Guest Speakers
Day 1
Guido Imbens, Stanford
The Applied Econometrics Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Professor of Economics in the Economics Department at Stanford University
Professor Guido Imbens is The Applied Econometrics Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) and Professor of Economics in the Economics Department at Stanford University. He is also the Chai-Siriwatwechakul Faculty Fellow at the GSB. He has held tenured positions at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Harvard University prior to joining Stanford in 2012.
Professor Imbens specializes in econometrics, and in particular methods for drawing causal inferences from experimental and observational data.
In 2021 he shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel with David Card and Joshua Angrist for “methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationship”.
Professor Imbens is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Statistical Association, and an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of St. Gallen and Brown University. In 2017 he received the Horace Mann medal at Brown University. Currently Imbens is Editor of Econometrica, one of the leading academic journals in economics.
Alex Pentland, MIT & Stanford
Toshiba Professor of Media, Arts, and Sciences at MIT, co-creator of the MIT Media Lab, and Founder of the MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics Labs
Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland is a global expert on AI, data analytics, and secure distributed information systems that support such analysis. He has more than twenty years of experience in the financial, social, and engineering aspects of building, operating, and evolving these fields.
Professor Pentland began his career as a Lecturer at Stanford, then transferred to MIT to help create the Media Lab and later the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. He advises the OECD and formerly the UN Secretary General, EU Presidency, World Economic Forum, Google, AT&T, Telefonica, and Nissan, as well as many start-up firms. He has been appointed a Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI).
He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and has won numerous awards and prizes, including the 40th Anniversary of the Internet from DARPA, the Brandeis Privacy Award, the AI Influencer Lifetime Achievement Award, and many scientific awards.
Carme Artigas, United Nations
Co-Chair United Nations AI Advisory Body, former Spain’s Secretary of State for Digitalization and AI
Carme Artigas is a highly regarded leader in AI, big data, cybersecurity, and technology innovation, with over 30 years of experience. She co-founded Synergic Partners, a pioneering European Big Data company, which was acquired by the Telefonica Group in 2015. From 2020 to 2023, she served as Spain’s first Secretary of State for Digitalization and AI, where she played a crucial role in advancing the EU AI Act during the Spanish Presidency of the EU. She is now Co-Chair of the United Nations AI Advisory Body and a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center.
Throughout her career, she has held senior positions at Procter & Gamble, the City of Barcelona, and Ericsson, where she led their European venture capital firm. Artigas holds a Master of Science in Chemical Engineering and has completed postgraduate programs at Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute. She has been named an ambassador for Stanford’s "Women in Data Science (WIDS)" initiative and is widely recognized as an international expert in AI regulation and governance.
Shafi Goldwasser, Berkeley
Director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley
Professor Goldwasser was the recipient of ACM Turing Award for 2012. She was also the recipient of the Gödel Prize in 1993 and another in 2001 for her work on interactive proofs and connections to hardness of approximation, and was awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (1996), the RSA award in mathematics (1998), the ACM Athena award for women in computer science (2008), the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science (2010), the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (2011), the Barnard College Medal of Distinction (2016), the Suffrage Science Award (2016), the BBVA Frontier Knowledge Award (2017), the Loreal Unesco International Women in Science Award(2021).
She is a member of the AAAS, ACM, NAE, NAS, Israeli Academy of Science, London Mathematical Society, the Russian Academy of Science and a foreign member of the Royal Society. She holds honorary degrees from Oxford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv University, Ben Gurion University, University of Haifa and University of Waterloo.
Thomas Hardjono, MIT
CTO of Connection Science and Technical Director of the MIT Trust-Data Consortium at MIT in Cambridge, MA
Dr Hardjono is an early pioneer in the field of digital identities and trusted hardware, and has been instrumental in the development and broad adoption of the MIT Kerberos authentication protocol. His activities include leading standard development efforts, notably at the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), IEEE, Trusted Computing Group, Confidential Computing Alliance and others.
He has published more than 70 technical conference/journal papers, several books and more than 30 patents. He is currently involved in several startups around the MIT community. His current area of interest is Web3 Digital Assets, with focus on the interoperability of asset networks and survivability of these networks against cybersecurity attacks.
Praneeth Vepakomma, MIT & MBZUAI
Assistant Professor, Department of Machine Learning, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
Praneeth Vepakomma recently submitted his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Machine Learning at Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi.
He has extensive industrial experience from his time at Meta, Apple, Amazon Web Services, Motorola Solutions, Corning and several startups. He has won the Meta PhD research fellowship in Applied Statistics and two SERC Scholarships (for Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing) from MIT's Schwarzman College of Computing. He co-founded a research based non-profit (Integrity Distributed) that won the Financial Times Digital Innovation Award.
He holds an MS in Mathematical and Applied Statistics from Rutgers University. His research focuses on developing algorithms for distributed computation in statistics & machine learning under constraints of privacy and efficiency.
Peter Kairouz, Google
Research Scientist, Google, USA
Peter Kairouz is a research scientist at Google, where he leads research efforts on distributed, privacy-preserving, and robust machine learning. Prior to joining Google, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University, and before that, he was a PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is the recipient of the 2012 Roberto Padovani Scholarship from Qualcomm's Research Center, the 2015 ACM SIGMETRICS Best Paper Award, the 2015 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Finalist Award, and the 2016 Harold L. Olesen Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from UIUC.
Samuel Horvath, MBZUAI
Assistant Professor, Department of Machine Learning, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
Samuel is an assistant professor of Machine Learning at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). He completed his MS and Ph.D. in statistics at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).
His research focuses on understanding distributed and federated training algorithms, particularly how they interact with system-level and statistical heterogeneity, with the goal of designing efficient and practical algorithms. Samuel is broadly interested in federated learning, distributed optimization, and efficient deep learning.
Miguel Hernán, MIT
Kolokotrones Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health and Director of CAUSALab
Professor Miguel Hernán uses health data and causal inference methods to learn what works. As Director of the CAUSALab at Harvard, he and his collaborators repurpose real world data into scientific evidence for the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental illness. His work shapes health policy and research methodology worldwide.
Professor Hernán joined the Harvard School of Public Health in 1999, becoming a professor in 2011 before being appointed Kolokotrones Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2016. In 2021, Prof Hernán was named Director, CAUSALab, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and he is also an Associate Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
He is currently as Associate Editor of Annals of Internal Medicine, and Editor Emeritus of Epidemiology, and previously as Associate Editor of Biometrics, American Journal of Epidemiology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association.
Professor Hernán has been awarded the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics, Rothman Epidemiology Prize, and the MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health and has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Statistical Association.
Francisco (Paco) Herrera
Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Granada and Director of the Andalusian Research Institute in Data Science and Computational Intelligence (DaSCI). Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences (Spain).
Professor Herrera received his M.Sc. in Mathematics in 1988 and Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1991, both from the University of Granada, Spain. He is an academician of the Royal Academy of Engineering (Spain). He has published over 600 journal papers, received more than 130,000 citations (Scholar Google, H-index 173), and is an editorial member of a dozen academic journals. Professor Herrera has been nominated as a Highly Cited Researcher in Computer Science, Engineering, and Clarivate Analytics).
His current research interests include computational intelligence, information fusion and decision-making, explainable artificial intelligence, and data science (including data preprocessing, prediction, and big data).
Marcos López de Prado, ADIA
Global Head of Quantitative R&D at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Professor of Practice at Cornell University's School of Engineering, Research Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (U.S. Office of Science), and Professor of Practice at Khalifa University’s Department of Mathematics.
Marcos Lopez de Prado has spent the past 25 years modernizing finance by pioneering machine learning and statistical methods, while implementing the Big Science paradigm at major investment firms. His work has earned him numerous awards, including Spain's National Award for Academic Excellence (1999), Quant Researcher of the Year (2019), Buy-Side Quant of the Year (2021), and the Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Award (2024).
Since 2011, he has been a research fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and published extensively in leading journals. He is the author of several key textbooks, including Advances in Financial Machine Learning (2018) and Causal Factor Investing (2023). Prof. López de Prado holds two PhDs and completed postdoctoral work at Harvard and Cornell, where he is now a faculty member. He also holds an Erdős #2 and an Einstein #4 according to the American Mathematical Society.
Day 2
Steven Chu, Stanford
William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular & Cellular Physiology in the Medical School at Stanford University.
Professor Steven Chu, co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light, is an internationally renowned scientist whose recent work centers on finding innovative solutions to the world’s energy and climate challenges. As the U.S. Secretary of Energy from 2009 to 2013, and previously as the Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he spearheaded research into alternative and renewable energy technologies aimed at addressing climate change.
Professor Chu has made significant contributions across a wide range of scientific fields, including atomic physics, quantum electronics, polymer and biophysics, and electrochemistry. His research has led to advances in laser cooling and trapping, atom interferometry, molecular biology, medical ultrasound imaging, and battery technology. He has published over 300 scientific papers and holds 20 patents.
A member of numerous prestigious academies and societies, including the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, and the American Philosophical Society, Professor Chu has also been awarded 34 honorary degrees. He holds degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Youssef Wehbe, National Center of Meteorology
Chief Science Officer for the UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science at the National Center of Meteorology
Dr. Youssef Wehbe is the Chief Science Officer for the UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science at the National Center of Meteorology. He spearheads the monitoring and evaluation process for international research and technology development programs and seed funds ($30M+), while overseeing intellectual property management and techno-economic assessments for transitioning research outcomes toward operational testing and integration. Dr. Wehbe also serves as an Engineering Duty Officer in the US Navy Reserve and is a Non-Resident Scholar with the Climate and Water Program at the Middle East Institute, Washington, DC.
Dr. Wehbe led and contributed to several atmospheric science field/airborne campaigns under the NASA Airborne Science Program and authored 50+ peer-reviewed studies on next-generation water resource monitoring by integrating satellite and radar remote sensing, hydro-meteorological modeling, and relevant applications of AI/machine learning tools. His areas of expertise include water resource management, coupled land-atmosphere modeling, cloud microphysics, and weather modification technology. Youssef holds a B.E. in Civil Engineering from Notre Dame University, a M.S. in Water and Environmental Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – Masdar Institute Collaborative Program, and a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Khalifa University.
Torsten Hoefler, ETH Zurich
Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, Winner of the Gordon Bell Prize (2019), a member of Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE.
Following a “Performance as a Science” vision, Professor Hoefler combines mathematical models of architectures and applications to design optimized computing systems. Before joining ETH Zurich, he led the performance modeling and simulation efforts for the first sustained Petascale supercomputer, Blue Waters, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also a key contributor to the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard where he chaired the "Collective Operations and Topologies" working group.
Torsten won best paper awards at ACM/IEEE Supercomputing in 2010, 2013, 2014, 2019, 2022, and at other international conferences. He has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific articles and has won numerous prizes for his work, including the IEEE CS Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award in 2022, and the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in 2019. Torsten was elected to the first steering committee of ACM's SIGHPC in 2013 and he was re-elected for every term since then. His research interests revolve around the central topic of performance-centric system design and include scalable networks, parallel programming techniques, and performance modeling for large-scale simulations and artificial intelligence systems.
Soh Young In, KAIST
Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and an Affiliate Faculty of the Graduate School of Green Growth and Sustainability at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)
Soh Young In’s research interest is demonstrating environmental, social, and economic incentives related to low-carbon transition and implementing sustainable and resilient infrastructure systems through behavior change of various stakeholders. She studies corporate management, investment strategies, infrastructure development, and public policies required to adopt and mitigate risks posed by climate change and decarbonization transition. Her three main research topics are “Climate Risk Analysis,” “Sustainable Integration,” and “Data-Driven System Transformation.”
Soh Young also serves as a Research Fellow at the Sustainable Finance Initiative (SFI) at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, and holds a B.A. in Economics and Statistics from Columbia University, an M.A. in International Policy from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University.
Luis Seco, University of Toronto
Professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto and Director of Risklab in Toronto, Canada.
Professor Seco’s core activity is bringing artificial intelligence into today’s sustainability challenges to build a new and better world.
His has extensive expertise in developing University-Industry relationships, which he has done since 1996. In October 2007, he won the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Synergy Award for Innovation. In 2011, he was admitted Caballero de la Orden del Mérito Civil (Knight of the Order of Civil Merit), an award from the Government of Spain for his application of mathematics to foresee economic cycles.
Professor Seco ’s career started at Princeton University in 1985, and landed at the University of Toronto in 1992 after a short stay at the California Institute of Technology. Today, he holds adjunct appointments at Renmin University in Beijing, Florida International University, the Technical University of Munich, the University of Zurich and Kutaisi International University.
Vivian Clavel, Minsait
Head of Open Banking & Digital Currency Initiatives, Minsait Financial Services
A leading expert in digital finance, Vivian Clavel is an expert in Open Banking and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). With a deep understanding of the intersection of financial technology and sustainability, Vivian explores how digital transformation can foster resilient and inclusive financial ecosystems, particularly to address SME financial inclusion. As Head of Open Banking & Digital Currency Initiatives at Minsait, she has successfully led large-scale digital initiatives, including the acquisition of fintech startups and the development of strategic partnerships in cryptocurrency and digital assets.
In addition to her leadership in digital finance, Vivian has pioneered the integration of generative AI into financial planning. This innovative approach has transformed complex financial decisions into more accessible and engaging experiences, increasing personalization for both consumers and financial advisors. Her academic role as a lecturer in Project Management and Organization at Universidad Nebrija complements her industry expertise, providing a practical perspective on the evolving digital landscape. Vivian's interests include the role of emerging technologies in financial services and how they can be leveraged to create more resilient and inclusive economic systems.
Alex Lipton, ADIA
Global Head – Quantitative Research & Development at ADIA, Visiting Professor and Dean’s Fellow at HUJI’s School of Business Administration, Professor of Practice at KU’s Department of Mathematics, and Connection Science Fellow at MIT’s Media Lab.
Professor Alex Lipton joined ADIA in 2021 as Global Head of Quantitative Research & Development in the Strategy & Planning Department. He is also the Co-Founder of Sila, Visiting Professor and Dean’s Fellow at HUJI, and Connection Science Fellow at MIT, while advising several global fintech companies.
Previously, he served as Co-Head of the Global Quantitative Group at Bank of America, and held senior roles at Citadel, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Bankers Trust. He was also a Full Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois.
He has received awards such as the Inaugural Quant of the Year (2000) and Buy-side Quant of the Year (2021) from Risk Magazine. Professor Lipton has authored 11 books and over 100 scientific papers, and is a frequent keynote speaker.
Jonathan Ledgard, Tehanu-Interspecies Money
Co-founder and CEO, Tehanu-Interspecies Money
Jonathan invented the Interspecies Money concept, which seeks to build the digital infrastructure that would allow many species to participate in the human market economy. He is a leading thinker on risk, nature, and advanced technology. As a director at the EPFL in Switzerland he led several futuristic initiatives, notably the invention of drone delivery of blood and medicines and its successful introduction into Africa. As "J.M. Ledgard", he is an acclaimed novelist. His first novel, Giraffe, is a cult novel for animal rights activists. His second, Submergence, was a New York Times Book of Year and adapted for Hollywood by Wim Wenders. Separately, he was longtime award-winning foreign and war correspondent for The Economist, reporting lead stories from 50+ countries and many wars, including a decade as Africa correspondent.
Patrick McSharry, Tehanu-Interspecies Money
Co-founder and CTO, Tehanu-Interspecies Money
Patrick is a Research Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University. He specializes in developing quantitative techniques for automating decision-making and managing risk using artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, big data, forecasting, and predictive analytics. As a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow at Oxford University, he established a catastrophe risk financing center and founded the World Bank’s first African Centre of Excellence in Data Science (ACE-DS) in Rwanda. He is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, Senior Member of the IEEE and advises organizations such as the World Bank, OECD's Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), Mastercard Foundation, the GSMA Foundation's Inclusive Tech Lab, Google Foundation, Brookings Institute, Rockefeller Foundation, and the International Growth Centre. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers and three books including the "Big Data Revolution" and is currently building partnerships to create data-driven sustainable solutions to global challenges.
Day 3
Dan Shechtman, Technion
Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy's Ames National Laboratory, and Professor of Materials Science at Iowa State University.
After earning his doctorate, Prof. Shechtman became an NRC fellow at Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio, where he spent three years studying the microstructure and physical metallurgy of titanium aluminides. In 1975, he joined the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at Technion, where his groundbreaking research would later take place. During a sabbatical from 1981-83 at Johns Hopkins University, while studying rapidly solidified aluminum-transition metal alloys, he made the Nobel-worthy discovery of the Icosahedral Phase, which opened the new field of quasiperiodic crystals. This discovery revolutionized the scientific understanding of crystal structures, previously believed to consist solely of repeating atomic arrangements.
From 1992-94, Prof. Shechtman worked at NIST, studying the effects of defect structures in CVD diamond on its growth and properties. At Technion, his research is carried out in the Louis Edelstein Center and the Wolfson Centre, both of which he has overseen. In addition to his research, he has served on several Technion Senate Committees and headed one of them. Prof. Shechtman's discovery in the early 1980s fundamentally changed the way scientists view crystallography, earning him global recognition for challenging established scientific norms.
Edward Jung, ADIA
Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Intellectual Ventures
Edward Jung is a global expert in innovation ecosystems, with 40 years of experience in software, R&D, entrepreneurship, and startups in multiple countries, with scientific expertise in mathematical physics and biophysics. An avid inventor and entrepreneur, Edward holds more than 1,200 issued patents and founded more than 40 organisations in the areas of biomedicine, computing, networking, energy, and material sciences.
Edward founded Intellectual Ventures in 1999 after leaving Microsoft Corporation, where he was chief architect and co-founder of Microsoft Research. His biomedical research in the 1980s in protein structure and function was published in journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Journal of Biochemistry.
Edward has served as an advisor to numerous non-commercial organisations, including the National Academy of Sciences, Harvard Medical School, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and World Health Organization.