World Metaverse Summit

Meet the 2022 AI Brains

PETER NORVIG

Pioneer in AI, Author of best-selling textbook, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Distinguished Education Fellow

Google and Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence

PETER NORVIG

Pioneer in AI, Author of best-selling textbook, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Distinguished Education Fellow

Google and Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence

Peter Norvig is a Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute and a researcher at Google Inc; previously he directed Google’s core search algorithms group and Google’s Research group.

He was head of NASA Ames’s Computational Sciences Division, where he was NASA’s senior computer scientist and a recipient of NASA’s Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has taught at the University of Southern California, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006.

He was co-teacher of an Artificial Intelligence class that signed up 160,000 students, helping to kick off the current round of massive open online classes. His publications include the books Data Science in Context (to appear in 2022), Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (the leading textbook in the field), Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and the world’s longest palindromic sentence. He is a fellow of the AAAI, ACM, California Academy of Science and American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

MICHAEL KAGAN

CTO 

NVIDIA

MICHAEL KAGAN

CTO 

NVIDIA

COLIN MURDOCH 

 Director of Applied AI and Chief Business Officer

DeepMind 

COLIN MURDOCH 

 Director of Applied AI and Chief Business Officer

DeepMind 

VANDI VERMA

Chief Engineer of Robotic Operations - Mars 2020, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

NASA

VANDI VERMA

Chief Engineer of Robotic Operations - Mars 2020, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

NASA

Vandi Verma, Chief Engineer of Robotic Operations – Mars 2020, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), NASA (USA)

Vandi Verma is the Chief Engineer for Robotic Operations for the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, and the Assistant Section Manager for Mobility and Robotics Systems at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She specializes in space robotics, autonomous robots and robotic operations. She has worked on a number of Space Robotics and Artificial Intelligence research and technology development tasks and has designed, developed, and operated rovers on Mars, the Arctic, Antarctica, and the Atacama Desert.

She has been working at NASA since graduating with a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. She works on new capabilities from early design, through development, testing and launch, to landing and surface operations. Since 2008 she has been driving rovers on Mars (Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance) and operating the robotic arm and sampling system as a Rover Planner. She enjoys coding and has written flight software that runs onboard Curiosity and Perseverance, and simulation software used in operations.

BLAISE AGUERA Y ARCAS

VP Fellow

Google Research 

BLAISE AGUERA Y ARCAS

VP Fellow

Google Research 

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google Research, where he leads an organization working on both basic research and new products in AI. His focus is on augmentative, privacy-first, and collectively beneficial applications, including on-device ML for Android phones, wearables, and the Internet of Things.

One of the team’s technical contributions is Federated Learning, an approach to training neural networks in a distributed setting that avoids sharing user data. Blaise also founded the Artists and Machine Intelligence program, and has been an active participant in cross-disciplinary dialogs about AI and ethics, fairness and bias, policy, and risk. Until 2014 he was a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. Outside the tech world, Blaise has worked on computational humanities projects including the digital reconstruction of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii’s color photography at the Library of Congress, and the use of computer vision techniques to shed new light on Gutenberg’s printing technology. Blaise has given TED talks on Sead­ragon and Pho­to­synth (2007, 2012), Bing Maps (2010), and machine creativity (2016), and gave a keynote at NeurIPS on social intelligence (2019). In 2008, he was awarded MIT’s TR35 prize. In 2018 and 2019 he taught the course “Intelligent Machinery, Identity, and Ethics” at the University of Washington, placing computing and AI in a broader historical and philosophical context.

JOELLE PINEAU

Co-Managing Director | Meta AI Research

Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar, School of Computer Science | McGill University

JOELLE PINEAU

Co-Managing Director | Meta AI Research

Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar, School of Computer Science | McGill University

MICKY ADRIAANSENS

Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy

Government of the Netherlands

MICKY ADRIAANSENS

Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy

Government of the Netherlands

PAUL NEMITZ

Principal Advisor | European Commission

Member | German Data Ethics Commission 

Visiting Professor of Law | College of Europe

PAUL NEMITZ

Principal Advisor | European Commission

Member | German Data Ethics Commission 

Visiting Professor of Law | College of Europe

Paul NEMITZ is the Principal Adviser on Justice Policy in the European Commission.

He was appointed in April 2017, following a 6-year appointment as Director for Fundamental Rights and Citizen’s Rights in the EU Commission. As Director, Nemitz led the reform of Data Protection legislation in the EU, the negotiations of the EU – US Privacy Shield and the negotiations with major US Internet Companies of the EU Code of Conduct against incitement to violence and hate speech on the Internet. He is a Member of the Global Council on Extended Intelligence of the IEEE and the MIT in Boston.

His 2018 Article “Constitutional democracy and technology in the age of artificial intelligence”, downloaded more than 20000 times from the UK Royal Society Website, and his 2020 book “Prinzip Mensch – Macht, Freiheit und Demokratie im Zeitalter der Künstlichen Intelligence“ (www.PrinzipMensch.EU), co-authored with Philospher and Journalist Matthias Pfeffer, lay the ground for a global approach to Tech regulation based on Democracy, Fundamental Rights and the Rule of Law.

Follow him on Twitter @PaulNemitz. #1 TECH #EUInfluencer in the 2020 ZN Consulting #EUInfluencer survey.

MARK SURMAN

President and Chief Executive

Mozilla Foundation 

MARK SURMAN

President and Chief Executive

Mozilla Foundation 

KERSTI KALJULAID

Former President (2016-2021) 

Estonia

KERSTI KALJULAID

Former President (2016-2021) 

Estonia

Kersti Kaljulaid 

Kersti Kaljulaid served as the President of the Republic of Estonia from 2016-2021. During her time in office, she made her presence felt in both her homeland and the international arena.

Previously she had been serving as a Member of the European Court of Auditors, advising Prime Minister Mart Laar and holding diferent top level positions in energy, investment banking and telecom sector. Genetic engineer and economist by education, she has been a member of the Supervisory Board of the Estonian Genome Center and the Council Chair of the University of Tartu from 2012 to 2016.

In summer 2021, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appointed President Kaljulaid to the position of Global Advocate for the ‘Every Woman Every Child’ strategy on the health and well-being of women, children and adolescents around the world for the next two years. She was also the first Estonian to be featured in the Forbes World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.

Kersti Kaljulaid has become a sought-after speaker at high-level forums on digital, security and foreign-policy topics and more broadly for analysing and interpreting societal and economic change.

President Kaljulaid is a vocal advocate of human rights, rule of law, freedom of speech and democracy. One of the principles in the in office of president has been the one she set out upon her inauguration: “I am never silent when our security is in question, when our freedoms are at stake or when those weaker than us are treated unjustly.

PROFESSOR FRANCESCA ROSSI 

President | AAAI

Fellow and AI Ethics Global Leader | IBM 

PROFESSOR FRANCESCA ROSSI 

President | AAAI

Fellow and AI Ethics Global Leader | IBM 

Francesca Rossi is an IBM Fellow and the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader.
She is based at the T.J. Watson IBM Research Lab, New York, USA, where she leads AI research projects.

Before joining IBM, she has been a professor of computer science at the University of Padova, Italy, for 20 years.

Her research interest span various areas of AI, from constraints to preferences, from graphical models to social choice, to neuro-symbolic AI.

She co-chairs the IBM AI Ethics board and she participates in many global multi-stakeholder initiatives on AI ethics, such as the Global Partnership on AI, of which both US and France are members.

She is the president of AAAI, the world-wide association of AI researchers.

ORLANDO MACHADO

Chief Data Officer and Vice President

The LEGO Group

ORLANDO MACHADO

Chief Data Officer and Vice President

The LEGO Group