World Metaverse Summit

Peter Norvig is a Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute and a researcher at Google Inc; previously he directed Google’s core search algorithms group and Google’s Research group.

He was head of NASA Ames’s Computational Sciences Division, where he was NASA’s senior computer scientist and a recipient of NASA’s Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has taught at the University of Southern California, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006.

He was co-teacher of an Artificial Intelligence class that signed up 160,000 students, helping to kick off the current round of massive open online classes. His publications include the books Data Science in Context (to appear in 2022), Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (the leading textbook in the field), Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and the world’s longest palindromic sentence. He is a fellow of the AAAI, ACM, California Academy of Science and American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Vandi Verma, Chief Engineer of Robotic Operations – Mars 2020, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), NASA (USA)

Vandi Verma is the Chief Engineer for Robotic Operations for the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, and the Assistant Section Manager for Mobility and Robotics Systems at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She specializes in space robotics, autonomous robots and robotic operations. She has worked on a number of Space Robotics and Artificial Intelligence research and technology development tasks and has designed, developed, and operated rovers on Mars, the Arctic, Antarctica, and the Atacama Desert.

She has been working at NASA since graduating with a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. She works on new capabilities from early design, through development, testing and launch, to landing and surface operations. Since 2008 she has been driving rovers on Mars (Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance) and operating the robotic arm and sampling system as a Rover Planner. She enjoys coding and has written flight software that runs onboard Curiosity and Perseverance, and simulation software used in operations.

Michael Spranger is the COO of Sony AI Inc., Sony’s strategic research and development organization established April 2020. Sony AI’s mission is to “unleash human imagination and creativity with AI.” Michael is a roboticist by training with extensive research experience in different areas of AI including Natural Language Processing, robotics, and foundations of Artificial Intelligence. Concurrent to Sony AI, Michael also holds a Senior Researcher position at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc., and is actively contributing to Sony’s overall AI ethics strategy.

Stefano La Rovere is the Director of Amazon’s Worldwide Robotics Advanced Technology in Europe. He is responsible for the identification, development and implementation of next generation technologies in advanced mechatronics, directed towards safety and autonomy.

Prior to joining Amazon, Stefano worked in the Fast-Moving Consumer Good industry, where he held several positions within the Product Supply organization across Engineering, Manufacturing, Start-up and Logistics.

Francesca Rossi is an IBM Fellow and the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader.
She is based at the T.J. Watson IBM Research Lab, New York, USA, where she leads AI research projects.

Before joining IBM, she has been a professor of computer science at the University of Padova, Italy, for 20 years.

Her research interest span various areas of AI, from constraints to preferences, from graphical models to social choice, to neuro-symbolic AI.

She co-chairs the IBM AI Ethics board and she participates in many global multi-stakeholder initiatives on AI ethics, such as the Global Partnership on AI, of which both US and France are members.

She is the president of AAAI, the world-wide association of AI researchers.

Kersti Kaljulaid 

• President of Estonia 2016-2021
• United Nations Secretary-General’s Global Advocate for Every Woman Every Child since 2021
• Mother of four and grandmother of four
• Speaks Estonian, English, French, Russian, Finnish
• Born in 1969 in Estonia

Kersti Kaljulaid served as the President of the Republic of Estonia from 2016-2021. During her time in office, she made her presence felt in both her homeland and the international arena.

Previously she had been serving as a Member of the European Court of Auditors, advising Prime Minister Mart Laar and holding diferent top level positions in energy, investment banking and telecom sector. Genetic engineer and economist by education, she has been a member of the Supervisory Board of the Estonian Genome Center and the Council Chair of the University of Tartu from 2012 to 2016.

In summer 2021, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appointed President Kaljulaid to the position of Global Advocate for the ‘Every Woman Every Child’ strategy on the health and well-being of women, children and adolescents around the world for the next two years. She was also the first Estonian to be featured in the Forbes World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.

Kersti Kaljulaid has become a sought-after speaker at high-level forums on digital, security and foreign-policy topics and more broadly for analysing and interpreting societal and economic change.

President Kaljulaid is a vocal advocate of human rights, rule of law, freedom of speech and democracy. One of the principles in the in office of president has been the one she set out upon her inauguration: “I am never silent when our security is in question, when our freedoms are at stake or when those weaker than us are treated unjustly.

Dr Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. 

He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch.  He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry.  He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009),  In November 2021 his two-volume work The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World was published by Perspectiva Press. 

Neuroscientist Anil Seth is interested in understanding the biological basis of conscious experience, a topic he considers one of the greatest challenges for 21st century science. His groundbreaking research provides fascinating insight into what this means for storytelling. His 2017 TED talk has been viewed over 5 million times.

Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and Codirector of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He seeks to understand the biological basis of consciousness by bringing together research across neuroscience, mathematics, AI, computer science, psychology, philosophy and psychiatry. Key to his work is exploring the relationship between perception and hallucination, and how this applies to the experience of being a “self.” Seth is also Editor in Chief of the academic journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow. He was the 2017 President of the British Science Association (Psychology Section).