Our 2024 Speakers

Rama Akkiraju is VP of Enterprise AI & Automation at NVIDIA. Previously, she held leadership roles at IBM, including IBM Fellow and CTO of Watson AI Operations. Rama has co-authored over 100 technical papers and holds 50+ patents. Recognized as one of Forbes' "Top 20 Women in AI Research," she has received multiple awards, including the 2022 "AI Industry Leader of the Year." Rama led efforts to scale IBM Watson’s AI services globally and developed key AI technologies like Personality Insights and Tone Analyzer. She holds a master's in computer science and an MBA from NYU.

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The New York Times headlined: "When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber 'Dad'." In 1990-91, he laid the foundations of "Generative AI," by introducing the principles of Generative Adversarial Networks (used for deepfakes), unnormalised linear Transformers (the T in ChatGPT), and self-supervised Pre-Training (the P in ChatGPT). His lab also produced LSTM, the most cited AI of the 20th century, and the Highway Net (a variant of which is the most cited AI of the 21st century). Elon Musk tweeted: "Schmidhuber invented everything." His AI is on over 3 billion smartphones, and used many billions of times per day.

Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter, a contributor to The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal, and an assistant professor of journalism at New York University. Schellmann became involved in holding artificial intelligence (AI) accountable after a conversation with a Lyft driver in 2017 and has been described as "one of the women detoxifying the world of AI." In her 2024 book, The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired, And Why We Need To Fight Back (Hachette), she investigates the rise of AI in the workplace. Drawing on exclusive information from whistleblowers, internal documents, and real-world tests, Hilke reveals that many of the algorithms that were supposed to "democratize hiring" are biased, racist, and do more harm than good.

Ramin is the co-founder and CEO of Liquid AI and a machine learning Scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ramin’s research focuses on modeling and understanding intelligence and sequential decision making. Ramin is known for his major contributions to the AI and machine learning field in designing explainable and robust deep learning systems. He co-invented liquid neural networks, a class of brain-inspired AI systems that can stay adaptable even after training. He received his Ph.D. degree with distinction in Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria.

Selena Deckelmann is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. She brings more than 20 years of experience in open source technology, product management, and engineering leadership. Before joining the Wikimedia Foundation in 2022, Selena was Senior Vice President at Mozilla. She is a Python Foundation Fellow and former Major Contributor to PostgreSQL, one of the largest free and open source databases in the world. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.

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Fascinated by software development since his childhood in Germany, Thomas Dohmke has built a career building tools developers love and accelerating innovations that are changing software development. Currently, Thomas is Chief Executive Officer of GitHub, where he has overseen the launch of the world's first at-scale AI developer tool, GitHub Copilot. Before his time at GitHub, Thomas previously co-founded HockeyApp and led the company as CEO through its acquisition by Microsoft in 2014, and holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from University of Glasgow, UK.

Oliver Brock is the Alexander-von-Humboldt Professor of Robotics in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technische Universität Berlin. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2000 and held postdoctoral positions at Rice University and Stanford University. He was an Assistant and Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst before moving back to Berlin in 2009. Oliver Brock directs the Research Center of Excellence "Science of Intelligence". He is an IEEE Fellow and was president of the Robotics: Science and Systems Foundation from 2012 until 2019.

Professor Chin-Teng Lin is a pioneer in brain computer interfaces (BCI), computational intelligence-based brain cognitive models, and human-centric AI applications. He has revealed brain dynamics behind cognitive status and identified biomarkers that show brain health and mental workload, give humans neurofeedback, and identify stress signals when performing complex tasks and activities. Using wearable and wireless BCI technology, he synergises AI and BCIs into solutions for human-AI teaming and co-learning, spontaneous intelligence teaming and translating EEG signals to speech, text, and machine and robot control. His work is applied in brain healthcare, fatigue detection, situational awareness, and assistive technologies.

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Thomas Wolf is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, where he leads open-source, educational, and research initiatives. Passionate about making complex AI models and datasets accessible, he created the Hugging Face Transformers and Datasets libraries. Thomas advocates for open science in AI/ML, bridging academia and industry through projects like the BigScience Workshop, resulting in the BLOOM experiments. His research focuses on Large Language Model (LLM) accessibility and overcoming their limitations. He also enjoys creating educational content, including co-authoring "Natural Language Processing with Transformers" and producing blog posts and videos on AI and NLP.

Dr. Katja Hofmann is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, where she leads the Game Intelligence team. She drives research in generative AI and reinforcement learning, leveraging the rich environments and data provided by modern video games. She and her team share the belief that machine learning insights developed in complex game environments will drive a transformation of how people interact with AI. Her long-term goal is to develop systems that learn to collaborate with people, to empower their users and help solve complex real-world problems.

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Jonas Andrulis is Founder and CEO of German AI R&D start-up Aleph Alpha. He worked on AI innovation in academia and industry, starting AI software companies for logistics and computer vision and was in Apple AI R&D special projects until 2019. 

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Riccardo Loconte is a Psychologist and a PhD Student in Cognitive, Computational and Social Neuroscience at IMT School of Advanced Studies Lucca (Italy). He is currently visiting the Department of Methodology and Statistics at Tilburg University (Netherlands). His first research interest was in forensic psychology and in how people dissimulate to appear more socially desirable. Later, he became interested in how to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to further psychological research, addressing old questions with new tools. With the aim of combining these two main interests, his research currently investigates the application of AI and computational methods for verbal lie detection.

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Julian Schilliger is a Digital Archeologist. Digital archeology started for him as a balance during his studies at ETH Zurich (BSc Computer Science, MSc Robotics) and became a full-time job after winning the Vesuvius Challenge. He develops software that restores CT scans of ancient, rolled-up scrolls. He enjoys working with visual computing, machine learning and algorithms of all kinds. He develops new algorithms most efficiently outdoors in nature, for example on a hike.

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Raia joined Google DeepMind in 2014 to advance its mission to build AGI safely for the benefit of humanity. After a decade of contributions in continual learning, reinforcement learning, and robotics, she is now a VP of research and oversees foundational and exploratory research at DeepMind. Raia leads numerous teams exploring new AI innovations and models for critical challenges such as weather and climate modeling. Raia is also a change leader in the broader AI community, where most recently she was a founder and Editor-in-Chief of a new open journal, Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR).

Vit is a PhD student at the University of Oxford, supervised by Andrew Markham and Niki Trigoni. His research interests are in Machine Learning for Climate Change applications, namely in methane detection using satellite data. He also works with AI on-board of communication constrained devices. He undertook research internships at the ETH Zürich in the EcoVision group (2019) and at Carnegie Mellon University in Franz Franchetti’s group (2017-18). He has been participating in the Frontier Development Lab since 2021 as a ML researcher and team lead. He likes Arts, literature, travelling and analog photography.

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Andrea Lavazza is a moral philosopher at Pegaso University and the Centro Universitario Internazionale in Italy. His research focuses on the ethics of new technologies, including neuroscience, neurotechnologies, and artificial intelligence. Lavazza is interested in the impact of novel devices on humans and the moral status of new entities, both biological—such as brain organoids—and non-biological—such as digital agents. He has also explored the fate of free will and certain human functions, such as memory, in a technological age. Lavazza has published 15 books and 180 papers and chapters, both as an author and an editor.

Youssef Nader is an Egyptian AI researcher and a graduate student at the Freie University in Berlin. He works on the intersection of explainable AI, machine learning, self-supervised learning and swarm intelligence. Youssef enjoys competing in AI challenges tackling different problems, and has won multiple awards in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing.

In 2023, Youssef was one of the first people to use AI to read inside a 2000 year old burnt Greek scroll, uncovering 10 letters. Following on with that success he later led the winning team of the Vesuvius Grandprize and was able to recover more than 2000+ letters from inside the carbonized scroll. In his free time, Youssef enjoys creative writing, poetry, and inventing new recipes.

Victor Riparbelli is the CEO and co-founder of Synthesia, the world’s leading AI video communications platform for enterprises. More than 55,000 businesses, including half of the Fortune 100, use it to communicate efficiently and share knowledge at scale using AI avatars. Victor has been involved in technology entrepreneurship for the past 10 years and co-founded Synthesia in 2017 together with prof. Matthias Niessner, prof. Lourdes Agapito, and Steffen Tjerrild. Combining technical, academic, and entrepreneurial excellence, Victor and his team are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible using AI, while striving to pioneer the field in an ethical and responsible way.

Cara Hunter MLA is an elected Social Democratic and Labour Party politician who has been a dedicated Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly since 2020. Her key policy focus is on enhancing mental health services, advancing suicide prevention education, and promoting peace-building in post-conflict Northern Ireland. She uses her platform to advocate for addiction recovery, address gender-based violence both online and offline, and need for early intervention for those struggling with addiction. In 2019, as the youngest female Deputy Mayor of Derry City and Strabane Council, she worked relentlessly to build a more inclusive and compassionate Northern Ireland.

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Architect and lead author of the EU AI Act, Dr. Gabriele Mazzini is a pioneer and world-renowned expert in AI governance and regulation. During his tenure at the European Commission, he shaped the European approach to AI since inception and from 2019 he designed the draft AI Act and was the lead advisor on the legislative negotiations. Beforehand, he was a senior executive of the Millennium Villages Project, a science and technology based international development initiative across several sub-Saharan countries founded by economist Jeffrey Sachs. He also worked with start-ups in New York. Frequent public speaker, lecturer and advisor, currently Gabriele is a Fellow at MIT. He holds a LLM from Harvard Law School, a PhD from the University of Pavia and a Law Degree from the Catholic University in Milan.

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Shaolei Ren is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. He has taught and researched computational sustainability for more than a decade. His work on sustainable AI has been featured in many international AI governance and ethics guidelines, contributed to K-12 education materials, led to industry innovations like real-time water footprint reporting tools, and gained worldwide media coverage.

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