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.

Vicki Hanson is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), globally serving computing professionals and students. She was President of ACM from 1 July 2016 – 30 June 2018.

Vicki was a Distinguished Professor in the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology (2013 – 2018), and a Visiting Professor at the University of Dundee in Scotland, and Lancaster University in England. A former Research Staff Member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, she has been working on issues of inclusion for older adults and disabled people throughout her career, first as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. She joined the IBM Research Division in 1986 where she founded and managed the Accessibility Research group. She has been at the University of Dundee since 2009 and at RIT since 2013.

She has served on research advisory boards and agenda setting committees in both the US and the UK.   Her research focus is on accessibility of technology for people with disabilities, the aging population, and related research ethics.  At RIT, she, along with Matt Huenerfauth and Kristen Shinohara direct the Center for Accessibility and Inclusion Research (CAIR).

Shwetak N. Patel is the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professor in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington. His research interests are in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing, Sensor-enabled Embedded Systems, and User Interface Software and Technology. His work includes developing new sensing systems, energy and water sensing, mobile health, and developing new interaction technologies.
Dr. Patel was also a founder of Zensi, Inc., a demand side energy monitoring solutions provider, which was acquired by Belkin, Inc in 2010. He is also a co-founder of a low-power wireless sensor platform company called SNUPI Technologies and a consumer home sensing product called WallyHome. WallyHome was acquired by Sears in 2015. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008 and B.S. in Computer Science in 2003. Dr. Patel received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2011, is a 2012 Sloan Fellow, received the TR-35 award in 2009, was named top innovator of the year by Seattle Business Magazine, was named Newsmaker of the year by Seattle Business Journal, and was a recipient of the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship in 2011. His past work was also honored by the New York Times as a top technology of the year in 2005.
For more information visit Dr. Patel’s homepage, and see the Ubicomp Lab website for the latest news, publications, and detailed project descriptions.

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.

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.

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.

Passionate about Technology, Business and helping products truly solve the problems they are designed for.

Extensive experience in Engineering, Finance, Sales/ Marketing and Entrepreneurship and dedicate my time outside the office to helping the black community excel in business, both in the USA and in Africa

Lead go-to-market for Nvidia’s fastest growing business channel, cloud for AI, HPC, futuristic Graphics.

Founded Alliance for Africa’s Intelligence, organization to ensure African innovations get the chance to change millions of lives, and the continent is never again left behind during industrial revolutions.

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.

Experienced Senior Software Engineer with a demonstrated history of working in global computer software industry. Skilled in Scrum, Quality Assurance/Control, System Engineering, Strategic Planning, Business Development, Organizational Development, and Public Speaking.

Emele is a Tokelauan (Te Kaiga o Fagatiale, Nukunonu, Te Kaiga o Koloi, Uea) Fijian (Kaideuba) multi-disciplinary storyteller working across live performance & film as a performer, writer, director, photographer & videographer.

​Her work is intercultural centring the development of trans-indigenous collaborative creative processes & outcomes informed by Indigenous epistemologies.

​Emele has produced content for Sydney Opera House, Audrey Journal, Talanoa & Black Birds, directed work for Casula Powerhouse, Festival Fatale & Wantok and performance coached for Warner Music. She has been featured on ABC, SBS, The Quo, Accent on Women & worked with musicians such as Solange Knowles, Ngaiire, Thelma Plum, Wallace & Ric Rufio.

Her visual art & film work has exhibited in the United States, Barbados, Aotearoa & Australia.

Emele is the Creative Director of Talanoa

Maggie is responsible for developing and leading the organization’s strategy to leverage technology and expertise in support of disaster response. Prior to joining Amazon, Maggie served as Vice President of Corporate Partnerships at the UNICEF USA. In this capacity, Maggie and her team led relationships with the corporate sector in the United States, including gifts-in-kind, cause-related marketing, sponsorships, philanthropic grants, special events, corporate social responsibility, and employee engagement. Maggie also served as the Deputy Director of the Shot@Life campaign at the United Nations Foundation. While in this role, Maggie led the Halo Award Winning “Get a Shot. Give a Shot.” campaign with Walgreens. Maggie first fell in love with strategic philanthropy as Senior Manager of Community Relations/Social Responsibility at the National Basketball Association. In this role, Maggie managed the NBA’s disaster response program, cause marketing platforms, and many corporate and community partnerships globally. Maggie graduated from James Madison University with a B.S. degree in Health Sciences.

My general focus is on identifying and developing emerging and transformative technologies that can impact society in significant and exponential ways. I do this by helping create interdisciplinary frameworks for understanding and planning new developments and the funding required to bring new innovations to market.

I help start, grow, and run innovative ventures, and focus on working with startups and growth-oriented companies on products and initiatives that could trigger significant breakthrough with substantial economic and societal impact. Particular emphasis on machine learning and predictive systems, IoT, knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing, Education, and digital health. I usually help teams on initial market opportunity validation, product roadmap strategy, pricing and business model, go-to-market operations, fundraising and mentorship, Mergers and high-growth partnerships.

I also have managed a few private and public technology investment and venture capital funds and know how to establish fund operations and their overall strategies and requirements.

I enjoy teaching and have been a guest lecturer and adjunct professor at UC Berkeley, HEC Paris, Chapman University, Claremont McKenna College, and UC Irvine.

Dave Troy is a serial entrepreneur and community activist in Baltimore, Maryland. He is currently CEO and product architect at 410 Labs, maker of the popular e-mail management tools Mailstrom.co and Chuck. He has been acknowledged by the founding team at Twitter as the first developer to utilize the Twitter API, with his project “Twittervision,” which was featured in the 2008 MoMA exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind,” curated by Paola Antonelli. His current projects use social network data to map cities. He is also organizer of TEDxMidAtlantic in Washington, DC and is passionate about data, cities, and entrepreneurship. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and two children.

tefan 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.

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.

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.

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.

I am a physicist with a background in nanotechnology, and a passion for citizen science. I also have broad experience in science management, teaching and communication, in the United States, China, Japan, Germany, Denmark and Switzerland. During the past decade, I have managed the development of a series of online citizen science projects in a wide range of research fields, starting with the launch of LHC@home in 2004 while I was a manager at CERN. In 2009, I established a partnership for citizen science between CERN, the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and the University of Geneva, now called Citizen Cyberlab. As an invited professor at the Centre Universitaire d’Informatique (CUI) of the University of Geneva since 2014, I coordinate Citizen Cyberlab, managing the development of technologies for crowdsourced research, exploring the broader impact of citizen science for society, and promoting public participation in science through hands-on events. I also teach courses on Open Science and Citizen Science at the bachelor and master level. Since 2016 I am Director of the Geneva Tsinghua Initiative, a comprehensive education programme for the UN Sustainable Development Goals. From 2016-18 I was Director of Digital Strategy for the University of Geneva.

Houlin Zhao was re-elected ITU Secretary-General at the 20^th Plenipotentiary Conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in November 2018. ​

Mr Zhao is an information and communication technology (ICT) engineer who has served in a variety of senior management positions at ITU, began his second, and last, four-year term on 1 January 2019.

Prior to first being elected as ITU Secretary-General in 2014, Zhao served eight years as ITU Deputy Secretary-General. In that role, he assisted the ITU Secretary-General, in close cooperation with the other elected officials of the Union, to manage the implementation of the ITU Strategic Plan and the operations of the ITU Secretariat, in particular with a view to increasing the transparency and efficiency of the organization.

He was responsible for implementing important innovations, including the promotion of a new category of membership open to the global academic community, internal efficiency measures such as the move to a near-paperless work environment, the increased use of remote participation systems, and measures to increase revenue from sales and cost-recovery services. In addition, he focused closely on membership-driven priorities including maintaining and extending ITU’s commitment to accessibility, to multilingualism, and to broad multistakeholder participation in the work of the Union.

He also served two elected terms as Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB), which develops technical standards to ensure worldwide ICT interoperability.

During his two terms as TSB Director, he spearheaded the introduction of new efficiency measures to improve ITU’s standards-making environment through fostering even closer cooperation with industry members, while strengthening the promotion of ITU’s leadership in global ICT standards development.
Before that, he was a Senior Counsellor with TSB for 12 years.

Before joining ITU, Mr Zhao served as an engineer in the Designing Institute of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications of China, taking an active role in his country’s expert meetings on telecommunication standards and national plans, as well as participating in ITU work as a Chinese delegate. He contributed important articles to a number of prestigious Chinese technical publications, and in 1985 was awarded a prize for his achievements in science and technology within the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.

Born in 1950 in Jiangsu, China, Mr Zhao graduated from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and holds an MSc in Telematics from the University of Essex in the United Kingdom.

He is married with one son and two grandchildren, and is fluent in three official ITU languages: English, French and Chinese.

Mr Zhao is committed to further streamlining ITU’s efficiency, strengthening its membership base through greater involvement of the academic community and of small- and medium-sized enterprises, and to broadening multistakeholder participation in ITU’s work.

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.

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.

Bryn Balcombe is 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.