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

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

Francesca Rossi is a professor of computer science at the University of Padova, Italy. Currently she is on sabbatical at Harvard with a Radcliffe fellowship.

Her research interests include constraint reasoning, preferences, multi-agent systems, computational social choice, and artificial intelligence.

She has been president of the international association for constraint programming (ACP) and she is now the president of IJCAI. She has been program chair of CP 2003 and of IJCAI 2013.

She is in the editorial board of Constraints, Artificial Intelligence, AMAI, and KAIS. She will be Editor in Chief of JAIR starting January 2015.

She has published over 160 articles in international journals, in proceedings of international conferences or workshops, and as book chapters. She has co-authored a book. She has edited 16 volumes, between conference proceedings, collections of contributions, and special issue of international journals. She has co-edited the Handbook of Constraint Programming (Elsevier, 2006).  Her h-index is 27. Her most cited papers have more than 560 citations. She has more than 100 co-authors.

Ajay Bhalla is president of Cyber & Intelligence for Mastercard and serves on the global management committee.  He leads the team that develops product solutions that enhance safety, security and experience for consumers, merchants, partners and governments around the world. Under Ajay’s tenure, Mastercard has embedded AI technologies across its network, powering key security solutions for more than 75 billion transactions per year and saving billions of dollars of potential fraud

Meriem is a Senior Analyst for The EIU’s Public Policy Consulting team. She focuses on macroeconomic policy analysis, developing strategies for diversification and growth, and designing technology, healthcare and education-related policies across the Middle East and North Africa region. Most recently, Meriem managed research for the Google-sponsored technology report ‘Scaling Up: Potential Economic Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the UAE and Saudi Arabia’. Other notable flagship products include the Global Food Security Index and the Global Health Security Index.

She has previous work experience with the World Bank, in which she focused on governance, policy research, and strategic economic reform.

Meriem holds an MSc degree in Public Management and Governance from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she specialised in public policy analysis and reform, economic development and international security.

Teemu Roos is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Helsinki. Prof Roos’s research interests include the theory and applications of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science. He developed the Elements of AI online course which plays a pivotal role in Finland’s unique, inclusive AI strategy.

Kate is Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Artificial Intelligence, King’s College London. Coming from an Arts and Humanities background (as an archaeologist) with a subsequent PhD in Computer Science, Kate has a demonstrable track record of combining diverse fields and methods of research. Her work investigates how people interact with and react to technology, to understand how emerging and future technologies will affect us and the society in which we live. Her recent research has focused on cognition, sexuality and intimacy and how these might be incorporated into cognitive systems. This formed the topic of her new book, Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Kate is a member of Ada-AI, an international non-profit organisation working to ensure that AI is developed and adopted in ways that are inclusive and equitable.

Kate is a campaigner for gender equality and is involved in initiatives to improve opportunities for women in tech. She is also a mental health campaigner and fundraiser.

Who is responsible in an accident with a self-driving car? How do we protect our privacy when using tracking apps? And how can we prevent unfair treatment from fraud detection systems? Futures researcher Rudy van Belkom has searched for answers in his foresight study on the future of artificial intelligence (AI). In his search he discovered that while there is a lot of talk about ethics, there is still often a lack of perspectives for action. If we want to use ethically responsible AI applications in the future, now is the time to put ethics into practice. He wrote a book about ethics in the design process (‘AI no longer has a plug‘) that offers developers, policymakers, philosophers and basically anyone with an interest in AI, tools for integrating ethics into the AI ​​design process.  

A book about ethics in the design process of AI which argues that a lot is written about ethics and that an action perspective is often missing, has to go beyond the written word, which is why he developed an ethical design game, inspired by the scrum process, that can be used to better streamline the discussion about ethics. The game was developed in collaboration with the standards commission AI of the NEN (The Royal Netherlands Standardization Institute) and the Artificial Intelligence lectorate of the HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht. The essence of the game is based on the position paper that he wrote together with the HU research group and was accepted for ECAI 2020: ‘An Agile Framework for Trustworthy AI‘. 

Van Belkom also investigated the role of AI in the future of his own field. His scientific article ‘The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Activities of a Futurist‘ appeared in World Futures Review. 

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Gillblad is the Head of AI Research at RISE, the Swedish Research Institutes, and Co-Director of AI-Innovation of Sweden. He has a background in machine learning and large scale data analytics, and has extensive experience of applying such methods in practice.