Speakers 2018

Alex Stil

President of [m]Platform EMEA

Mr. Alex Stil has been President of [m]Platform for EMEA at GroupM Worldwide Inc. since December 19, 2016. Mr. Stil has been Chief Operating Officer at Mindshare USA, LLC since 2008 and serves as its Head of Digital EMEA. Mr. Stil serves as an Advisor of eVentures Africa Fund BV. He served as Chief Operating Officer at MindShare B.V. He was the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Reddion BV and Managing Director at Arthouse Multimedia BV. He has extensive experience working with global clients including Unilever, KPN, monster.com , ING, Dell and Kodak. He played a significant role supporting GroupM’s agencies in real time media management. He is one of the most accomplished digital innovators in Europe.

Dominic Grainger

CEO GroupM EMEA

Dominic started his career at Price Waterhouse in 1987 where he advised a number of FTSE 100 companies and multinationals specializing in mergers and acquisitions across Europe. His advertising-related clients included CIA Group (later Tempus Group PLC) as it started to expand by acquisition across Europe from 1993 onwards.His media career started in 1997 when he joined CIA as Chief Financial Officer of CIA Europe and was heavily involved in building and then consolidating the European network. Dominic became Chief Operating Officer when the CIA regions were aligned to create CIA Worldwide in 2001.In late 2001, Tempus was acquired by WPP. Following the merger of CIA with The Media Edge in 2002.Dominic was appointed Chief Executive Officer of MEC Europe, Middle East and Africa. In the following three years Mediaedge:cia EMEA saw significant growth and developed its offer into one of the region’s leading communications planning and implementation agencies with 120 offices in 46 countries.Dominic became Managing Director of GroupM Europe, Middle East and Africa in January 2006 and was promoted to Chief Executive Officer in October 2008.

www.groupm.com/news/dominic-grainger-elected-president-of-eaca-to-drive-digital-agenda

Nick Goldman

Goldman Research

Nick Goldman has a first degree in mathematics and received his PhD in molecular evolution from the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, in 1992. He has worked at London’s Natural History Museum, the UK Medical Research Council’s National Institute for Medical Research (London) and the University of Cambridge before joining the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in 2002.

He leads a research group devising novel data analysis techniques for molecular evolution, and has published approximately 100 scientific papers. Nick is also an EMBL Senior Scientist, and a member of EBI’s Executive and Strategy Management Committees.

www.ebi.ac.uk/
www.ebi.ac.uk/about/people/nick-goldman

Dr. David Hanson

Hanson Robotics

David Hanson designs intelligent humanlike robots with naturalistic expressive faces and aesthetics, with abilities to openly converse with people, walk, see, learn and remember experiences, and build relationships with people. Integrating his original R&D in robotics, material science, AI and science of mind, Hanson seeks to transmute AI and robotics into living sculptural and narrative media that speak to the human heart. With over 50 original robots deployed as fine art, platforms for research, healthcare, autism treatment, and prototyped consumer product, Hanson’s works serve at institutions around the world, including Cambridge University, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, KAIST, JPL/Caltech, the University of Geneva, the Open Cog foundation, and numerous museums.

Over three decades, Hanson initiated and led many influential projects in the sciences, arts, education, and entrepreneurship, serving as PI, CEO, CTO, lead scientist, lead designer, and professor. In 2005, Hanson founded Hanson Robotics Inc. to deploy humanlike robots, and took the company from startup to product release, to cashflow positivity. In 2009 Hanson founded the non-profit Initiative for Awakening Machines (IAM), dedicated to the realization of wise and beneficial artificial general intelligence (AGI). Throughout these efforts, Hanson collaborates with diverse scientists, artists, business people, students and decision makers, hoping to bridge disparate communities to accelerate machine awakening.

Ultimately, Hanson strives to give rise to machines with superhuman intelligence, creativity, and compassion—new class of beings who truly care about us and yield a positive and stable future. Hanson contends that only wise superintelligent machines can counter impending existential threats including those of non-wise superintelligent machines. Hanson hopes that by humanizing AI with figurative character interfaces, AI and people may come to relate to each other, emotionally bond, and develop deep, mutual understanding, thereby enabling AI to evolve toward safe, wise AGI.

To these aspirations, Dr. Hanson brings varied talents including: classical sculpture, material science, cognitive science, AI software design, mechanical design, robotics, and fiction writing. A former Walt Disney Imagineer, Hanson developed both sculptural works and experimental robotics technologies for theme parks. As a fine artist Hanson exhibited at art museums including the Reina Sophia, Tokyo Modern, and the Cooper Hewitt Design Museums. Hanson’s large figurative sculptures stand prominently in the Atlantis resort, Universal Studios Islands of Adventure, and several Disney theme parks.

Dr. David Hanson

Prof. Winfried Hensinger

University of Sussex

Winfried Hensinger obtained his undergraduate degree at the Ruprechts-Karls University in Heidelberg, Germany and then moved to the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia to complete a Master’s degree. Subsequently he obtained his PhD at the University of Queensland under guidance of Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop, Norman Heckenberg and Gerard Milburn in the field of experimental nonlinear quantum dynamics with ultracold atoms. During his PhD candidature he spent an extended period at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, USA in the group of Nobel laureate William Phillips where he demonstrated dynamical tunnelling in a sodium Bose-Einstein condensate. After completing his PhD he spent three years as a FOCUS Research Fellow in the group of Chris Monroe at the University of Michigan developing ways to scale ion trap quantum information processing. In 2005, he moved to the University of Sussex, where he is now Professor of Quantum Technologies. Hensinger heads the Sussex Ion Quantum Technology Group and he is the director of the Sussex Centre for Quantum Technologies. Hensinger’s group works on constructing a trapped-ion quantum computer demonstrator device, a quantum simulation engine as well as portable quantum sensors in collaboration with a number of academic and industrial partners.

This short film provides a popular science introduction about his research. Devoting much of his life to utilizing the strange nature of physics to solve the world’s problems, this short documentary follows him on his current venture to create a large-scale quantum computer.

www.sussex.ac.uk

Prof. Michael Sandel

Harvard University

Michael Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard University. His writings—on justice, ethics, democracy, and markets–have been translated into 27 languages. His course “Justice” is the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and on television. It has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world, including in China, where Sandel was named the “most influential foreign figure of the year.” (China Newsweek)
Sandel’s books relate enduring themes of political philosophy to the most vexing moral and civic questions of our time. They include What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets; Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?; The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering; Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics; Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy; and Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.
Sandel has been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne, and delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Oxford, the BBC’s Reith Lectures, and the Kellogg Lecture on Jurisprudence at the U.S. Library of Congress. In 2016, East China Normal University (Shanghai) convened an international conference to explore points of contact between Sandel’s work and the Confucian tradition.

www.harvard.edu
www.scholar.harvard.edu/sandel/home

Prof. Dr. med Alena Buyx

Member of the Ethics Council of German Government

Alena Buyx, MD, PhD, is Professor of Biomedical Ethics and Co-Director of the Institute of Experimental Medicine, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Germany. She is a medical doc-tor with postgraduate degrees in philosophy and sociology. Her research spans the whole field of biomedical and public health ethics, with a particular focus on data-rich medicine/Big Data, research ethics, emerging health technologies, participatory research, and questions of solidarity and justice in contexts such as public health and health care provision. She has expertise in theo-retical ethical analysis as well as in empirical approaches and policy development. She is keen on interdisciplinary approaches and collaborates regularly with clinical colleagues as well as with public health professionals, political and social scientists, philosophers, lawyers or health economists. Previously, she has held appointments at Harvard University, University College London, and Münster University.
Alena is passionate about contributing to the practical, political and regulatory aspects of bio-medical ethics. She sits on a number of high-level national and international ethics bodies con-cerned with policy development and implementation (such as the German Ethics Council), advi-sory boards (such as Forum Alpach), and she consults for various international research consor-tia and policy initiatives. Alena is committed to communicating with the public and lectures widely. She is regularly featured on TV, radio and in print. Find more information on her work on her homepage at alenabuyx.net.

Prof. Kevin Slavin

Research Affilitate MIT

As an entrepreneur, Kevin Slavin has successfully integrated digital media, game development, technology, and design. He is a pioneer in rethinking game design and development around new technologies (like GPS) and new platforms (like Facebook).
In 2005 he co-founded Area/Code (acquired by Zynga in 2011), where he developed large-scale, real-world games using mobile, pervasive, and location-aware technologies. This included work for major companies, including Nokia, Nike, and Puma, and also for media giants, including MTV, A&E, the Discovery Channel, CBSl, and Disney. He co-founded AFK Labs in 2008, designing next-generation responsive environments, including one for what was then the largest and densest sensor mesh on the planet.
Slavin argues that we’re living in a world designed for–and increasingly controlled by–algorithms. His very popular TED talk, “How Algorithms Shape Our World,” has received over 2 million views. He frequently delivers keynote addresses and has spoken at international venues such as the Royal Society of Art, Aspen Institute, BBC, and MIP/Cannes.
Slavin has taught at NYU’s ITP, the Cooper Union, and Fabrica, and has worked as a creative director and strategic planner in advertising agencies, including DDB and TBWA\Chiat\Day. He is currently working on producing a TV show for network broadcast. As an artist, his public, city-scale work has been exhibited in Frankfurt’s Museum fuer Moderne Kunst and the Design Museum of London. He has been written about in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Wired, and Fast Company. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union.

www.media.mit.edu/people/slavin/overview/

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