Topic: Artificial Intelligence

Asha Saxena

Asha Saxena is a strategic and innovative leader with a track record of building successful technology companies over the past 30 years.

She is the author of the bestselling book “The AI Factor – How to Apply Artificial Intelligence and Use Big Data to Grow Your Business Exponentially” and the Founder and CEO of Women Leaders in Data and AI, a global leadership organization brining world leaders together to create a fair digital world with parity and equity.

Asha is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, teaching graduate classes on Entrepreneurship and served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Columbia Business School. She also served as a partner at CEO Coaching International, a management services company focused on building, turning around, and selling successful businesses.

In the past, Asha served as the CEO of a healthcare data analytics company, built an e-commerce platform, and was the President and CEO of Future Technologies. This company provided data analytics solutions to Fortune 1000 companies and was recognized at the World Economic Forum as a “Global Growth Company for 2007”.

Asha earned her BS in Computer Science from Bangalore University in India, an MS in Data Science from Southern Methodist University, and underwent management training at MIT and the London Business School.

Aishwarya Srinivasan

Aishwarya worked as a Data Scientist in the Google Cloud AI Services team to build machine learning solutions for customer use cases, leveraging core Google products including TensorFlow, DataFlow, and AI Platform. Prior to this, Aishwarya was working as an AI & ML Innovation Leader at IBM Data & AI, where she was working cross-functionally with the product team, data science team and sales to research AI use-cases for clients by conducting discovery workshops and building assets to showcase the business value of the technology.

She is the founder of Illuminate AI, first of its kind non-profit organization for providing resources and mentorship for people who want to build their career in the field of AI. She is an advocate for open-source technologies, presently an open source Developer Advocate for Deepchecks; previously a developer advocate for PyTorch Lightning and a contributor to Scikit Learn.

Aishwarya has been awarded Trailblazer of the Year by Women in AI in 2022 and Women of Influence by Business Journal in 2022. She holds a post-graduate in Data Science from Columbia University.

She has worked with clients all across the globe and has traveled internationally to London, Dubai, Istanbul, and India to lead and work with them. She is very focused on expanding her horizons in the machine learning research community including her recent Patent Award won in 2018 for developing a Reinforcement Learning model for Machine Trading.

She is an ambassador for the Women in Data Science community, originating from Stanford University. She has been spotlighted as a LinkedIn Top Voice 2020 for Data Science and AI, which features Top 10 Machine Learning influencers across the world.

She is an ardent reader and has contributed to the scholastic community.

Besides being a data junkie, she is a fitness fanatic who is into martial arts (Krav Maga) and yoga.

Manisha Tank

Charismatic, dynamic and intellectually curious, Manisha Tank is a highly experienced emcee and moderator, who leverages warmth and empathy to serve the needs of clients and engage audiences, eliciting insight from panellists in an authoritative manner.

With 25 years of broadcast experience as a news anchor and correspondent, at Reuters, the BBC and CNN International, she’s adept at riding minute to minute adjustments, following time cues and navigating fast paced, in-depth, often deeply technical conversations in live situations. Over those years Manisha has interviewed hundreds of CEOs, founders, policy experts, A-List celebrities and political leaders, on a wide range of topics, from geopolitics to business and entertainment.

Increasingly, her work focuses on Net Zero transition, digitalisation and new technologies for enterprise transformation including blockchain, artificial intelligence and cloud and she is a regular face on Singapore’s high-profile conference and event circuit. Concurrently she is the host of various podcast series for a range of blue chip clients including Standard Chartered CCIB and Accenture.

In November 2023, Manisha hosted Earthshot +, a part of The Earthshot Prize’s first ever Earthshot week, hosted in Singapore, as well as commanding the 7000 + seat festival stage at the world renowned, Singapore Fintech Festival, for which she has been the host for five years.

Manisha is also an angel investor in companies focused on achieving The United Nation’s SDGs, with a personal passion for gender equality, rural development and sustainable transition technologies.

Toby Lewis

Toby Lewis is a Cyber Security Expert with a career that began within the British Intelligence Services. He was a founding member of the National Cyber Security Centre and now leads an international team of Cyber Security Analysts for British AI & Cyber Security firm, Darktrace. His career has been punctuated by major Cyber Security events, initially working on the threat from Nation State espionage until WannaCry transformed the Cyber Crime landscape into one dominated by Ransomware.

Toby has delivered keynote speeches at flagship conferences on Cyber Security, sharing his experiences working at the sharp end, combating major Cyber Security incidents and providing insights into the cyber threat landscape. He has provided expert commentary for mainstream broadcast news and print media, on topics ranging from the benefits and risks associated with Artificial Intelligence, to joining BBC Radio 5 Live on the morning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine to discuss the potential use of Cyber Weapons by the two countries.

Since joining Darktrace at the start of 2021, Toby has been at the forefront of the real-world application of AI and Machine Learning within Cybersecurity, drawing on his Artificial Intelligence expertise and a deep understanding of the value in the right type of AI for the right application and the human factors around building confidence within organisations as they begin their journey with AI. With the AI explosion associated with ChatGPT, this also means engaging in a much more informed debate, balancing out the hype and catastrophisers with a pragmatic view of this new technology.

War stories gathered over nearly 20 years in Cyber Security allow Toby to provide an accessible introduction to the intersections of technology, geopolitics and cybersecurity, as well as deeper expertise on topics such as the application of Artificial Intelligence in cyber security, and what really happens when hackers get access to your network.

Matej Curda

Introducing Matej Curda, a seasoned consultant turned influential web3 leader.

Having previously helped organizations extract maximum value from their data, and starting his own web3 startup, he now leverages this expertise to guide Fortune 500 companies and startups in their web3 strategies.

Beyond consulting, Matej is also a familiar face on the stages of major web3 conferences in cities like New York, London, and Paris.

With a proven track record in investing, his mission to bring web3 closer to people is further manifested in his website and newsletter, where he guides individuals through the complexities of web3 investing.

Stephanie Hare

Stephanie Hare is a leading author, keynote speaker, commentator and consultant on technology, trends and business. From AI and tech ethics to the metaverse and cyber security, Stephanie enlightens and illuminates audiences, clients and readers about the dynamic changes unfolding around us. Artificial intelligence is a particular speciality of Stephanie’s and she is in huge demand across media platforms as a commentator on the challenges posed by AI, in addition to her keynote speaker work on the subject.

The author of Technology Is Not Neutral: a short guide to technology ethics, a Financial Times best summer books of 2022, Stephanie brings academic rigour and credibility to all her work, while her vibrant on-stage delivery has enthralled and entertained audiences around the world. She is also a highly accomplished Event MC and moderator - an expert in facilitating panels, whose warmth and humour elicit the best from guests and interviewees.

Stephanie was selected for the BBC Expert Women programme, contributes frequently to BBC World Television and the BBC World Service, and has published in the Financial Times, The Washington Post, the Guardian/Observer, the Harvard Business Review, and WIRED. Previously she worked at Accenture, Palantir, and Oxford Analytica, and held the Alistair Horne Visiting Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford. She earned a PhD and MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, including a year at the Université de la Sorbonne (Paris IV).

Organisations she has worked with for events or consultancy include KPMG, IKEA, LEGO, BAE Systems, Citywire, the Royal Society, the Vodafone Institute, SOLACE (the UK's leading network for public sector professionals), Avanade, CERN, Mishcon de Reya, Mayer Brown, 7 Bedford Row, Fujitsu, Vistage, the Internet of Things Alliance Australia, the Data Lab, and the Alan Turing Institute.

Andrea Iorio

Andrea Iorio is one of the most requested keynote speakers about Digital Transformation, Leadership, Customer-centricity and Web3 globally, and he shares his thoughts and ideas at the intersection of business, technology, philosophy and neuroscience in his more than 150 keynotes per year to companies such as Abbott, Bayer, Cargill, Dow, IBM, Roche, Syngenta, Tetrapak and more.

He is a columnist at the MIT Technology Review Brazil, the official host of NVIDIA’s podcast in Brazil, as well as counts with more than 70k followers on Linkedin.

He holds more than 10 years of experience in multinational and tech companies: he was the Head of Tinder across Latin America for 5 years, and Chief Digital Officer at L’Oréal Brazil. He is an economist with a Degree from Bocconi University (Milan, Italy), and a MA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins’ SAIS (Washington, DC), and is now an MBA professor at Fundação Dom Cabral.

He is the author of 3 books in Portuguese: “6 Competências para Surfar na Transformação Digital”, “O futuro não é mais como antigamente”, and “Metanoia Lab: lições sobre competências humanas na era digital”: the first one reached the n. 1 position on Amazon in the People Management and Leadership sections in Brazil. Also, he has just launched his first book in English: "Meta-leadership: the new leader's skill set in the world of AI and Web3)

Ed Newton-Rex

Ed Newton-Rex is one of the world’s leading experts and speakers on Generative AI. He is one of only a handful of people to have founded and sold a Generative AI company, and has a breadth of experience working at a senior level for social media giants TikTok and Snapchat. Most recently Ed was the VP of Audio at the billion-dollar Generative AI company Stability AI, but resigned over his concerns about the use of copyrighted material without permission.

Having graduated top of his year in Music at Cambridge University, in 2010 Ed founded Jukedeck, the world’s first AI music company. Jukedeck’s technology was used to create more than a million original pieces of music, and won a number of awards, including a Cannes Innovation Lion. In 2019, the company was acquired by ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company.

At ByteDance, Ed first led the AI music lab, then ran Product in Europe for TikTok, working on the world-renowned AI recommendation algorithm. At Snapchat, Ed was Chief Product Officer for Voisey, a music creation app that made it easy to make and collaborate on music, which led to record deals for a number of its users.

Most recently, Ed was VP of Audio at Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, the hugely successful, open-source image generation technology that helped kickstart the mass adoption of Generative AI. He led the team that built and launched Stable Audio, a state-of-the-art AI music generation product that was named one of TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2023.

Ed is also a professional composer, published by Boosey & Hawkes, which gives him a unique perspective on the impact AI will have - and is already having - on the creative industries. He was a co-organiser and judge of the first international AI Song Contest, and is a mentor on the startup programme at Abbey Road Studios in London.

Ed was named one of Business Insider’s 30 most creative people in UK tech, and one of Sifted’s 20 generative AI ‘power players’ in Europe. He has made a number of media appearances  discussing AI and creativity, including on the BBC, and has spoken on the topic at a range of conferences including TEDx, Mobile World Congress and Slush.

Rayid Ghani

Did you vote in 2012? If so, Rayid Ghani may have lent a hand. He was the chief scientist at Obama for America in 2012 and played a groundbreaking role in the campaign. Focusing on analytics, technology, and data, he used online tools like email and social networking to motivate people’s offline actions, from fundraising and volunteering to voting.

Ghani is one of a small number of tech wizards in an increasingly data-driven world. If the 2008 campaign was about charisma and hope, the 2012 campaign was about science and data. Gone is the art of the political campaign. Successful campaigns are no longer run by people who play by gut instinct but instead by people like Ghani. With work that focuses on developing and using machine learning and data mining algorithms to solve challenges in business, government, and politics, he helps organizations make the most out of their institutional knowledge. In today’s data-centric, competitive world, businesses need to utilize increasingly targeted approaches to attract consumers. One of the leading experts in this field, Rayid Ghani addresses how data, analytics, and communications advances can be used to influence and change consumer behavior. He tells stories from his time in the Obama camp and shares successes about using the latest tools and applying big data to organizations.

At Obama for America, Ghani aimed to convert the vast amount of data collected through large commercial databases, boutique lists, voter files, social media sites, and an unprecedented quantity of voter interviews into a source of valuable data. With the use of sophisticated analytics, algorithms, and machine learning, the insights from the data were used to galvanize the campaign and predict voters’ views on particular issues like abortion and the economy. Armed with this information, the campaign was more focused in its message, and the result was vastly increased efficiency in fund-raising and volunteer and voter mobilization.

Before Obama for America, Ghani worked at Accenture Technology Labs for 10 years as a research scientist and the director of analytics research. His work closed the gap between academia and business and spanned a variety of industries, including healthcare, retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG), manufacturing, intelligence, and financial services. Ghani mined mountains of private corporate data to find statistical patterns that could forecast consumer behavior. He then helped organizations find and use patterns in consumer behavior to develop targeted strategies for individual preferences. For example, he deployed algorithms that replaced health insurers’ random audits, to anticipate which of 50,000 daily claims were most likely to require individual attention.

Ghani’s work has been published in more than 50 academic publications with more than 2,000 citations. He has received myriad media mentions on TV and in publications like TIME, The New York Times, Slate, Businessweek, Financial Times, Chicago Tribune, and U.S. News & World Report. He has also been featured in books, such as The Numerati and SuperCrunchers. Ghani’s interests span a whole gamut from general machine learning and data mining to privacy preserving data mining, text mining, semi-supervised learning, active learning, information retrieval, NLP, and knowledge management. He has filed for 15 patents and seven have been awarded so far.

Danilo McGarry

Digital transformation, Ai, Innovation and future of work are the most important topics in any company today. Every board, C level and decision maker is grappling how to lead and run such initiatives. Danilo McGarry is a speaker that can add significant value in relation to these topics.

Danilo McGarry is not just a speaker, he has circa 2 decades of designing, delivering and scaling numerous global technology & operational board level critical initiatives through effective enterprise-wise digital vision and strategy. He has ran some of the largest and most respected Transformation, Ai, Data and Innovation programs in market leading blue-chip companies (such as Citigroup, UnitedHealth Group) in multiple countries and industries. Danilo also has proven board & advisory level experience as well as Public and Private (listed & unlisted) experience. Extensive technical and global people management experience.

Danilo’s work has been published in The Financial Times, The Times, Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, Computer Weekly – who have coined him as an industry thought and practitioner leader. Danilo is ranked as the 20 most influential people in Ai in the world, top 10 in the world by research and consultancy firms in various other tech domains such as Innovation, Digital Transformation, CRS and Data. He is also hyper connected in tech circles due to active involvement with tech & advisory companies, with whom he develops synergised digital strategy and digital ecosystems.

Danilo’s approach drives and builds a culture of unparalleled efficiency, drastically improved services, new and improved revenue streams and products. He is a digital leader that is technically able but with an entrepreneurial mind set. His speeches are well known for delivering real impact and value, where everyone can walk away from what he delivers wiser and with up-to-date market insights in how to lead and run their technology initiatives better.

Spiros Margaris

Perhaps no voice in financial technology is as respected and influential as that of Spiros Margaris. His insights have guided the application of AI and blockchain to mainstream financial services. As an investor, Margaris has supported some of the field’s most innovative start-ups. Fintech events with their eyes on the future hire Margaris to deliver insightful, actionable keynote speeches.

Spiros Margaris is a venture capitalist (Margaris Ventures), futurist, keynote speaker, and board member. He is a senior advisor to – and investor in – several companies in the fintech, insurtech, cybersecurity, health care, and AI sectors. Two of the fintech start-ups he has advised have become unicorns (with valuations of over $1 billion).

Spiros is the first international influencer to achieve “The Triple Crown” (No. 1 International FinTech, Blockchain, and AI influencer) ranking by Onalytica. In 2021, Onalytica named him The Key Opinion Leader in Fintech. That year, MarkTechPost included him, for the third time, in a list of the “Top Artificial Intelligence Influencers to Follow.” In 2020, Onalytica ranked him as the No. 1 Global FinTech Influencer, while Refinitiv (Thomson Reuters) ranked him as the No. 1 Finance Influencer.

Spiros has been a keynote speaker at international fintech and insurtech conferences and has also given a TEDxAcademy Talk. He published a white paper on AI, “Machine learning in financial services: Changing the rules of the game,” for the enterprise software vendor SAP. In 2019, he was the first non-IBM keynote speaker at the largest IBM event in Europe, held at the IBM Systems Technical University.

Aleissia Laidacker

Aleissia is a Cretive Technology Director with over 20 years experience in the Immersive Technology space. 

She is a leader in AR/XR, where she was Head of Developer Experience at Magic Leap. Working with numerous partners to find creative and technically innovative ways of pushing the boundaries of interactions and storytelling using Augmented Reality.

She led as the Global Director of Creative Technology at The Mill working with teams to build world-class Experiences and Branded-Content for AR, XR, Virtual Worlds and LBEs.
She also advises and consults on a number of startups, focused on building the future Open Metaverse through technologies such as Web3, Blockchain and XR. 

Previous to working in the XR space, she worked in Game Development for over 10 years. Having led the Technology, Gameplay and AI Direction on some large game franchises such as Assassin's Creed at Ubisoft.

She is also co-founder of Mixed Flour, an Immersive Design Company focused on creating location-based experiences that bring together Food, Technology and Interaction Design.

As a technology evangelist, she often speaks at conferences, about XR, Interaction Design, Immersive Experiences, The Metaverse and Artificial Intelligence.

Luc Julia

Luc Julia is an innovator at heart, conceived, built and deployed complex digital media desktop products, scalable Mobile and Internet applications (500M+ users), worked on big data and distributed architectures. Built and led large, multidisciplinary, multi-sites engineering and research teams. Interested in all kinds of technologies to improve human lives with a special twist for data fusion, home automation, wearable devices and the next generation of context-based Human Computer Interactions.

 Luc directed Siri at Apple, was Chief Technologist at HP and co-founded a number of start-ups in the Silicon Valley. He holds dozens of patents and is recognised as one of the top 100 most influential French developers in the digital world.

As CTO and VP Innovation for Samsung from 2012 to 2017, Dr Luc Julia led the company’s vision and strategy for the Internet of Things.
Now, as Technical Director and SVP and besides is group in Silicon Valley, he is developing the new Artificial Intelligence Lab of Samsung in Paris (SAIL) where he focuses on making everyday products smarter for everyone by defining a new generation of objects.

After graduating from Pierre et Marie Curie University (Paris) and receiving a Ph.D. in computer science from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (Paris), he moved to Silicon Valley to start his career at SRI International to create the "Computer Human Interaction Center" (CHIC). He developed alongside his team the first smart refrigerators and smart vehicles.

Dr. Luc Julia also participated in the launch of Nuance Communications in 1994, the world leader in speech recognition. Nuance develops solutions for a variety of sectors such as healthcare and automotive industries, financial services and public administration.

After ten years of research, he spent the following ten years building several start-ups in Silicon Valley. Over the past ten years, he worked for big companies such as HP, Apple and Samsung to lead development teams.

He is the author of "Artificial intelligence does not exist" published by First editions (2019), to demystify the concept of AI and replace it by “augmented intelligence”. Through the pages of his book, Luc Julia shakes up conventional thinking utterly shared by mass media and Hollywood about AI purposes and the potential future threat that means to humans.

Luc Julia insists that he is not "clairvoyant" because he doesn’t pretend to predict the future. However, he dedicates himself to knock the common idea about AI because, according to Luc Julia, it is based solely on data provided by man and can’t supplant his intelligence, nor his ability to create and innovate.

Oliver Cameron

Oliver is a leader in self-driving cars and artificial intelligence.

Most recently, Oliver was the Vice President of Product at Cruise, joining through the acquisition of Voyage. Cruise is building the world's most advanced self-driving vehicles to safely connect people with the places, things, and experiences they care about. Through partnerships with General Motors and Honda, Cruise is the only self-driving company with fully integrated manufacturing at scale, building all-electric, zero-emission, self-driving vehicles that will help save lives, reimagine cities, reduce carbon pollution, redefine time in transit, and restore freedom of movement for individuals who live in dense urban settings.

Prior to Cruise, Oliver was the co-founder and CEO of Voyage. Voyage developed and deployed self-driving cars designed for senior citizens who struggled to drive. Voyage's first product was an autonomous taxi service located within a 160,000 resident retirement community in Florida. Here, their fleet delivered on the promise of autonomous driving—solving the mobility needs of residents who need it most. Voyage raised $52M in venture capital from Khosla Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Initialized Capital, and CRV. Cruise acquired Voyage in March 2021.

Prior to Voyage, Oliver was the Vice President of Product & Engineering at the online education startup Udacity. Udacity was born out of a Stanford University experiment in which Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig offered their "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" course online to anyone, for free. Over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled and not much later, Udacity was born. At Udacity, Oliver led a 200-strong Product, Engineering, and Content team, focusing on our autonomous vehicle, robotics, artificial intelligence, and deep learning curriculum.

Pieter Abbeel

AI speaker Pieter Abbeel is an AI & Robotics Professor, as well as the Robot Learning Lab’s Director at UC Berkeley. In 2014, Pieter co-founded Gradescope.com, while in 2017, he co-founded Covariant.ai. He is also an Advisor for many companies in the Robotics and AI field, including OpenAI. Moreover, Pieter created the Venture Fund AI@TheHouse and often gives lectures on artificial intelligence.

Pieter started the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab following his appointment at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor. Furthermore, in 2014, he helped develop Gradescope, which was sold to TurnItIn in 2018. Pieter created Gradescope with Sergey Karayev, Arjun Singh, Ibrahim Awwal, and several other UC Berkeley engineers.

Speaker Pieter Abbeel began working for OpenAI in 2016. Since then, he has written plenty of articles on robot learning, reinforcement learning, and unsupervised learning. 2016 saw him also take on the role of co-director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab. The BAIR involves undergraduate and postdoctoral students that are passionate about robotics and machine learning.

His other venture is Berkeley Open Arms, which has licensed the intellectual property (IP) from Berkeley related to the Blue Robot project. In 2017, he was appointed as a tenured, full-time professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Pieter Abbeel, Rocky Duan, Peter Chen, and Tianhao Zhang launched AI-based company covariant.ai in 2017. The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Wired, and IEEE Spectrum all wrote articles regarding the company’s launch.

Covariant.ai leverages recent developments in deep reinforcement learning and deep imitation learning to produce artificial intelligence software that simplifies the process of teaching robots new, advanced skills. Abbeel is actively performing researches as well as teaching upper-division and graduate courses in robotics, artificial intelligence, and deep unsupervised learning.

He has won numerous awards, including best paper awards at ICML, NIPS and ICRA, early career awards from NSF, Darpa, ONR, AFOSR, Sloan, TR35, IEEE, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Pieter's work is frequently featured in the popular press, including New York Times, BBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Wired, Forbes, Tech Review, NPR.

Current main research thrusts: robotics and machine learning with particular focus on deep reinforcement learning, deep imitation learning, deep unsupervised learning, meta-learning, learning-to-learn, and AI safety.

On OpenAI: OpenAI was co-founded by Pieter Abbeel's PhD student John Schulman (who is also the lead architecture behind ChatGPT) in December 2015. Abbeel himself was recruited to OpenAI in early 2016, where he helped lead many of the OpenAI research projects, including projects on reinforcement learning, generative AI, meta-learning, robot learning. In Fall 2017 Abbeel left his full-time role at OpenAI to found Covariant, which is leading the way in AI powered robotic automation, and transitioned into an Advisory position at OpenAI.

Marco Gercke

Prof. Dr. Marco Gercke is an entrepreneur, scientist and consultant. His first focus area is Cybersecurity. With more than 100 speeches in over 100 countries and over 100 scientific publications, Prof. Gercke is one of the world's leading experts in the field of cybersecurity and cybercrime. He is the founder and director of the Cybercrime Research Institute, an independent research institute and think tank based in Cologne. He advises governments, organizations and large enterprises around the world on strategic, political and legal issues in the field of cybersecurity. The main focus of his work is the development of innovative approaches to tackling a problem that has developed into one of the most challenging issues for governments and businesses in recent years – Cybercrime.  Over the past 15 years, he has worked in over 100 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Pacific and Latin America.

As a respected and experienced speaker, Prof. Gercke offers excellent and useful insider knowledge on the subject of cybersecurity due to his many years of activity and internal view. His lectures are clearly structured, very informative and include practical examples. As an eloquent and experienced speaker Marco usually gives free speeches without slides – an approach that allows him to adjust the response from the audience at all time.

In addition to speeches, Prof. Gercke is conducting "Cyber ​​Incident Simulations" with governments and board members of large enterprises. These are not technical simulations, but a “war gaming” / “serious gaming” approach, which allows the participants to check their capabilities in dealing with sophisticated attacks. The basis can be a real or a fictitious company (with different branches of industry available). Depending on the decision of the participants the plot of the simulation develops dynamically. It is also highly interactive and allows an interaction with the audience.

In the last years Prof. Gercke has carried out such simulations worldwide with numerous governments and board members of large enterprises. The simulation was also run for World Bank, the European Central Bank and the United Nations, and has been part of the Munich Security Conference program for the last three years. Global Speakers Bureau clients can book such simulation giving the audience an exclusive insight into how ministers and directors of large companies are preparing for cyber attacks.

The second focus of his lecture and advising activities are the digitization and its effects - especially with regard to "Machine Learning" and Artificial Intelligence. In the 90th he founded a company that utilized "Machine Learning" to develop software solutions for medical diagnostics. He was responsible for the development of the underlying technology. The next company he founded, a media agency, used "machine learning" and artificial intelligence for user interaction. Today, he focuses on advising international organizations and executive boards of major companies on issues related to the opportunities and risks of digitalization and the use of artificial intelligence. As an entrepreneur, scientist and consultant, his speeches are visionary and provide an insight into the significant development in this area.

Marco believes in customization of speeches. He does not give the same speech twice and is always open to discussing with organizers of events how to best tailor the speech to the event and audience.

Joel Selanikio

A practicing physician, TED speaker, futurist and emergency responder, Joel Selanikio bridges the worlds of healthcare, global health and technology to illustrate opportunities in the application of artificial intelligence (AI), big data, cloud computing, and mobile technology to health, healthcare, and social challenges.  A former CDC outbreak investigator and Ebola clinic director, he also frequently speaks about the challenges of providing clinical services in “the hot zone”, and the role that technology (and humanity) can play in emergencies.

A recognized innovator in global health, technology, and social enterprise, his broad career has allowed him to observe and leverage the great technological changes of our time – including the worldwide shift from personal computers to mobile, the adoption of cloud technologies, and the growing application of big data to healthcare – as few others have done.  Named in 2009 as one of Forbes’ “most powerful innovators”, he is a recipient of both the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainable Innovation and the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award for Healthcare for his work in healthcare technology.  A TED speaker, he has spoken at or provided consultation to organizations including the Royal Society of Medicine, Harvard, Stanford School of Business, DARPA, the World Economic Forum at Davos, and Google – and been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Economist, CNN, Fox News, and the BBC, among others.

Selanikio is a graduate of Haverford College and the Brown University School of Medicine, and he continues to practice pediatrics at Georgetown University.

Charlie Ang

Charlie Ang is an Exponential Keynote Speaker, Business Futurist, Disruption Advisor, and Innovation Strategist. As a Business Futurist, he analyses, imagines and explains the future, especially on how technology will impact, disrupt and empower industries, professions and economies. As an Innovation Strategist, he inspires, advises and speaks to organisations and leaders to innovate and transform in the 4th Industrial Revolution. He is the Founder of Everything40.com, a future-readiness agency, Ambassador of SingularityU Singapore, the local chapter of Singularity University and Adjunct Advisor at IDC. Charlie is also the Regional Judge of the IDC Asia-Pacific Digital Transformation Awards and on the steering committee and judging panel for Singapore Human Resources Awards 2018.

Max Tegmark

Max Tegmark is a professor doing physics and AI research at MIT, and advocates for positive use of technology as president of the Future of Life Institute. He is the author of over 200 publications as well as the New York Times bestsellers “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” and "Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality". His work with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year: 2003.”

Nick Bostrom

Nick Bostrom is Professor at Oxford University, where he is the founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute. He also directs the Governance of Artificial Intelligence Program. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (Routledge, 2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (ed., OUP, 2008), Human Enhancement (ed., OUP, 2009), and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (OUP, 2014), a New York Times bestseller.
Bostrom has a background in physics, artificial intelligence, and mathematical logic as well as philosophy. He is recipient of a Eugene R. Gannon Award (one person selected annually worldwide from the fields of philosophy, mathematics, the arts and other humanities, and the natural sciences). He has been listed on Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice; and he was included on Prospect magazine's World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15 from all fields and the highest-ranked analytic philosopher. His writings have been translated into 24 languages. There have been more than 100 translations and reprints of his works.

Paul Armstrong

Paul Armstrong is a leading strategist, author and speaker on the future of technology, disruption, retail innovation, media industry, social technologies, consumer technology, mobile innovation, IoT, Martech/Adtech, start-ups and the start-up ecosystem.

Paul runs the technology advisory HERE/FORTH where he helps clients including PwC, Coca-Cola, O2, P&G, jkrGlobal and MEC understand trends and how to sensibly apply emerging technologies strategically.

Paul is regularly seen on the BBC and News at Ten, when industry comment is called for, and currently writes for a number of publications, including Forbes, Cool Hunting and Short List.

Paul's first book, ‘Disruptive Technologies’, offers organizations a distinct response to emerging technologies including Blockchain (Bitcoin), artificial intelligence, graphene and nanotechnology and other external factors - such as the sharing economy, mobile penetration, millennial workforce, ageing populations - that impact on their business, client service and product model. 'Disruptive Technologies' became a best seller on Amazon with pre-orders alone.

Nell Watson

Nell Watson is an engineer, entrepreneur, and futurist thinker who grew up in Northern Ireland. She has a longstanding interest in the philosophy of technology, and how extensions of human capacity drive emerging social trends.
Nell lectures globally on Machine Intelligence, AI philosophy, Human-Machine relations, and the Future of Human Society, serving as Associate Faculty at Singularity University and a member of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
She has had an unusual career, including teaching post-grad Computer Science at the age of 24, and later co-founding a successful Graffiti arts company. Her ability to bridge the world of technology and the Humanities makes it easy for her to translate complex subjects so that they can be clearly understood.
In 2010 Nell founded Poikos, a machine learning-driven ‘AI for for body measurement’. Nell’s patented technology ‘dematerialises’ the 3D body scanner, by providing accurate 3D scans of the body with only 2D camera hardware, such as that found within smartphones, or laptops. This may then be applied to a range of markets, such as mass customisation, and health.
She is also Co-Founder of OpenEth.org, a machine ethics research company. OpenEth have a vision of building a safer and more just world, by enabling humans and machines to make better decisions.
In her spare time Nell enjoys coding games, such as her startup life simulator, Founder Life. Founder Life attempts to teach the mindfulness and psychological habits necessary for entrepreneurs to consistently execute under pressure.
Possessing a long-term mindset, Nell serves as Senior Advisor to The Future Society at Harvard, as well as serving as an advisory technologist to several startups, accelerators, and venture capital funds.

Tom Koulopoulos

Tom Koulopoulos is Chairman and founder of Delphi Group, a 30-year-old Boston-based think tank named one of the fastest growing private companies by Inc. Magazine, and the founding partner of Acrovantage Ventures, which invests in early-stage technology startups. He is also the author of 13 books, an inventor with several patents, an Inc.com columnist, the past Executive Director of the Babson College Center for Business Innovation, the past director of the Dell Innovation Lab, and a professor at Boston University.

His insights have received wide praise from luminaries such as the late Peter Drucker, the father of modern management; Dee Hock, founder of Visa International; and Tom Peters, who called his writing, “a brilliant vision of where we must take our enterprises to survive and thrive.” His Inc. column is read by over one million people yearly.

Mr. Koulopoulos’ thirteen books include his most recent, Reimagining Healthcare, The Bottomless Cloud, Revealing the Invisible, The Gen Z Effect, and Cloud Surfing. His upcoming book, Gigatrends, looks at the seven tech trends that are shaping the future of how we live, work, and play.

Tom’s keynotes blend humor, insight, and a cutting-edge view of the future in a way that’s customized to each audience. According to Tom’s mentor, Peter Drucker, Tom’s writing “makes you question not only the way you run your business but the way you run yourself.”

Dennis Hong

Dr. Dennis Hong, a TED alumnus, is a Professor and the Founding Director of RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory) of the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department at UCLA.
His research focuses on robot locomotion and manipulation, autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. He is the inventor of a number of novel robots and mechanisms, including the ‘whole skin locomotion’ for mobile robots inspired by how amoeba move, a unique three-legged waking robot STriDER, an air-powered robotic hand RAPHaEL, and the world’s first car that can be driven by the blind.
His work has been featured on numerous national and international media. Washington Post magazine called Dr. Hong “the Leonardo da Vinci of robots.” Dr. Hong has been named to Popular Science’s 8th annual “Brilliant 10”, honoring top scientists younger than 40 years of age from across the United States, “Forward Under 40” by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Alumni Association, and also honored as “Top 40 Under 40” alumni by Purdue University. Hong’s other past awards include the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award, the SAE International’s Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award, and the ASME Freudenstein / GM Young Investigator Award to name a few.
Dr. Hong also actively leads student teams for various international robotics and design competitions winning numerous top prizes including the DARPA Urban Challenge where they won third place and the $500,000 prize, and the RoboCup, the international autonomous robot soccer competition where his team won First Place in both the Kid-Size and Adult-Size Humanoid divisions and brought the Louis Vuitton Cup Best Humanoid Award to the United States for the very first time. Dr. Hong received his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1994), his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University (1999, 2002).
He is also a serious gourmet chef and a magician performing annual charity magic shows and lectures on the science of magic.

Steve Wozniak

A Silicon Valley icon and philanthropist for more than thirty years, Steve Wozniak has helped shape the computing industry with his design of Apple’s first line of products the Apple I and II and influenced the popular Macintosh. In 1976, Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer Inc. with Wozniak’s Apple I personal computer. The following year, he introduced his Apple II personal computer, featuring a central processing unit, a keyboard, color graphics, and a floppy disk drive.

The Apple II was integral in launching the personal computer industry.

In 1981, he went back to UC Berkeley and finished his degree in electrical engineering/computer science. For his achievements at Apple Computer, Wozniak was awarded the National Medal of Technology by the President of the United States in 1985, the highest honor bestowed on America’s leading innovators.

In 2000, he was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame and was awarded the prestigious Heinz Award for Technology, The Economy and Employment for single-handedly designing the first personal computer and for then redirecting his lifelong passion for mathematics and electronics toward lighting the fires of excitement for education in grade school students and their teachers.

Through the years, Wozniak has been involved in various business and philanthropic ventures, focusing primarily on computer capabilities in schools and stressing hands-on learning and encouraging creativity for students.  Making significant investments of both his time and resources in education, he adopted the Los Gatos School District, providing students and teachers with hands-on teaching and donations of state-of-the-art technology equipment. He founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and was the founding sponsor of the Tech Museum, Silicon Valley Ballet and Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose.

In 2006, Wozniak published his autobiography, iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. It was co-authored by writer Gina Smith.

In 2007, Wozniak joined Scottevest as an Advisory Board Member.

In 2009, Wozniak joined Fusion-io, a data storage and server company, in Salt Lake City, Utah as their chief scientist.

In 2014 Wozniak became an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Engineering & Information Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

Wozniak continues to pursue his entrepreneurial and philanthropic interests to this day. In October 2017, Steve co-founded Woz U — a postsecondary education and training platform focused on software engineering and technology development. He has also recently co-founded Efforce — which leverages disparate applications of blockchain technology.

Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson is a former journalist and Wall Street technology analyst who is a leading angel investor, philanthropist, and commentator focused on breakthrough efficacy in healthcare, government transparency, digital technology, biotechnology, and space.

She has devoted her life to discovering the inevitable and promoting the possible. As an investor/commentator, she focuses on emerging technologies and business models (peer-to-peer, artificial intelligence, the Internet, wireless applications), emerging markets (Eastern Europe) and emerging companies (Cybiko, Sourceree, Trustworks, CV-Online, Brunswicks Direct*, Newspaper Direct, IBS, and others you will someday hear of).

In 1994, she was one of the first to explore the impact of the Net on intellectual property (among other things, why Bill Gates now plans to offer software as an online service). In 1997, she wrote a book on the impact of the Net on individuals' lives, "Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age".

Dyson is the chairman of EDventure Holdings which publishes the influential monthly computer-industry newsletter, Release 1.0, and sponsors two of the industry's premier annual conferences, PC (Platforms for Communications) Forum in the US and EDventure's High-Tech Forum in Europe. In addition, she donates time and money as a trustee to emerging organizations (the Santa Fe Institute, the Eurasia Foundation and bridges.org). In November 2001, she finished a two-year-term as founding chairman of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the international agency charged with setting policy for the Internet's core infrastructure (technical standards and the Domain Name System) independent of government control.

After graduating from Harvard in economics, Dyson began her serious career in 1974 as a fact-checker for Forbes and quickly rose to reporter. In 1977, she joined New Court Securities as "the research department", following Federal Express and other start-ups. After a stint at Oppenheimer covering software companies, she moved to Rosen Research and in 1983 bought the company from her employer Ben Rosen, and renamed it EDventure Holdings.

The daughter of an English physicist and a Swiss mathematician, Dyson started traveling in Eastern Europe in 1989 and eventually helped to fill the small but vital vacuum at the intersection of Eastern Europe, high-tech and venture capital.