CONFIRMED SPEAKERS.

ÄTNA

At first sight, the wheelhouses of Inéz and Demian Kappenstein hardly seem to match: He immerses himself in crafting organic beats, recorded on drums and enhanced with delicate effects. She is an utterly unique kind of singer who with voice, piano and synths fuses melodies like as refracted through a prism to a new futuristic sound. But when you listen closely, the songs they produce together as ÄTNA are imbued with an incomprehensible magic that defies all conventions, singular in style and execution.

Songs such as “Ruining my Brain” and “Come to Me” seamlessly blend art pop, futuristic indietronica, lush rhythms, and glorious vocals, evoking a longing that speaks of wanderlust – and cause goosebumps without fail. There is no doubt about it: Their debut Made By Desire marks a new chapter in German pop history. For this, ÄTNA was rightly warded the coveted Anchor Award of the Reperbahn Festival.

ÄTNA are a creative partnership of equals. With fashion and design integrated into their music, ÄTNA wear monochrome stage costumes and deliver stunning videos, something they succinctly refer to as "making their own world". ÄTNA also prove this in collaborations with artists such as Solomun or Martin Kohlstedt, which always bear their own personal signature. We cannot wait to see what ÄTNA will surprise us with next!

Jens Baas

CEO, Techniker Krankenkasse

Jens Baas is CEO of Techniker Krankenkasse. His vision is a public health insurance for the digital age. TK is Germany’s largest statutory health insurance with more than ten million people insured. Baas is overseeing Business Development, Finance/Controlling, Information Technology, Brand/Marketing, Politics/Communications and the Board of Directors/Executive Board. Previously he worked for the Boston Consulting Group as a Partner and Managing Director responsible for payers & providers, and also serving the pharmaceutical and medical technology industries. Baas holds a degree in human medicine from the University of Heidelberg. After graduating, he worked in the surgical department at the university hospitals of Heidelberg and Münster.

Francesca Bria

President of the Italian National Innovation Fund

Francesca Bria is the President of the Italian National Innovation Fund. She is Honorary Professor in the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL in London and a Senior Adviser to the United Nation (UN-Habitat) on digital cities and digital rights. Francesca Bria is leading the DECODE project on data sovereignty in Europe, and is a member of the European Commission high level expert group Economic and Societal Impact of Research and Innovation (ESIR). She is the former Chief Digital Technology and Innovation Officer for the City of Barcelona in Spain.

Francesca has a PhD in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from Imperial College, London and MSc on Digital Economy from University of London, Birbeck. As Senior Programme Lead at Nesta, the UK Innovation Agency, she has led the EU D-CENT project, the biggest European Project on digital democracy platforms and digital currencies. She also led the DSI4EU project, advising the EU on digital social innovation policies and purpose-driven innovation. She has been teaching in several universities in the UK and Italy and she has advised Governments, public and private organizations on technology and innovation policy, and its socio-economic and environmental impact.

Francesca has been listed in the Top 50 Women in Tech by the Forbes Magazine, and in the World’s top 20 most influential people in digital government by Apolitical. She has also been featured in the Italian Magazine Repubblica "D", amongst the 100 Women Changing the World.

twitter: @francesca_bria
website: https://www.francescabria.com

Shohini Ghose

NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering; Director, Centre for Women in Science (WinS)

Current Positions and Affiliations
- Professor, Physics & Computer Science, NSERC Chair for Women in Science & Engineering (CWSE), Wilfrid Laurier University
- Founding Director, Laurier Centre for Women in Science
- Past President, Canadian Association of Physicists
- Canadian Representative, Working Group 5, International Union of Pure and Applied Physics
- Affiliate Member, Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo
- Adjunct Professor, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo
- Fellow, Balsillie School of International Affairs
- Member, Guelph-Waterloo Physics Institute
Previous Positions and Affiliations
- Co-Editor in Chief, Canadian Journal of Physics
- Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Specialist (2018-19), Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

Ingmar Hoerr

Founder CureVac
(c)Matthias_Baus

Ingmar Hoerr was chairman of the BOD of CureVac AG and he served as founding CEO for 18 years. In 2000 he founded “CureVac, the RNA people“ together with colleagues in Tübingen, Germany. His entrepreneurship was motivated by his surprising discovery during his doctoral research that naked mRNA is capable to be expressed in vivo without the risk of rapid degradation and the ability of generating strong specific immune responses, in contrary to what had previously been believed. From this key discovery, Ingmar Hoerr, Steve Pascolo and Florian von der Mülbe built up a company that is now the most advanced company in the research and development of mRNA-based drugs. mRNA-based drugs can be developed for a huge variety of diseases and infections.
"the RNA people" have worldwide since 2000 an extensive experience in handling and optimizing the versatile molecule RNA for medical purposes. Ingmar triggered the first ever clinical human trials in the space of mRNA and laid the foundation for the whole mRNA industry. The company already has several active ingredients in R&D for the treatment of cancer, the protection against infectious diseases and for protein replacement. Until today, CureVac has tested its mRNA-based products in ten clinical studies with more than 500 human patients and healthy volunteers.
Since Ingmar founded CureVac, he and his colleagues raised for the Unicorn approximately $500 million in equity, in total CureVac recieved funding of about $800 million since its inception . He contributed 30+ patents. CureVac has entered into various collaborations with multinational corporations and organizations, including agreements with Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly, Genmab and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Michael Kretschmer

Prime Minister of the Freestate of Saxony

Michael Kretschmer was born in Görlitz on 7 May 1975. He is Protestant and the father of two sons. Following his schooling, he completed an office IT technician’s apprenticeship and gained entrance to a university of applied science through this alternative educational path. From 1998 to 2002, he studied industrial engineering at Dresden University of Applied Sciences, obtaining his degree in 2002.

Michael Kretschmer began his political career as a city councillor in his hometown of Görlitz from 1994 to 1999. From 1993 to 2002, he was on the regional executive committee of the Young Union (Junge Union) of Saxony and Lower Silesia. On 23 April 2005, Michael Kretschmer was elected secretary general of Saxony’s CDU party, and was confirmed in office several times thereafter. He has been the leader of Saxony’s CDU regional association since 9 December 2017.

He was first elected to Germany’s Bundestag as a direct candidate in the Görlitz electorate in 2002, and remained a member until 2017. From 2005 to 2009, he was the deputy chair of the Education and Research work group run by the CDU/CSU parliamentary party in the German Bundestag. Michael Kretschmer was deputy party leader, with portfolios in education and research, art, culture and media, from 2009 to 2017. From the German federal election in 2013 to September 2017, Michael Kretschmer was also the leader of the Saxon regional group within the CDU/CSU party in the German Bundestag.

On 22 August 2017, Michael Kretschmer was elected president of the Sächsischer Volkshochschulverband e. V. (Saxon association for adult education centres). He is also involved with the “Fürst-Pückler-Park Bad Muskau” development association.

On 13 December 2017, Michael Kretschmer was elected Minister-President of the Free State of Saxony.

Christian „Mio“ Loclair

Creative Director, Waltz Binaire & former Robo-Dancer and Computer Scientist

Christian “Mio” Loclair, creative director at Waltz Binaire, is a media artist and choreographer from Berlin, Germany. He explores the harmonic friction of human bodies, movement and nature colliding with digital aesthetics.
Using cutting edge technology in interactive installations, audio-visual experiences, visual narratives and dance performances, he continuously illuminates the beauty and drama of human identity. He is publishing his work on mobile applications, digital projections and theater stages around the world for independent and commissioned projects.

Mio studied Computer Science at the University Potsdam and Hasso Plattner Institute, specializing in Media Engineering and graduated in Human Computer Interaction (2010). He published the scientific paper Pinchwatch about gestural micro interactions at the Mobile HCI 2010 Lisbon.

Mio started his professional career as a dancer in 2001 and became the winner of the International Battle of the year (Popping 2007), the Ruhrpott Battle (2007) and the Wutal Battle (2008 Pina Bausch Festival). Mio was chosen to represent Germany at the UK Bboy World Championships (2007, 2010) and portrayed the world champion of hiphop dance in the US Movie "You got Served 2". Furthermore he choreographed the theater pieces "Marionettes", "Reflection", "Volvere" and co-choreographed "110" (Niels Storm Robitzky) and "POW_2045" (Raphael Hillebrand).

Frank Mastiaux

Chairman of the Board of Management of EnBW Energie Baden-Württemberg AG / Chief Executive Officer

Miriam Meckel

Co-founder & CEO ada Learning GmbH

Prof. Dr. Miriam Meckel is the Co-founder and CEO of ada Learning GmbH and professor of Communication Management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Previously, she was editor-in-chief and publisher of WirtschaftsWoche, Germany’s weekly business magazine, since 2014. For one legislative period, she was government spokesperson and State Secretary for Media, Europe and International Affairs in the North Rhine-Westphalian state government. Miriam Meckel was a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society for several years as well as a Visiting Professor at the Singapore Management University, the University of Vienna and the Université de Neuchâtel.
Her research focuses on the transformation of communication through new technologies, disinformation on the internet, data simulation and decision management, and quantum computing. Miriam Meckel has received, among others, the Cicero Speaker Prize in the category of science and the Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. Her bestseller "Letter to my Life" was filmed for ZDF in 2015.

Angela Merkel

Bundeskanzlerin der Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Milena Merten

Lead Editor ada Learning GmbH

Milena Merten is the Lead Editor of ada, Germany’s platform for life in the digital era and the economy of the future. Previously, she was a staff writer for the Innovation and Digitization Department of WirtschaftsWoche, Germany’s leading weekly business magazine. She graduated from Georg von Holtzbrinck School for Business Journalists and wrote for Handelsblatt, WirtschaftsWoche and DIE ZEIT. Milena studied politics and communication sciences in Mainz, Düsseldorf and Davis, California. She is passionate about topics at the intersection of technology and society.

Mutale Nkonde

Founder & Executive Director, AI For the People

Mutale Nkonde is the Founder/Executive Director of AI For the People, a non profit that seeks to educate Black communities about AI and social justice through popular culture, and a 2019/2020 fellow at the Berkman Klein Center of Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Prior to this Mutale Nkonde acted as a tech policy expert for Congresswoman Yvette Clarke. During her tenure she was the legislative lead for the Algorithmic and Deep Fakes Accountability Acts. However she found it difficult to move the legislation and so decided to look for new ways to influence AI policy.
Mutale Nkonde started her tech career in 2013 as a community coding advocate, a position that led her working opposite the Google External Relations team and writes on AI, Policy and Race. As well as contributing to pieces in the MIT Tech Review, Zora, Venturebeat, One Zero and Fast Company.

Maria Noth

Managing Director, Frauenkirche Dresden Foundation

Maria Noth is managing director of the non-profit Frauenkirche Dresden Foundation, which is responsbile for shaping the rich spiritual and cultural life within the reconstructed Lutheran Frauenkirche and for preserving the unique church building. Previously, she was in charge of the foundations and cultural sponsoring activities of the Ostsächsische Sparkasse Dresden for many years. Maria Noth studied cultural studies and management, American and Judaic studies at Brown University, the University of Leipzig, and Brandeis University. She has dealt with the reconstruction of cultural memories and identities, for example in the context of material culture and religion. Maria Noth is a certified foundations manager by the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. She integrates perspectives from business administration and the human/ social sciences in managing a multifaceted non-profit organization. She grew up in Saxony as the daughter of a Lutheran pastor.

Iyad Rahwan

Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin

Iyad Rahwan is a director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where he founded and directs the Center for Humans & Machines. He is also an honorary professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin. Until June 2020, he was an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A native of Aleppo, Syria, Rahwan holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Rahwan‘s work lies at the intersection of computer science and human behavior, with a focus on collective intelligence, large-scale cooperation, and the societal impact of Artificial Intelligence and social media. His early work explored how social media can be used to achieve unprecedented feats, such as searching an entire continent within 9 hours, and re-assembling shredded documents. He led the winning team in the US State Department’s Tag Challenge, using social media to locate individuals in remote cities within 12 hours using only their mug shots.

Recently, Rahwan led a team that crowdsourced 40 million decisions from people worldwide about the ethics of autonomous vehicles. Through a series of projects, he also exposed tens of millions of people world-wide to new implications of AI, such as bias in machine learning, human-AI creativity and the ability of AI to induce fear and empathy in humans at scale.

Another theme that interests Iyad is the future of work and human-machine cooperation. He demonstrated the world’s first human-level strategic cooperation by an AI, and innovated new methods to anticipate the potential impact of AI on human labor.

Iyad Rahwan’s work appeared in major academic journals, including Science, Nature and PNAS, and features regularly in major media outlets, including the New York Times, The Economist, and the Wall Street Journal.

Moon Ribas

Cyborg Artist

Moon Ribas is a Catalan avant-garde artist and cyborg activist best known for developing the Seismic Sense, an online seismic sensor once implanted in her feet that allowed her to perceive earthquakes taking place anywhere in the planet through vibrations in real time. In order to share her experience, she then translated her seismic sense on stage. Ribas transposed the earthquakes into either sound, in her piece Seismic Percussion; or dance, in Waiting For Earthquakes. In these performances the Earth is the composer and the choreographer; and Ribas, the interpreter.

Ribas’ seismic sense also allowed her to feel moonquakes, the seismic activity on the Moon. Ribas believes that by extending our senses to perceive outside the planet, we can all become senstronauts. Adding this new sense allowed her to be physically on Earth while her feet felt the Moon, so in a way, she was on Earth and space at the same time.

Since 2007 Moon has been experimenting with the union between technology and her body to explore the boundaries of perception and to experience movement in a deeper way. Some of her previous research includes transdental communication, 360º perception and the Speedborg. In 2010 she co-founded the Cyborg Foundation, an international organisation that aims to help people become cyborgs, defend cyborg rights and promote cyborg art. Ribas also co-founded the Transpecies Society in 2017, an association that gives voice to non-human identities, defends the freedom of self-design and offers the creation of new senses and new organs in community.

Frank Sauer

Senior Research Fellow, Universität der Bundeswehr München | Head of Research, Metis Institut für Strategie und Vorausschau

Dr. phil. Frank Sauer studied political science, sociology, philosophy and international law at Goethe University Frankfurt, from where he also received his doctoral degree. He is the author of "Atomic Anxiety: Deterrence, Taboo, and the Non-Use of U.S. Nuclear Weapons" and the co-editor of the German language "Handbook of International Relations".

Frank works on international politics with a focus on security. He has done research on nuclear issues, terrorism, cyber security as well as emerging technologies, especially the military application of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics.

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Frank’s expertise and communication skills make him a sought-after dialogue partner and consultant on the nexus of technology, society and security. He shares his knowledge widely, with decision-makers of private companies, with the public through interviews and op-eds, with the German parliament’s policy-makers through expert testimonies, and with the international community at the United Nations in Geneva.

Frank is a leading member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC.net | @icracnet ). He also serves as a Senior Advisor on the International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons (iPRAW.org | @iPRAW_org) as well as on the expert commission on the responsible use of technologies in the European ‘Future Combat Air System’ (fcas-forum.eu).

Sebastian Seitz

Director of Learning, ada Learning GmbH

Sebastian is Director of Learning and has been part of ada since 2019. He is responsible for curricular development, together with his team he designs virtual and physical workshops and acts as a presenter of the interactive formats for our conferences and festivals. Prior to that he was project leader at the Open Knowledge Foundation and at the Technologiestiftung Berlin. In 2015 he published the book “Open Source and School – Why Education Needs Openness”. Sebastian studied Educational Science in Bielefeld. From primary schools to businesses he developed and implemented solutions for learning in almost all areas of education.

Judith Simon

Professor of Ethics in Information Technology at the University of Hamburg
Bild:UHH/Nicolai

Judith Simon is Professor of Ethics in Information Technology at the University of Hamburg and has previously conducted research in Germany and abroad on topics from philosophy, philosophy of science and technology assessment. She deals with ethical, epistemological and political questions in the context of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and digitization in general. She is a member of the German Ethics Council and of numerous other advisory boards and commissions.

Léa Steinacker

Co-founder & COO ada Learning GmbH

Léa Steinacker is the Co-Founder and Chief Operations Officer of ada, an education tech start-up that equips workers with the mindset, knowledge and skills for the future. She oversees strategy, develops live experiences, and shapes content curation for the platform. Previously, Léa served as the Chief Innovation Officer of WirtschaftsWoche, Germany’s leading business magazine, where she covered the future of work and socio-technological change. Prior to joining Handelsblatt Media Group, Léa worked with social justice NGOs in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was selected as a Forbes 30 Under 30 leader, one of Medium Magazine’s Top 30 Under 30 journalists, an Atlantik Bruecke Young Leader, and a Leader of Tomorrow by the St. Gallen Symposium. In 2011, she was awarded the Henry Richardson Labouisse Prize. Léa holds degrees from Princeton University and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the University of St. Gallen under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Damian Borth (Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning) and Prof. Dr. Veronica Barassi (Digital Anthropology, Media & Communication).

Shermin Voshmgir

Author, founder of Token Kitchen and BlockchainHub Berlin

Shermin is the author of the book Token Economy, the founder of Token Kitchen and BlockchainHub Berlin. In the past she was the director of the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics which she also co-founded. She was a curator of TheDAO (Decentralized Investment Fund), an advisor to Jolocom (Web3 Identity), Wunder (Tokenized Art) and the Estonian E-residency program. Shermin studied Information Systems Management at the Vienna University of Economics and film-making in Madrid. She is Austrian, with Iranian roots, and works on the intersection of technology, art & social science.

Sandra Wachter

Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford

Professor Sandra Wachter is an Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow in Law and Ethics of AI, Big Data, and robotics as well as Internet Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. Wachter is specialising in technology-, IP-, data protection and non-discrimination law as well as European-, International-, (online) human rights,- and medical law. Her current research focuses on the legal and ethical implications of AI, Big Data, and robotics as well as profiling, inferential analytics, explainable AI, algorithmic bias, diversity, and fairness, governmental surveillance, predictive policing, and human rights online.
At the OII, Professor Sandra Wachter also coordinates the Governance of Emerging Technologies (GET) Research Programme that investigates legal, ethical, and technical aspects of AI, machine learning, and other emerging technologies.
Wachter is also a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London, a Fellow of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Values, Ethics and Innovation, an Academic Affiliate at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford’s Law Faculty and a member of the Law Committee of the IEEE. Prior to joining the OII, Wachter studied at the University of Oxford and the Law Faculty at the University of Vienna and worked at the Royal Academy of Engineering and at the Austrian Ministry of Health.

Dina Zielinski

Senior Scientist, Bioinformatics/Biostatistics at Cibiltech

Dina Zielinski is a molecular and computational biologist based in Paris. Most of her research has been in human genetics and genomics, from decoding mutations in cancer and rare diseases to encoding digital data in DNA. She studied biology and French at NYU where she received her bachelor’s degree. Dina started her career as a molecular biologist at the Whitehead Institute/MIT where she worked on bridging molecular and computational strategies in human genetics. Later, she moved to the New York Genome Center and Columbia University where she was inspired to focus on bioinformatics to bring biological data to life. While at the Institut Curie, she completed her MSc in bioinformatics at the Université de Paris and is now completing her PhD at Sorbonne Université. She is currently a senior scientist at Cibiltech and research affiliate of the Paris Transplant Group where she applies machine learning approaches in organ transplantation to improve patient care. Dina was selected as a 2020 NAS Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow. Her work has been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, BBC, STAT, and WIRED, and her TEDxVienna talk on DNA Storage, published on TED.com, has received nearly 2M views.