Thomas Wolf is co-founder and Chief Science Officer (CSO) of Hugging Face where he has been at the inception of the open-source, educational and research efforts.

Thomas enjoys creating open-source software that makes complex research, models and datasets widely accessible (for instance by creating the Hugging Face Transformers and Datasets libraries). When he’s not building OSS libraries, he can be found pushing for open science in research in AI/ML, trying to lower the gap between academia and industrial labs through projects like the BigScience Workshop on Large Language Models (LLM) which leads to the BLOOM experiments, model and dataset. His current research interests revolve around LLM accessibility and measuring and overcoming present limitations of Large Language Models. He also enjoys writing and filming educational content on AI, ML and NLP, including writing the reference book “Natural Language Processing with Transformers” published at O’Reilly with amazing co-authors, writing (not often enough) in his blog and recording (also not often enough) educational videos like The Future of Natural Language Processing.

A pioneer in teleoperated and autonomous robot systems across applications such as surgery, space exploration, disaster rescue and self-driving cars, Carol is a multi-faceted innovator working across a broad spectrum of transformative industries. In her current tenure as Co-Founder of DeepMusic.ai, Carol and her team are shaping the future of music to figure out how and where AI can assist creatives and utilize human strengths to build something novel. From founding TinkerBelle Labs to design low-cost medical tools and Squishybotz for educational, storytelling robots; to leading a robot outreach program for more than 1,000 low-income students as part of her tenure as instructor at Johns Hopkins University – Carol is a true advocate for underrepresented groups in tech through her unparalleled community work.

Athina Kanioura is Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at PepsiCo. PepsiCo products are enjoyed by consumers more than one billion times a day in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. PepsiCo generated more than $86 billion in net revenue in 2022, driven by a complementary beverage and convenient foods portfolio that includes Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos, Gatorade, Pepsi-Cola, Mountain Dew, Quaker, and SodaStream. PepsiCo’s product portfolio includes a wide range of enjoyable foods and beverages, including many iconic brands that generate more than $1 billion each in estimated annual retail sales.

An accomplished innovator and transformation leader, Kanioura oversees PepsiCo’s end-to-end strategy to win both as a total company and in key markets, including our digitalization strategy. She also leads company-wide transformation—ensuring that our scale is leveraged as we focus on accelerating profitable growth and identifying areas of cost efficiency and optimization—in addition to overseeing Data Products, Platforms, and Talent. 

Prior to joining PepsiCo, Kanioura was the Chief Analytics Officer and Global Head of Applied Intelligence at Accenture, where she specialized in applying AI and analytics to drive business value. During her 15 years at Accenture, Kanioura grew the Applied Intelligence function from a subspecialty to a global group at the forefront of scale business transformation. She also ran Sales and Customer Analytics globally and drove the company’s offerings in customer relationship management and personalization. 

Kanioura specializes in transforming businesses with emphasis on data and technology, and brings many years of practical experience globally in industries such as telecomms, oil and gas, financial services, and consumer packaged goods, having worked with companies such as Mondelez, Unilever, P&G, Reckitt Benkiser, Phillip Morris, and Adidas.

Kanioura is a member of the Royal Statistical and Economics Society, where she contributes to shaping government policy around how data is used by bodies like the IMF. She also sits on the board of the Institute of Marketing Sciences and is a keen educator who has held lectureships at UMIST (UK), Imperial College London (UK), and the University of Sheffield (UK), where she also earned her PhD in Econometrics and Quantitative Economics.  Kanioura is based in Purchase, N.Y

Robert Silvers was confirmed by the Senate as the Under Secretary for Strategy, Policy, and Plans on August 5, 2021. He is responsible for driving policy and implementation plans across all of DHS’s missions, including counterterrorism; cybersecurity, infrastructure security, and resilience; border security and immigration; international affairs; and trade and economic security. Mr. Silvers also Chairs the Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force, the Cyber Safety Review Board, and oversees the Supply Chain Resilience Center.

Mr. Silvers previously served in the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama-Biden Administration as Assistant Secretary for Cyber Policy. In that role he oversaw private sector engagement, federal government incident response, and diplomatic outreach pertaining to cybersecurity and emerging technology. Mr. Silvers also previously served as DHS’s Deputy Chief of Staff, managing execution of policy and operational priorities across the entire Department.

Prior to his appointment, Mr. Silvers was a partner at the law firm Paul Hastings LLP, where his practice focused on cybersecurity and data privacy, government security review of foreign investments, and investigations and litigation at the intersection of law and national security. After graduating law school, he clerked for Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Mr. Silvers holds a J.D. from New York University School of Law and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught as an adjunct professor in the M.S. in Cybersecurity Risk and Strategy Program co-offered by the NYU Law School and NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Philippe Rambach is the SVP, Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer of Schneider Electric.

Philippe Rambach joined Schneider Electric in 2010 through the acquisition of AREVA. He has more than 20 years of experience in strategy, innovation, and business responsibility in many industries.

He is a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique in France and has held various leadership roles in Industrial Automation. Most recently, as SVP Industrial Automation Commercial, he has led the commercial organization with strong results and impact. He has an international career background and is currently based in France, reporting to the Chief Digital Officer, Peter Weckesser.

Lambert Hogenhout is Chief Data and AI at the United Nations Secretariat. He is also an author, keynote speaker and advisor on AI and responsible use of technology. He has 25 years of experience working both in the private sector and with international organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations. He leads governance and strategy in the areas of data and AI and oversees its practical implementation. He has published on data privacy, data governance, the societal implications of technology and responsible use of AI.

We are thrilled to introduce Cihangir Kocak, an expert in business strategy and AI advisory. He is known for creating opportunities and building strong ecosystems that empower businesses to thrive. Cihangir has successfully guided numerous organizations through the challenges of digital transformation and strategic business development. He is appreciated for his ability to simplify complex concepts and inspire actionable insights. Cihangir is passionate about enabling business growth in the AI industry for HP, its customers, and partners, ranging from emerging startups to established enterprises.

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).