Dr. Kai-Fu Lee has spent more than three decades at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence research, development, and investment in both the US and China. He’s the chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, a leading venture capital firm focused on developing the next generation of Chinese high-tech companies. Previously, Dr. Lee was the president of Google China and a senior executive at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple. Co-chair of the Artificial Intelligence Council at the World Economic Forum, he has a bachelor’s degree from Columbia and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. Dr. Lee is the author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-seller AI Superpowers, which examines the role of the US and China in the future of artificial intelligence, as well as its impact on society. His latest book, co-authored with award-winning science-fiction writer Chen Quifan, is called AI2041: Ten Visions for Our Future. It presents a roadmap to educate and explore the opportunities and challenges presented by AI over the coming decades.

DR. WERNER VOGELS, CTO, AMAZON.COM

Dr. Werner Vogels is Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s customer-centric technology vision.

 As one of the forces behind Amazon’s approach to cloud computing, he is passionate about helping young businesses reach global scale, and transforming enterprises into fast-moving digital organizations.

 Vogels joined Amazon in 2004 from Cornell University where he was a distributed systems researcher. He has held technology leadership positions in companies that handle the transition of academic technology into industry. Vogels holds a PhD from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.

On his blog, all things distributed, Werner shares insights and thought leadership content on a range of topics, such as cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, as well as his annual technology predictions.

Professor Simon See is currently the Solution Architecture and Engineering Director, Chief Solution Architect and Global Head for NVIDIA AI Technology Center, NVIDIA Corporation.   He is also an Adjunct Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Conventry University, and Universitas Indonesia (UI).  He is also an distinguish fellow in Fudan University.  Previously Professor See is also the Chief Scientific Computing Advisor for BGI (China) and has a position in Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) and King-Mong Kung University of Technology (Thailand).  Professor See is currently involved in a number of International computational,  mathematical science  projects and  national AI initiatives.   Recently Professor  Simon has been appointed as the Executive Director of the ASEAN Applied Research Centre (AARC).   His research interests are in the area of High-Performance Computing, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computational Science,  Applied Mathematics and Simulation Methodology.    Professor See is also leading some of the AI initiatives in Asia Pacific. He is a Steering Committee member of NSCC’s flagship High Performance Computing Conference Supercomputing Asia (SCA) since March 2018. He has published over 200 papers in these areas and has won various awards in the field.

Professor See is a Fellow member of IET, Chairman of TaskForce of IEEE’s CIS Neural Networks Technical Committee, a member of SIAM, IET, AAAI, SCS, and also on the Advisory Team of AIP (AI Professional Association), International Advisory Board of Institute of Operations Research & Analytics (IORA), Advisory Team of Machine Intelligence and Data Analytics Research Centre (MIDARC), School of Computing Sciences (India) and Board of Studies, MS Tech Programs of Mahindra University, Editorial Board Member of Journal of Computational and Cognitive Engineering (JCCE), and the committee member of more than 50 conferences.

Professor See graduated from the University of Salford (UK) with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and numerical analysis in 1993.   Prior to joining NVIDIA, Professor See worked for SGI, DSO National Lab. of Singapore, IBM, International Simulation Ltd (UK), Sun Microsystems and Oracle.  He is also providing consultancy to a number of national research and supercomputing centers.

Dave is a scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur whose work emphasizes the role of machine learning and AI, especially with respect to time-series data, search and optimization in program space, and decision making under uncertainty. He is Chief Science Officer at X and runs a team of mathematicians and machine learning experts working on early stage projects. He co-founded several companies, including Cerebellum Capital, which was an asset management company powered by an auto-ML system that discovered trading strategies. He also invested in and advised a number of startups in the data science and wearables space. He previously worked at Bodymedia, where he ran the machine learning team and several advanced development projects. Over the years, he’s helped start a number of other businesses. Personally, he’s a husband, father, snowboarder, passionate player of soccer and bridge, a puzzle nerd, a burner, and a travel-lover. He runs robot & programming clubs for his two kids to help them & friends get a deeper tech education. He got started down his path at Stanford University (1994: BS Symbolic Systems, BA Psychology) and completed his official education at UC Berkeley (2003: PhD EECS with a focus on Artificial Intelligence). He feels very lucky to have been interested in AI & ML well before it was cool.

Divya Chander, MD, PhD is a physician, neuroscientist, futurist, and entrepreneur. She is a practicing anesthesiologist with specializations in neurosurgery, ENT, and critical care. While on the Anesthesiology Faculty of Stanford University School of Medicine, she taught the residency neuroanesthesia curriculum for 8 years. Dr. Chander is also a data scientist with expertise in neural signal processing, and has developed algorithms to automate tracking of states of consciousness. Her research interests center around mapping consciousness (using optogenetics and EEG), how consciousness will be altered by human augmentation, and how mapping consciousness in humans may enable us to recognize it in non-human, intelligent beings (both on and off-planet, e.g. through partnerships with organizations like SETI). Dr. Chander is also Chair of Neuroscience at the Singularity Group, a Silicon Valley think tank and education institution for data and technology acceleration, applications, and ethics. She serves as medical, science, and technology advisor and board member to a number of companies in the medical, space life sciences, and neurotechnology spaces. Dr. Chander is also a passionate advocate for data and biometric rights, especially neurorights and neurosovereignty. In that capacity, she has advised global organizations and governments, and serves as medical advisor to the Extended Reality Safety Initative (XRSI.org). Dr. Chander founded Lucidify, a continuous remote brain monitoring platform, for the detection of delirium and other altered state of consciousness to support brain health. While Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council Geotech Center, and now, at the Stimson Center Loomis Innovation Council, she has been collaborating with industry and governments to foster good data and technology policy choices for key stakeholders around the world in the area of data trusts, data security, public health, and pandemic resilience. Finally, Dr. Chander also contributes to space life sciences and medicine. A finalist for astronaut selection and an alumnus of the International Space University, Dr. Chander has performed remote simulations of trauma rescues, anesthesia and surgery in Mars analogue settings.  

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres announced on 10 June 2022 the appointment of Amandeep Singh Gill of India as his Envoy on Technology.  The Secretary-General wishes to extend his appreciation and gratitude to the Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Coordination and Inter-Agency Affairs, Ms. Maria-Francesca Spatolisano, for her dedication and commitment as Acting Envoy on Technology.

Mr. Gill is the Chief Executive Officer of the International Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence Research Collaborative (I-DAIR) project, based at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva.

A thought leader on digital technology, he brings to the position a deep knowledge of digital technologies coupled with a solid understanding of how to leverage the digital transformation responsibly and inclusively for progress on the Sustainable Development Goals.

Previously, he was the Executive Director and Co-Lead of the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation (2018-2019).  In addition to delivering the report of the High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, Mr. Gill helped secure high-impact international consensus recommendations on regulating Artificial Intelligence (Al) in lethal autonomous weapon systems in 2017 and 2018, the draft Al ethics recommendation of UNESCO in 2020, and a new international platform on digital health and Al.

Mr. Gill was India’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva (2016-2018).  He joined his country’s Diplomatic Service in 1992 and served in various capacities in disarmament and strategic technologies and international security affairs, with postings in Tehran and Colombo.  He was also a visiting scholar at Stanford University.

Mr. Gill holds a PhD in Nuclear Learning in Multilateral Forums from King’s College, London, a Bachelor of Technology in Electronics and Electrical Communications from Panjab University, Chandigarh and an Advanced Diploma in French History and Language from Geneva University.  He is fluent in English, French, Hindi and Punjabi.

JoAnn C. Stonier serves as Chief Data Officer for Mastercard, leading the organization’s data innovation efforts while navigating current and future data risks. She oversees the curation, quality, governance and management of the company’s extensive data assets. JoAnn and her team design and operationalize Mastercard’s global data strategy, guiding enterprise deployment of cutting-edge data solutions, including advanced analytics and AI, and the development of enterprise data platforms. Her leadership is integral to Mastercard’s push to deepen the strategic value it can provide its merchant, banking and government customers and cardholders through its expanding data-driven products and capabilities. JoAnn previously served as the company’s Chief Information Governance & Privacy Officer, responsible for global privacy and information governance, and leading regulatory engagement for data compliance. JoAnn is a recognized and highly sought-after thought leader in emergent data and privacy issues. She has advised industry executives, governments, intergovernmental organizations and NGOs. Currently, she serves on the United Nations Expert Group on Governance and Artificial Intelligence and is Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Data Policy. JoAnn also serves as a Board Advisor for Truata, a data trust co-founded by Mastercard and IBM, on the Board of Directors and Governance Committee for Hope For The Warriors, a non-profit Veteran service organization, and on the Board of Trustees and Executive & Finance Committees for Academy of Mount St. Ursula, where she attended high school in Bronx, New York. JoAnn received her Juris Doctorate from St. John’s University and her Bachelor of Science degree from St. Francis College. She holds memberships in the Bar of the State of New York and the Bar of the State of New Jersey. She is based in Purchase, N.Y

Marc Mathieu, SVP, AI Transformation & Vice-Chair, Salesforce Global Advisory Board, is a storied Business and Marketing leader known for humanizing Fortune 500 global brands as CMO at Samsung, Unilever, Coca-Cola, and Danone. Marc is an industry visionary who partners with Salesforce’s C-suite Customers to implement successful digital first AI and emerging tech transformations.

Dr. Steve Chien is JPL Fellow, Senior Research Scientist, and Technical Group Supervisor of the Artificial Intelligence Group and in the Mission Planning and Execution Section at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology where he leads efforts in automated planning and scheduling for space exploration.  Dr. Chien was previously Adjunct Faculty with the Department of Computer Science of the University of Southern California, and a Research Scientist at the Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering and a Visiting Scholar with the Department of Computer Science of the University of California at Los Angeles. He holds a B.S. with Highest Honors in Computer Science, with minors in Mathematics and Economics, M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, all from the University of Illinois.

He is a founder of the International Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Space held every other year from 1997 onward and was the Chair or Co-chair  of numerous workshops.  He is former chair of the AIPS Executive Council (2000-2002), was a founding member of the ICAPS Executive Council (2002-2006), and was founding President of the ICAPS Executive Council 2002-2004. He was also a Councilor for the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (2003-2006)

Dr. Chien was a recipient of the 1995 Lew Allen Award for Excellence, JPLs highest award recognizing outstanding technical achievements by JPL personnel in the early years of their careers. In 1997, he received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal for his work in research and development of planning and scheduling systems for NASA. He is the Team Lead for the ASPEN Planning System , which received Honorable Mention in the 1999 Software of the Year Competition and was a contributor to the Remote Agent System which was a co-winner in the same 1999 competition. In 2000, he received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal for service and leadership in research and deployment of planning and scheduling systems for NASA. He is the Principal Investigator for the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment which is a co-winner of the 2005 NASA Software of the Year Award. In 2007, he received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal for outstanding technical accomplishments in the development of the Autonomous Sciencecraft deployed on the Earth Observing One Mission and the development of the Earth Observing Sensorweb. In 2011 He was awarded the innaugural AIAA Intelligent Systems Award, for his contributions to Spacecraft Autonomy. In 2011, he was the team co-lead for the Sensorweb Toolbox team, which was awarded Honorable mention in the 2011 NASA Software of the Year Competition. In 2015 He was awarded a JPL Magellan Award as well as the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal for his contributions to automated science scheduling for ESA’s Rosetta mission.

Dr. Chien has supported the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Defense Science Board, and Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.  In 2018, Dr. Chien was appointed to the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

Dr. Chien has presented invited seminars on planning, scheduling, and resource allocation as well as on spacecraft autonomy and autonomous systems. He has authored numerous publications. in these areas, and has served as a consultant to several multinational corporations in these areas. His current research interests lie in the areas of: planning and scheduling, machine learning, operations research, and decision theory.

Dr. Larry P. Heck is the co-director of the Artificial Intelligence Hub and Machine Learning Center, and Professor with a joint appointment in ECE and Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds the Rhesa S. Farmer Advanced Computing Concepts Chair and is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. From 2017-2021, he was the CEO of Viv Labs and SVP at Samsung where he led Bixby for North America. From 2014-2017, he was a Principal Scientist at Google, leading an advanced Dialogue effort in Google Research. From 2009-2014, he was the Chief Scientist of the Microsoft Speech products team and later a Distinguished Engineer in Microsoft Research. In 2009, he was a co-founder of Microsoft’s Cortana personal assistant. From 2005-2009, he was Vice President at Yahoo! responsible for Search and Advertising quality. From 1998-2005, he was with Nuance Communications and served as Vice President of R&D. He began his career as a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute (1992-1998) initially in acoustics and later in speech research with the Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory. Funded by the US government’s NSA and DARPA, his SRI Speaker Recognition team was the first to successfully create large-scale deep neural network (DNN) deep learning technology in the field of speech processing (1998 National Institute of Standards and Technology Speaker Recognition evaluation) and the first to deploy a major industrial application of deep learning. He received the PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1991. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, published numerous scientific papers and holds 50+ United States patents. He was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni at Georgia Tech and received the Distinguished Engineer Award from the Texas Tech University Whitacre College of Engineering.

Parag Parekh is the Chief Digital Officer (a role he shares with Wim Blaauw) at Ingka Group. He has the responsibility for developing digital capabilities and accelerating the digital transformation of the business. Parag joined Ingka Group as Chief Technology Officer, Group Digital, in 2021 and has more than 20 years of technology experience working for global companies.

Prior to IKEA, Parag held senior roles at Adidas with responsibilities for omnichannel transformation, ecommerce, and product engineering.  He also spent several years as Senior Program Manager and as part of the leadership program at General Electric (GE).

An engineer by trade, Parag also has a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA), Information Technology from Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS). He is also a graduate of the Executive Development, Business Administration and Leadership program at Harvard Business School.

Born in India, Parag has worked in the US, UK, Asia, Spain, and Germany. He now lives in Sweden with his wife and two daughters. He enjoys running, listening to podcasts, and taking every opportunity to enjoy the outdoors with his family.

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.

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).