De Kai

De Kai, one of eight members selected by Google for its AI ethics council ATEAC, is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST and Distinguished Research Scholar at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. He is among only 17 scientists worldwide named by the Association for Computational Linguistics as a Founding ACL Fellow, for his pioneering contributions to machine translation and machine learning foundations of systems like the Google/Yahoo/Microsoft translators. In 2015, Debrett’s HK 100 recognized him as one of the 100 most influential figures of Hong Kong.

Sophie Hackford

Sophie Hackford is a futurist, co-founder of Oxford’s 1715Labs, and on the board of two growth-stage startups. Her clients include Adobe, Deep Mind, Bank of New York and Vogue. Sophie previously worked at WIRED Magazine, at Singularity University on the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley, and Oxford University where she raised $120m for frontier-bending research. Despite very real threats, Sophie is an optimist about the future.

Yusef Salaam

Dr. Yusef Salaam was just fifteen years old when his life was upended after being wrongly convicted in the “Central Park jogger” case, along with four other boys who are now known as the Exonerated Five. Their story has been documented in the award-winning film The Central Park Five by documentarians Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon and in Ava DuVernay’s highly acclaimed series When They See Us. Yusef is now a poet, activist, and inspirational speaker who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from President Barack Obama, among other honors.

Kai-Fu Lee

Kai-Fu Lee is the CEO of Sinovation Ventures and New York Times bestselling author of AI  Superpowers. Lee was formerly the president of Google China and a senior executive at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple. Co-chair of the Artificial Intelligence Council at the World Economic Forum, he has a  bachelor’s degree from Columbia and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon.

Simon Callow

Simon Callow is an actor, author and director. His films include A Room with a View, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Shakespeare in Love, and Phantom of the Opera. He directed Shirley Valentine in the West End and on Broadway, Single Spies at the NT, Les Enfants du Paradis at the RSC, Carmen Jones at the Old Vic, as well as the film of The Ballad of the Sad Café. He has directed a number of operas and has made many appearances with the LPO, the LSO and the London Mozart Players.

Sarah Gilbert

Sarah Gilbert is Professor of Vaccinology at the Jenner Institute within the University of Oxford. Having devoted her career to developing vaccines against infectious diseases, since January 2020 she has been the Oxford Project Leader for ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, also known as the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. Professor Gilbert has over 25 years of experience in the design and early development of new vaccines, and a commitment to increasing public understanding of science.

Assaf Biderman

Assaf Biderman is an entrepreneur, author, and technology inventor. He is the founder and CEO of Superpedestrian, a robotics company that develops platforms of small electric vehicles for shared use. Assaf is also the Associate Director and founding member of the MIT Senseable City Lab, a research group which develops technologies in big data, machine learning and robotics aimed at improving livability in cities.

Dr. Makaziwe Mandela and Paul van Zyl

Dr. Mandela is currently the Chairman of House of Mandela. Dr. Mandela previously sat on the Boards of Rand Water Services, Myriad Medical, Envirosev and the Nelson Mandela Foundation. She is also a consultant in training development and life skills at Self Empowerment International. She has been intricately involved in developing a substantial investment portfolio within Nozala, a women’s investment group, and using these funds in the economic upliftment and empowerment of women in South Africa.

Sinead Bovell

Sinead Bovell is a Futurist and the Founder and CEO of WAYE, an organization that prepares youth for a future with advanced technologies. To date, Bovell has educated over 10k young entrepreneurs on the intersection of technology and the future, and has spoken at world renowned institutions such as the United Nations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Bloomberg, and Cornell University on the future of technology. Bovell has a Bachelor’s degree in Finance and Chemistry, and an MBA from the University of Toronto.

Dr. Vas Narasimhan

Vas Narasimhan, M.D., has been Chief Executive Officer of Novartis, one of the world’s largest medicines producers, since 2018. Dr. Narasimhan is one of the youngest CEOs leading a Fortune 500 company, a member of the National Academy of Medicine and serves on the board of African Parks. He was recognized recently as one of the Top Global Influencers on LinkedIn, where he shares his personal journey to reimagine leadership.

Emmanuel Jal

From his start in life as a child soldier in the war-torn region of Southern Sudan in the early 1980s, Emmanuel Jal has come through a huge number of struggles during his life to become a successful and acclaimed recording artist and peace ambassador. He has continued to support and work alongside Amnesty International as one of their main spokespeople and has received numerous awards for his peace efforts in South Sudan including recognition from Ban Ki Moon at the UN.

Herman Narula

Herman Narula is the co-founder and CEO of Improbable, a British metaverse technology company. Improbable partners with video game developers, entertainment companies, and defence and academic institutions to enable powerful, virtual worlds of unprecedented size and usefulness. This year, Improbable established M2 (MSquared), a network of interoperable metaverses powered by its Morpheus technology. M2 allows companies, brands and creators to establish their own metaverses and Web3 businesses within its network, organise large-scale experiences with their communities involving thousands of active participants, and provide interoperability with existing blockchains and Web3 businesses.

Sinan Aral

Sinan Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is a Professor of IT & Marketing, Chair of the Marketing Department, Professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society and where he co-leads MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. Sinan’s research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award and a Fulbright scholarship.

Mira Awad

Mira Awad is an Arab-Israeli singer, songwriter, actress, TV content creator and a cultural activist. She has released two solo albums, and has collaborated with many international artists including Andrea Boccelli and Noa. She created and hosted a number of TV shows, and also created and co-wrote the successful TV drama Muna, broadcasted on Israel national TV channel. In addition, Mira is an award winning composer for theatre and film.

Jimmy Nelson

Jimmy Nelson is an award-winning photographer, creator and author of Before They Pass Away and Homage to Humanity. Jimmy strongly believes that if you change the way you look at people, the people you look at change. And if that change is powerful enough, it will gather momentum to affect the whole of humanity.

Jenny Bonello

Jenny Bonello is a 16-year-old conservationist and Founder of Secure Forest, an environmental activist organisation focused on saving the trees through preventing forest degradation and deforestation around the globe.

William Jayne with John Markoff

William Jayne is a serial, cross-discipline entrepreneur whose technological achievements include products ranging from building the first global Artificial Intelligence-based food forecasting system in the late 1970’s, to software industry household names like Symantec and Windows, to robotic systems that revolutionised the $40 billion global outdoor advertising industry. He has also contributed to an extensive list of mergers and acquisitions, calling on his experience serving the legal community to provide patent research and development, IP portfolio management, and IP competitive analysis.

Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam

Ibi Zoboi holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her novel American Street was a National Book Award finalist and a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of Pride and My Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich, a New York Times bestseller. She is the editor of the anthology Black Enough.

Dr Alex Dehgan

Alex Dehgan is the CEO of Conservation X Labs and Professor of the Practice at Arizona State University. CXL builds novel technologies through its labs, and harnesses open innovation, to create transformative solutions to prevent the sixth mass extinction.  Alex previously served as the Chief Scientist of USAID, with rank of Assistant Administrator, and worked in multiple positions in the Office of the Secretary at the State Department.  Alex was also the founding country director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Afghanistan Program and helped create Afghanistan’s first national park.

Dr. Afton Halloran

Dr Afton Halloran is an independent consultant in sustainable food systems transitions and a transdisciplinary scientist, She advises on issues related to food and agriculture, working with such organisations as the World Bank, World Health Organisation, Food Planet Prize Secretariat, and the Nordic Council of Ministers. Afton also holds a research position at the University of Copenhagen Sustainability Science Centre and is the host of the Nordic Talks podcast.

Nicola Benedetti with Matthew Stadlen

Nicola Benedetti is one of the most sought-after violinists of her generation. She won the GRAMMY Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo in 2020 and Best Female Artist at both 2012 and 2013 Classical BRIT Awards. This season, Nicola will collaborate with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment for live concerts at the BBC Proms and with digital projects for the Philharmonia and Paavo Järvi and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra with Maxim Emelyanychev. Nicola launched the Benedetti Foundation in 2019, which aims to inspire young people and teachers through transformative orchestra-based workshops that showcase what Music Education at its best can look and feel like. Nicola plays the Gariel Stradivarius (1717), courtesy of Jonathan Moulds.

Rebecca Henderson

Rebecca Henderson is the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard University and teaches the Reimagining Capitalism course at Harvard Business School. She is a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Henderson is an advisor to some of the world’s leading companies and a board member of Amgen and IDEXX Laboratories. The Financial Times recently named her a ‘Director of the Year’.

Rachel Clarke

Before going to medical school, Dr Rachel Clarke was a journalist and documentary maker. She now specialises in palliative medicine, caring deeply about helping patients live the end of their lives as fully and richly as possible – and in the power of human stories to build empathy and inspire change. Her first book, the Sunday Times bestselling Your Life in My Hands, revealed what life is like for a junior doctor on the NHS frontline. Her new memoir, Dear Life, is also a Sunday Times bestseller.

Kenneth Roth

Kenneth Roth is the former executive director of Human Rights Watch. He has extensively investigated human rights abuses around the world, focusing especially on the world’s most dire situations, the pursuit of international justice, the major powers’ foreign policies, the work of the United Nations, and the global contest between democracy and autocracy. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and other major publications. He spends his time between New York and Geneva.

Phillip Agnew

Phillip Agnew co-founded the Dream Defenders in 2012 after the murder of Trayvon Martin and has been dubbed “one of this generation’s leading voices” and recognized by both EBONY magazine and The Root as one of the 100 most influential African Americans in the nation. His work in community organizing and art has been highlighted on MSNBC, BET’s “Rest in Power”, PBS, the Huffington Post, USA Today, the Guardian, Democracy Now, ESSENCE, TruthOut and Time Magazine.

John Markoff

John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting “for its penetrating look into business practices by Apple and other technology companies that illustrates the darker side of a changing global economy for workers and consumers.” He is a journalist best known for his work at The New York Times, and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture of hacker Kevin Mitnick. He is the co-author of The High Cost of High Tech; Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier; and Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America’s Most Wanted Computer Outlaw.

Sumit Jamuar

Sumit S Jamuar is the co-Founder, Chairman & CEO of Global Gene Corp (GGC). Sumit previously served as a Managing Director & Global Head at Lloyds Bank in UK, and CEO at SBICAP (UK), as a consultant with McKinsey & Company, on the World Economic Forum’s Global Precision Medicine Council, and as Board Director at GEFCO plc. He serves as a member of UK BIA’s Genomic Advisory Committee, Scientific Advisory Board of CINECA and as a Senior Associate of the Royal Society of Medicine. 

Gerard Barron and Bjarke Ingels

Gerard Barron is on a mission to help wean humanity off fossil fuels and transition to a circular resource economy. He is a seasoned entrepreneur with a track record of building global companies in battery manufacturing, media and future-oriented resource development. His passion is building companies that will help us build a truly net-zero carbon future and believes DeepGreen will play a key role in supplying the world with the essential metals to build the technologies needed for this sustainable future, while avoiding the impacts of terrestrial mining.

Bjarke Ingels founded BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group in 2005 after co-founding PLOT Architects in 2001 and working at OMA in Rotterdam. Named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by TIME Magazine in 2016, Bjarke has designed and completed award-winning buildings globally. Alongside his architectural practice, Bjarke has taught at Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, and Rice University. He is a frequent public speaker and continues to hold lectures in venues such as TED, WIRED, AMCHAM, 10 Downing Street, the World Economic Forum and many more.

Po Bronson and Arvind Gupta

Arvind Gupta

Ndeye Marie Aida Ndiguene

Ndeye is a civil engineer, climate activist, writer and entrepreneur from Senegal. She builds storage spaces from recycled materials for farmers, and leads other initiatives like Nawari, a platform promoting local and organic products made in Africa, and Environnementalistes, a group of environmental experts implementing actions to fight climate change in Senegal.

Aditya Mukarji and Ndèye Marie Aïda Ndiéguène

Aditya is a student from India who began campaigning against single-use plastic at the beginning of 2018. His campaign #RefuseIfYouCannotReuse has since removed over 26 million straws and several million other single-use plastics from the hospitality industry. In 2019 he was invited to attend the UN Youth Climate Action Summit.

Ndeye is a civil engineer, climate activist, writer and entrepreneur from Senegal. She builds storage spaces from recycled materials for farmers, and leads other initiatives like Nawari, a platform promoting local and organic products made in Africa, and Environementalistes, a group of environmental experts implementing actions to fight climate change in Senegal.