Dr. Chander is a physician, neuroscientist, and futurist who trained at Harvard, UCSD, UCSF, and the Salk Institute. She is Chair of Neuroscience and Faculty of Medicine at Singularity University, Visiting Scholar in Medicine at Stanford (where she was on faculty for 8 years), and Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council GeoTech Center. She has also co-founded and leads 2 companies during the pandemic – Lucidify, a tele-neuroICU platform, and Plexxus, a company building the world’s connected global immune system. Dr. Chander also serves on a NASA-White House task force for COVID19, and both co-chairs and directs the post-pandemic global health initiative for OneShared.World. Her research interests center around mapping human consciousness, 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). In 2004, she was a finalist for astronaut selection, and has since maintained a passion for building medical systems in space to sustain human exploration.

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.

Creating, scaling, transforming companies with data.
As the Global Lead of Data-led Transformation for Accenture, and our lead for our Applied Intelligence business in Europe, Joe helps Fortune 500 clients cross industry leverage data to bring new products and services to market, fuel employee and consumer experiences, drive operational efficiency, and ultimately help improve the way we work and live. In addition, Joe has served as the interim Chief Data and AI Officer for a Fortune 100 company where we are rapidly transforming the organization by creating new
businesses and products, driving operational efficiencies, and changing ways of working to drive growth and innovation. Joe leads our Europe AI Team with a talented team of data scientists, business consultants, cloud engineers, and AI strategists. Committed to recruiting, developing and retaining diverse talent, this high performing team has been recognized for its contribution to driving innovation and positive change at our clients. More importantly, by creating an inclusive culture of servant leadership, Joe is focused on fostering growth among the people with whom he works.

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.

Cathy is EY’s Global Trusted AI Leader and Canadian Technology Risk Leader. In these roles, she helps corporate executives and Directors understand and manage business risks related to technology in the Transformative Age, including the ethical and control implications of artificial intelligence.

Cathy leverages her unique background as a CPA, technology risk practioner and involvement with the EY Climate Change & Sustainability practice to consider the full spectrum of technological and societal implications of technology transformation. 

She currently serves on technical advisory committees with the Responsible AI Institute, CIO Strategy Council, CPA Canada and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers to develop industry and regulatory standards for emerging technology.

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.

Man

As the Applied Intelligence Lead for Accenture the Netherlands, Laurence supports large organizations with shaping and executing their journey towards becoming a Data Driven Enterprise. Bringing value to client operations and customer service through end-to-end Data & Analytics Services: from value definition and strategy to capabilities and deployment at scale. ​

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Laurence leads our Netherlands Applied Intelligence practice with a talented team of data scientists, business consultants, cloud engineers, and AI strategists. ​

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Laurence is passionate about people and data. From all colleagues in the Applied Intelligence practice to client excecutives, to all the people involved in the data supply chains: from data production to data consumption. Creating new insights, aspirations and innovations and connecting people through data.

aging Director, Digital Technologies

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. 

Wei Li is VP/GM of AI and Analytics (AIA) at Intel. He is an AI software executive, who started his career as a computer scientist for supercomputers. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University, and taught Advanced Compiling Techniques at Stanford University. He is passionate about product strategy, technology and execution. Together with his world-wide team of engineering magicians, Wei has been instrumental in Intel’s multi-billion dollar AI revenue growth. His team consistently set goals to win and deliver, winning 5 Intel Achievement Awards.

With the  vision of AI Everywhere enabled by an open AI software ecosystem.  He is leading the Data+AI software effort for both performance and productivity. Most recently, his team improved AI performance by 10-100X through software acceleration, and enabled customers such as MasterCard, Burger King, AWS, Google among many others. He is responsible for a broad AI and Analytics including deep learning, statistical machine learning and big data analytics, e.g. optimizing mainstream AI software such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, MXNet, PaddlePaddle, TVM, XGBoost, Scikit-learn, DGL, Numpy, SciPy, Pandas, Modin, numba, Python, SPARK as well as developing Intel oneAPI performance libraries and productivity tools such as oneDNN, oneDNN Graph, oneCCL, oneDAL, BigDL, Intel Neural Compressor (INC) and AI Analytics toolkit. His team is also responsible for AI hardware co-design on CPU and GPU as well as heterogenous and distributed computing.

He served as an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, and was on the Intel/Microsoft committee that funded the creation of parallel computing research centers at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/wei-li-sf/

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).

Jack McCauley an Innovator in Residence at Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation at UC Berkeley, Professor at UC Berkeley, Co-Founder of Oculus, an American engineer, hardware designer, inventor, video game developer and philanthropist. Jack is best known for designing the guitars and drums for the Guitar Hero video game series, and as a co-founder and former chief engineer at Oculus VR. At Oculus, Jack designed and built the Oculus DK1 and DK2 virtual reality headsets. Oculus was acquired by Facebook for $2 Billion.  McCauley holds numerous U.S. patents for inventions in software, audio effects, virtual reality, motion control, computer peripherals, and video game hardware and controllers. Jack was awarded a full scholarship to attend University of California, Berkeley where he earned as BSc., EECS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1986.  Jack has authored numerous research papers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and mathematical modeling of AI-based systems and is currently pursuing new projects at his private R&D facility and hardware incubator in Livermore, California.

Dr. Ansgar Koene is Global AI Ethics and Regulatory Leader at EY (Ernst & Young) where he leads the AI related public policy team and contributes to the work on AI governance and EY’s Trusted AI framework. As part of this work, he represents EY on the OECD Network for Experts on AI (ONE.AI) and the Business at OECD Committee on Digital Economic Policy (BIAC CDEP).

Ansgar chairs the IEEE P7003 Standard for Algorithmic Bias Considerations working group and is a convener for the CEN-CENELEC JTC21 “AI” committee’s work on AI conformity assessment. 

He is a trustee for the 5Rights foundation for the Rights of Young People Online and advises on AI and Data Ethics for AfroLeadership, a pan-African NGO.

Ansgar has a multi-disciplinary research background, having worked and published on topics ranging from Policy and Governance of Algorithmic Systems (AI), data-privacy, AI Ethics, AI Standards, bio-inspired Robotics, AI and Computational Neuroscience to experimental Human Behaviour/Perception studies. He holds an MSc in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Computational Neuroscience.

Sarah Porter has launched 21 b2b and b2c technology products in 11 countries since 1996 and has a renowned reputation for taking ideas from concept to market with subsequent significant growth globally.

Emerging tech / AI / Medtech / Singularity / Existentialism is where her core experience lies and she has over 20 years of commercial experience.

As a board executive for i2i Events Group (parent company The Guardian Media Group / Apax – Ascential – previously Top Right Group) with the specific remit to rapidly grow the business whilst leveraging operational costs and prepare pre IPO. She sat on the i2i mergers and acquisitions committee identifying, analysing and approaching target businesses and accelerated growth by 22% within 12 months.

Achievements include the launch and acquisition of Money2020 – a leading fintech product. This included negotiation, 3 stage due diligence, its subsequent integration, and the long term geo-adaption into a global portfolio worth over $40m. The launch of World Retail Congress in 10 countries, the re-launch of the Cannes Lions festival.

Sarah is a regular keynote speaker on start-ups, business and women/equality related issues and is an ambassador for the Royal Marsden where she champions the use of AI tech in oncology advances.

Dr. Safiya U. Noble is an internet studies scholar and Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she serves as the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). She holds affiliations in the School of Education & Information Studies, and is a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford where she is a Commissioner on the Oxford Commission on AI & Good Governance (OxCAIGG). In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (also known as the “Genius Award”) for her ground-breaking work on algorithmic discrimination, which prompted her founding of a non-profit, Equity Engine, to accelerate investment in companies, education, and networks driven by women of color. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely-reviewed in scholarly and popular publications. She is the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Early Career Award. In 2022, she was recognized as the inaugural NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award recipient.

Her academic research focuses on the internet and its impact on society. Her work is both sociological and interdisciplinary, marking the ways that digital media intersects with issues of race, gender, culture, power, and technology. She is regularly sought out for her expertise on issues of algorithmic discrimination and technology bias by national and international press including The Guardian, the BBC, CNN International, USA Today, Wired, Time, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The New York Times, and a host of network news and podcasts. Her popular writing includes critiques on the loss of public goods to Big Tech companies, as featured in Noema magazine.

Safiya is the co-editor of two edited volumes: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture and Class Online and Emotions, Technology & Design. She is a member of several academic journal and advisory boards, and holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in Sociology from California State University, Fresno where she was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award for 2018. In 2020, she was awarded the Distinguished Alumna Award from the iSchool Alumni Association, and is also the inaugural Diversity and Inclusion Award winner from the Illinois Alumni Association at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Noble is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, serving those vulnerable to online harassment. She was recently appointed as a board member for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, America’s Black think tank.

Co Founder

Rina is co-founder of Seedlink Tech, a tech scale-up developing artificial intelligence for better and faster matching of candidates to jobs. Rina is driven by the vision to leverage cutting edge technology to remove human bias from the decision making process. She got appointed in the Taskforce for A.I. in the Netherlands and recently presented a national A.I. strategy and action plan. Prior to Seedlink, Rina founded HR Consultancy International Top Talent in both China and Europe and she held various management positions at DSM. Rina is a regular speaker and writer on A.I., innovation, human capital and China, where she lived for the past seven years. She councils a think tank of the European Commission on A.I. policies and serves as a mentor for start-ups. In Shanghai, she delivered a TedxTalk on ‘How AI changes the way we find careers’ at TedxShanghaiWomen and got featured on her work at the BBC and Tegenlicht (‘Holland Gets Talent’). Rina holds an Msc and MA degree from Groningen University. She is married and has four kids.

Miguel Martín Acosta is UAS Chief Engineer at Airbus, where he leads AI-driven NextGen Autonomous Drones able to flight in urban environment. He formerly worked as Lead Data Scientist in his role of Head of Health Management and Predictive Analytics at Airbus. Prior to joining Airbus, he worked as developer for control systems and computer vision.

He holds a degree in electronic engineering, a master in robotics and PhD candidature in AI and teaches AI in different university programs, as MSc in Intelligent Avionics from University of Malaga and MSc in Unmanned Aerial System from Polytechnic University of Madrid.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google Research, where he leads an organization working on both basic research and new products in AI. His focus is on augmentative, privacy-first, and collectively beneficial applications, including on-device ML for Android phones, wearables, and the Internet of Things.

One of the team’s technical contributions is Federated Learning, an approach to training neural networks in a distributed setting that avoids sharing user data. Blaise also founded the Artists and Machine Intelligence program, and has been an active participant in cross-disciplinary dialogs about AI and ethics, fairness and bias, policy, and risk. Until 2014 he was a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. Outside the tech world, Blaise has worked on computational humanities projects including the digital reconstruction of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii’s color photography at the Library of Congress, and the use of computer vision techniques to shed new light on Gutenberg’s printing technology. Blaise has given TED talks on Sead­ragon and Pho­to­synth (2007, 2012), Bing Maps (2010), and machine creativity (2016), and gave a keynote at NeurIPS on social intelligence (2019). In 2008, he was awarded MIT’s TR35 prize. In 2018 and 2019 he taught the course “Intelligent Machinery, Identity, and Ethics” at the University of Washington, placing computing and AI in a broader historical and philosophical context.

CMO & COO

Dr. Cara Antoine joined Microsoft the Netherlands in January 2017 as Chief Marketing & Operations Officer. In this position, Cara is responsible for the overall marketing, strategy, and operations of Microsoft the Netherlands, in particular for the digital transformation of companies which is made possible thanks to innovations in the cloud.

Cara was previously employed at Royal Dutch Shell where she was responsible for the business transformation of the global IT within the Shell organisation. Prior to Shell, she held various executive roles in both Germany and France for Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, and Polaroid. Cara received her DBA degree (Doctor of Business Administration) through her research into Collaborative Innovation in Technology at the University of Bradford Graduate School of Management & Law in the UK and the Tias-Nimbas Graduate School of Business in the Netherlands.

Cara is passionate for the arts and music and she has a special affinity for persons with impairments. She has an active voice to bring equality, accessibility, and sustainability to the world for all persons, no matter our differences.

Fleurette Poiesz started her career 8 years ago working on the international expansion of tech start-up Magnet.me where she first discovered her love for technology. Since then she has successfully expanded and grown business units & companies ranging from Microsoft to Plain Concepts and enjoys managing high performance teams through growth and innovation. 

Fleurette thrives in high-paced environments and brings order in the chaos while maintaining a strategic vision. She recently started a new adventure as Business Lead at Dutch unicorn Picnic Technologies and is an active board member of the Women In Tech Netherlands organization who takes a proactive style to leadership. Through positive energy and encouragement she helps tells the tales of women in technology from all over the world both on stage or through podcasting with the main goal of getting more women in tech.

Lieke Lamb is CEO of the Future Expertise Center.

Being an Innovation Ambassador and Trend Strategist she has been closely following technological, social and economic trends for over 20 years. As an advisor of companies, governmental organizations, Start-Ups and NGO’s she is a leading Trend Analist and Keynote Speaker on topics as Leadership, Digital Transformation, Technology, Diversity & Inclusion, and the Educational System. Regularly on Dutch TV as expert, presenter and interviewer. Member of the Board of Women in Tech NL . Guest teacher at Nyenrode University (Strategic Leadership Program) and owner of the Dutch broadcast channel Trendwatcher.TV.

Cristina Garcia Albela started her professional career 2 years ago in the Netherlands as Project Engineer and CFD Analyst at Mecal High-Tech Systems, working inside the challenging and fast growing lithograph/semiconductors industry. She got her Mechanical Engineer degree from UPM (Madrid), followed by a Erasmus Mundus Master in Computational Mechanics (UPC, Barcelona and ECN, Nantes) with which she specialized in Numerical methods and Fluid dynamics. 

She defines herself as troubleshooting, intuitive, determinant and certainly not afraid to face new challenges. She is an empathetic and tolerant person, open to help people to find their best. As a young woman in tech, she has the objective to feel empowered and embrace technology industry, with especial interest in the new generations that are to come. That’s why she joined Women in Tech NL, where she is involved in organizing different events and workshops.

Ralf Herbrich leads the group on Artificial Intelligence and Sustainability at the Hasso-Plattner Institute in Potsdam since May 2022. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President, Builder Platform & Artificial Intelligence at Zalando (2020 – 2022),  Managing Director of the Amazon Development Center in Germany with its locations in Berlin, Dresden, Aachen and Tübingen and was Director of Machine Learning at Amazon in Berlin from (2013 – 2020). Prior to these roles at Amazon, he led Facebook’s Unified Ranking and Allocation team in 2011. From 2000 to 2011, he served as Director of Microsoft’s Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Lab UK and worked for nine years at Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, UK.

Ralf has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and holds over 50 patents. He holds a PhD in Statistics from Technical University of Berlin and obtained his Diploma in Computer Science from the same institution. His research interests include Bayesian inference and decision making, natural language processing, computer vision, learning theory, robotics, distributed systems and programming languages. Ralf is one of the inventors of the Drivatars™ system in the Forza Motorsport series as well as the TrueSkill™ ranking and matchmaking system in Xbox Live.

Christopher Bishop is a Microsoft Technical Fellow and Laboratory Director of the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, UK.

He is also Honorary Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. In 2004, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, in 2007 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 2017 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society.

At Microsoft Research, Chris oversees a world-leading portfolio of industrial research and development, with a strong focus on machine learning and AI, and creating breakthrough technologies in cloud infrastructure, security, workplace productivity, computational biology, and healthcare.

Chris obtained a BA in Physics from Oxford, and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Edinburgh, with a thesis on quantum field theory. After his PhD he joined the Theoretical Physics Division of Culham Laboratory where he conducted research into the physics of magnetically confined fusion plasmas. During this time he developed an interest in machine learning, and became Head of the Applied Neurocomputing Centre at AEA Technology. He was subsequently elected to a Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Aston University, where he set up and led the Neural Computing Research Group.

Chris is the author of two highly cited and widely adopted machine learning text books: Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition (1995) and Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (2006). He has also worked on a broad range of applications of machine learning in domains ranging from computer vision to healthcare. Chris is a keen advocate of public engagement in science, and in 2008 he delivered the prestigious Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, established in 1825 by Michael Faraday, and broadcast on national television.

Chris is a member of the UK AI Council. He was also recently appointed to the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology.

Joseph Bradley is the visionary CEO behind NEOM’s Tonomus, with strategic foresight in the delivery of a full-scale, end-to-end cognitive technology ecosystem for NEOM. By harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and metaverse, Joseph and his team are bringing cognitive cities to life.

Joseph’s career has been defined by remarkable success, both as an executive in the tech sector and a business leader. With a lifelong passion for data-driven systems that enable sustainable synergy between people and technology, Joseph is a renowned entrepreneur with a reputation for enabling companies to leverage innovation in maximizing these dynamic interactions.

The California native graduated with a B.A. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, before starting his career at Pacific Bell, where he became Chief Financial Officer of the largest operating unit by the young age of 28. He moved on to AT&T as General Manager of the Data Communications group, and held several leadership positions at C3 Communications, including CEO, CFO and Senior Vice President of Shared Services.

Joseph joined Tonomus after 15 years of senior leadership at Cisco, the most recent of which was Global Vice President IoT, Blockchain, AI and Incubation Businesses. In addition to managing the delivery of advanced services, business development, commercialization, staffing and operations for Cisco Systems’ incubation operation, Joseph was instrumental in developing its next-generation consulting model, with a data-driven path outlining how customers can capture the value of Internet of Everything (IoE). The term, which he had helped coin, encapsulates how people, process, and data work together, and is key to both his leadership and approach to cognitive technologies at Tonomus.

Davood Shamsi is a Senior Engineering Manager in Apple specialized in Optimization, AI and ML. He has led many projects that require in-depth interaction of real-world data, optimization and machine learning. Previously, he worked at advertising.com and developed various large scaling algorithms for ad optimization in digital advertising.  He received his PhD from Stanford University in Management Science and Engineering, and his Master’s degree from Rice University in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

A multi award winning Computer Scientist, Technology Evangelist and Digital Skills Expert, Professor Sue Black was awarded an OBE for “services to technology” in the 2016 Queen’s New Year’s Honours list. She is Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evangelist in the Department of Computer Science at Durham University, a UK government advisor, thought leader, Trustee at Comic Relief, social entrepreneur, writer and public speaker.

Sue set up the UK’s first online network for women in tech BCSWomen in 1998 and led the campaign to save Bletchley Park, home of the WW2 codebreakers. Sue’s first book Saving Bletchley Park details the social media campaign she led to save Bletchley Park from 2008-2011. Sue has championed women in tech for over two decades, founding the #techmums social enterprise in 2013 and the pioneering TechUPWomen retraining underserved women into tech careers in 2019.

Passionate about technology as an enabler Sue didn’t have a traditional start to her career. She left home and school at 16, married at 20 and had 3 children by the age of 23. A single parent at 25 she went to university, gained a degree in computing then a PhD in software engineering. Sue now has 4 children and 6 grandchildren.

Grady Booch is Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM Research where he leads IBM’s research and development on embodied cognition. Having originated the term and the practice of object-oriented design, he is best known for his work in advancing the fields of software engineering and software architecture. A co-author of the Unified Modeling Language (UML), a founding member of the Agile Alliance, and a founding member of the Hillside Group, Grady has published six books and several hundred technical articles, including an ongoing column for IEEE Software and IEEE Spectrum. Grady is also a trustee for the Computer History Museum. He is an IBM Fellow, an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, has been awarded the Lovelace Medal and given the Turing Lecture for the BCS, and was named an IEEE Computer Pioneer for his work in software architecture.

Grady has served as an architect or architectural mentor for a multitude of complex software-intensive systems across many domains around the world, including finance, transportation, defense, commerce, productivity, government, medical, gaming, animation, software development, artificial intelligence, and many others.

Grady is currently developing a major transmedia documentary for public broadcast on the intersection of computing and the human experience: Computing.

As head of the IT Big Data & Analytics (BDA) department, Ment is responsible for delivering a portfolio of analytics solutions for his business partners to support them in a variety of business challenges. The department’s vision is to unlock the value of data for everyone within the organization. This is achieved through in one hand partnering closely with the business consumers to enable new insights and support fact-based decisions, and on the other through integrating data to provide faster access to high quality, secure and consumable data products. The information hunger within the organization has grown significantly over the last years, requiring a scalable organization with a strong partner network. In an SAFe/Agile setup, more then 65 DevOps teams execute the vision of the department on a day to day basis.

Specialities
Data Strategy | Data & Analytics | Analytics services | Cloud & Infrastructure | Agile Leadership

As the Lead of the Big Data & Analytics (BDA) Innovation Lab at ASML IT, Diederick is responsible for taking new and innovative ideas from ideation to product. The Innovation Lab’s vision is to be the driver and enabler of applying advanced analytics within ASML processes. Diederick leads three teams which consists of a mixture of highly skilled data scientists, innovation consultants, data engineers and cloud engineers. Diederick has been responsible for creating the innovation lab from scratch to the embedding of the teams in the larger department.Diederick has an almost endless interest for everything Data & AI related, and a special interest in the change process how to get these technologies embedded in a large enterprise. As an advisor to the IT BDA Management Team Diederick turns his knowledge on Data & AI also to a strategic level, ensuring that those technologies not only impact the few in the Innovation Lab but also the organization at large.

Specialties
Product Management | Data & AI |Turning strategy into action | High-performing Teams | Organizational Design | IT Expert

Ray Shirkhodai is responsible for PDC’s strategic development, market and partnership expansion, and all aspects of the enterprise operation. Serving in information management and senior leadership roles since 1991, Ray first joined PDC in 2002 as the Chief Information Officer before his selection for Executive Director in 2007. During his tenure at PDC, Ray architected PDC’s flagship DisasterAWARE® risk intelligence platform and mobile applications, developed and oversaw strategies for PDC’s expansion into the global hazard and risk reduction markets, and increased the Center’s competitive project revenues, augmenting PDC’s base research and operating budgets. Ray has led the Center’s support of major international disaster relief operations. He has served as a chief technology advisor to regional and national disaster management offices around the world. Ray has written for numerous United Nations publications on analytical software design for risk reduction. He has been an invited keynote speaker, lecturer and participant at many international events focused on technologies for risk reduction and resilience. Ray is on the advisory board of the University of Hawaii Maui College Applied Business and Information Technology (ABIT) program. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from George Mason University followed by graduate studies in Artificial Intelligence at George Mason University.

The speaker Thomas Weber is Chief Product Owner for the West European Region at Huawei Technologies. He is responsible for planning new services for the Public Cloud platforms of Huawei, incorporating customer requirements, and coordinating with the R&D side of Huawei to provide these new services. He also provides technical support for large companies, e.g. to integrate existing systems, infrastructure and business processes and to enable the introduction of public, private and hybrid cloud architectures. Topics that he is taking care of especially are BigData and AI, Quantum Computing and high performance computing.

Beverly currently serves as CEO of Portfolio T, Tonomus’ Venture Studio & Fund. Beverly leads a team of top-tier entrepreneurs and C-suite executives in developing Silicon Valley-modelled ventures and disruptive, sustainable solutions to power the world’s first ecosystem of cognitive technologies. She is also focused on attracting investment and fostering long-term optimization.

As CMO of Tonomus since 2021, she is tasked with building and managing a world-class commercial organization comprising: sales and channels; ventures; solutions; delivery; communications, events, and product and field marketing. Her work enables the successful development and execution of Tonomus’ programs, which require the establishment of global partnerships to provide scale for NEOM’s growth.

Beverly’s deep experience and insights come from serving in the C-suite at Fortune 10 and Global 100 companies, including Hitachi Limited (Japan), General Electric (US) and Ericsson (Sweden). She was also CEO at C-level Consulting, an executive for CenturyLink/Qwest/US West, and an attorney.

Beverly has degrees in marketing, finance, law and taxation. She graduated JD Cum Laude from the Seattle University School of Law and attended the University of Washington LLM Program.

Dr. Danny Lange is Senior VP of AI and Machine Learning at Unity. As SVP of AI and Machine Learning, Danny leads Unity’s efforts around AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Machine Learning. He joined from Uber, where he was Head of Machine Learning. At Uber, Danny led the efforts to build the world’s most versatile Machine Learning platform to support Uber’s hyper growth. Previously, Danny was General Manager of Amazon Machine Learning — an AWS product that offers Machine Learning as a Cloud Service. Before that, he was Principal Development Manager at Microsoft where he led a product team focused on large-scale Machine Learning for Big Data. Danny spent eight years on Speech Recognition Systems, first as CTO of General Magic, Inc., then through his work on General Motors OnStar Virtual Advisor, one of the largest deployments of an intelligent personal assistant until Siri. Danny started his career as a Computer Scientist at IBM Research.

Danny holds MS and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Technical University of Denmark. He is a member of ACM and IEEE Computer Society and has several patents to his credit.

Sohel is a Managing Director with Accenture Song. He leads the Accenture Song business for France and BeNeLux.

Sohel Aziz has over 29 years of experience in delivering strategies and solutions for businesses that leverage digital technologies to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.  He has extensive experience in digital strategy advisory and technology-enabled marketing transformation programs.  He has worked with clients on leveraging AR, VR, XR as well as AI to create meaningful business impacting customer experiences. The Metaverse is a natural extension of those efforts. Today, Sohel and his team are helping clients with strategic business rationale for investment in the Metaverse and other Web 3 topics.

Alex is the founder of Big Technology, an independent publication that covers the inner workings of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. His email newsletter goes out to thousands of Silicon Valley decision-makers each week.

Alex’s first book, Always Day One, debuted in 2020. The book is a reported deep dive on the tech giants’ work cultures, featuring more than 130 interviews with insiders from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to front line workers. Inc. named Always Day One a Business Book You Have to Read in 2020.

Prior to founding Big Technology, Alex was a Senior Technology Reporter at BuzzFeed News. In 2019, he won a Mirror Award as part of a BuzzFeed team recognized for reporting on “Social Media in the Crosshairs.” Before BuzzFeed, Alex was a staff reporter at Advertising Age. He began his career buying ads and selling ad-tech software in New York.

Alex lives in San Francisco. He is a graduate of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Arvid Kok, Senior Data Scientist and Lead Data Science & AI Technology, at the NATO Communications and Information (NCI) Agency. After a 15 year career in industry as solution architect, data scientist and consultant in Big Data, Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, Arvid joined NATO as one of the first Data Scientists in the NCI Agency. He participates in shaping Data Science & AI in NATO, its vision and roadmap. As Lead Data Science & AI Technology, he works with the team, academia and industry to adapt most promising and innovative technologies to real NATO use cases, resulting in several published scientific articles.

Jeroen van den Hoven is university professor and full professor of Ethics and Technology at Delft University of Technology and editor in chief of Ethics and Information Technology. He is currently the scientific director of the Delft Design for Values Institute. He was the founding scientific director of 4TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology (2007-2013). In 2009, he won the World Technology Award for Ethics as well as the IFIP prize for ICT and Society for his work in Ethics and ICT. Jeroen van den Hoven was founder, and until 2016 Programme Chair, of the program of the Dutch Research Council on Responsible Innovation. He published Designing in Ethics (Van den Hoven, Miller & Pogge eds., Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Evil Online (Cocking & Van den Hoven, Blackwell, 2018) He is a permanent member of the European Group on Ethics (EGE) to the European Commission. In 2017 he was knighted in the Order of the Lion of The Netherlands.

Georgios Passalis is a Managing Director at Accenture Applied Intelligence, leading Customer, Marketing & Sales Analytics across Europe. He is the head of Accenture’s Advanced Analytics Innovation Center located at Athens, Greece. He has been with Accenture for 11+ years helping Accenture’s global clients formulate, adopt and execute enterprise solutions combining Machine Learning, AI and Big Data. Georgios holds a PhD in Machine Learning from University of Athens, a MSc in Computer Science from University of Houston and a BSc in Computer Science from University of Athens. He has multiple publications in the Machine Learning domain on acclaimed journals and conferences.

Ioana Puscas is a Researcher on artificial intelligence with UNIDIR’s Security & Technology Programme. Her work covers various aspects of AI and autonomy, including ongoing multilateral processes.

Before joining UNIDIR, Ioana was Senior Research Officer at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP), working on emerging technologies.

She holds master’s degrees from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) and from Central European University. She speaks English, French, Romanian and basic Russian.

Ioana’s areas of expertise include artificial intelligence, machine learning, military human enhancement, emerging technologies and technological convergence.

As a data scientist, Marijn has been leading Capgemini’s AI efforts for 5 years. Marijn believes in improving people’s lives through data – be it for governments, NGO’s, refugees or farmers worldwide.

He enjoys finding outside-of-the-box solutions to existing problems, to distinguish science from fiction. Additionally, Marijn is a frequent speaker at events on the cutting edge of AI, data and social science.

Seema, co-founded FIA in 2012. She was influenced by her childhood spent in some of the most inaccessible terrains in India, with a desire to work towards reducing the inequities she witnessed. FIA is focused on using technology to drive inclusion – economic, digital & financial – of the un(der) served and economically weaker sections. 

At FIA, Seema is responsible for innovation in financial products and services so as to cater to the needs of the un(der) served. She also leads FIA’s expansion globally. Prior to FIA, Seema has managed transformation programs in IT, Mobility and Operations, in the US, Europe & India.

Seema has done a Sloan Fellows MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and prior to it an MBA from XLRI Jamshedpur and a BTech in Electronics & Communications from Kerala University. 

Seema is also a UN-NITI Aayog Women Transforming India awardee. In addition to FIA, Seema’s interests include affordable healthcare and sustainable waste management solutions for every household.

Dr Kate Devlin is Reader in Artificial Intelligence & Society, King’s College London. Her research investigates how people interact with and react to technologies, both past and future. Kate is the author of the critically acclaimed Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (Bloomsbury, 2018), which examines the ethical and social implications of technology and intimacy. She is Advocacy and Engagement director for the UKRI Trusted Autonomous Systems Hub – a collaborative platform to enable the development of socially beneficial robotics and artificial intelligence systems that are both trustworthy in principle and trusted in practice.

Frans is responsible for the regulation and supervision of AI in the financial industry. Before working at DNB he was responsible for the regulation of AI in the Dutch Healthcare industry. Frans is also a Phd candidate, where he is researching the role of public values in the effectiveness and  legitimacy of regulatory agencies.

Gina Romero is the co-founder and CEO of Connected Women, a social impact tech startup that matches talented Filipino women with meaningful remote work opportunities. She’s an unconventional entrepreneur, community builder, and technology advocate.

Gina is an unconventional entrepreneur and community builder. She was a founding member of The Athena Network (UK) women’s business network in 2005 and went on to be the Operations Director in 2008.

In 2011, after relocating to Singapore with her family, Gina launched The Athena Network Singapore.

As part of her mission to better equip women entrepreneurs and professionals with the technology skills to scale their businesses and careers, Gina launched Connected Women (Singapore) in 2013 and the Connected Women Magazine in 2014.

In 2016 she set her heart on helping Filipino women and moved to the Philippines. In 2017 she co-founded Connected Women Jobs, a social impact tech startup that matches talented Filipino women with meaningful remote work opportunities.

Connected Women runs a number of initiatives that provide technology skills training and online job matching and aims to impact 100,000 women in the Philippines. They have received global recognition in the categories of inclusive innovation (Asia/USA), the future of work (UK), and e-employment (Switzerland).

In October 2020, Gina was awarded as a Finalist of the prestigious “Asia CEO Awards’ in the Shero of the Year category.

Rohit, based out of Amsterdam, works with clients in Europe to deliver business value & digital transformation through pre-configured AI solutions from Accenture. He comes with a strong background in AI & Intelligent Automation Consulting & Implementation across industries & geographies.

As the Senior Manager, Applied Intelligence within Accenture Hamid helps organizations in the journey of Data Led Transformation touching from Cloud to Augmented Insights. He is responsible for the A.I Go to Market strategy. Hamid brings a myriad of cross-industry experience and is passionate about data, digital innovation and people.

Ramon Rahangmetan began his career in the hospitality service industry at the age of 12 years old, few years later he studied Hospitality Management and Entrepreneurship in Wageningen, where he was the Chairman of the Student Council Board for two years, after this accomplishment he studied Sustainable Urban Development part e-learning at Wageningen University and Delft University of Technology.

Ramon has a broad interest in lifelong-learning, world-history, youth-empowerment and upcoming future technological trends. He uses this approach in his writing, working in a team, moderating a roundtable, speaking engagements, moderating, and speaking with people from various backgrounds. Adaptive learning, networking and cultural understanding are his driving principles.

Hello,

Data is now a fundamental part of our economy, society and environment—we live in a data-enabled world. We also face vast societal challenges where data can work harder to help us make better decisions.

I’ve spent 20 years helping to make our data infrastructure useful to everyone: creating and leading businesses, bringing together the web, finance, policy, data, science, the environment, art and media. This has led to the creation of dozens of companies, the employment of 100’s of people, and £100Ms in measurable impact (including $137M in four years at the ODI) and helping to create $multi-billion markets* through the development of regulated markets such as the Open Banking Standard.

Working together, we have tackled complex challenges ranging from climate change to government transparency; digital supply-chains to open banking. My ambition is to create positive impact@web-scale on issues that require the coordination of multidisciplinary teams across private, public and third sectors. Harnessing the power of people and machines (‘collective intelligence’), our current Dgen Constellation projects include the internationalisation of Open Finance and making data work harder to deliver net-zero via IcebreakerOne.org (which launched at Davos in 2020 and delivered over $5M in grant-funded innovation in its first year of operation).

If you are interested in receiving ideas and notes of events, please subscribe to my personal newsletter.

Best,
Gavin

Anna Scaife (PhD Cantab) is Professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on the use of artificial intelligence for discovery in data-intensive astrophysics and in 2019 she was appointed as one of the five inaugural AI Fellows of the UK’s Alan Turing Institute. She has previously led a number of projects in technical radio astronomy development and scientific computing as part of the Square Kilometre Array project, including the design of the computing and storage for a European SKA Regional Data Centre.

In addition to her scientific work, Anna runs two training programs that provide bursaries for students from Southern Africa and Latin America to pursue graduate degrees in the UK focusing on big data and data intensive science. In 2014, Anna was honoured by the World Economic Forum as one of thirty scientists under the age of 40 selected for their contributions to advancing the frontiers of science, engineering or technology in areas of high societal impact. In 2017 she was awarded the Blaauw Chair in Astrophysics (prize chair) at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands for excellence in research, broad knowledge of astronomy and an outstanding international status in astronomy. In 2019, Anna received the Jackson-Gwilt Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, awarded for outstanding invention, improvement, or development of astronomical instrumentation or techniques.

Joukje Keuning  is Director of Infra 2025 within Vitens. She is a civil engineer and has done lots of different jobs at drinking water companies: from process engineer, to project manager, to manager of the central control room, to business change manager and now program manager for the digitalization of the purifying and distribution process within Vitens. 

The Infra 2025 program is designed to scale smart grid solutions across Vitens. Innovation typically starts with just a good idea, beyond that this program is based on an approved business case. So we scale digital solutions to improve the process of water purification and distribution based on clearly articulated benefits that outweigh the costs of the operation.

Ryan is a strategic innovator with a global outlook and currently works on conversational assistants at Google’s headquarters. Prior to Google, Ryan lived in 10 countries with a range of international working experience with Airbnb in London, a tech startup in Silicon Valley, a hospitality group in Vietnam and a marketing consultancy in China.

Marloes Pomp is the Initiator and Program Officer for the blockchain and AI projects within the Dutch Government, including projects in the field of digital identities, logistics, healthcare, finance and food. She is also responsible for the international strategy and partnerships of the Dutch Blockchain Coalition  and the National AI Coalition. Both coalitions are a jointly developed partnership by government, industry and knowledge institutions. Together they have a leading role and joint responsibility for the success of the solving societal challenges and making a major contribution to new economic activities.

She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the European AI Forum, a

platform where entrepreneurs and policymakers get together to jointly determine the path forward for European AI innovation. 

Marloes her professional interests focus on tech-innovation within governments. Prior to the blockchain and AI activities, Marloes Pomp worked in several roles like project leader and researcher at governmental organizations, including the ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations and the city of Amsterdam. In addition, she serves as an advisory member for the SIDN Fund, the Dutch Court, The Blockchain and the Society Board of the University of Amsterdam (VU)

Gregory brings to InvestHK more than 18 years of successful business development and consulting experience within the life sciences and innovation sector in Europe and in Asia. Gregory has a strong background in social sciences and is fluent in German, English and Danish.

On the job he has gained substantial life sciences insights within biotech, medtech and stem cells sciences plus medical-ai and was dedicated to international management, FDI, tech-transfer, strategy and communication.

Prior to InvestHK he has worked for a renown biomedical cluster which became one of the greater life science clusters in Asia. During his tenure he has attracted several regional and international biomedical firms to join the cluster which included international Pharma and well-known bio-ventures as vital FDI projects. After the cluster term he supported specific companies and research institutes to proliferate cutting-edge life science projects committed to Medical AI and Robotics (brain-computer-interface and robotic exoskeleton for rehabilitation) and the creation of advanced bioanalytical tools to detect earlier severe muscle-dystrophies. For the leading projects, he has r

Maria Morais is an Innovative, results-oriented leader with a 15+ years successful track record in complex business transformation initiatives in consumer industries. Maria is the SAP consumer industries director for EMEA N, leading early adoption campaigns for industry cloud solutions. 

Maria is also de chair of Circklo, the leading trusted advisor for hundreds of digital native start ups looking to fundraise pre seed, seed and series A rounds.

Linda Leopold is Head of Responsible AI & Data at global fashion retailer H&M Group, where she leads the company’s work on sustainable and ethical artificial intelligence and data. She joined the AI department at H&M Group in 2018, after many years in the media industry. She is a former Editor-in-Chief at the critically acclaimed fashion and culture magazine Bon, and the author of two non-fiction books. She has been a columnist for Scandinavia’s biggest financial newspaper and has worked as an innovation strategist at the intersection of fashion and tech. Her passion lies in merging fashion and culture with science and technology. 

Toby Walsh is an ARC Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of AI at UNSW and CSIRO Data61, and adjunct professor at QUT. He is a strong advocate for limits to ensure AI is used to improve our lives, having spoken at the UN, and to heads of state, parliamentary bodies, company boards and many other bodies on this topic. He is a Fellow of the Australia Academy of Science, and was named on the international “Who’s Who in AI” list of influencers. He has authored three books on AI for a general audience, the most recent entitled “Machines Behaving Badly: the morality of AI”.

Catherine is a machine learning scientist and consultant based in Cambridge UK, and founder of Kingfisher Labs consulting. 

Since completing her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2008, she has built commercial and academic experience of automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding and human-computer dialogue systems. 

Catherine has previously worked at Cambridge University, Toshiba Research, Amazon Alexa, and Cobalt Speech. 

She is excited by the application of research to real-world problems involving speech and language at scale. 

Buster is the founder of FruitPunch AI, the global community teaching and applying AI for Good through real-world challenges with partners like the European Space Agency and the wildlife rangers of South Africa (1,500 AI engineers and growing).

Buster has an academic background in brain computer interfacing at Eindhoven University of Technology where he helped to build the AI Research Institute (EAISI) and now works full time at FruitPunch AI after attracting VC funding.

Berna (she/her) is a Legal Advisor at ECNL specialized in human rights, civic freedoms and community engagement and empowerment strategies. She works at the different intersections of ECNL’s work on civic space, technology and counter terrorism. More specifically, she focusses on the impact of counter terrorism and/or technology related legislation and policies on civil society and coordinates ECNL’s capacity building activities for (non-digital) civil society groups. Before joining ECNL, she worked as a network coordinator of the Human Rights NGO platform in the Netherlands (Breed Mensenrechten Overleg – BMO) focusing on (global) civic space trends. She has also worked as a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam teaching ethics and philosophy of law, human rights, and politics.

Jill Toh is co-founder and secretary of the Racism and Technology Center, a non-profit organisation based in Amsterdam. She is also a PhD researcher at the Institute for Information Law (University of Amsterdam), and her interdisciplinary research looks at data governance and algorithmic management in the platform economy. In particular, it explores the constitutive and transformative potential of the law to construct worker power towards social justice ends.

Mobility Project

In the mobility project, we aim to develop machine learning algorithms that extract mobility patterns, measure mobility poverty, and recommend flows to eliminate it.

About him:

Dimitris obtained his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and his master’s degree in Data Science at the University of Amsterdam. Prior to joining the Civic-AI lab, he has worked as a software engineer, a web developer, and a data analyst. His research interests include tackling social inequalities, facilitating public service, and promoting data literacy.

After an initial career in derivatives trading in Brussels and London, Patrick did a professional reboot into IT, IT project Management and ultimately sales of complex B2B SaaS software solutions, with companies such as BirchStreet Systems, Ivalua Inc, Ivalua SAS and Zycus Infotech. In each of these roles, his main deliverable has been sales growth and sales team growth. Today, Patrick brings his experience to Predictive Layer as Chief Commercial Officer, working closely with the founders to execute the corporate strategy. Patrick is based in the Netherlands and, in his spare time, enjoys travel, gastronomy, photography and music, together with his wife.

Patrick St-Amant is the CTO and cofounder of Zetane. He is the inventor of Zetane’s technology and leads the development of Zetane Protector (ML model robustness testing and evaluation) and Zetane Insight Engine (model introspection 3D engine). He has successfully led over 15 end-to-end ML projects with industrial clients and partners in the fields of defense, aerospace, construction, energy, 3D simulation and manufacturing. Over the last five years, he met with over 200 leaders and data scientists in the field of AI and ML. Before Zetane, he was a passionate mathematics professor that supervised over 100 student projects which each led to novel mathematical discoveries. He did PhD studies in mathematics (category theory) at the University of Ottawa (2007). He was invited to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2006 & 2007) where he presented his work on a new universal mathematical language. He has a MSc degree in computer science and mathematics (UQAM) and holds the patent “Scalable Transform Processing Unit for Heterogeneous Data”.

Florens Greßner, is a Mathematician with the focus on Statistics and Optimization. After diving  into the abstracts of academic Mathematics he realized that real world applications, such as Machine Learning, suffer from the absence of profound mathematical understanding and a structured approach towards optimizing respective quality parameters.

At the age of 22 he co-founded neurocat to concentrate his efforts to pave the way for a safe and innovative future, by consulting the industry in risk assessment, robustness, and interpretability of AI systems. For 5 years he gained experience in AI Quality Consulting and the development of respective Test Methods and Strategies in several domains such as Automated Driving, Unmanned Aircraft, Chatbots, Voice Assistants and Virtual Sensors.

Pieter Luitjens has a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Mathematics and a Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Western Australia as well as a Masters from the University of Toronto. He worked on software for Mercedes-Benz and developed the first deep learning algorithms for traffic sign recognition deployed in cars made by one of the most prestigious car manufacturers in the world. He has over 10 years of engineering experience with code deployed in multi-billion dollar industrial projects. Pieter specializes in ML edge deployment & model optimization for resource-constrained environments.

Senior Product Manager for the Open Telekom Cloud

Since 2020 joining Open Telekom Cloud(OTC) Product Management Team and striving to keep the OTC as one of the most successful clouds in Europe. Most of my activities are related to increase revenue, Sales, Marketing and deliver vision for XaaS and Artificial Intelligence services@OTC. I am responsible at the moment for 16 amazing Cloud Services(AOM, CES, CSS, CTS, DCS, DDS, DIS, DRS, DMS, LTS, MRS, RDS, RMS, SMN, TMS & ModelArts).

I was in the past as Speaker in 2018  @CERN, Switzerland; @SURFsara, Amsterdam and @DESY,Hamburg for HelixNebula SciCloud focused on HPC-aaS for LOFAR project.

I’ve been working in the Big Data and AI team for 2 years now and have been in the AI industry since 2017.

I graduated as an electrical engineer but at the university I participated in more and more AI projects and I worked on AI projects such as recommendation systems, intelligent search engines built from studies, smart camera systems using Raspberry Pis, chatbot development using NLPs, image classification and generation using CNNs and GANs. Nowadays I’m getting involved in more and more DevOps projects.

She has more than 7 years of experience in project management and cascade funding calls in EU projects focused on supporting the deep tech ecosystem in verticals such as AI, IoT, Robotics, Industry 4.0 and Digitization. Currently responsible for coordinating a team of Project Managers involved in AI-related projects.

Project Manager at FundingBox since 2018 managing cascade funding, tech transfer programmes and community building activities in H2020 projects. Currently with particular focus on Artificial intelligence (I-NERGY) and NGI (eSSIF-Lab) domains. Thomas is a Project Manager and Business Developer with extensive international experience having previously in his career co-founded a tech startup in the creative industries and worked with SaaS and digital content startups, marketing agencies, brands and media.

Project Manager at Fundingbox, since 2007 she has been involved in innovation, IT and R&D projects on the national and international levels. She has 4 years of experience in managing the cascade funding calls in EU projects with a particular focus on the Artificial intelligence domain ( AI4EU, StairwAI and ELISE ).

Kim is a strategic leader with a passion for technology and its impact on the world. With roots in advertising, communications and behavioural psychology, Kim has cultivated a career in global marketing, product development, experiential design and business strategy. 

Prior to joining Humanising Autonomy, Kim co-founded a conference firm aimed at incubating nascent industries and built the events and experiences team and strategy at WIRED UK.

Wouter Kroese studied both medicine and logic, and founded Pacmed after participating in the Dutch National ThinkTank together with Willem Herter and Hidde Hovenkamp. 

Wouter is responsible for all medical matters at Pacmed, ranging from long term strategy to setting up medical partnerships. 

Pacmed develops and implements AI based clinical decision support systems to help doctors have their patients leave the ICU healthy and in time and to reduce the pressure on hospital personnel and capacity. 

Pacmed has recently successfully launched the first version of their product Pacmed Critical that supports safe and timely discharge from the ICU in the Amsterdam UMC and is currently implementing and improving their software in a large collaboration in the Santeon group.

Sharon O’Dea, Founder, Lithos Partners Sharon O’Dea is an experienced digital strategist, advising complex organizations on digital workplace technologies and the future of work.

A regular writer and speaker on the role of digital in a changing world of work, Sharon is co-author of two books and host of Fujitsu’s Future of Work podcast series. She was was a founding member of the CIPR’s AI in PR panel, looking at the impact of artificial intelligence on the communications profession.

Organisations Sharon has collaborated with include HSBC, Credit Suisse, Allen & Overy, Standard Chartered Bank, Shell, DSM, Barnardo’s, the Houses of Parliament, UK Research and Innovation and the Department for International Trade.

Founder at Meerkat, an AI driven recruitment platform. Meerkat is a Machine Learning platform that learns from your previous successful and unsuccessful matches. The Machine Learning model is developed using the BERT Language model which is a transformers based learning technique for natural language processing.

Hajo is an entrepreneur who operates as an international leader in the field of technology and human behavior. Hajo combines commercial focus with user centered design principles growing projects and organizations from basic ideas to internationally scaled-up successful enterprises. Hajo’s passion and purpose is building creative teams around new tech driven ideas with the goal of influencing people’s lives. Hajo is a member of the World Economic Forum group of Young Global Leaders since 2014 and has been trained at Harvard, Oxford, Singularity University, Insead, and THNK. Hajo is the co-author of many publications on the use of mobile technologies in emerging markets and received a UN leadership award from the deputy Secretary General in 2014 for his work. Hajo is also involved as a shareholder and advisor for SingularityU in the Benelux region.

Vaikkunth Mugunthan is the CEO and Co-Founder of DynamoFL. He spearheads the AI/ML research team at DynamoFL and focuses on training personalized and privacy-preserving ML models using federated learning and differential privacy. Vaikkunth received his SM and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Adriana Bora is a PhD Candidate in the School of Mathematical Sciences at the Queensland University of Technology, and the Project Lead of Project AIMS (AI against Modern Slavery) developed now at Mila, AI for Humanity.

Adriana is listed as one of the 20 Rising Stars in AI Ethics 2022 and won the UNESCO International Research Centre in Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI)’s AI Award 2021 for her efforts to develop AI solutions to combat modern slavery, contributing to SDG 8, Target 8.7.

Her research focuses on applying machine learning in analysing and benchmarking the businesses’ reports published following the Modern Slavery Acts from the UK and Australia.

Throughout her membership and involvement in Code 8.7, DataJam, Traffick Analysis Hub and the MIT Computational Law Report Task Force on Modern Slavery, she has been working and connecting an interdisciplinary, global community, collaborating in the fight against modern slavery with technological-driven solutions.

Adriana is also the Queensland Community Lead of Women in AI (WAI) Australia, working towards increasing female representation and participation in AI.

Adriana holds a Master’s Degree in International Public Management from Sciences Po Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA). She has also studied at the University of Hong Kong and holds a diploma in International Relations and Advanced Quantitative Methods from the University of Essex.

Daan is a scientific researcher in AI by training and is now working for the City of Amsterdam. He has a Ph.D. from Maastricht University and moved to Amsterdam after a short time in the UK.

As part of the founding team of Bundles and Batches, Marnix works on the missing fundamental of analytical data processing: software that binds data to the context needed to understand and process it. Context-bound data in combination with context-bound transformations unlocks the type of large-scale collaborations we know and love from software engineering, but that are still missing from analytical data processing. Previously, Marnix was co-founder of Cubonacci, a code-first MLOps startup and Maneros, a data science engineering consultancy, focusing on operationalising data science and advanced analytics.

Laurens is the Tech Lead of the Computer Vision Team for the City of Amsterdam. As a background, Laurens obtained a master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam, where he was able to publish his thesis at one of the biggest computer vision conferences (ICCV). After that, he worked as a Machine Learning Engineer at Research & Development for autonomous driving at TomTom. For the City of Amsterdam, Laurens started in the AI team, where he built prototypes for blurring algorithms and garbage detection. Thereafter, he co-founded the Computer Vision Team, which aims to create valuable machine learning solutions to detect relevant objects in the public space in an ethical manner. These solutions will contribute to the goals of the municipality to improve the livability, cleanliness and safety of the city.

Guido is co-founder and Teamlead of the Computer Vision team within the Municipality of Amsterdam. Guido has a Master of Science degree in both Business Studies – specialization Strategy and organizational development- and Sociology – specialization comparative organization and labour studies – at the University of Amsterdam. He is an experienced organizational (AI) team manager and organizational developer. His most important motivation is to make a difference in the lives of citizens and organizations. As an organizational leader he helps organizations create high performance teams and fun places to work. As an organizational developer he focuses on centralizing the needs of the customer in order to develop valuable solutions through AI.

Bart is a Product Owner and Legal Advisor for the municipality of Amsterdam. He was involved in the development of several predictive machine learning models. As part of his work, he created an AI framework that focuses on the ethical, legal and governance parts of AI. Together with a dedicated team, he also worked on a method to detect bias and how to mitigate this to acceptable levels.
Currently he is part of the Computer Vision Team. This team creates solutions for the municipality by detecting relevant objects in the public space. By combining these detection with other data, public servants can use this information to keep the city livable, safe and clean more effectively. Next to the legal aspects on this project, he is responsible for the gathering of the necessary data from the public space. His focus is to organize this in a more compliant, ethical and acceptable way.

Michael Radvany is a high-energy leader with vast experience across mega-corporations within the technology sector.

Leading delivery and business development of multi-million-euro projects, Michael has achieved tremendously impactful results. Due to personal motivation related to his daughter, he decided to dedicate his corporate expertise towards an inclusive, ethic AI.

His initiative aims to combine the technology and social domains by providing thousands from the Autistic Spectrum community what they need most: pride, self-confidence, appreciation, and inclusivity. With this goal, Michael founded Spectrum Intelligence, an entity that combines strong technological (AI domain, data annotation services), social and economic impact The autistic spectrum contributors can excel in this domain, matching one to one the activities requirements. Michael is fully convinced that the most successful companies, organizations and economies are the ones that combine technology and economy with the social impact. Michael is a true leader in the path towards an inclusive society and inclusive economy.

Yoshua Bengio is Full Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), CIFAR Program co-director of the CIFAR program on Learning in Machines and Brains,  Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms. His main research ambition is to understand principles of learning that yield intelligence. He supervises a large group of graduate students and post-docs. His research is widely cited (over 80000 citations found by Google Scholar in September 2017, with an H-index of 101).

Yoshua Bengio is currently action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research, associate editor for the Neural Computation journal, editor for Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning, and has been associate editor for the Machine Learning Journal and the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks.

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.

Rediet Abebe is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University, where she was advised by Jon Kleinberg, as well as an M.S. in applied mathematics from Harvard University, an M.A. in mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. in mathematics from Harvard College. Her research is broadly in the fields of artificial intelligence and algorithms, with a focus on discrete algorithms, optimization, network and computational science, and their applications to equity and social good concerns. As part of this research agenda, she co-founded and co-organizes Mechanism Design for Social Good (MD4SG), a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary research initiative working to improve access to opportunity for historically underserved and disadvantaged communities. This initiative has participants from over 100 institutions in 20 countries and has been supported by organizations including Schmidt Futures, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Abebe’s work has informed policy and practice at various organizations including the National Institute of Health and the Ethiopian Ministry of Education. Throughout 2019, she served on the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director Working Group on AI, whose recommendations were unanimously approved by the General Director’s advisory committee. Abebe was recently named one of 35 Innovators Under 35 by the MIT Technology Review. She has also been honored by ELLE as a woman transforming technology and the 2019 Bloomberg 50 list as a “one to watch.” She has recently presented her research in venues including the National Academy of Sciences, the United Nations, and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2017, Abebe co-founded Black in AI, a non-profit organization tackling representation and inclusion issues in the field. Her research is deeply influenced by her upbringing in her hometown of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 

Manuela M. Veloso is the firmwide Head of AI Research, which pursues fundamental research in areas of core relevance to financial services, including data mining and cryptography, machine learning, explainability, and human-AI interaction. The team partners with applied data analytics teams across the firm as well as with leading academic institutions globally.

Professor Veloso is on leave from Carnegie Mellon University as the Herbert A. Simon University Professor in the School of Computer Science, and the past Head of the Machine Learning Department.

With her students, she had led research in AI, with a focus on robotics and machine learning, having concretely researched and developed a variety of autonomous robots, including teams of soccer robots, and mobile service robots. Her robot soccer teams have been RoboCup world champions several times, and the CoBot mobile robots have autonomously navigated for more than 1,000km in university buildings.

Professor Veloso is the Past President of AAAI, and the co-founder, Trustee, and Past President of RoboCup. Professor Veloso has been recognized with a multiple honours, including being a Fellow of the AAAI, AAAS, ACM, IEEE. She is the recipient of several best paper awards, the Einstein Chair of the Chinese Academy of Science, the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award, an NSF Career Award, and the Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research.

Stuart Russell is a pioneer in the understanding and uses of artificial intelligence (AI), its long-term future, and its relation to humanity. He also is a leading authority on robotics and bioinformatics.

Stuart Russell is the author or coauthor of three books on knowledge, reasoning, and machine learning, including the standard textbook on artificial intelligence. Stuart Russell is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC-Berkeley and Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at UC-San Francisco.

Artificial intelligence. AI is a machine’s ability to perceive its environment and use that information to maximise its chance at succeeding at some goal. All of the technologies behind artificial intelligence are evolving at exponential rates and are just now beginning to rocket up the curve. Soon artificially intelligent machines will be doing things we can barely conceive, in virtually every area of human business, life, and culture. Few people understand this future better than Stuart Russell, who wrote the standard textbook on AI (with coauthor Peter Norvig), now in its third edition.

Robotics. Stuart Russell is also a leading researcher in the practical applications of machine intelligence. If AI is the brain of the machine of the future, the robot is its body. Robots are taking over more and more functions that once required a human actor, with far-reaching consequences — and opportunities — for people, businesses, and society as a whole. He has focused recently on the threat of autonomous weaponry.

Biological information. As an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery, Stuart has been researching computational physiology, with a current focus on Intensive Care Unit monitoring systems. He is a leader in the development of technologies that make sense of biological data and that apply this information in ways that advance human health.

Credentials. In addition to the positions already mentioned, Stuart Russell holds the SmithZadeh Chair in Engineering at UC-Berkeley and is Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Council on AI and Robotics. He is the recipient of many awards and held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris from 2012 to 2014. He is a researcher at a number of research centers, including the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR), the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), and the Synthetic Biology Institute (SBI). He is the founder and Vice-President of Bayesian Logic, Inc., a data analysis start-up under contract with the UN to build a new Nuclear Test Ban Treaty global monitoring system.

Kai-Fu Lee is the Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and New York Times bestselling author of AI Superpowers. Lee was formerly 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. Joseph Sirosh is the CTO for Microsoft AI. Prior to this role, he has served as a Corporate Vice President of the AI and Data Platform at Microsoft responsible for Databases, Big Data, Machine Learning Cognitive Services, Bot Services and Information Management, and as the Vice President of the Global Inventory Platform at Amazon where he also spent nearly 9 years in various roles including building internal Machine Learning platforms. Prior to Amazon he was the VP of R&D at Fair Isaac Corporation. He holds a PhD in Neural Networks from the University of Texas at Austin and a BTech from Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai.

Hui Xiong is a Professor at Rutgers University, and is currently on leave and serving as head of Business Intelligence Lab and Talent Intelligence Center at Baidu Inc. His research interests include data mining, mobile computing, and their applications in business. He has authored over 200 research articles, and co-edited or coauthored 4 books including the widely used Encyclopedia of GIS, which has been recognized as the Top 10 Most Popular Computer Science Book authored by Chinese scholars at Springer. Dr. Xiong has served as chair/co-chair for many international conferences in data mining, including a Program Co-Chair (2013) and a General Co-Chair (2015) for the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), and a Program Co-Chair of the Research Track (2018) and the Industry Track (2012) for the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). Dr. Xiong’s research has generated substantive impact beyond academia. He is an ACM distinguished scientist and has been honored by the 2018 Ram Charan Management Practice Award as the Grand Prix winner from the Harvard Business Review, the 2017 IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Award, and the ICDM-2011 Best Research Paper Award.

Nicola Mendelsohn is currently the Vice President for Europe, Middle East, and Africa for Facebook. A role she has held since 2013. She is also a non-executive of Diageo, serves on the UK government’s Digital Economy Council, the Mayor of London’s Business Advisory Board, and is co-president of the charity Norwood.

In 2019, Nicola founded and launched the Follicular Lymphoma Foundation, a charity focused solely on raising funds to help the thousands of people living with Follicular Lymphoma to live well and get well.

Prior to joining Facebook Nicola worked in advertising for over 20 years working at BBH, Grey and Karmarama. Prior roles include: first female President of the IPA (the advertising industry trade body), Trustee of The White Ribbon Alliance, Chairman of Women’s Aid Development Board and President of the Women in Advertising and Communications London club (WACL). She was also a Director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and Co-Chair of the UK Governments Creative Industries Council. In 2015 she was awarded a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) for services to the creative industries in the UK. Her greatest joy in life comes from her husband Jon and her four children Gabi, Danny, Sam and Zac.

Meredith Whittaker is the Minderoo Research Professor at New York University and the founder of Google’s Open Research group.

Her research and advocacy focus on the social implications of artificial intelligence and the tech industry responsible for it, with a particular emphasis on power and the political economy driving the commercialization of computational technology. Prior to NYU, she worked at Google for over a decade, where she led product and engineering teams, founded Google’s Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab, a globally distributed network measurement platform that now provides the world’s largest source of open data on internet performance. She also worked extensively on issues of privacy and security, helping provide funding, strategy, and support for efforts dedicated to providing privacy from governments and large tech corporations. As a long-time tech worker, she also helped lead labor organizing at Google. She was one of the core organizers pushing back against Google’s military contracts, the company’s insufficient response to concerns about AI and its harms, and was a central organizer of the Google Walkout. She continues to work in solidarity with organizers in tech, driven by the belief that worker power and collective action are necessary to ensure meaningful tech accountability, especially in the context of concentrated industrial power. She has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations on artificial intelligence, internet policy, measurement, privacy, and security.

Timnit is currently a research scientist at Google in the ethical AI team. Prior to that Timnit did a postdoc at Microsoft Research, New York City in the FATE (Fairness Transparency Accountability and Ethics in AI) group, where she studied algorithmic bias and the ethical implications underlying any data mining project (see this New York Times article for an example of my work). She received her PhD from the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, studying computer vision under Fei-Fei Li. Timnit’s thesis pertains to data mining large scale publicly available images to gain sociological insight, and working on computer vision problems that arise as a result. The Economist, The New York Times and others have covered part of this work. Some of the computer vision areas Timnit is interested in include fine-grained image recognition, scalable annotation of images, and domain adaptation. Prior to joining Fei-Fei’s lab she worked at Apple designing circuits and signal processing algorithms for various Apple products including the first iPad. Timnit also spent an obligatory year as an entrepreneur (as all Stanford undergrads seem to do). Her research was supported by the NSF foundation GRFP fellowship and the Stanford DARE fellowship

Grady Booch is Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM Research where he leads IBM’s research and development on embodied cognition. Having originated the term and the practice of object-oriented design, he is best known for his work in advancing the fields of software engineering and software architecture. A co-author of the Unified Modeling Language (UML), a founding member of the Agile Alliance, and a founding member of the Hillside Group, Grady has published six books and several hundred technical articles, including an ongoing column for IEEE Software and IEEE Spectrum. Grady is also a trustee for the Computer History Museum. He is an IBM Fellow, an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, has been awarded the Lovelace Medal and given the Turing Lecture for the BCS, and was named an IEEE Computer Pioneer for his work in software architecture.

Grady has served as an architect or architectural mentor for a multitude of complex software-intensive systems across many domains around the world, including finance, transportation, defense, commerce, productivity, government, medical, gaming, animation, software development, artificial intelligence, and many others.

Grady is currently developing a major transmedia documentary for public broadcast on the intersection of computing and the human experience: Computing.

Head of JDX Silicon Valley Research Center

Dr. Hui Cheng is the Head of JD.com’s JD-X Silicon Valley Research Center and the Head of JD.com Silicon Valley Innovation Center, where he leads teams working on technologies that will revolutionize E-commerce and Logistics. JD-X is developing autonomous ground delivery vehicles, delivery drones and warehouse robotic systems, all powered by artificial intelligence, advanced robotics and computer vision. Dr. Cheng also serves on the board of directors of a high-flying AI and robotics startup company.

Prior to JD, Dr. Cheng was Senior Research Manager of Amazon Go where the new grab-and-go shopping experience was first developed. He was also the Program Director and head of the Cognitive and Adaptive Vision System Group at SRI International where he led more than 30 client-sponsored R&D programs in many areas including social medial analysis, video understanding, cloud-based Big Data analysis, AR/VR, mobile authentication, mobile activity understanding, media forensic, etc.

Dr. Cheng received his Ph.D degree from Purdue University. He has more than 60 publications and holds more than 30 patents.

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, as Mastercard increasingly looks 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.

Global Senior Managing Director, Accenture Labs

Marc Carrel-Billiard is the Global Senior Managing Director of Accenture Labs, the company’s dedicated R&D organization. In his role, he also directs Accenture’s annual Technology Vision research, which looks at the future of enterprise technology.

Marc has been with Accenture for nearly 20 years and has worked across all the five industries we serve. Before taking on leadership of Technology R&D, Marc was the global lead for Emerging Technology in Accenture. He has held several global leadership roles within Accenture’s technology group, including within Application Portfolio Optimization and SOA/Integration Architecture. He has worked across several cutting-edge areas of IT including voice recognition, knowledge-based systems and neural networks.

Marc is one of a select group of Accenture certified Master Technology Architects, and is also a Solution Architect and Select Quality Assurance director. He has broad software engineering and delivery experience, particularly in areas such as component and object-oriented technologies.

Before joining Accenture in 1998, Marc was part of IBM Global Services where he published several articles and books on C++ and Java programming with Prentice Hall. Marc currently is based in Accenture’s Labs in Sophia Antipolis, France. He lives in Vence, France with his wife and his passions include photography and hiking.

Jaan Tallinn is a founding engineer of Skype and Kazaa. He founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk with Huw Price and Martin Rees. He is also a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute and philanthropically supports other existential risk research organizations. He is also a partner at Ambient Sound Investments (asi.ee), an active angel investor, and has served on the Estonian President’s Academic Advisory Board.

He has given a number of high-profile talks highlighting the potential risk from advances in artificial intelligence.

Chief Scientist

Silvio Schembri is an elected Maltese politician and academic currently serving as a Junior Minister for Financial Services, Digital Economy & Innovation within the Maltese Government. Hon. Schembri was born in Luqa, the second child among four siblings. His father John Schembri has occupied the office of Mayor of Luqa since 2001. Silvio is an experienced lecturer in Economics with a demonstrated history of working in the higher education industry. He is skilled in political communications, negotiations, sustainable development, political science, and analytical skills. He has a Master of Arts and a Bachelors Degree of Honours focused in Economics from the University of Malta.

Cédric O was born on December 18th, 1982 in l’Arbresle and graduated from HEC Paris in 2006. He is a founding member of En Marche! political movement and has served on its Executive Board since its establishment. In May 2017, he joined both the Office of the President and the Office of the Prime Minister, as an advisor for State’s holdings and the digital economy.

On March 31st, 2019, he was appointed Minister of State for Digital Affairs. His three priorities are the support and development of the digital economy in France, regulatory policies and the promotion of digital inclusion.

On July 26th, 2020, as part of Prime Minister Jean Castex’s Government, he was appointed Minister of State for the Digital Transition and Electronic Communications, in addition to his former responsibilities. He is now in charge of the digital economy, regulatory policies and all types of telecommunications, from infrastructure to daily use by the French people.

Former Vice President

Neelie Kroes has served as a Director since May 2016. Ms. Kroes is the former Vice President of the European Commission, European Commissioner for Competition and European Commission for Digital Agenda. Ms. Kroes served as Commissioner for Competition from 2004 to 2010 and as Vice President and Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society from 2010 to 2014. Prior to joining the European Commission, Ms. Kroes served in the Dutch House of Representatives and as State Secretary and Cabinet Minister.

She is currently a member of the Global Policy Advisory Board of Uber Technologies, Inc. She is also a member of the Advisory Board of Bank of America Merrill Lynch and a member of the Finance Committee of Rijksmuseum Fonds (Amsterdam). Ms. Kroes previously served on the boards of Lucent Netherlands, AB Volvo and McDonald’s Netherlands and was the chairperson of Nyenrode University. Ms. Kroes received her M.S. in Economics from Erasmus University.

Mona Keijzer began her career in January 1991 as a legal policy officer serving the municipality of Waterland. From 1993 to 1994 she was a management trainee at Leiden University. She then held legal positions at the Gelderland Environment Inspectorate and the municipality of Almere.

In 1998 Ms Keijzer became a member of the municipal executive and deputy mayor of the municipality of Waterland. In 2006 she began working as a lawyer and certified mediator at the law firm Abma Schreurs Advocaten en Notarissen in Purmerend. In 2007 she became a member of the Purmerend municipal executive.

In 2012 Ms Keijzer became a member of parliament for the Christian Democratic Alliance (CDA), with policy responsibility for chronic care for older and disabled people, and later became spokesperson for hospital care and asylum, migration and integration policy.

On 26 October 2017 Mona Keijzer was appointed State Secretary for Economic Affairs and Climate Policy in the third Rutte government.
Party political positions and outside activities

Ms Keijzer was a member of the CDA strategic council (which in 2012 presented proposals to take the party in a new direction over the next 10 to 15 years), served on the general board of the North Holland CDA, and chaired the national CDA party committee for the 2010 municipal elections. She was also deputy chair of the committee for the 2002 municipal elections. From 1994 to 1998 she was a member of the Waterland municipal council for the CDA, spending the last two years as leader of the CDA group.

Other roles she has held include secretary of the board of the Wethoudersvereniging (the association of members of municipal executives), member of the general board of the Hoogheemraadschap Uitwaterende Sluizen (a water authority) and chair and member of the supervisory board of the Stichting CPOW (a group of Christian primary schools).

Assistant Professor and High-Level Expert Group on AI

Co-Director at Foundation for Responsible Robotics & Co-Founder of ALLAI Netherlands

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.

Ms Stefania Giannini was appointed UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education in May 2018, becoming the top UN official in the field. In this position, she provides strategic vision and leadership for UNESCO in coordinating and monitoring the implementation of the Education 2030 Agenda, encapsulated in Sustainable Development Goal 4.

With an academic background in the Humanities, Ms Giannini has served as Rector of the University for Foreigners of Perugia (2004 – 2012), being one of the first and youngest women to hold this position in Italy. As Senator of the Republic of Italy (2013 – 2018) and Minister of Education, Universities and Research (2014 – 2016), she developed and implemented a structural reform of the Italian education system, centred on social inclusion and cultural awareness. She has also been closely involved in an advisory capacity with the European Commissioner for Research and Innovation.

Dr. Peter Lee is Corporate Vice President, Research and Incubations, at Microsoft. He leads Microsoft Research across its eight laboratories around the world. He also oversees several incubation teams for new research-powered lines of business, the largest of which today is Microsoft’s growing healthcare and life sciences effort. Dr. Lee has extensive experience in managing fundamental research to commercial impact in a range of areas, spanning artificial intelligence, to quantum computing, to biotechnology, and more. Before joining Microsoft in 2010, he was at DARPA, where he established a new technology office that created operational capabilities in machine learning, data science, and computational social science. From 1987 to 2005 he was a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and from 2005 to 2008 the Head of the university’s computer science department. Today, in addition to his management responsibilities, Dr. Lee speaks and writes widely on technology trends and policies. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He serves on the Boards of Directors of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine, and the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. In public service, Dr. Lee was a commissioner on President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity and led several studies for both PCAST and the National Academies on the impact of federal research investments on economic growth. He has testified before both the US House Science and Technology Committee and the US Senate Commerce Committee.

VP Strategy & Business Development Intelligent Computing BU

Jiang Tao is the vice president of Huawei Intelligent Computing BU, responsible for the strategy & business development.
Over 18 years of experience in ICT industry. Currently responsible for the strategy and business development of intelligent computing products and solutions, including AI module, inference/training board, edge computing equipment, mobile vehicle computing platform, x86 Server, ARM server, AI server etc.
Prior to Huawei, Jiang Tao acquired a master degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

Dr. Rumman Chowdhury’s passion lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and humanity. She is a pioneer in the field of applied algorithmic ethics, creating cutting-edge enterprise technical solutions for ethical, explainable and transparent AI since 2017.

She is currently the Director of the META (ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability) team at Twitter as well as GP of a venture capital fund, Parity Responsible Innovation Fund, that invests in early-stage responsible technology startups. She was previously CEO and founder of Parity AI, an enterprise algorithmic audit platform company and formerly served as Global Lead for Responsible AI at Accenture Applied Intelligence.  

Rumman has been featured in international media, including the the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, NPR, MIT Sloan Magazine, MIT Technology Review, BBC, Axios, Cheddar TV, CRN, The Verge, Fast Company, Quartz, Corrierre Della Serra, Optio, Australian Broadcasting Channel and Nikkei Business Times. She has been recognized as one of BBC’s 100 Women, Bay Area’s top 40 under 40, and honoured to be inducted to the British Royal Society of the Arts (RSA). She has also been named by Forbes as one of Five Who are Shaping AI. 

As service to the field and the larger community, she serves on the board of Oxford University’s Commission on AI and Governance, the University of Virginia’s Data Science Program, and Patterns, a data science journal by the publishers of Cell. 

Dr. Chowdhury holds two undergraduate degrees from MIT, a master’s degree in Quantitative Methods of the Social Sciences from Columbia University, and a doctorate in political science from the University of California, San Diego. You can follow her on Twitter @ruhowdh

Dr. Steve Chien is Technical Group Supervisor of the Artificial Intelligence Group and Senior Research Scientist 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 is also Adjunct Faculty with the Department of Computer Science of the University of Southern California and previously was a Visiting Scholar with the Department of Computer Science of the University of California at Los Angeles. He holds a B.S. with Highest Honours in Computer Science, with minors in Mathematics and Economics, M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, all from the University of Illinois. 

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 Honourable 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 inaugural 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 Honourable 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.

Gary Marcus, scientist, bestselling author, and entrepreneur, was CEO and Founder of the machine-learning startup Geometric Intelligence, recently acquired by Uber, and is known for his provocative and bold claims in artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Trained by Steven Pinker, he received his PhD at MIT at age 23. His professional research, published in leading journals such as Science, Nature, Cognition, and Artificial Intelligence, has focused on the foundations of cognition in humans, animals and machines, spanning fields from developmental psychology to neuroscience to genetics to artificial intelligence. A special interest has been on the challenge of endowing machines with common sense.

He is also well-known for his writing for the general public, including frequent essays and op-eds for The New Yorker and The New York Times. His books include The Algebraic Mind, The Birth of the Mind, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, The New York Times Bestseller, Guitar Zero and The Future of the Brain: Essays By The World’s Leading Neuroscientists.

In a 2012 essay for The New Yorker, he was perhaps the first person to publicly criticize deep learning, drawing on arguments he developed in his 2001 technical book The Algebraic Mind. More recently, in a 2018 arXiv article, Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal, he asked whether deep learning might be “approaching a wall.” The challenges he laid out there were covered everywhere from The
New York Times to Wired to The Financial Times and Wall Street Journal.

In another provocative 2012 essay, Moral Machines, Marcus was the first to adapt “trolley problems” to driverless cars, anticipating much recent research on the ethics of AI. His next book, REBOOT: Getting to AI We Can Trust, to be published by Pantheon in Fall 2019, co-authored with Ernie Davis, calls for a fundamental rethinking of current approaches to artificial intelligence.

Vice President, Berggruen Institute; Director, Berggruen Institute China Centre

Berggruen Institute provides a platform for top thinkers and opinion leaders from China and West to exchange ideas on the global challenges of our day. The institute’s areas of inquiry include the ethics artificial intelligence and the transformations of global governance. As a senior member of the Berggruen Institute, Ms. Song is responsible for the overall strategy and programmatic and institutional development of the China Center.

Prior to joining the Berggruen Institute, Ms. Song served in a senior country leadership position for Goldman Sachs’ China business. Earlier in her career, she did legal and public policy research in Singapore and China and published works on Chinese administrative law and competition law.

Mikhail Parakhin has been leading teams in AI innovation for some of the world’s top tech companies for over a decade. After several years at Microsoft leading the Bing Multimedia team, Mikhail brought his machine learning expertise to Yandex, one of Europe’s largest tech companies that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning.  As CTO of Yandex, Mikhail leads all technical teams globally for the company.  

Under his leadership, Yandex introduced the Machine Intelligence and Research (MIR) Division, which functions as a centralized, cross-functional unit to accelerate innovation and unify Yandex’s core machine learning technologies: MatrixNet (proprietary ML platform) and its development, CatBoost (best in class GBDT implementation), DaNet (DNN framework), computer vision, speech, and translation.  Yandex has also recently launched it’s intelligent assistant, Alice, and tested its driverless vehicle on the snowy roads of Moscow among other innovation milestones set to shape the future.

Mikhail brings his unique background in machine learning and coding plus specializations in Search, Image processing and Handwriting/Speech recognition algorithms to not only advance Yandex’s technologies and products but the global tech ecosystem.  Mikhail holds a Master’s in Physics from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute.

Celeste Kidd is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where her lab investigates learning and belief formation. The Kidd Lab is one of few in the world that combine technologically sophisticated behavioral experiments with computational models in order to broadly understand knowledge acquisition. Her lab employs a range of methods, including eye-tracking and touchscreen testing with human infants, in order to show how learners sample information from their environment and build knowledge gradually over time. Her work has been published in PNAS,Neuron, Psychological Science, Developmental Science, and elsewhere. Her lab has received funding from NSF, DARPA, Google, the Jacobs Foundation, the Human Frontiers Science Program, and the Templeton Foundation. She is a recipient of the American Psychological Science Rising Star designation, the Glushko Dissertation Prize in Cognitive Science, and the Cognitive Science Society Computational Modeling Prize in Perception/Action. Kidd was also named as one of TIME Magazines 2017 Persons of the Year as one of the “Silence Breakers” for her advocacy for better protections for students against sexual misconduct.

Itamar holds MSc and BSc (summa cum laude) in Computer Vision and Machine Learning from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology). His research interests include efficient video and image analysis, with focus on automated deep learning. Prior to Alibaba, Itamar was a serial entrepreneur, founding startups in the field of robotics, visual recognition and web development. He was a mentor in Microsoft Accelerator TLV, and he mentors Israeli leading AI startups in the fields of medical and drones. He holds several patents, and his research outcomes have been integrated into various products in Alibaba Group.

Kim Cobb, Ph.D. is the ADVANCE professor and Georgia Power faculty scholar in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. Her research uses corals and cave stalagmites to probe the mechanisms of past, present, and future climate change.

Cobb received her B.A. from Yale University in 1996 and her Ph.D. in oceanography from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in 2002. She spent two years at Caltech in the Department of Geological and Planetary Sciences before joining the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2004. Cobb has sailed on oceanographic cruises to the deep tropics and led caving expeditions to the rainforests of Borneo in support of her research.

She has received numerous awards for her research, most notably a NSF CAREER Award in 2007 and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2008. Cobb is an editor for Geophysical Research Letters, sits on the international CLIVAR Pacific Panel, and serves on the advisory council for the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Leshner Institute for Public Engagement.

As a mother to four, she is a strong advocate for women in science. Cobb is also devoted to the clear and frequent communication of climate change to the public through speaking engagements and social media.

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where I have taught since 2008. I am also the Research Director for Environmental Collaboration and Conflicts in the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC) at the Maxwell School. At Syracuse University, I am a faculty affiliate/associate across several programs and departments, such as Women’s and Gender Studies Department, International Relations Program, Center for Environmental Policy and Administration (CEPA), South Asia Center, Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, Tolley Humanities Faculty, Democratizing Knowledge Collective, and Asian/Asian-American Studies.

Prior to joining Syracuse University, I was a faculty member in the Department of Geography at King’s College London and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK. Before becoming an academic, I was a Programme Officer at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for a $26M large environment-development program in Bangladesh. I obtained my M.A. and Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Minnesota, where I was a John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow and International Water Management Institute (IWMI) Fellow. I obtained my A.B. (Cum Laude) in Geosciences and Environmental Studies from Princeton University.

As an internationally-recognized interdisciplinary scholar, I am broadly interested in nature-society relationships, political ecology, critical development studies, feminist theories, urban studies, climate change, water governance, social justice, human rights, citizenship, and South Asia. My work is informed by not only my background and training in the natural sciences, social sciences, and policy experience, but also from having lived and worked on three continents, being a post-colonial subject and scholar, and having a lifelong commitment to critical praxis and social justice. I am the recipient of the 2019 Glenda Laws award from the American Association of Geographers.

Sasha Costanza-Chock (pronouns: they/them or she/her) is a scholar, activist, and media-maker, and currently Associate Professor of Civic Media at MIT. They are a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Faculty Affiliate with the MIT Open Documentary Lab and the MIT Center for Civic Media, and creator of the MIT Codesign Studio (codesign.mit.edu). Their work focuses on social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha’s first book, Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement, was published by the MIT Press in 2014. They are a board member of Allied Media Projects (AMP); AMP convenes the annual Allied Media Conference and cultivates media strategies for a more just, creative and collaborative world (alliedmedia.org).