Archives: Speakers

Gerfried Stocker is a media artist and telecommunications engineer. In 1991, he founded x-space, a team formed to carry out interdisciplinary projects, which went on to produce numerous installations and performances featuring elements of interaction, robotics and telecommunications.

Since 1995, Gerfried Stocker has been artistic director of Ars Electronica. In 1995-96, he headed the crew of artists and technicians that developed the Ars Electronica Center’s pioneering new exhibition strategies and set up the facility’s in-house R&D department, the Ars Electronica Futurelab.

He has been chiefly responsible for conceiving and implementing the series of international exhibitions that Ars Electronica has staged since 2004, and, beginning in 2005, for the planning and thematic repositioning of the new, expanded Ars Electronica Center.

Daniel J. Levitin is an award-winning neuroscientist, musician, and best-selling author. His research encompasses music, the brain, health, productivity and creativity.

Levitin has published more than 300 articles, in journals including  Science, Nature, PNAS, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal. His TED talk is among the most popular of all time. He is the author of four New York Times bestselling books. A popular public speaker, he has given presentations on the floor of Parliament in London, to the U.S. Congress, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. He has consulted for a number of companies including  Apple, Booz-Allen, Microsoft, the United States Navy, Sonos, Philips, Sony, Fender, and AT&T.

Dr. Levitin earned his B.A. from Stanford in Cognitive Science, his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology with a Ph.D. minor in Music Technology from the University of Oregon, and completed post-doctoral training at Stanford University Medical School and UC Berkeley in Neuroimaging and Perception.

Levitin taught at Stanford in the Departments of Computer Science, Psychology, History of Science, and Music, and has been a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth, and UC Berkeley. He is currently the Founding Dean of Arts & Humanities at the Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute, San Francisco, California, and James McGill Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Neuroscience and Music at McGill University.

https://www.daniellevitin.com/bio

César A. Hidalgo is a Chilean-Spanish-American scholar known for his contributions to economic complexity, data visualization, and applied artificial intelligence.

Hidalgo currently leads the Center for Collective Learning at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Institute (ANITI) of the University of Toulouse. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Manchester and a Visiting Professor at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Between 2010 and 2019 Hidalgo led MIT’s Collective Learning group, climbing through the ranks from Assistant to Associate Professor. Prior to working at MIT, Hidalgo was a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Hidalgo is also a founder of Datawheel, an award winning company specialized in the creation of data distribution and visualization systems. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Notre Dame and a Bachelor in Physics from Universidad Católica de Chile.

Hidalgo’s contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2018 Lagrange Prize and three Webby Awards. Hidalgo is also the author of three books: Why Information Grows (Basic Books, 2015),  The Atlas of Economic Complexity (MIT Press, 2014), and How Humans Judge Machines (MIT Press, Forthcoming 2020).

Trebor Scholz is a scholar-activist and founding director of the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at The New School in New York City. In 2014, he introduced the concept of “platform cooperativism” as a way of bringing the co-op model into the digital economy.

Who Owns the World? brings together the global community around this work and marks ten years of the influential digital labor conferences at The New School. Scholz’ books include Uber-Worked and Underpaid, How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy, Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, the co-edited Ours to Hack and to Own: Platform Cooperativism, A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. Scholz’ articles and ideas have appeared in The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, Le Monde, and The New York Times, among many other publications. Today, Prof. Scholz is working to advance the cooperative digital economy through the Platform Co-op Development Kit while also keynoting conferences worldwide. He presented at the Harvard Law Forum and is currently an Open Society Fellow.

Anna Coote is Principal Fellow at the New Economics Foundation (NEF). She has published widely on social justice, sustainable development, working time, public health policy, public involvement and democratic dialogue, and gender equality.

She previously served as Director of Health Policy at the King’s Fund, Deputy Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, Editor of current affairs television at Diverse Productions, and Deputy Editor of the New Statesman. She was Commissioner for Health with the UK Sustainable Development Commission from 2000 to 2009.

Her recently authored or co-authored publications include The Case for a Four Day Week, The Case for Universal Basic Services, Universal Basic Income: A Union Perspective, and Building a New Social Commons.

Dr Sandhya Sriram is the CEO and co-founder of Shiok Meats Pte. Ltd., Singapore. Sandhya is a stem cell scientist with over 10 years of experience working with muscle, adipose, cells and stem cells. After graduating with a PhD from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Sandhya pursued her postdoc at A*STAR in Singapore. Following 4 years of postdoctoral work, she took up business development at a research institute. Alongside, she co-founded 2 companies, Biotech In Asia and SciGlo. Sandhya has been featured on Forbes Women in Tech for her entrepreneurial ventures. Currently, Sandhya and Dr Ka Yi Ling, her co-founder and CTO of Shiok Meats, are working on cell-based meat (seafood), based out of Singapore.

• He began his career at the internet company IXIR before moving on to TBWA\Istanbul. He worked at TBWA London and Hamburg.
• He worked with Turkey’s leading brands, including Akbank, Turkcell and Beko.
• He served as a jury member for Euro Effies, Effie Turkey, MediaCat Felis Awards, Kristal Elma Awards and Kirmizi.
• He delivered talks at the Golden Drum, Kaktus Festival, and Kristal Elma Festival.
• He was invited to deliver a talk at SXSW.
• He leads the Disruption Workshop, a workshop based on strategy and innovation, as well as START, a strategic planning team, and NABZ, a digital insights and social media team at TBWA.

Burak Babacan is the founder and CEO of  growth strategy consulting company Divera AI. After working as a professional for 15 years in the corporate sector, he founded his own consulting company in 2012 with a laser-focused vision: using technology to find the answer to the “why” question behind human decisions.

Over the last 9 years, he single handedly built a very powerful approach fusing artificial intelligence technology and human expert insight to solve growth problems in marketing.

Using his own innovation, he worked with Unilever, Arcelik Global, Nutricia Danone and many others to solve very difficult growth cases. His work has enabled their customers to multiply their sales, beat the world’s best brands, to become market leaders and become champions of growth by surpassing their competitors.

Rainer Kattel is professor and deputy director at Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, UCL. He has published extensively on innovation policy, its governance and specific management issues. His research interests include also public sector innovation, digital transformation in the public sector and financialization.

His recent books include The Elgar Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic Development (edited with Erik Reinert and Jayati Gosh; Elgar, 2016), Financial Regulations in the European Union (edited with Jan Kregel and Mario Tonveronachi; Routledge, 2016), and Innovation Bureaucracy (with Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo; Yale, forthcoming in 2021).

Following a PhD and over 10 years of research in urban planning and city geography, Konstantinos Dimopoulos moved on to combine his knowledge of urbanism with his love for designing games, and has been helping establish the young field of game urbanism ever since. From 2014 he has been designing cities, urban mechanics, civic systems, settlement concepts, and narrative geographies for several tabletop and video games , and has worked and consulted on projects such as The Sinking City, Lake, We Are Free Mice, Seed, A Place for the Unwilling, and Ex Novo.

He teaches level design, game design, and game urbanism at SAE Athens, maintains the CityCraft column in Wireframe magazine, gives talks on virtual and game urbanism, and is the author of the Virtual Cities atlas. Konstantinos Dimopoulos has also contributed to the Architectonics of Game Spaces volume, as well as to the Second Edition of Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames.