy Head of Unit of the European Innovation Council – Innovation Ecosystems unit (TF2). He was before for 8 years the head of the Startup Europe initiative at the European Commission. Since 2015 Isidro has also been nominated thought leader at United Nations ITU, and is member of several advisory boards to international networks of startups. He combines his professional activities with academic activities such as being Cambridge University CSAP Continuing Fellow, visiting lecturer to CEPADE (Universidad Politecnica of Madrid) and writing books and papers, some of which have been translated into other languages, including Japanese. After graduating as an Engineer from the Universidad Politecnica of Madrid, he set up his own software business in the Tecg AgriFood area, before becoming a strategy advisor to CEOs of large corporations. Afterwards he became director in charge of IT and Change Management Projects in a large corporation. In 2001 he moved into the public sector where he has been mainly working on strategy and innovation within the European Commission as well as member of advisory committees of many international organisations.

Dr Stephen Cave is Executive Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) at the University of Cambridge, UK, where he is also Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Philosophy and Fellow of Hughes Hall. At CFI, he oversees a team of researchers across five programmes on the nature and impact of AI in the short and long term. His own research interests currently focus on the portrayal and ethics of intelligent machines. Previously, Stephen earned a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge, then joined the British Foreign Office, where he served as a policy advisor and diplomat. He is author of the book Immortality (Penguin Random House), a New Scientist book of the year, and co-editor of AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking About Intelligent Machines (OUP).

Marco Merens is the Chief of ICAO’s Integrated Aviation Analysis section of the Air Navigation Bureau, as well as Programmes Coordination and Implementation Section, in Air Navigation Bureau.

As an Aeronautical Engineer, he started his career at Airbus in Toulouse, working on the design of avionic and flight control systems for the A340 and A380. He returned to Luxembourg to join the CAA, where he held various positions from the head of the airworthiness department to the manager of the CAA’s occurrence reporting and analysis system.

He joint ICAO in 2009 as a Safety Data Analysis Officer. He is credited for establishing the ICAO integrated Safety Trend Analysis System (iSTARS), he became chief of the Section in 2015.
His passion for Technology and Innovation in Aviation, together with how technology can keep us safe in Aviation has taken him on an exciting journey to the future of Aviation. His ever-expanding interest and experiments in Innovation and Artificial Intelligence have involved him in thought-provoking projects, he is a founding member of the First Innovation Fair, during the ICAO 40 Assembly in 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhzpp5KgSRg. He lectures and speaks frequently on Innovation and Future of Aviation, Artificial intelligence and Digital Science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzAp4p109SY

Marco Bego currently serves as the Executive Director of the Chief Innovation Office at the University Hospital São Paulo (Hospital de Clínicas). In this position, he is leading the cross-functional efforts to integrate innovation in all activities of the hospital and associated departments through public-private partnerships, private sector collaboration and entrepreneurship. Marco is an effective member of the Technical Chamber of Informatics in the Brazilian Federal Council of Medicine (CFM) and assumed the presidency of the Brazilian Association of Chief Innovation Officers in Health in May 2017. Marco has a degree in Electrical Engineering and has 27 years of experience in Health IT.

Azer Bestavros is the Inaugural Associate Provost for the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences at BU, a degree-granting academic unit with a mission to catalyze and integrate research and education programs in computing and data sciences across the landscape of disciplines at BU. Prior to taking on this leadership role in 2019, he was the Founding Director of the Hariri Institute for Computing, set up in 2010 to nucleate BU’s presence in computing and data sciences. Under his leadership, the Institute has become a landmark at the crossroads of computational research at BU, engaging over 250 researchers from 38 departments, and securing over $100M in external research funding for incubated projects. From 2000 to 2007, Azer chaired the CS Department in the College of Arts and Sciences, having joined it in 1991 after obtaining his PhD from Harvard University.

Praised by students for his engaging teaching style and his use of memorable analogies, Azer is recognized for his signature CS-350 course, which he developed in the mid-1990s and taught for over 25 years, covering fundamental concepts that are immune to technological churn and yet underlie the design and implementation of all types of computing systems. Specializing in distributed systems research, Azer made seminal contributions to many areas of CS, most recently focusing on privacy-preserving big-data analytics for social and public good applications. As of 2019, funded by over $49M from government and industry sponsors, his research yielded 19 PhD theses, 8 patents, 2 startups, and hundreds of refereed papers with over 20,000 citations.
Azer has a long track record of service to the computing community, most recently chairing the 2019 and co-chairing the 2014 Committee of Visitors charged by NSF to evaluate its CISE Directorate; serving on the inaugural advisory board of the congressional Cloud Computing Caucus set up in 2013 to raise public awareness on cloud technologies; and serving for seven years until 2012 as chair of the IEEE Computer Society TC on the Internet. Currently, he serves on the Advisory Committee of the CISE Directorate of the NSF and on the Editorial Board of the Communications of the ACM. He is frequently tapped for plenary presentations, federal and local government agency briefings, and media coverage related to contemporary issues at the nexus of computing, society, and public policy.

In recognition of distinguished teaching, research, and service, Azer received a number of awards, most notably the ACM Sigmetrics Inaugural Test of Time Award for 1996 work “whose impact is still felt 15 years after its initial publication” and the 2010 United Methodist Scholar Teacher Award for “outstanding dedication and contributions to the learning arts and to the institution.” In 2017, he was named a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, the highest distinction bestowed upon senior faculty members at BU.

Maite is “Profesora Titular de Universidad” (similar to Associate Professor or Tenured University Lecturer/Professor) at University of Barcelona (UB)

She is member of the WAI (Volume Visualization and Artificial Intelligence) research group (2009 SGR 362)- CLiC Centre de Llenguatge i Computació (2014 SGR 623, 2017 SGR 00341) and adjunct scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA), as well as member of the Consolidated Educational Innovation Group INDOMAIN (Grup d’Innovació Docent Consolidat: GIDC) at UB (code GIDCUB-13/138), former board member of the ACIA: Catalan Association of Artificial Intelligence / Associació Catalana d’Intel.ligència Artificial, and one of the board directors of the EURAMAS (European Association for Multi-Agent Systems).

Konstantinos Karachalios is the Managing Director of the IEEE-Standards Association. His expertise is in public policy, strategic planning, and the non-for-profit sector. He created and led the International Academy. He has also worked for the Department of Technical Assistance to the Middle East and Africa and the Bureau for Public Policy Issues at the European Patent Office (EPO). He has a PhD in Energy Engineering (Nuclear Reactor Safety) and a Master in Mechanical Engineering, both from the University of Stuttgart.

Neama Dadkhahnikoo comes to the XPRIZE Foundation with 12 years of experience in entrepreneurship and technology management. He leverages his expertise in artificial intelligence and startup development as Technical Lead on the IBM Watson Artificial Intelligence XPRIZE.

Prior to joining XPRIZE, Mr. Dadkhahnikoo was most recently the CTO of CaregiversDirect (AI startup for home care), co-founder and COO of Textpert (AI startup for mental health), and a startup consultant. He started his career as a Software Developer for The Boeing Company.

Mr. Dadkhahnikoo holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson; an MS in Project Management from Stevens Institute of Technology; and a BA in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, with a minor in Physics, from UC Berkeley.

Robert Oliver is a New Zealand chef who was raised in Fiji and Samoa. He has developed restaurants in New York, Miami, Las Vegas and Sydney, “farm to table” resorts in the Caribbean and food programs feeding homeless people and African immigrants with AIDS in New York City.

Robert returned to the South Pacific to write his first book, Me’a Kai: The Food and Flavours of the South Pacific (Random House, New Zealand), with Dr. Tracy Berno and Fiji photographer Shiri Ram. Written with a mission to connect Pacific agriculture to the regions tourism,

Me’a Kai stunned the food world by winning top prize, “Best Cookbook in the World 2010,” at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Paris, considered to be the Pulitzers of cookbooks, beating the books from NOMA and The New York Times.

In 2013, Robert released “Mea’ai Samoa: Recipes and Stories from the Heart of Polynesia” (Random House). In May 2014, this book won the “Best TV Chef Cookbook in the World 2013” at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Beijing.

Robert is Chef Ambassador for Le Cordon Bleu, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands and is the presenter of REAL PASIFIK, a television series based on the food culture of the South Pacific.

He is a features contributor to The Huffington Post (New York) and Global Gourmet Beijing. Robert was a keynote speaker at TEDx Auckland in 2013 and was one of the authors chosen to represent New Zealand at the Frankfurt Bookfair in 2012 and between 2011 & 2012 Consulting Chef for NZ Trade & Enterprise (NZTE) in China (based in Shanghai). In 2014 and 2015 Robert appeared as one of the Tasting Panel judges in “My Kitchen Rules New Zealand” and co hosted “Marae Kai Masters” with renowned actor Te Kohe Tuhaka on Maori TV”.

Agora Food Studio is a plant-foward restaurant created by the Timor-Leste Food Lab – a social enterprise dedicated to mentoring future food and coffee innovators. The Timor-Leste Food Lab represents a community of people that believe in a simple, but powerful idea: “Food should be good, clean and fair for producers, eaters and the environment. We believe in a food system that celebrates biodiversity and nourishes the planet; a food system that creates healthy communities where everyone can eat, and eat well.” We are based in Timor-Leste, located 8.8 degrees south of the equator. This half-island nation is part of a greater archipelagic region with profound food diversity and bio-cultural history that we hope to research, experiment, taste and document, and then share to a wider audience. Every day is an exploration.

I work at the interface of science, technology, policy, and global impact. My strengths are public speaking, team building, and strategic planning, which flow from my background in science, engineering, and public policy. At XPRIZE I work on all things energy, environment, and climate, including the $20 million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, a global competition to recycle CO2 into valuable products as way to decarbonize our economy and avoid dangerous climate change.

Samira Ardalan is an author, culinary producer and Mediterranean health & wellness entrepreneur living in McLean, Virginia. By the age of 12, Samira had mastered cooking Thanksgiving and Nowruz (Iranian New Year) family feasts. After graduating from Towson University with a degree in Business Management, Samira became the Marketing Manager at the Capella Hotel in Georgetown, a luxury residential-style retreat newly opening in the heart of Washington D.C. There she worked with chefs on designing creative, seasonally inspired culinary campaigns and social engagement. Her professional training in cooking and hotel restaurant management throughout Baltimore and Washington, D.C. fueled her passion for modernizing culinary and health traditions from history’s past. Her fascination with Persian culinary anthropology in particular led to the publication of three books including Avicenna Cuisine in 2015. Additionally, Samira has trained and networked with some of the most prominent teachers and experts in the field of Iranian Traditional Medicine also known as Tibb Medicine, including Professor Hakima Amri, Professor and co-founder of the CAM (Complimentary and Alternative Medicine) graduate program at Georgetown University School of Medicine, and Samira’s grandmother, Laleh Bakhtiar, Editor-at-large of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine English translation by Kazi Publications.

Lorin is an expert on the future of food systems with over 15 years of experience. Prior to founding FutureTable she served as Head of Food Systems Collaboration at the World Economic Forum. She has advised Fortune 500 businesses, start-ups, international organizations, family foundations and NGOs. She speaks regularly at conferences and has published insights including with the Harvard Business Review, Harvard Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative, and via a regular Forbes column on how technology and innovation can improve our food systems. Lorin received a Master’s in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Sasha Cahill is a serial technology entrepreneur, speaker, and startup mentor. Professionally, Sasha is focused on bringing AI-enabled technology to the Healthcare market. Passionate about female empowerment and patient rights she spends a lot of time volunteering at a number of organizations with global imprint. Born and raised in Russia, Sasha currently splits her time between the US and Switzerland.

A passionate Circular Economy scholar, system thinker, activist and intrapreneur (with over 15 years of experience in design and innovation in the food industry).
‘I made it my mission to be a driving force in a food revolution, a paradigm shift. I believe in a future of food as a force for good. I want to leave a world, in which economic, social and ecological interests are aligned. Food can fuel this system shift through innovation, the adaptive power of the system, towards a resilient food system with a positive impact, by design.’
Merijn holds a Bachelor in Industrial Design Engineering and studies Circular Economy at the Bradford School of Management as one of the first to specialize in the Circular Economy for Food.
‘I strive to further the understanding and catalyzing the adoption of Circular Economy principles in food and the food industry, every day, leading Open Innovation and Circular Economy at Danone.

Neil Sahota (萨冠军) is an IBM Master Inventor, United Nations (UN) Artificial Intelligence (AI) subject matter expert, and Professor at UC Irvine.

With 20+ years of business experience, Neil works to inspire clients and business partners to foster innovation and develop next generation products/solutions powered by AI. Neil’s work experience spans multiple industries including legal services, healthcare, life sciences, retail, travel and transportation, energy and utilities, automotive, telecommunications, media/communication, and government. Moreover, he is one of the few people selected for IBM’s Corporate Service Corps leadership program that pairs leaders with NGOs to perform community-driven economic development projects.

In addition, Neil partners with entrepreneurs to define their products, establish their target markets, and structure their companies. He is a member of several investor groups like the Tech Coast Angels and assists startups with investor funding. Neil also serves as a judge in various startup competitions and mentor in several incubator/accelerator programs.

Skye Gilbert joined PATH in 2016 as deputy director of PATH’s Digital Health program. Skye leads Digital Health’s strategy, business development, adaptive management and data use efforts. Digital Health’s portfolio in this space includes the Data Use Partnership in Tanzania, which is supporting end-to-end digital transformation of Tanzania’s health system, digital support to BID Initiative—which is analysing Tanzania’s >200K patient dataset to improve medical supply chains and clinical outreach, and Digital Square, which aims to strengthen the digital ecosystem by providing high-quality, sustainable digital global goods to countries that need them.

Prior to joining PATH, Skye worked on health and information systems, first as an academic researcher living in Senegal and China, then as a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group, and finally as a program and strategy officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Skye has a Global Executive MBA from INSEAD and bachelor’s degrees in economics, international studies, and psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Partner, Networks Development
An early enthusiast of Blockchain technologies and Crypto asset management, Enrique Alvarado Hablutzel is a Partner, Networks Development at Bamboo Capital Partners.

Passionate about impact entrepreneurship and innovation, Enrique worked as Strategy and Business Development Manager at Impact Hub Geneva and Lausanne. His main focus was the financial development of Accelerate2030 – a multi-stakeholder program co-initiated by Impact Hub Geneva and UNDP in 2016 which aims at identifying ventures with tested and scale-ready solutions in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Today, Accelerate2030 is implemented in 20+ developing and emerging economies, including Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. It involves over 1 million people and more than 500 entrepreneurs worldwide.

His strong interest in entrepreneurship also led him to work at SeedStars – a Swiss-based group with the mission to impact people’s lives in emerging markets through technology and entrepreneurship.

Prior to that, he was part of Virgin Group’s strategic management and corporate development team, working on business analysis, M&A, and financial modeling in different industries across the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

Enrique holds a Master’s Degree in Management and Corporate strategy (HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne) with a specialization in Innovation and Technology (EPFL, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne). He also holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Business, Trade, and Commerce (Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico).

He is fluent in Spanish, English, and French.

Nicole Büttner is the CEO of MerantixLABS, a leading AI solutions provider, and sits on the board at 42.cx. She has been building technology driven solutions for clients for over 6 years.

She looks back on 12+years of business experience and 6+years implementing machine learning solutions for Fortune 500 companies and governments globally.

She sits on the board of Digital Leaders for Europe of the World Economic Forum, serves on the board of alumni of the University of St.Gallen and selected as Young Leader by the Aspen Institute. Nicole is a volunteer mentor at Startup Teens to encourage young adults to found their own companies.

Nicole trained as an economist and econometrician at the University of St.Gallen, Stockholm School of Economics and Stanford University and holds a MA in quantitative economics and finance. Previously, she worked as an alternative investments portfolio manager at OFI AM in Paris.

Max Cuvellier is the Head of Mobile for Development (M4D) at GSMA. M4D is singularly positioned at the intersection of the mobile ecosystem and the development sector to drive innovation in digital technology to reduce inequalities in our world, enabled by partnerships with forward-thinking donors and a team of 130 passionate professionals. Max joined GSMA in 2012 and held positions within various programmes. He initially helped mobile operators and partners design solutions to ensure women in emerging markets do not get left out of the digital economy as part of the Connected Women programme. He later headed the Ecosystem Accelerator and M4D Utilities programmes which have allocated a combined $22 million in grant funding to 85 ventures in 40+ countries across Africa and Asia; these ventures had since collectively raised $450+ million in additional funding and impacted more than 10 million citizens as of January 2020. Prior to joining GSMA, Max worked in the Middle East and Africa innovation unit of mobile operator Orange for 3 years, based in Jordan and in France, and as a telecom strategy consultant with Altai Consulting, where he focused on projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. Max holds a Masters in Management from HEC Paris, and a Masters in International Management from ESADE Barcelona, and is one of the Young Leaders of the French-African Foundation, placed under the high patronage of the French and Ghanaian Presidents. Max is passionate about technology and entrepreneurship, and their combined impact on our Planet, our societies and our economies.

Celina is the CEO and co-founder of Zindi. She has a passion for unleashing the power of data for social good. Celina has a proven track record of thought leadership in the intersect between data and development and has played central roles in the launches of global platforms including the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (www.afi-global.org), insight2impact (www.i2ifacility.org), and now Zindi (www.zindi.africa). Celina’s work has expansively bridged across the private and public sectors and across various development areas including financial inclusion, micro and small enterprise development, market system development, gender, climate change, and public health. She has lived and worked in countries throughout Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Bryan was born in a tiny village with no running water and no electricity, in the southeastern desert of Iran. He began his career working as an Aerospace Engineer at NASA at the age of 16.Subsequently, he started his first company while in college, and sold his second company in his late twenties. More recently, Bryan was a manager at ZocDoc and helped that organization achieve unicorn status. He then worked at a series of early stage technology companies as an executive, and enabled those companies to achieve profitability or exits.Currently, Bryan runs Ahura AI, an artificial intelligence and biometric data
company that has created technology that enables people to learn 3x-5x faster than traditional education. They have a partnership with Harvard and have enterprise clients, including Apple.For every license they sell to corporates, Ahura AI provides free licenses to members of underserved communities globally: people in Africa, women in slums in India, women in favelas in Brazil, and people in refugee camps in Syria, Turkey, and Norway.Bryan also runs two non-profits and an AI Venture Studio.

Dr Salih Ergut has more than 15 years of experience in the telecommunication domain in academia and industry. He has worked for vendor and operator companies in the sector including Ericsson Wireless (San Diego, CA), Ericsson Silicon Valley, Aware (Boston, MA), Nextwave (San Diego, CA), Turk Telekom Group (Istanbul, Turkey) and is currently working at Turkcell 5G R&D team in Istanbul, Turkey. He received his BS in Electrical Engineering from Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey), MS in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Northeastern University (Boston, MA), and PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering from University of California San Diego (La Jolla, CA). His research interests include wireless communications, machine learning, big data technologies, 5G technologies, SDN, NFV, and IoT.

Mr Cheng is the chairman of tje Telecommunication Task Group of Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance (AIIA) of China. In addition, he holds the position of Director Engineer of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT).

Doctor of Technical Sciences, Honored Worker of Communications of Russia, Science Consultant in Federal State Unitary Enterprise Radio Research and Development Institute (FSUE NIIR). Viliam Saryan is State Prize of Russia winner, has 2 prizes of the Russian Government in science and technology. Author of more than 200 scientific papers and 47 inventions and patents.
He has studied at Moscow Electrotechnical Institute of Communications (today Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics) and the Department of Engineering Physics of MSU.
He worked in NIIR from 1965 to 1991. During 1992 to 2004 he was the Vice-president of TV-Inform. Since 2004 he is working in NIIR as Science Consultant.
Dr. V.K. Saryan is professor at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (State University) and the Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics. Area of scientific interest of Dr. Saryan includes the theory of information management networks, the theory of ICT services, development of the model of limitations of the development of information and communication technologies, development of customized management in emergency situations, etc.
Dr. V. Saryan was elected a foreign academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia.​

Seongbok Baik is a research scientist in the Division of Network Infrastructure Innovation at KT Infra R&D Laboratory where he has been a research member since 1995. He has been serving on FG-ML5G as a Vice Chair since 2018.

Engr Charles Chike Asadu holds a HND Electrical/Electronics Engineering, specializing in Digital Electronics from the Institute of Management and Technology, Enugu in 1981; BSC Ed., Vocational Education, specializing in Industrial Technical Education – 1996 and Med, Arts Education, specializing in Educational Technology – 2002 from University of Nigeria, Nsukka; PGD Computer Science and Engineering – 2003 and M. Eng., E​lectrical Electronic Engineering specializing in Communication Engineering – 2007 from the Enugu State University of Science and Technology, Enugu; and presently undergoing PhD Educational Technology at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Slawomir Stanczak studied electrical engineering with specialization in control theory at the Wroclaw University of Technology and at the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin).
He received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in 1998 and the Dr.-Ing. degree (summa cum laude) in electrical engineering in 2003, both from TU Berlin; the Habilitation degree (venialegendi) followed in 2006. Since 2015, he has been a Full Professor for network information theory with TU Berlin and the head of the Wireless Communications and Networks department.

Prof. Stanczak has been involved in research and development activities in wireless communications since 1997. In 2004 and 2007, he was a Visiting Professor with RWTH Aachen University and in 2008, he was a Visiting Scientist with Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. He is a co-author of two books and more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers in the area of information theory, wireless communications, signal processing and machine learning.
Prof. Stanczak received research fellowships from the German Research Foundation and the Best Paper Award from the German Communication Engineering Society in 2014. He was a Co-chair of the 14th International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC 2013). Between 2009 and 2011, he was an Associate Editor of the European Transactions for Telecommunications (information theory) and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing between 2012 and 2015.

Since February 2018 Prof. Stanczak has been the chairman of the ITU-T focus group on machine learning for future networks including 5G.

Lorenzo gets his hands dirty with impact tech ventures and impactful projects 🌳 that can solve the Humanity’s Grand Challenges as well as drive social change, working closely with different stakeholders to foster equality and better humanity 🤝
He supported 200+ entrepreneurs and brings a financial/analytical background & experience in operations and community management in both the startups’ ecosystem and international cooperation 🌏 Member of the Global Shapers Community, Former Startup Grind Milan Co-Director & ex Aiesecer too.
Passionate about impact tech and frugal innovation, coffee lover ☕, former rugby player 🏉 & true love for snowboarding in the Alps 🏔

Eldad Elnekave, MD is a US and Israeli Board Certified Radiologist and has served as the Chief Medical Officer of Zebra Medical Vision since its founding. He completed his Interventional Radiology training at Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and practices clinically as the Director of the Interventional Oncology clinic at Davidoff Oncology Center. Dr. Elnekave envisions a foreseeable future in which machine learning algorithms will contribute substantial, even critical, insight in every radiologic examination, from X-ray to CT and MRI.

Born in Iran and based in Paris, Moojan is a serial entrepreneur and an advocate for women’s rights. She is the co-founder of Women in AI, which is a global nonprofit organisation on the mission to close the gender gap in AI by educating the youth and fostering female role models.

She has run several businesses and nonprofit initiatives across the globe. She has worked in various industries from Corporate Banking, to IoT and AI in five continents.

She is an advisor to the GreenTech Alliance and a contributor to Grit Daily news. She has also advised ARCEP, UNESCO and European Parliament on the future of Technologies, Gender Diversity and Inclusion in AI.

She was ranked as the Top 50 Europe’s most Influential Women in startups & VCs in 2020 by EU Startups, Top 10 Pioneering Women in AI and Machine Learning in 2019 by Enterprise Management 360, 4 inspiring women who count in AI by ADN,19 Inspiring Women in AI, Big Data, Data Science, Machine Learning by Kdnuggets.

She is a marathon runner, a certified scuba diver and passionate about space and new frontiers.

Dr. Taniya Mishra is Director of AI Research and Lead Speech Scientist at Affectiva. She leads a team of AI researchers who train deep learning models to estimate emotional or cognitive states. Taniya finds building new systems that enhance people’s lives and gives them a positive experience of interacting with technology to be the most rewarding part of her work. Her work on machine learning, speech understanding and synthesis, and affective computing has resulted in dozens of technical articles and patents, and has been featured in press articles in MIT Technology Review, NBC Learn and The Atlantic.

Taniya is deeply passionate about increasing diversity in AI and has mentored individual students in ML and AI every year for the last ten years. She has also developed and led Affectiva’s very popular EMPath (Emotion Machine Pathway) internship program, where students anywhere from high school to graduate school learn valuable skills and work on real-world projects with one on one mentoring. Her advice to new entrants to the field of AI is to dream big, continuously upskill, and raise your hand!

Melita Moore is a medical doctor based in Washington, DC, who is an expert in sports medicine and esports medicine and, as well, an in-demand international speaker. She has been team doctor for, among others, the WNBA’s Washington Mystics and the NBA 2K League Wizards District Gaming team. In September 2019, she created a month-long elective for physical medicine and rehabilitation residents focusing on esports medicine and digital lifestyle.

Koen Schobbers, based in Holland, has been an esports athlete since he was 15, That was in 2007. Since, he has been an esports-related TV host and, like Dr. Moore, a much-demanded speaker. Two years ago, he opted to take a leave from his medical studies to focus on his business career in esports. A book for parents with gaming children is forthcoming.

A thought leader in AI, authentication and security technologies, Joseph K. Hopkins leads an innovative emerging technologies firm that serves as a proprietary first-mover advantage IP incubation model that concentrates on growth opportunities in digital identity protection, security and advance encryption technologies to mitigate the exploitation of data privacy and data rights breaches. Mr. Hopkins authored key patent applications about network security, identity verification, content security, as well as network tracking/use verification.

Additionally Joseph K. Hopkins serves as an AI SME with City.AI where the group identify needs which apply to AI ecosystems globally and set up various initiatives that foster the democratization of the design, development and use of AI. Contributing also to the UCI CDT Digital Innovation Forum which aims to become a vital center of influence, advancing the competitiveness and productivity of businesses in the digital economy and drive innovation.
Prior to his AI and digital identity security work, Mr. Hopkins served in key executive management roles for Fortune 500 companies, including Kaiser Permanente, 3M, GSK, Allergan, and KPMG. His experience represents over 20 plus years of entrepreneurship, technology, global operations management and business development responsibilities largely within the Healthcare and Life Sciences industry.

Toyosi Akerele-Ogunsiji, named by Forbes as one of the 20 most Powerful Young Women in Africa is a Data Science & Artificial Intelligence Leader, Social Entrepreneur & Policy Advisor in EdTech & Human Capital Development. She is the Founder / CEO of RISE NETWORKS, Nigeria’s leading Social Enterprise whose mandate focuses on using Tech Innovation to create advocacy, skills empowerment and learning opportunities for the inclusive growth of Youth with the core objective of preparing them for effective Value Based Leadership at all levels in the Public, Private and Social Sectors.

Chester King is founder and chief executive of the British Esports Association with extensive experience in overseeing online and live esports events and tournaments. Further: he has 26 years of senior management experience in the health care, marketing, leisure, sports and esports industries. He is co-owner of the International Group of companies; since 1988, International Group has owned Stoke Park.

A deal-maker, passionate builder and social business advocate, Richard St-Pierre oversees C2’s international development and mobilizes the brightest and most influential minds from a wide network of countries and industries. These efforts result in a unique ecosystem of partners engaging with C2 during its annual flagship event in Montreal as well as during events of varying scale abroad. Prior to his journey at C2, Richard had accumulated more than 25 years of experience in operations, sales and corporate planning for various organizations, from governmental institutions to private corporations.

Haneen Khalaf comes to the XPRIZE Foundation with 4 years of experience in the hospitality industry and 2 years of experience in International Development. Ms. Khalaf draws on her experience in both client and nonprofit management to support the Adult Literacy XPRIZE as an Associate of Prize Development and Execution.

Prior to joining XPRIZE, Ms. Khalaf worked and conducted research within extremely impoverished communities in both rural Uganda and Tanzania, providing business skills training and micro-finance opportunities to improve wellbeing and to end the cycle of poverty.

Ms. Khalaf holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business/Tourism Management from Arizona State University and a Master’s in International Relations from Harvard University. Her thesis on happiness won the Dean’s Outstanding Thesis Award in International Relations. Haneen was born in Detroit, Michigan and has since lived all over the world, including Hawaii, Boston, Arizona, Uganda, and now California. Having traveled around the globe, she calls the world her playground. She enjoys spreading happiness, attending concerts, hiking, talking to strangers, and swimming with sharks in the ocean.

José Suárez-Varela received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Telecommunication engineering from the University of Granada (UGR), in 2014 and 2017 respectively. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the Barcelona Neural Networking Center (BNN-UPC). During 2019, he was a visiting researcher at the University of Siena, where he was investigating about Graph Neural Networks with some pioneering researchers of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) field. His main research interests are in the field of network AI, particularly in the application of Graph Neural Networks for network control and management. He is also interested in traffic measurement and classification, and their application in Software-Defined Networking.

Paul Bosman is with Eurocontrol since more than 25 years and currently the Head of (ATM) Infrastructure Division.

Working in close cooperation with all ATM stakeholders this division manages & supports European ATM/CNS planning, deployment, reporting and monitoring programmes digitising the SES European Sky. He was the chair of the European High Level Group on Artificial Intelligence which published its FLY AI report on 5 March. See https://www.eurocontrol.int/publication/fly-ai-report

Marco started working in the ATC industry in 2010 as a System Analyst for Searidge Technologies. He received his B.Eng. in Sustainable and Renewable Energy Engineering from Carleton University in 2016. As Head of Innovation, Marco leads the Innovation team at Searidge Technologies. 

Marco and the Innovation team constantly research, advance, and apply the latest technology to help ANSPs and airports improve their operational safety and efficiency. Marco is also tasked with the management of key programs and partnerships at Searidge, which bring novel technology solutions into operation at ANSPs and airports globally. 

With 30 years of experience in the air traffic management industry Andy Taylor has lead, developed and delivered innovative ATC solutions for global customers to increase airport capacity and operational performance.

Throughout his career, Andy has capitalised on emerging trends in the air traffic market and related technologies to maximise operational value to current and future customers.

As Chief Solutions Officer, Andy works across both NATS and Searidge Technologies, following the acquisition of a 50% stake in the market leader in Digital Tower solutions. He is responsible for the joint development of the partnership’s Digital Tower capabilities and delivery models.

Yannis Ioannidis (UC Berkeley PhD, 1986) is the President & General Director of the ATHENA Research and Innovation Center and a Professor at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens. His research work focuses on Database and Information Systems, Data Science, Data and Text Analytics, Scalable Data Processing, Data Infrastructures and Digital Repositories, and Recommender Systems and Personalization. He is the coordinator of several European and national projects, including OpenAIRE, which implements the European policy for open access to publications and data. His work is often inspired by and applied to data management and analysis problems that arise in industrial environments or in the context of other scientific fields (Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Biodiversity, Cultural Heritage).

Yannis Ioannidis is an ACM and IEEE Fellow, a member of Academia Europaea, a recipient of the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award and of several research and teaching awards, including the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award. He has just finished serving as the ACM Secretary Treasurer but remains a member of the ACM Europe Council. He is also vice-chair of ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures).

Jean-Philip has been in the innovation space for over than 10 years and for the last 7 years being actively involved in product creation and improvement, open innovation, high technologies scouting & advisory as well as high technologies integration management. Passionate about technologies, Jean-Philip co-founded a startup in the wearables sector focused on an artificial intelligence (AI) platform using the wearables incoming live data to extract different human states. Currently manager of the open innovation program at CENTECH (Collision Lab), he oversees several projects including technologies like AI, IoT, 5G, AR / VR, drones, Big Data to name a few. He finds himself at its best to target the needs of corporate clients and lead the project vision beyond the realization of the PoC (Proof of Concept) created within the program.

Arun Shroff is an entrepreneur, startup advisor and mentor who has founded and grown multiple technology ventures in USA and India. Arun is founder of XTend.AI, a startup using AI to solve global challenges in various domains including health, education, energy and business. These include using AI for detecting diabetic retinopathy, chest X-ray analysis, and health risk prediction. Arun is also a topic driver at ITU/WHO’s Focus Group on AI for health. In addition, Arun is co-founder and CTO at MedIndia.net, a leading website, with the mission to provide personalized information and tools to everyone for better health. Arun is also Director and advisor with several companies including STAR Associates, Startup Tribes, FrontPoint Systems and has been a speaker at the AI for Good Summit, ITU/WHO meetings, Rutgers University, NJIT, and TiE NJ.
In addition, Arun advises and volunteers with several non-profits, including MOHAN USA and MOHAN Foundation, promoting ethical organ donation, and IIMPACT, an NGO providing free primary education to girls in India’s villages.
Arun has a B.Tech from IIT Madras, an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad, a M.S. in Computer Science from Pennsylviania State University, and certifications in Machine Learning, Deep Learning and AI for Medicine.

Dr. Jackie Berry is a Cognitive Scientist studying visual perception, human-computer interaction, and expertise. Dr. Berry was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar at the American University in Cairo for the 2019-2020 academic year where she served as a teacher and researcher. Her work focused on TetLag which is the brief performance dip caused by switching to a different, but familiar, computer interface. Jackie holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology, a Master of Science in Human Factors Psychology, a Master of Business Administration, and a Doctorate in Cognitive Psychology. She was the first person at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to collect online research data and the first African-American to graduate with a Doctorate in Cognitive Psychology from the State University of New York at the University in Albany. Her major research projects include developing a new model of geometric feature detection for English letter recognition, studying task switching in older adults, and investigating attentional capture during visual search. During her Fulbright U.S. Scholar award year Dr. Berry investigated whether Arabic-English biliterates might be better able to switch between different interfaces and configurations for the same task because they must regularly alternate between different orientations of text in reading, writing, and technology use in their daily lives. She wishes to continue this research with other “bidirectional biliterates” such as biliterate speakers of Hebrew and Chinese.

Dr. Vukosi Marivate is the ABSA UP Chair of Data Science at the University of Pretoria. Vukosi works on developing Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence methods to extract insights from data. A large part of his work over the last few years has been in the intersection of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. Vukosi is interested in Data Science for Social Impact, using local challenges as a springboard for research. In this area, Vukosi has worked on projects in science, energy, public safety and utilities. Vukosi is a founder of the Deep Learning Indaba, the largest Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence workshop on the African continent, aiming to strengthen African Machine Learning. Professional website http://www.vima.co.za

Dr. S. Ama Wray self describes as Performance Architect and is an Associate Professor of Dance at the University of California, Irvine. Through dance methods she innovates across disciplinary lines, collaborating widely with practitioners from music, new media, health, visual art and theatre. She is one of the co-Founders of AI 4 Afrika, inspired by AI for Good, and also the Africana Institute for Creativity Recognition and Elevation. In 2018 she received the 2018 Emerging Scholar Award from the African Diaspora SIG of the Comparative International Education Society. Her research into improvisation through the lens of West African performance, specifically Ewe, is burgeoning into a new interdisciplinary field, an integrative study of the optimization of human performance. The outcomes include Embodiology® an inclusive movement and mind method, optimizing creativity, empathy and wellbeing. As a consequence of COVID-19 she has created online wellness practice – Embodying Resilience – to maintain vitality and create community. Her creative praxis as relates to digital domains began in the U.K as recipient of the 2003 National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts Fellowship, producing the prize-winning Texterritory. Integrating a cellphone performance platform it transforms audiences into co-creators in live performance settings. As founding Artistic Director of JazzXchange Wray continues to elevate jazz music in the concert dance setting, collaborating with artists including: Wynton Marsalis, Bobby McFerrin, Nicole Mitchell, Gary Crosby, OBE, Zoe Rahman and Julian Joseph, OBE. Her academic writing on Embodiology® and also Jazz Dance have been published by Oxford Books, Routledge and Florida University Press.

José Cossa, Ph.D., is a Mozambican scholar, writer/author, researcher, poet, blogger, “twitterer”, podcaster, entrepreneur, and an Associate Professor in the College of Education at Pennsylvania State University. Most recently, Cossa served as a Visiting Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the American University in Cairo and a Senior Lecturer at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. Cossa holds a Ph.D. in Cultural and Educational Policy Studies with a depth area in Comparative and International Education from Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of the book Power, Politics, and Higher Education: International Regimes, Local Governments, and Educational Autonomy, the recipient of the 2012 Joyce Cain Award for Distinguished Research on People of African Descent, awarded by the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), and a member of the MacArthur Foundation 100&Change Panel of Judges for two consecutive competitions (Inaugural Challenge and 2019/2020). Cossa’s research focus is on power dynamics in negotiation over educational policy; unveiling issues inherent in the promise of modernity and working towards de-colonializing, de-bordering, de-peripherizing, and de-centering the world; higher education policy and administration; system transfer; international development; and, global and social justice. In addition, Cossa is currently engaging in a new (exterior to modernity) theorizing, i.e., Cosmo-uBuntu, to offer alternative theoretical grounding to research, analysis, and practice.

Arthur van der Wees, LLM studied and obtained his doctorate degree in computer, privacy, intellectual property rights and business law and human rights at Leiden University. He is founder and managing director of Arthur’s Legal, an international law firm with a global reach.

Next to being co-founder and director to the Institute for Future of Living, Arthur is founding member of the Alliance for IoT Innovation (AIOTI), where he is leader of both the Security in IoT, Privacy in IoT and Trust in IoT taskforces. and co-founder of the Institute for Accountability in the Digital Age.

Arthur is attorney at law, standardization expert, entrepreneur, strategist and frequent speaker worldwide and has in-depth experience and is well-connected in the world of digital, data, human-centric emerging technology, accountability, resilience & global business.

Dr. Bilel Jamoussi is Chief of the Study Groups Department at the International Telecommunication Union Standardization Bureau in Geneva Switzerland where he is responsible for the organization and management of the ITU-T Study Groups, Focus Groups, Global Standardization Initiatives, Joint Coordination Activities, and their secretariat.

Before joining ITU, Bilel was with Nortel for 15 years in Canada and then the United States where he held several leadership positions including Strategic Standards, Advanced Technology, University Research, Software Development for routing/switching platforms, and Data Network Engineering of major international customer networks.

As Director of the Strategic Standards organization within the office of the Chief Technical Officer (CTO), Bilel provided strategic technology direction and leadership for Nortel’s involvement in more than 90 standards development organizations, forums and consortia. He also contributed to the MIT one laptop per child (OLPC) initiative.

Bilel is an IEEE Senior Member. He was elected to the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) Board of Governors (BOG) and the IEEE-SA Corporate Advisory Group (CAG). He served on the IEEE Standards Education Committee, the IEEE-SA Nominations and Appointments Committee, the IEEE-SA BOG International ad hoc, and the Technical Liaison from IEEE-SA to ITU-T and ITU-D.

Bilel contributes to the innovation and advancement of technology in the ICT Field. He has 22 granted and filed US patents in diverse areas: packet, optical, wireless, and quality of service.

Bilel received a BS. ’89, MS. ’92, and PhD ’95 degrees in Computer Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, USA.

As the Director of Global Programs for Real Estate & Workplace Services, Bakker leads Google’s renowned workplace programs and services such as food, transportation, events, guest services, sustainability, placemaking as well as fitness, massage and well-being. Bakker is focused on providing integrated offerings and experiences that enable Google to thrive. He is also focused on supporting the growth and future of Google through the scaling of these programs, ongoing innovation and partnerships.  

Bakker has spent over 25 years in global hotel and food and beverage operations, creating and building out partnerships, hotel F&B developments, openings, and food experience design. Before joining Google, Bakker worked for Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide  in various roles for 17 years. From 2012 to 2017, Bakker led Google’s Food program, supporting all food service related activities and initiatives for Google’s global community as well as developing internal and external partnerships to explore and tackle the challenges and opportunities of the broader food systems. 

Bakker continues to be very involved in the ever-evolving and growing intersection of food, health, and sustainability through various roles and organizations around the world such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development  Food and Nature Board, the EAT Forum Advisory Board,, the Yale School of Management Center for Customer Insights’ Advisory Board and the Culinary Institute of America’s Menus of Change Business Leadership Council.

Bakker holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from the Hotel Management School Maastricht (The Netherlands), an MBA from the University of Bradford (United Kingdom), a Master’s of Hospitality Administration degree from the University of Nevada (USA) and a Master’s degree in Real Estate and Construction Management at the University of Denver (USA).

Emma Chow serves as the project lead on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Food initiative, which brings together major industry players from across the food value chain, along with city municipalities, to take a systemic approach to unlocking the powerful positive potential of the food system. Hailing from Toronto, Canada, Emma previously worked in business management consulting, social entrepreneurship and for environmental NGOs.