2019 Executive Summit: Utopia for Beginners

Luciano Floridi

Luciano Floridi is the OII’s Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, where he is also the Director of the Digital Ethics Lab of the Oxford Internet Institute. Still in Oxford, he is Distinguished Research Fellow of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics of the Faculty of Philosophy, and Research Associate and Fellow in Information Policy of the Department of Computer Science. Outside Oxford, he is Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute (the national institute for data science) and Chair of its Data Ethics Group; and Adjunct Professor (“Distinguished Scholar in Residence”) of the Department of Economics, American University, Washington D.C. His research concerns primarily Information and Computer Ethics (aka Digital Ethics), the Philosophy of Information, and the Philosophy of Technology. Other research interests include Epistemology, Philosophy of Logic, and the History and Philosophy of Scepticism.

Siddha Ganju

Siddha Ganju, who Forbes featured in their 30 under 30 list and is on Silicon Valley's 100 Woman of Influence list. Siddha is a Self-Driving Architect at Nvidia. Previously at Deep Vision, she developed deep learning models for resource constraint edge devices. A graduate from Carnegie Mellon University, her prior work ranges from Visual Question Answering to Generative Adversarial Networks to gathering insights from CERN's petabyte-scale data and has been published at top-tier conferences including CVPR and NeurIPS. Siddha is admitted to the Royal Society of Chemistry. Serving as an AI domain expert, she has also been guiding teams at NASA as well as featured as a jury member in several international tech competitions.

Andrew Keen

Andrew Keen was among the earliest to write about the dangers of the Internet to our culture and society. Keen’s new book, How to Fix the Future, based on research, analysis, and Keen’s own reporting in America and around the world, showcases global solutions for our digital predicament. Keen identifies five broad strategies to tackle the digital future: competitive innovation, government regulation, consumer choice, social responsibility by business leaders, and education. How to Fix the Future has been called “the most significant work so far in an emerging body of literature…in which technology’s smartest thinkers are raising alarm bells about the state of the Internet, and laying groundwork for how to fix it”

Anjali Lai

Anjali Lai is a senior analyst with Forrester. She helps chief marketing officers navigate a market fueled by the ever-evolving consumer. Anjali synthesizes multimodal data and applies cutting-edge research techniques to distil the most important changes in consumer behavior and decision making. Her research defines what these consumer insights mean for the future of industries and brands; her frameworks guide executives to make strategic calls that win and retain consumers accordingly.

Peter Leyden

Peter Leyden is an expert in new technologies and future trends who frequently gives keynote talks and works for innovative organizations out to reinvent fields. Leyden was managing editor at the original Wired Magazine, and worked at Global Business Network, the pioneering think tank on the future. He was founding director of the New Politics Institute helping reinvent politics on the Internet. Leyden currently is founder and CEO of Reinventors, a network of innovators using the new medium of group video for a series of conversations about how to reinvent America. Leyden started his career as a journalist, including as a special correspondent for Newsweek magazine in Asia. He co-authored two books on the future: The Long Boom and What’s Next.

Carl Miller

Carl Miller is an award-winning author and researcher who has thrown himself into some of the most scary, hidden, weird and important parts of the digital age to understand how all of our lives are changing. His work combines data and analysis with immersive, first-hand reporting.

He is the co-founder and Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos the first UK think tank institute dedicated to studying the digital world and is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London.

​His debut book, The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab was published in 2018 by Penguin RandomHouse, and won the 2019 Transmission Prize. He has written for Wired, New Scientist, the Sunday Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian, appears frequently in the press, and speaks about his work around the world

Carlota Perez

Carlota Perez is one of the world’s foremost experts on the impact of technical change on economic growth and development of society. Silicon Valley venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz take her predictions as a guidance for their investments. Carlota Perez is Author of the influential Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages.

Koen Schobbers

Koen Schobbers has more than 10 years of experience as a professional esporter in the Trackmania racing game. As a medical student at Academic Medical Center, the University of Amsterdam hospital in the Netherlands, he was awarded top sport status in 2017 in order to be able to continue training and traveling for his tournaments. Among other things, he now hosts the Inside Esports program on FOX Sports and Twitch.tv, writes a book about parenting and gaming, and helps companies draw up strategies for gaming and esports.

Shravan Thaploo

Shravan Thaploo is a young research scientist at Harvard Medical School specializing in neuroscience. Having traveled both across the world and across the United States, he has worked in various different research labs including a social cognitive neuroscience lab as well as a behavioral neuroscience lab. He uses fMRI technology, simple brain machine interfaces, and other techniques to understand how neuroscience can affect society and change the way people interact with one another. 

Nell Watson

Nell Watson is an engineer, educator, and tech philosopher who grew up in Northern Ireland. She lectures globally on Machine Intelligence, AI philosophy, Human-Machine relations, and the Future of Human Society, serving on the Faculty of AI & Robotics at Singularity University. She is also Co-Founder of EthicsNet, a non-profit, building a movement of people who are committed to help machines understand humans better. This community acts as role models and guardians to raise kind AI, by providing virtual experiences, and collecting examples of pro-social practices.

Day 1, September 10th

Utopia for Beginners – Towards a Synthetic Future

Welcome
Michiel Boreel – CTO Sogeti, Raj Nath – CEO Sogeti USA

Setting the Stage I
Menno van Doorn, Pierre Hessler

The Future is Already Here and it is Synthetic
Sander Duivestein, Senior Analst SogetiLabs

• A new ‘Synthetic’ generation is coming of age

• Their ‘abnormality’ is the new normal

Our Digital Future – A New Golden Age of Opportunity
Carlota Perez, Professor of Economics, London School of Economics, Tallinn University of Technology

• Techno-Economic Paradigm Shifts and the theory of great surges

• Making the right choices for Social Sustainability

2:30pm – 2:45pm

Break

2:45pm – 4:50pm

AI for Happiness

Digital Transformation @ Dick’s Sporting Goods
David Lammers, Vice President of Store Technology, Dick’s Sporting Goods (Tentative)

Augmenting the Human Heart & Soul
Nell Watson, Entreprenerd & Engineer, Lector Singularity University

• A recipe for building a better society
• The industrialization of human higher needs
• Automated Externality Accounting as a game changer

Synthetic Data as the Holy Grail of AI
Aleksandr Volkov, Solution Architect at Nvidia

• Developments in AI & Deep Learning
• Solving ‘unsolvable’ problems and societal impact

4:20pm – 4:35pm

Break

Digital Transformation @ Munich RE
Lisa Wardlaw, COO, Munich RE (Tentative)

4:50pm – 6:15pm 

How to Fix the Future

The Changing Form & Shape of Power in Digital Society
Carl Miller, Center for the Analysis of Social Media, Demos;  King’s College London

• The rise of the ‘Digital Citizen’ - Reinventing Democracy
• The rebirth of the Fourth Estate - Holding the Government to Account
• Reverse Engineering how the World works

Utopia for Beginners
Andrew Keen, Entrepreneur and Author

• The Future is Broken
• Five ‘easy’ fixes towards a ‘Happy’ future

7:30pm-8:00pm

Drinks

8:00pm 

Dinner

Day 2, September 11th

8:30am – 8:35am

Welcome Back
Menno van Doorn, Director – SogetiLabs

8:35am – 10:40am

Have Confidence in the New Generations

Setting the Stage II
Menno van Doorn, Director – SogetiLabs

What to expect from the Synthetic Generation?
Peter Leyden, Reinvent, Former Managing Editor – Wired, Author

• Generations & Societal shifts
• The world needs a new narrative for Utopia - ‘The Long Boom’ revisited

Tales from the Unexpected – eSports
Koen Schobbers, eSports Educator, Consultant and Host FOX Sports and Twitch.tv

• How the next generation is spending their time
• Opportunities in the new normal

Augmenting Our Brains
Shravan Thaploo, Neuro-scientist, Harvard Medical School

• Breakthroughs in Neuro Science
• Our Brain as a new source of (neural) data
• Rewriting the rules of marketing

10:40am – 11:00am

Break

11:00am – 12:50pm

Your Role in the Utopian Digital Society

Designing a Revolution
Mikko-Pekka Hanski, Co-Founder Idean

• The emergence of Direct Consumer Branding
• Design for the next generation

Reaching for the Unreachables
Anjali Lai, Senior Analyst Forrester Research

• Understanding the Synthetic Generation through Forrester’s Consumer Energy Index
• Facebook: The Myth of the Monopoly
• The Art of Storytelling in the Purpose Economy

Onlife – Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era
Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information, Oxford Internet Institute

• Digital Society under construction
• Discontent as the father of progress

Closing Remarks
Pierre Hessler, Capgemini Fellow

12:50pm

Lunch