Giovanni Abramo holds undergraduate and postgraduate degrees respectively in engineering from the University of Rome “Sapienza” in Italy, and in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S. He is acting director of the Institute for System Analysis and Computer Science (IASI) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR); founder of the IASI Laboratory for Studies in Research Evaluation (https://sites.google.com/view/laboratoriortt); and founder and president of the CNR spin-off company “Research Value”.

He is also Honorary Professor at Waikato Management School, the University of Waikato, New Zealand; and Adjunct Professor of Management of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy. He has acted as a consultant to the European Commission, the United Nations, and a number of national and local government administrations and multinational corporations. His research interests focus on quantitative studies of science, with concentration in evaluative scientometrics aimed at informing research management and policy.

Tülay Adali received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA, in 1992 and joined the faculty at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), Baltimore, MD, the same year.

She is currently a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at UMBC. She has been very active within the IEEE and is currently serving as the Vice President for Technical Directions of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

Prof. Adali is a Fellow of the IEEE and the AIMBE, a Fulbright Scholar, and an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer. She is the recipient of a 2021 Humboldt Research Award, 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, 2013 University System of Maryland Regents' Award for Research, and an NSF CAREER Award. Her current research interests are in the areas of statistical signal processing, machine learning, and their applications with emphasis on applications in medical image analysis and fusion. 

Dr Peter Addo is an experienced data scientist, and has an extensive background in working with data, and emerging technologies in the developing contexts. Currently, he is the lead on Artificial Intelligence, and serves as the head of DataLab at the Innovation, Research And Knowledge (IRS) Directorate of the French Development Agency (AFD), Paris, France.

He leads efforts to provide advisory and actionable research on harnessing data and the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) driven by artificial intelligence (AI) for a sustainable development agenda, both broadening and deepening current action of Groupe AFD. He is a member of several expert networks including the OECD Network of AI Experts.

Website: https://pmaddo.com

Mohammed AlQuraishi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Systems Biology and a member of Columbia’s Program for Mathematical Genomics, where he works at the intersection of machine learning, biophysics, and systems biology. The AlQuraishi Lab focuses on two biological perspectives: the molecular and systems levels. On the molecular side, the lab develops machine learning models for predicting protein structure and function, protein-ligand interactions, and learned representations of proteins and proteomes. On the systems side, the lab applies these models in a proteome-wide fashion to investigate the organization, combinatorial logic, and computational paradigms of signal transduction networks, how these networks vary in human populations, and how they are dysregulated in human diseases, particularly cancer.

Dr. AlQuraishi holds undergraduate degrees in biology, computer science, and mathematics. He earned an MS in statistics and a PhD in genetics from Stanford University. He subsequently joined the Systems Biology Department at Harvard Medical School as a Departmental Fellow and a Fellow in Systems Pharmacology, where he developed the first end-to-end differentiable model for learning protein structure from data. Prior to starting his academic career, Dr. AlQuraishi spent three years founding two startups in the mobile computing space. He joined the Columbia Faculty in 2020.

Elias Bareinboim is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Director of the Causal Artificial Intelligence Lab at Columbia University, New York. Before joining Columbia, he worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University.

He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) under the supervision of Professor Judea Pearl, where he also did his post-doctoral fellowship. He is a recipient of the prestigious NSF Career Award. His research area is in the domain of artificial intelligence, more specifically in causal inference.

Building on the modern language of causation that emerged in the last decades, his work develops a theoretical framework for understanding, representing, and algorithmizing causal generalizations from a heterogeneous mixture of observational and experimental studies.

Gregg co-founded an organisation that became the market leader in contract management systems in Africa and was selected to provide the E-commerce platform for the Southern African Development Community (SADC) common market. He headed the International Association for Contract and Commercial Management (IACCM) in Southern Africa to develop and advance contract and commercial management in the region.

Over the last decade Gregg has been engaged in data science and machine learning. This includes the establishment and management of data science and machine learning operations, working across people, process and technology, integrating structured and unstructured data to derive insights for research and business strategy.
He is a supporter of ELLIS and CLAIRE, and a participant in MLCommons, the Energy Efficient High Performance Computing Working Group (EE HPC WG), TinyML4D, and the OECD.AI Compute task force.

He holds an undergraduate degree from Oxford Brookes University in Marketing and Business Management, a Masters in Data Science from Northwestern University, and has completed the Professional Risk Manager (PRM) and Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) programs. Gregg serves as the Alumni Admission Council Director and the Global Ambassador for Northwestern University in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Jennifer manages the global public policy team at DeepMind, the London-based AI research lab. She works with governments and the policy community, supporting discussions about the governance of new technologies and ensuring that public interests in creating safe and ethical AI are reflected in DeepMind’s research.

She is a Member of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) "ONE AI" network of experts on AI.

Jennifer has worked at the intersection of public policy and technology for over a decade. She previously managed Google’s policy strategy team for media and intellectual property across the Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region.

Prior to that she held roles at Google focused on online content regulation in South Africa; U.S. federal policy in Washington, D.C.; and product legal operations in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has also worked at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington, D.C.

Marjory S. Blumenthal is a senior fellow and the director of the Technology and International Affairs program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 

In her previous position at RAND she had a broad portfolio of work centering on innovation and emerging technologies, including prospects for citizen science, safety for automated vehicles, research ethics, and opportunities and challenges presented by artificial intelligence. 

Prior to joining RAND, she was executive director of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, addressing such topics as biosecurity and public health, big data and privacy, R&D needs and associated infrastructure, and how technologies can assist with education, aging, and the evolution of cities. 

Trends, applications, and impacts of information technology have been a theme in all of her positions, especially her time as the founding executive director of the National Academies' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board.

Dr Aleks Berditchevskaia is the Principal Researcher at Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design. She is the lead author of the report, ‘The Future of Minds & Machines’, on combining human and machine intelligence for problem solving.

She is also a co-author of the ‘Playbook for Collective Intelligence Design’, a toolkit for creating projects that mobilise collective intelligence, which has been used to train over 370 staff as part of the UNDP's Accelerator Lab network. Prior to Nesta, Aleks worked in science policy, covering a range of topics from the role of citizen science in research and innovation to the societal implications of machine learning.

Aleks holds a PhD in Neuroscience from Imperial College London.

Tamay is a researcher at the Neil Thompson Lab at MIT studying the economics of Artificial Intelligence and Computing.

He previously led strategy for a technology startup, and completed an MPhil in Economics at the University of Cambridge.

Philipp Boeing is a Senior Researcher in the Department for Economics of Innovation and Industrial Dynamics at the ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research in Mannheim, Germany.

In his research, Dr. Boeing studies the role of incentives for innovation and the influence of innovation on firm performance and economic growth. His work is characterized by the combination of unique micro data, econometric analysis, and methodological advancements. He is particularly interested in policy evaluation, patent indicators, productivity, and import competition. With a strong empirical focus on China and its rise in the global economy, he maintains a critical understanding of the data-generating process and institutions in China.

His work has been published in leading journals, such as Research Policy and China Economic Review, and is covered by the media, including Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Wirtschaftswoche. Dr. Boeing reported expertise to delegates of Germany’s national parliament and provided policy advice, for example to the World Bank, OECD, and the German Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Chinese Economic and Business Studies.

Dr. Boeing earned a doctoral degree in economics and a master’s degree in international business from Frankfurt School in Germany and graduated from the Ruhr University Bochum with a bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies and economics. He visited Peking University for two years as Assistant Professor (full-time term faculty), is a Research Affiliate with IZA – Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, and a Fellow with Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Distinguished Expert in Data Intelligence in Atos, Cédric has a PhD background in Electronics and computer vision in 2016 on dedicated hardware technologies for embedded machine learning applications.

Cédric joined Atos in 2016 in the Big Data & Security division and had several positions such AI expertise for supercomputing domain or AI product manager and is now leading the High Performance AI Business Unit in Atos.

Tonio Buonassisi is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Director of the MIT PVLab, and Principal Investigator and Associate Director of Outreach at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). He is pioneering the application of artificial intelligence to develop new materials and systems for societally beneficial applications, ranging from solar energy to integrated circuits to novel classes of antibiotics.

His early-career research in solar photovoltaics and technoeconomic analysis assisted technology developments in dozens of companies, earning him a U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) bestowed by President Obama. In 2018, he spearheaded the creation of, and served as founding director of, the Accelerated Materials Development for Manufacturing (AMDM) programme in Singapore, a S$24.7M effort combining machine learning (ML), high-throughput experiments, and simulation to accelerate the rate of novel materials development by >10x. This effort led to the spin-off company Xinterra, and seeded applied ML efforts in the region. Since returning to MIT and SMART in 2019, his team applies ML to extract scientific knowledge from experimental data, create new materials with high societal value, and overcome practical manufacturing challenges pertaining to scale-up.

A recipient of the prestigious MIT Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, his passion for education is evidenced by the >179k views of his MIT OpenCourseware PV lectures series, as well as his recent YouTube channel to disseminate methods and ML code to accelerate materials research, entitled “Accelerated Materials Development for Manufacturing.”

Jungwon Byun is the COO and cofounder at Ought, a machine learning research lab automating and scaling open-ended reasoning. Ought is the creator of Elicit, an AI research assistant. Elicit uses language models like GPT-3 to automate parts of researchers’ workflows. Researchers in domains like tech policy, behavioral science, and cognitive science use Elicit to automate literature review, data annotation, and finding collaborators.

Prior to Ought, Jungwon was the Head of Growth at Upstart, the leader in using artificial intelligence and machine learning for consumer credit.

After completing degrees in chemistry and in quantum mechanics at the University of East Anglia, Hugh joined the Chemistry Department at the University of Victoria, Canada, in 1973. In 1984, he became Laboratory Officer in the Chemistry Faculty at the University of Oxford. He was subsequently appointed Lecturer in Physical Chemistry at Oriel College and Lecturer, Senior Chemistry Tutor and Supernumerary Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford.

He returned to Victoria in 2011 and, though now formally retired, continues to work on books and scientific publications related to the application of Artificial Intelligence to science. His book on the use of Artificial Intelligence in Chemistry was the first in its field, and he is the author or editor of several further books, as well as a range of journal, conference, and other articles.

Recent publications

• Machine Learning in Chemistry, Hugh M. Cartwright (ed.), Royal Society of Chemistry, (2020).
• Artificial Neural Networks, Hugh M. Cartwright (ed.), Methods in Molecular Biology, Springer, (2021).

Professor and former Associate Dean, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University (2010-).

Chaire Blaise Pascale and Chaire Sorbonne (2017-2018). On leave from CMU, at Inria Paris since fall 2019. ACM Fellow (2017), Fellow Royal Academy of Scotland (2016), AAAS Fellow (2012), Anita Borg Women of Vision Award (2009).

AAMAS test-of-time award (2017). Chair, World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Robotics & Smart Devices (2011-2014). Since January 2021 a member of CNNUM (Conseil National du Numérique) – French National Digital Council.

Luigi Ceccaroni manages innovation and strategic research at Earthwatch, an independent research organisation in Oxford, UK.

In 2019-2020, he was vice-chair of the European Citizen Science Association. Luigi holds a BSc degree in Environmental Sciences, with a thesis on paleoclimatic change in Antarctica; an MSc degree in Information-Technology Languages and Systems; a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, with a thesis on ontologies and environmental decision-support systems; and an Executive MBA.

Dr. Veronika Cheplygina's research focuses on limited labeled scenarios in machine learning, in particular in medical image analysis. She received her Ph.D. from Delft University of Technology in 2015.

After a postdoc at the Erasmus Medical Center, in 2017 she started as an assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. In 2020, failing to achieve various metrics, she left the tenure track of search of the next step where she can contribute to open and inclusive science. She recently started as an associate professor at IT University of Copenhagen.

Next to research and teaching, Veronika blogs about academic life on https://www.veronikach.com, and gives talks and workshops on failure and related topics. She also loves cats, which you will often encounter in her work.

Matt Clancy is an economist at Iowa State University specializing in the economics of innovation. He is a Progress Studies fellow with Emergent Ventures and the creator of New Things Under the Sun, a dynamic living literature review of academic research related to innovation.

He has also published original research  with the National Bureau of Economic Research, as well as in Research Policy and other academic journals.

Prior to his current position at Iowa State University, he was a research economist working on science policy at the US Department of Agriculture.

Alessandra Colecchia is Head of the Science and Technology Policy Division of the OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation. She oversees the work on science, technology and innovation policy, including work on emerging and converging technologies, the Global Science Forum, the Space and Ocean programmes, as well as measurement standards and empirical analysis in the S&T area. Previously she headed the Economic Analysis and Statistics Division, overseeing measurement and empirical analysis of issues related to R&D, innovation, knowledge-based capital, new technologies, firms and industry dynamics and competitiveness. She led the measurement work for the OECD Innovation Strategy in 2010, delivered Measuring the Digital Economy: A New Perspective in 2014.

Between 2011 and 2017 she led the work on the OECD STI Scoreboard, the most comprehensive effort to provide a set of policy relevant and insightful indicators in the areas of science, technology, innovation and competitiveness of nations. In 2016 she led the 2016 Blue Sky Forum initiative, whose outcomes are set to guide future development of science and innovation measurement at the OECD. Most recently she led on Digital measurement and has delivered Measuring the digital transformation, that presents key indicators for each of the dimensions of the OECD Going Digital integrated policy framework and sets a Measurement Roadmap for the future.

Dr Patrick Courtney has 20 years’ industrial experience in the development of technology notably in the areas of sensing and robotics with a special focus on technology transfer. He has worked as director for global firm PerkinElmer, as well as at Sartorius and Cap Gemini, with spinouts, SMEs and clients in the life science and healthcare sectors.

He has a long involvement in EU and national programmes, leads a European working group on analytical laboratory robotics and is member of board of directors of SiLA (Standards in Laboratory Automation). He holds an MBA with a PhD in Robotic Engineering/Molecular Biology, and has 100 publications and ten patents.

Click here to contact Dr. Courtney

Alexander D'Amour is a Senior Research Scientist at Google Research. His research is focused on the intersection of causality and machine learning: both how we can use machine learning to more effectively answer causal questions, and how we can use concepts from causal inference to make machine learning more robust, fair, and trustworthy.

Alex has also done work in a number of application areas, including sports analytics, marketing, and epidemiology. Prior to joining Google, Alex was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics, and received his PhD from the Harvard University Department of Statistics.

Dr. Bruce Damer, has spent his life pursuing two questions: how did life on Earth begin? and how can we give that life (and humanity) a sustainable pathway into the universe? A decade of laboratory and field research with his collaborator Prof. David Deamer at UCSC and teams around the world resulted in the Hot Spring Hypothesis for an Origin of Life published in the journal Astrobiology in 2020. In 2021 with growing global collaboration and experimental successes around the hypothesis, he formed the BIOTA Institute with the mission to provide support for students and young scientists to test the hypothesis and explore its implications for humanity. He and BIOTA are actively collaborating with leading AI researchers, scientists from the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, and Philosophers of Science at the California Institute of Integral Studies and internationally.

Dr. Damer also has a long career working with NASA on mission simulation and design and recently co-developed a spacecraft to utilize resources from asteroids. He is an avid collector of vintage computing hardware in his DigiBarn Computer Museum and enjoys a fine life with his partner Kathryn Lukas, three cats and one adorable chihuahua in their Gandalf-inspired house high up in the Santa Cruz redwoods of Northern California.

Relevant Links
BIOTA Institute
Personal Page

Research Foci
The origin of life, spacecraft and mission design, the history and future of computing, strategic options for the human future.

Diamond studied philosophy and economics at the University of Chicago, where he also was a Post-Doctoral Fellow with Nobel laureate Gary Becker.  After Chicago, he was on the faculty at The Ohio State University and is now Professor of Economics at the University of Nebraska Omaha. 

Outside of academia, Diamond wrote the script for “Frank Knight and the Chicago School” in the Great Economic Thinkers series and has written commentaries or reviews for InsideSources and for publications such as Reason, the Orlando Sentinel, and the Wall Street Journal.  His “Innovation Unbound” policy brief from the Mercatus Center argues entrepreneurship flourishes when regulations are few.  His “Innovative Dynamism Allows All to Flourish” article on Oxford University Press’s blog argues that entrepreneurial capitalism most benefits the poor and unprivileged. 

He is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, and a Senior Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.

Jesse Dunietz is an AI researcher specializing in natural language processing. He holds a bachelor's degree from MIT and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, both in computer science. In his graduate research, he developed annotation standards and AI analysis tools for language about cause and effect. For the past three years, he worked at Elemental Cognition, a small AI firm, where he developed rigorous standards for evaluating systems' reading comprehension. He also worked on commercial applications that combined the company's symbolic reasoning tools—"classical" AI—with state-of-the-art natural language processing.

In addition to his technical work, Jesse has extensive experience in science communication. He has trained hundreds of researchers to communicate with both technical and non-technical audiences, and he has written many articles and video scripts for outlets such as Scientific American, SciShow, and Popular Mechanics. He currently works part-time as an instructional designer at the MIT Communication Lab, which helps engineering students build their technical communication skills.

Sašo Džeroski is head of the Department of Knowledge Technologies at the Jozef Stefan Institute (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and a full professor at the Jozef Stefan International Postgraduate School. He is also a visiting professor at the European Space Agency (Frascati, Italy). His research group investigates machine learning and data mining (including structured output prediction and automated modeling of dynamic systems) and their applications (in environmental sciences, including ecology/ecological modelling, and life sciences, incl. systems biology/systems medicine).

He has participated in many international research projects and has coordinated three. Most recently, he led the FET Open XTrack project MAESTRA (Learning from Massive, Incompletely annotated, and Structured Data). He has been scientific and/or organizational chair of numerous international conferences, including ECML PKDD 2017, ICML 2005 and 1999, DS 2019 and 2014, MLSB 2010 and 2009, and ILP 1999 and 1997.

Sašo Džeroski is currently the chair of the Slovenian Artificial Intelligence Society. He became a fellow of EurAI, the European Association of Artificial Intelligence (formerly ECCAI) in 2008, in recognition for his "Pioneering Work in the field of AI and Outstanding Service for the European AI community". In 2015, he was elected a foreign member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts and in
2016 a member of Academia Europea (European Academy of Humanities, Letters and Sciences).

I am Head of Ai Movement at UM6P – International Artificial Intelligence Center of Morocco.

I am Full Professor at Sorbonne University, specialized in Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. I am the holder of the Industrial chair of Excellence “Thales- SCAI Abu Dhabi” – 2020-2025 – Abu Dhabi / Paris. The chair topic is about Cognitive and collaborative Radars, Hybrid AI and Digital Twins”.

My research topics are Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent agents and Multiagent Systems applied in several domains such as Smart Cities, Intelligent Assistants and Defense.

I am Member of the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology COMEST – UNESCO.

Maryann P. Feldman is the Heninger Distinguished Professor in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina, Professor of Finance at the Kenan Flagler School of Business and Senior Fellow at the Frank H. Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.

Feldman’s early work revealed that universities were necessary, but not sufficient, for technology-based economic development. These findings launched investigations into university technology transfer.  She has written extensively on the process and mechanics of the commercialization of academic research. Feldman’s most recent work explores emerging industries, entrepreneurship and the process of regional economies.

Dr. Feldman was the winner of the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research for her contributions to the study of the geography of innovation and the role of entrepreneurial activity in the formation of regional industry clusters. Her dissertation, Geography of Innovation, examined the spatial distribution of industrial innovation and provided an empirical model of the factors and resources that affected the production of new product innovation.

Born in Bologna (Italy) in 1962, Gabriele Fioni is a Nuclear Physicist, graduate in Physics of the Bologna University (Italy) and Doctor of Science of the Ghent University (Belgium). Currently he is Regional Commissioner for Higher Education, Research and Innovation for the Auvergne Rhône-Alpes region in France.
Since 2016, he is the chairman of the Global Science Forum of the OECD. 

From 2016 to 2019, he was Director for International Corporate Cooperation, with responsibility for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, and Deputy Director of CEA Tech, the technology research division of the French Atomic and Alterative Energies Commission (CEA). He was the vice-chair of the Fusion for Energy European domestic Agency for ITER and chair of its Technical Advisory Panel.

From 2012 to end 2015 he was Director of the Physical Sciences Division that was in charge of all Physics and Chemistry fundamental research at CEA. From 2008 to 2012, he was Scientific Director and Deputy Director General for Research and Innovation at the French Ministry for Higher Education and Research. Prior to that he has held several senior strategic and managerial positions as CEA.

Kenneth D. Forbus is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Education at Northwestern University.  His research interests include qualitative reasoning, analogical reasoning and learning, spatial reasoning, sketch understanding, natural language understanding, cognitive architecture, reasoning system design, intelligent educational software, and the use of AI in interactive entertainment. 

He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Cognitive Science Society, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 

He is the inaugural recipient of the Herbert A. Simon Prize, a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award and served as Chair of the Cognitive Science Society.

I am a computational cognitive scientist interested in using recent advances in AI to study children's language and cognition in the wild. My computational training started during my college years at Ecole Polytechnique and has allowed me to take a computer modeling perspective on questions in cognitive science, first during my Ph.D. at ENS Ulm within the Cognitive Studies Department, and second, during my postdoc at Stanford University in the Psychology Department.

Since 2019, I have been teaching computer science at Aix-Marseille University as an Assistant Professor (Maître de Conférences). I am also a research fellow at the Institute of Language, Communication and the Brain (ILCB) where I am a member of its executive board. Since 2020, I have been directing an interdisciplinary research group (CoCoDev) where Computer scientists, neuropsychologists, and linguists have teamed up to study children's communicative and cognitive development in a largely interdisciplinary fashion, leveraging the power and flexibility of deep learning models. In September 2021, I was appointed visiting scholar at INRIA Paris within the Cognitive Machine Learning lab (Coml).

Jeremy Frey obtained his DPhil on experimental and theoretical aspects of van der Waals complexes, in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory, University of Oxford, funder the supervision of Prof. Brian Howard. He followed this with a NATO/SERC fellowship at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory with Prof. Yuan T. Lee.

In 1984 Jeremy took up a lectureship at the University of Southampton, where he is now Professor of Physical Chemistry and Head of the Computational Systems Chemistry Group in the and the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences (FEPS) champion for the UK Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF).

Russell Funk is an assistant professor in the Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship group at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. Before joining the faculty at Minnesota, he earned his PhD in economic sociology at the University of Michigan, where he received fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Rackham School of Graduate Studies.

His research focuses on topics relating to network science and innovation, and has appeared in leading management and health care journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Research Policy, Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, JAMA Surgery, Medical Care, Health Services Research, and Annals of Surgery, among others.

He teaches classes on business and society and computational social science. He earned his AB from the University of Chicago. Additional information about his research can be found at his website (http://www.russellfunk.org).

Aishik Ghosh is a researcher at the University of California Irvine and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab working at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and fundamental physics with the aim to develop better descriptions of our universe with AI. His research interests range from the enhancement of mathematical computations for theoretical physics to experiment design and measurements, with a strong focus on particle physics at CERN. He has contributed to forming the multi-decade European strategy for particle physics and is currently contributing to the American Physical Society’s process of determining a long term strategy for particle physics for the US. Aishik believes in maintaining close links with the industry on AI research.

Besides research, Aishik takes interest in AI policy and is involved with the OECD as a member of the network of experts on AI. He is one of the core member of physicists tackling the question of AI Ethics in the physics community. He is also involved in science communication and outreach, taking a keen interest in education in the developing world.

Post pandemic, Aishik will share his time between CERN (Geneva), Berkeley and Irvine (California).

Conor is an ethics and public policy researcher at DeepMind, the London-based AI research lab. He carried research on ethics and policy topics related to the safe and responsible development of AI, and its application to science research.

Prior to joining DeepMind, Conor spent a decade at The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) where he worked on public policy research, with a focus on science and technology policy.

During this time, Conor worked in London, China, and the Middle East, and managed a team of researchers and writers in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region. Prior to that Conor worked as an economic researcher in China for several years.

Dominique Guellec is Scientific Advisor at the Observatory of Science and Technology, a French government agency based in Paris. He contributes to the activities of the OST in the field of patent statistics and scientific publications. He leads a project using semantic analysis techniques on patent texts, in view of mapping technology evolution and the emergence and impact of novel ideas.

Until August 2019, Dominique Guellec was responsible for science and technology policies at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), developing policy analysis and recommendations in these fields for around fifty countries. He had previously been responsible for science and technology statistics at the OECD, leading notably the Patent Statistics Manual in 2009.

He was chief economist of the European Patent Office in 2004-2005, where he initiated the Patstat database. He has published numerous academic articles and several books on industrial property, innovation, productivity and economic growth, in French and English (among others: The Economics of the European Patent System, Oxford University Press, 2007).

Dr. Odd Erik Gundersen is the Chief AI Officer at the renewable energy company TrønderEnergi AS and an adjunct associate professor at the Department of Computer Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Gundersen has applied AI in the industry since 2006. Currently, he is investigating how AI can be made reproducible, automate the renewable energy sector and disrupt driver training.

Alexey Guzey is the Founder of New Science (newscience.org) -- a nonprofit organization building the new institutions of basic science.

Alexey grew up in Moscow, Russia and he spent the last several years studying the structures of scientists and the organization of academia, with his research being discussed on BBC and in Wired.

Tony Hey is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At the University of Southampton in the UK, his parallel computing research group designed and built one of the first distributed memory message-passing computers using innovative Inmos transputers. He was later Head of the Electronics and Computer Science Department at Southampton and also Dean of Engineering. In 2005 he was awarded a CBE for Services to Science after leading the UK’s eScience initiative.

After 10 years as Corporate Vice President for Technical Computing in Microsoft in the US, he returned to the UK and has been Chief Data Scientist at STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory since 2015. He was one of the originators of the MPI message passing standard in 1992 and was awarded the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Open Benchmark Council. In 2020 he chaired a US Department of Energy subcommittee that explored ‘the opportunities and challenges from Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for the advancement of science and technology’ or, as a shorthand, ‘AI for Science’.

Tony Hey is also the co-author of three popular books on science and computing –‘The New Quantum Universe’, ‘Einstein’s Mirror’ and ‘The Computing Universe’ – as well as the well-known graduate text ‘Gauge Theories in Particle Physics’ with Ian Aitchison. He has just completed editing a new edition of ‘The Feynman Lectures on Computation’.

Diana Hicks is Professor in the School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology specializing in metrics for science and technology policy. She was the first author on the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics published in Nature, translated into 25 languages and awarded the 2016 Ziman award of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) for collaborative promotion of public interaction with science and technology.

She co-chairs the biennial international Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy and was an editor of Research Evaluation. Prof. Hicks has also taught at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley; SPRU, University of Sussex, and worked at NISTEP in Tokyo. In 2018 she was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Sabine has written about physics for a broad audience for 15 years and is creator of the popular YouTube channel "Science without the Gobbledygook".

Her first book “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray” was published in June 2018 by Basic Books. She is currently writing her second book which is scheduled to be published in Summer 2022.

Paul Hünermund is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School. In his research, Dr. Hünermund studies how firms can leverage new technologies in the space of machine learning and artificial intelligence for value creation and competitive advantage. His work explores the potential for biases in organizational decision-making and ways for managers to counter them. It thereby sheds light on the origins of effective business strategies in markets characterized by a high degree of technological competition and the resulting implications for economic growth and environmental sustainability.

To study the determinants of firm innovation activities and performance, his research builds on ideas from a range of disciplines including economics, business strategy, game theory, and psychology. Furthermore, it employs a variety of methods from econometrics, machine learning, and the field of causal inference. Dr. Hünermund’s work provides insights for policymakers on optimally designing public R&D support schemes, which he has communicated widely in consulting projects and keynote addresses to the European Commission, the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education, and the OECD. Moreover, he is the co-founder of causalscience.org, a platform for fostering knowledge exchange between industry and academia on topics related to causal data science.

His work has been published in Research Policy, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Harvard Business Review, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Economics Letters, and Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. It has been covered by Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Politiken, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Dr. Hünermund serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Causal Inference and on the executive team of the Technology and Innovation Management division at the Academy of Management. He earned a Ph.D. in business economics at KU Leuven in Belgium and graduated from the University of Mannheim in Germany with a master’s degree in economics.

William H. Janeway is a Special Limited Partner of Warburg Pincus and an Affiliated Member of the Faculty of Economics of Cambridge University. He joined Warburg Pincus in 1988 and was responsible for building the information technology investment practice: leading investments included BEA Systems and VERITAS Software. Previously, he was executive vice president and director at Eberstadt Fleming. Dr. Janeway is a director of Magnet Systems and O'Reilly Media.

Dr. Janeway is a co-founder and member of the board of governors of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He is a member of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council and of the Advisory Board of the Princeton Bendheim Center for Finance. He is a member of the management committee of the Cambridge-INET Institute, University of Cambridge and a Member of the Board of Managers of the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance (CERF). He is the author of Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets, Speculators, and the State; the substantially revised and extended second edition of the book was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.

Dr. Janeway received his doctorate in economics from Cambridge University where he was a Marshall Scholar. He was valedictorian of the class of 1965 at Princeton University.

Ross D. King has joint positions at the University of Cambridge, and Chalmers Institute of Technology, Sweden, and he is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, London.   He is one of the most experienced machine learning researchers in Europe. His main research interest is the interface between computer science and science. He originated the idea of a ‘Robot Scientist’: integrating AI and laboratory robotics to physically implement closed-loop scientific discovery. His Robot Scientist ‘Adam’ was the first machine to autonomously discover scientific knowledge. His Robot Scientist ‘Eve’ is currently searching for drugs against neglected tropical diseases, and cancer. 

This research has been published in top scientific journals, Science, Nature, etc. and has received wide publicity. His other core research interest is DNA computing. He developed the first nondeterministic universal Turing machine, and is now working on ‘DNA supremacy’: a DNA computer that can solve larger NP complete problems than conventional or quantum computers. He is also very interested in applying AI and micro-robotics to double the number of known species.

Dr. Kressel served as a senior partner and managing director at Warburg Pincus, a major international private equity firm, for over thirty years where he focused on technology and communications investments. He has led investments in over thirty companies, many of which became publicly traded. These have ranged from startups to multibillion revenue enterprises and have established themselves as leaders in their industries. He is currently a Special Limited Partner at the firm.

Before joining Warburg Pincus in 1983, he was the vice president at RCA Laboratories responsible for the worldwide research and development of microelectronics, power electronics and associated software. Dr. Kressel holds 31 U.S. patents covering various electronic and optoelectronic devices. He pioneered the development and commercial introduction of the first semiconductor lasers, which are the basis of fiber optic communications systems, DVDs and other consumer, industrial and military products. He is the recipient of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE) David Sarnoff Award for contributions to electronic devices. A graduate of Yeshiva College, Dr. Kressel received an M.S. from Harvard University, an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and a doctorate in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He received an honorary doctorate degree from Yeshiva University. He is an IEEE Life Fellow and Fellow in the American Physical Society. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and is the founding president of IEEE Photonics Society. He co-founded the Journal of Lightwave Technology. Dr. Kressel has served in an advisory capacity to NASA, the U.S. Air Force, the National Science Foundation and served as a board member and advisor to SRI International (formerly called the Stanford Research Institute). He is Chairman Emeritus of Yeshiva University and a Trustee of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Julia is a Professor at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. She cofounded the Coleridge Initiative, whose goal is to use data to transform the way governments access and use data for the social good through training programs, research projects and a secure data facility. The secure facility was initially built at the behest of the Census Bureau to inform the decision-making of the Commission on Evidence Based Policy.

Julia has led many initiatives, including co-founding the Institute for Research and Innovation in Science (IRIS) at the University of Michigan and STAR METRICS programs at the National Science Foundation and establishing the PatentsView project at the US Patent and Trademark Office. She also initiated and led the creation and permanent establishment of the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program at the U.S. Census Bureau. This program began as a small two year ASA Census Bureau fellowship and evolved into the first large-scale linked employer-employee dataset in the United States. It is now a permanent Census Bureau program with appropriated funds of $11 million per year.

Julia has published over 80 articles in leading economics journals, and authored or edited thirteen books. She has been the recipient of over $150 million in grants; from foundations such as the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Overdeck Family Foundation, the Schmidt Futures Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; from government agencies such as the Departments of Commerce, Labor, and Health and Human Services in the U.S., the ESRC in the U.K., and the Department of Labour and Statistics New Zealand in New Zealand, as well as from international organizations such as the World Bank.

James A. Levine MD PhD is President of Foundation Ipsen (https://www.fondation-ipsen.org).

Fondation Ipsen, based in Paris and Washington DC, is the largest science communication foundation in Europe. Fondation Ipsen operates under the auspices of Fondation de France.

Dr. Levine spent 30 years as Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic where he was Director of the Mayo Clinic Obesity Solutions Institute and held the Richard Emslander Chairs (2) in Metabolism and Endocrinology. He is the Regents Professor at Umea University Sweden and the Deans Distinguished Professor at Case Western Reserve University.

In the United States, he was an invitee to the President’s Panel and the State Department and advised 4 US Presidents. He has consulted Internationally and is a designated Expert at the United Nations.

An entrepreneur: Levine helped 34 start-ups and received more than 50 awards in science: the Innovator Award at NASA, the World Trade Fair award for Innovation, and the President’s Award for Social Embeddedness.

Levine's novels (The Blue Notebook, Dignitas, Bingo’s Run), have been published in 37 countries, and 18 languages. He has won National Book Awards in the USA, France and Japan.

Professor Christopher L. Magee has been with MIT since January 2002 as a Professor of the Practice in the Institute for Data, Society and Statistics (IDSS) and Mechanical Engineering. Before Dr. Magee joined MIT, he had more than 35 years of experience at Ford Motor Company beginning in the Scientific Research Laboratory and progressing through a series of management positions to Executive Director of Programs and Advanced Engineering.

Dr. Magee’s research group is called the Design and Invention Group (DIG) and engages in research relative to technological progress particularly quantification and prediction. He also co-directs a multidisciplinary research center (SUTD/MIT International Design Center). He has co-published 2 books and about 70 papers during his time at MIT.

Dr. Magee is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of ASM and SAE and a participant on major National Research Council Studies. Dr. Magee is a native of Pittsburgh, PA and received his B.S. and PhD from Carnegie-Mellon University in that city. He later received an MBA from Michigan State University.

Eirini Malliaraki is a Systems Architect and Designer at Nesta's Centre for Collective Intelligence Design. Previously, she oversaw project development on AI for environmental science and climate change at the Alan Turing Institute.

She is also the founder of an education tech startup Filisia, and has worked as a researcher at the Morphological Computation Lab at Imperial College and Microsoft Research in the UK.

She has a joint MA/ MSc in Innovation Design Engineering from Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art.

Utpal Mangla (MBA, PEng, CMC, ITCP, PMP, ITIL, CSM) is a VP and Senior Partner in IBM Services. He is the Global Leader of TME Industry’s Centre of Competency. In addition, Utpal leads the 'Innovation Practice' focusing on AI, ML, Analytics, 5G EDGE, Hybrid Cloud and Automation technologies for clients worldwide.

In his role as senior executive in the business with P&L responsibility and thought leader in emerging technologies, Utpal’s mission is to fuel growth by building, scaling and implementing differentiated competitive market service solution offerings to meeting business imperatives of our customers. Under Utpal's leadership, IBM recently achieved the mission of scaling to make "Watson AI Impact 1 Billion Consumers” and creation of “Industry Ecosystem platforms”. Utpal is an inventor and is at the forefront in making AI/ML and Data analytics real for enterprises across the globe.

More details on Utpal can be found in his Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/utpal-mangla-b748541

GARY MARCUS is a scientist, best-selling author, and entrepreneur. He is Founder and CEO of Robust.AI, and was Founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company acquired by Uber in 2016. He is the author of five books, including The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and The New York Times best seller Guitar Zero, as well as editor of The Future of the Brain and The Norton Psychology Reader.

He has published extensively in fields ranging from human and animal behavior to neuroscience, genetics, linguistics, evolutionary psychology and artificial intelligence, often in leading journals such as Science and Nature, and is perhaps the youngest Professor Emeritus at NYU. His newest book, co-authored with Ernest Davis, Rebooting AI: Building Machines We Can Trust aims to shake up the field of artificial intelligence

Upcoming public events are listed here.

Juan Mateos-Garcia is Director of Data Analytics at Nesta, the UK Innovation Foundation. There, he leads a team of data engineers, data scientists and data visualisation experts using new data sources and methods to tackle societal challenges and inform policy.

This includes a programme of research about emerging technologies where Juan's team have studied the geography, gender diversity and technological diversity of AI research, and built indicators and tools to monitor AI research trends globally. Juan is an Economist with a MSc in Science and Technology Policy from the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex.

Staša Milojević is an Associate Professor of Informatics, the director of the Center for Complex Network and Systems Research, and Grant Thornton Scholar in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. She is also a core faculty of Cognitive Science program and a fellow of Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Her work covers a range of topics within the "science of science": dynamics of research teams, collaborative networks, formation and evolution of scientific fields, and research metrics. She is a co-founder and past chair of ASIST SIG METRICS.

She serves on the editorial boards of Scientometrics, BioScience, and Journal of Altmetrics. She is an Associate Editor for the Quantitative Science Studies and Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics. She received a PhD in Information Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Tsutomu Miyagawa is Professor of Economics in Gakushuin University, Japan. He graduated from Department of Economics in University of Tokyo and got Ph.D in Economics in Hitotsubashi University. He has written many books and articles on productivity growth in Japan and the Asian Economies. Especially, he focuses on the role of intangibles on productivity growth or firm performance. Recent articles on this topic are ” Intangible Investment in Japan: Measurement and Contribution to Economic Growth” (with Kyoji Fukao, Kentaro Mukai, Yukio Shinoda and Konomi Tonogi), Review of Income and Wealth 55, pp.717-736, 2009, ”Estimates of Intangible Investment by Industry and Productivity Growth in Japan” (with Shoichi Hisa), The Japanese Economic Review 64, 2013, pp42-72, and “Does Productivity J-curve Exist in Japan? :Empirical Studies Based on Multiple q Theory” (with Konomi Tonogi and Takayuki Ishikawa) Journal of the Japanese and International Economies 61, 2021.

From 2010 to 2014, he was a project leader of empirical research on intangible investment in Japan. In this project, he and his collaborators held an international conference on intangibles, innovation policy and economic growth at Gakushuin University. Professor Bounfour of Paris-Saclay University and I edited articles presented in this conference and published a book titled Intangibles, Market Failure, and Innovation Performance from Springer in 2015. Now, he is an advisor of The GLOBALINTO project organized by European experts on intangibles such as Professor Bounfour and Professor Piekkola of Finland.
He also serves for public organizations. He is a member of Statistical Committee of the Japanese Government, a faculty fellow of Research Institute of Economy, Trade, and Industry which is a research institution of Ministry of Economy Trade, and Industry, and a board member of Japan Productivity Committee.

Jessica Montgomery is currently Executive Director of the Accelerate Science, a new Cambridge University initiative developing AI tools and collaborations to tackle scientific challenges (further information at this link).

She also leads the Data Trusts Initiative, a collaboration between Cambridge and Birmingham Universities that is driving new thinking on the theory and practice of trustworthy data stewardship (further information at this link).

Her interests in AI and its consequences for science and society stem from her policy career, in which she worked with parliamentarians, leading researchers and civil society organisations to bring scientific evidence to bear on major policy issues.

Alistair Nolan is a Senior Policy Analyst in the OECD’s Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation. Prior to the OECD, Mr. Nolan led a range of industry-related analytic and technical assistance projects with the United Nations.

Over a number of years at the OECD Alistair has been involved in work on skills and education assessment, entrepreneurship, private sector development and policy evaluation. Alistair is currently coordinating various streams of OECD work on artificial intelligence, and is overseeing the work on AI diffusion under the AI-WIPS project.

Mr. Nolan oversaw preparation of the 2017 publication The Next Production Revolution: Implications for Governments and Business, which examines a variety of emerging technologies, their impacts and policy implications, and which was referenced at the start of the 2017 G7 Taormina Action Plan. Mr. Nolan led work on 2020 publication The Digitalisation of Science, Technology and Innovation : Key Developments and Policies, which among other topics addresses the role of AI in advanced production.

Mikko Packalen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Waterloo. He holds a Ph.D in economics from Stanford University and an M.Soc.Sci from the University of Helsinki.

His research examines the production of new knowledge, with an emphasis on identifying factors that aid the adoption of new ideas, on how new ideas develop into transformative ideas that improve health and well-being, and on how to measure scientific novelty.

This work has been published leading international journals such as Journal of Health Economics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Scientometrics, and has received funding from the National Institute of Aging, Amazon Web Services, Emergent Ventures and Business Finland.

Annalisa Primi (PhD) is the Head of the Economic Transformation and Development Division at the OECD Development Centre (Paris, France). She advices policymakers in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the OECD on global trade, innovation, infrastructure and industrial development. She shaped and created the OECD Initiative for Policy Dialogue on GVCs, Production Transformation and Development and the Production Transformation Policy Reviews (PTPRs).

Prior to joining the OECD in 2009, she was Associated Economic Expert at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL, Santiago, Chile). Her work focuses on the linkages between industrialization, innovation and development and on the role of the state in shaping development trajectories.

She has extensive experience in targeted policy support and technical assistance to developing countries, as well as a record of official and academic publications. An Italian national, she holds a PhD in Economics from School of Business and Economics of the University of Maastricht, The Netherlands, a Master Degree International Cooperation and Economic Development from the University of Pavia (Italy) and a Degree cum laude in Economics of Institutions and Financial Markets at the University of Tor Vergata (Rome, Italy). 

Adèle H. Ribeiro is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Causal Artificial Intelligence Lab at Columbia University.  Her research focuses on developing the emergent field of Causal Health Sciences. She is particularly interested in the development and applications of causal reasoning and decision-making tools for discovering, integrating, generalizing, and personalizing cause-effect relationships from biased and heterogeneous data collections.

She holds a Bachelor's degree in Computational and Applied Mathematics and Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, all from the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil. She also completed a research internship in the Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University. Before joining Columbia, she worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Laboratory of Genetics and Molecular Cardiology at the Heart Institute in USP.

José Luis Ricón is an independent researcher working on documenting and unlocking bottlenecks in science. In the past he has worked as a machine learning engineer at Twitter and Aiden.ai and published research on computational mechanics.

He is an Emergent Ventures Fellow. His writing can be found at Nintil.com.

Isabelle Ryl is professor at the University of Lille. From September 2010 to March 2018, she was director of the Paris Inria research center, whose researchers works in computer science and applied mathematics. She is also interested in the link between research and innovation and was acting Deputy CEO for Transfer and Industry Partnerships at Inria from March 2018 to September 2018.

She was vice-president of Cap Digital (French center of excellence digital content and services) from 2014 to 2019 and has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Agoranov incubator since 2011 and of the Innovation Council (interministerial council in charge of defining the orientations and priorities of the innovation policy) from June 2018 to January 2021. She is currently director of the PRAIRIE (PaRis Artificial Intelligence Research InstitutE) which is one of the four institutes launched as part of the French national strategy for artificial intelligence..

Dr Jack Scannell’s career spans neuroscience, drug discovery, consulting, and biopharma investment. His recent work focuses on the ability of disease models to predict clinical outcomes in patients; a focus that developed from his long term interest in the technological and economic history of biomedical innovation.

He coined the term “Eroom’s Law” to contrast the exponential decline in biopharmaceutical R&D productivity between 1950 and 2010 with the more familiar Moore’s Law, which described the exponential increase in computing power over a similar period. “Eroom” is “Moore” backwards. He has developed formal models of biopharmaceutical R&D as a process that searches biological and chemical space, to explore the parameters that determine innovative efficiency. Jack was Co-Head of European Pharmaceuticals and Biotech at UBS Investment Bank and Head of European Healthcare at Sanford Bernstein. He led Discovery Biology at E-Therapeutics PLC, an Oxford-based biotech firm.

He started his commercial career at the Boston Consulting Group. Before that, he was an academic neuroscientist. He has a D.Phil. in Physiology (Neuroscience) from Oxford and a Batchelor’s degree in Medical Sciences from Cambridge.

Bart Selman is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He previously was at AT&T Bell Laboratories. His research interests include computational sustainability, efficient reasoning procedures, planning, knowledge representation, and connections between computer science and statistical physics. He has (co-)authored over 100 publications, including six best paper awards. His papers have appeared in venues spanning Nature, Science, Proc. Natl. Acad. of Sci., and a variety of conferences and journals in AI and Computer Science.

He has received the Cornell Stephen Miles Excellence in Teaching Award, the Cornell Outstanding Educator Award, an NSF Career Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

John Shawe-Taylor is professor of Computational Statistics and Machine Learning at University College London and Director of the International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI) under the auspices of UNESCO at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia. He has helped to drive a fundamental rebirth in the field of machine learning, with applications in novel domains including computer vision, document classification, and applications in biology and medicine focussed on brain scan, immunity and proteome analysis. He has published over 250 papers and two books that have attracted over 80000 citations.

He has assembled a series of influential European Networks of Excellence. The scientific coordination of these projects has influenced a generation of researchers and promoted the widespread uptake of machine learning in both science and industry that we are currently witnessing. More recently he coordinated the X5gon (x5gon.org) European project developing infrastructure and portals for AI enhanced delivery of educational materials.

He was appointed UNESCO Chair of Artificial Intelligence in November 2018 and is the leading trustee of the UK Charity, Knowledge 4 All Foundation, championing the cause of open education and also helping to establish a network of AI researchers and practitioners in sub-Saharan Africa.

Dr. Neil R. Smalheiser, MD, PhD has directed several multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional consortia dedicated to text mining and bioinformatics research, which have created new theoretical models, databases, open source software, and web-based services. With support from NLM, NIMH and the Human Brain Project, the Arrowsmith Project developed a suite of free, public informatics tools that are designed to accelerate scientific discovery and collaboration.

The "Author-ity" author name disambiguation project assigns all authors and articles in PubMed and has been updated and expanded recently.

Dr. Smalheiser also co-directs a group that has created a flexible suite of free, public web tools to facilitate retrieval and mining of biomedical literature (http://arrowsmith.psych.uic.edu).

He also has over 30 years of experience pursuing basic and translational research in neuroscience, most recently studying the genomics of small RNAs and their roles in synaptic plasticity and neuropsychiatric diseases including Alzheimer’s Disease.

Didier Sornette is Professor of Entrepreneurial Risks at ETH Zurich since 2006, and dean of the Institute of Risk Analysis, Prediction and Management (Risks-X), at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen, since 2019.

He is a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences and of the Academia Europaea, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He uses rigorous data-driven mathematical statistical analyses combined with nonlinear multi-variable dynamical models with
positive and negative feedbacks to study the predictability and control of crises and extreme events in complex systems, with applications to all domains of science and practice.

Ben was most recently Head of Housing at Policy Exchange with a focus on making British towns and cities clean, beautiful, and functional.

Before he joined PX he was a management consultant at KPMG, an economics correspondent for City A.M., and for five years Head of Research and Head of Policy at the Adam Smith Institute. He has written for academic journals, every major newspaper and magazine, and appeared on every major radio station and television news programme.

Jim Spohrer serves on the International Society of Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP) Board of Directors.  At IBM, he led Open Source AI/Data, Global University Programs, Almaden Service Research, and CTO Venture Capital Relations Group. 

At Apple, he achieved Distinguished Engineer Scientist Technologist for authoring and learning platforms. After MIT (BS/Physics), he developed speech recognition systems at Verbex (Exxon), then Yale (PhD/Computer Science AI).

With over ninety publications and nine patents, awards include AMA ServSIG Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions to the Service Discipline, Evert Gummesson Service Research, Vargo-Lusch Service-Dominant Logic, Daniel Berg Service Systems, and PICMET Fellow for advancing service science.

Paula Stephan is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Professor Emerita of Economics, Georgia State University.  Her research focuses on the economics of science, the careers of scientists and the role that international mobility plays in the generation and transmission of knowledge.  She served on the Board of Reviewing Editors of the journal Science, from May 2012 to May 2019.  Her 2012 book How Economics Shapes Science (Harvard University Press) has been translated into Chinese and Korean.  She has published in such journals as Science, Nature, the American Economic Review, The Journal of Economic Literature, and Research Policy. 

Stephan serves on the Board on Science, Technology and Policy, the US National Academies, the Advisory Board of Politecnico di Milano School of Management and the Research Council of SUNY. She recently served on the National Research Council’s Board of Higher Education and Workforce and the Committee to Review the State of the Postdoctoral Experience for Scientists and Engineers. 

She served on the National Advisory General Medical Sciences Council, National Institutes of Health 2005-2009. Stephan received her undergraduate degree in economics from Grinnell College (Phi Beta Kappa) and her PhD from the University of Michigan.  She has held visiting positions at Harvard University, KU Leuven, the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition and Politecnico Torino.

Kristóf is CTO & Founder of the Turbine AI biotechnology company bringing cell simulations to drug discovery.

As an engineer in biology, he participated in the founding phase of multiple biotech startups in the last decade, spending a lot of time understanding how to apply AI to problems multiple pharma companies are facing.

His work on Turbine was recognized by being named one of the 35 Innovators under 35 by MIT Tech Review Europe.

Sezai Taskin holds a MBA from the University of Basel and brings 20 years of pharmaceutical industry experience.

He started his career in finance and moved to commercial roles. Sezai was a recognized business leader in hematology and oncology at Roche, Abbvie and AZ, at the regional and international level.

In his most recent role he helped to build up the alliance of AZ and Daiichi Sankyo in Europe. Sezai is responsible for the strategic value-based partnerships with pharma and biotech companies.

Jesse Thaler is a theoretical particle physicist who fuses techniques from quantum field theory and machine learning to address outstanding questions in fundamental physics. His current research is focused on maximizing the discovery potential of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) through new theoretical frameworks and novel data analysis techniques. Prof. Thaler is an expert in jets, which are collimated sprays of particles that are copiously produced at the LHC, and he studies the substructure of jets to enhance the search for new phenomena and illuminate the dynamics of gauge theories. He is also interested in new strategies to probe the nature of dark matter at the LHC and beyond, as well as in the theoretical structures and experimental signatures of supersymmetry.

Jesse Thaler joined the MIT Physics Department in 2010, and is currently a Professor in the Center for Theoretical Physics. From 2006 to 2009, he was a fellow at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University in 2006, and his Sc.B. in Math/Physics from Brown University in 2002. In 2020, Prof. Thaler became the inaugural Director of the NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions.

Dr. Georgia Tourassi is the Director of the National Center for Computational Sciences at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Concurrently, she holds appointments as an Adjunct Professor of Radiology at Duke University and as a joint UT-ORNL Professor of the Bredesen Center Data Science Program at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Her scholarly work includes 13 US patents and innovation disclosures and more than 260 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings articles, editorials, and book chapters. She is elected Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), the American Association of Medical Physicists (AAPM), the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Her research interests include high performance computing and artificial intelligence in biomedicine. For her leadership in the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer initiative, she received the DOE Secretary’s Appreciation Award in 2016. In 2017, she received the ORNL Director's Award for Outstanding Individual Accomplishment in Science and Technology and the UT-Battelle Distinguished Researcher Award. In 2020, Dr. Tourassi received the DOE’s Secretary Honors Award for her contributions to the COVID 19 Insights Partnership Team and to the COVID 19 HPC Resource Team.

Tourassi holds a B.S. in Physics from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University.

https://www.ornl.gov/staff-profile/georgia-tourassi

Josef Urban is a Principal Researcher at the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC) of the Czech Technical University in Prague where he is heading the ERC-funded project AI4REASON. His interests include Automated Reasoning, Formal Verification and Machine Learning. In particular, he is interested in development of combined inductive/learning and deductive/reasoning “strong AI” methods and systems over large formal (fully semantically specified) knowledge bases. Examples are large corpora of formally stated definitions, theorems and proofs in mathematics, software verification and related fields. He has made such corpora available to the AI methods, created the first benchmarks, and developed first approaches and systems combining learning and reasoning over such corpora in various feedback loops.

The systems developed by him and his colleagues have won several competitions and the methods today assist formal verification in proof assistants. He has also co-developed first learning/reasoning systems for automated formalization of informal mathematics, and co-founded the conference on Artificial Intelligence and Theorem Proving (AITP). He received his MSc in Mathematics and PhD in Computers Science from the Charles University in Prague, worked as an assistant professor in Prague, and as a researcher at the University of Miami and Radboud University Nijmegen.

Joaquin Vanschoren is an assistant professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His research focuses on the automation of machine learning (AutoML) and Meta-Learning. He co-authored the books 'Automatic Machine: Methods, Systems, Challenges' and 'Meta-learning: Applications to AutoML and data mining', published over 100 articles on these topics, and received an Amazon Research Award, an Azure Research Award, the Dutch Data Prize, and ECML PKDD demonstration award. He co-founded OpenML.org, an open science platform for machine learning, and is a founding member of the European AI associations ELLIS and CLAIRE.

He has been tutorial speaker at NeurIPS and AAAI, and has given more than 30 invited talks, including the UN Global Summit on AI for Good, VLDB, IDEAL, and workshops at NeurIPS, ICML, and SIGMOD. He is on the editorial board of the JMLR and MLJ journals, is datasets and benchmarks chair at NeurIPS 2021, chaired Discovery Science 2018 and LION 2016, and co-organizes the AutoML and Meta-Learning workshop series at NeurIPS and ICML from 2013 to 2021.

Website: https://joaquinvanschoren.github.io

Prof Dr. Reinhilde Veugelers is a full professor at KULeuven (BE) at the Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation. She is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel since 2009 and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics since 2020. She is also a CEPR Research Fellow, a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and of the Academia Europeana. From 2004-2008, she was on academic leave, as advisor at the European Commission (BEPA Bureau of European Policy Analysis). She served on the ERC Scientific Council from 2012-2018 and on the EU-RISE Expert Group advising the commissioner for Research. She is a member of VARIO, the expert group advising the Flemish minister for Innovation. She is currently a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of the journal Science and a co-PI on the Science of Science Funding Initiative at NBER.

With her research concentrated in the fields of industrial organisation, international economics and strategy, innovation and science, she has authored numerous well cited publications in leading international journals. Specific recent topics include novelty in technology development, international technology transfers through MNEs, global innovation value chains, young innovative companies, innovation for climate change, industry science links and their impact on firm’s innovative productivity, evaluation of research & innovation policy, explaining scientific productivity, researchers’ international mobility, novel scientific research. Websites:

https://feb.kuleuven.be/reinhilde.veugelers
https://bruegel.org/author/reinhilde-veugelers
https://www.piie.com/experts/senior-research-staff

Paola Villarreal is a data scientist and full-stack developer with over 22 years of international experience leading multidisciplinary teams in the public and non-profit sector. She is the former head of data science and engineering at the National Council for Science and Technology of the Government of Mexico where she helped coordinate the Covid-19 Data Efforts.

For her work on the field of Public Interest Data Science she's been recognized as an MIT Innovators under 35 LATAM, BBC's 100 Inspiring Women and was awarded a fellowship at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Lucy Lu Wang (@lucyluwang) is a Postdoctoral Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI, working in the areas of biomedical natural language processing, scientific document understanding, open access, and meta-science.

Her research on document accessibility, COVID-19 text mining, supplement interaction detection, and gender trends in publishing has been featured in Geekwire, Gizmodo, HackerNews, Axios, and the New York Times.

She received her PhD in Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education from the University of Washington, and also holds degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Physics from Johns Hopkins and MIT respectively.

Andrew W. Wyckoff is the Director of the OECD’s Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) where he oversees OECD’s work on innovation, business dynamics, science and technology, information and communication technology policy as well as the statistical work associated with each of these areas.

His experience prior to the OECD includes being a program manager of the Information, Telecommunications and Commerce program of the US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), an economist at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and a programmer at The Brookings Institution.

He has served as an expert on various advisory groups and panels which include joining the Global Board of Trustees of Digital Future Society (DFS), being a Commissioner on the Lancet/FT Governing Health Futures 2030 Commission, the International Advisory Board of the Research Council of Norway and Head of OECD’s Delegation at the G20 and G7 meetings on ICT and Digital Economy. 

Mr. Wyckoff is a citizen of the United States, holds a BA in Economics from the University of Vermont, and a Master of Public Policy from the JFK School of Government, Harvard University.

I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University. My principal research interest lies in the area of data mining/machine learning, computational social science and science of science.

I study the link between social networks and leadership attainment and how social networks can help women to achieve placement in leadership roles. Based on organizational theory, I am developing a model for estimating a terror group's future lethality by inferring from latent variables its hidden capabilities and resources. This model has unique early warning signals.

I also test the ability of artificial intelligence to address the replication problem in science. The goal is to demonstrate how AI can address replication problems at scale in ways that current methods cannot and can advance research by combining human and machine intelligence.

I consider myself a 'computational natural scientist'. Gregory Chaitin, one of the founders of Algorithmic Information Theory, once described me as a "new kind of practical theoretician". I introduced the field of Algorithmic Information Dynamics (AID).

After a research position at the Behavioural and Evolutionary Theory Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield (UK), I joined the Structural Biology Group of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford as a Senior Researcher and faculty member, and later as the Director of Oxford Immune Algorithmics, a biotech spinout from Oxford University based in the West of London (with branches in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Dhaka and Atlanta) that has raised 8M USD from UK and Canadian investors.

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