Co-founder, Chairman and CEO at Graphcore

Nigel Toon

Graphcore (graphcore.ai) is a silicon and systems company based in Bristol-UK,

that has developed a new type of processor, the Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU),

to accelerate machine learning and AI applications. Since its founding in 2016, Nigel

has secured over $700m in funding for the company from some of the world’s

leading venture capital and financial firms including Atomico, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity,

Jupiter, OTPP, Schroders, and Sequoia Capital, from major corporations including

BMW, Bosch, Dell, Microsoft and Samsung and from eminent Artificial Intelligence

innovators. At the company’s last funding round Graphcore was valued at $2.8Bn.

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Nigel has a background as a technology business leader, entrepreneur and engineer

having been CEO at two successful VC-backed processor companies XMOS and

Picochip (sold to Nasdaq:MSPD, now Intel), a founder of Icera (sold to Nasdaq:

NVDA) and VP/GM at Altera (Nasdaq: ALTR, sold to Intel for $17Bn) where he spent

over 13 years and was responsible for establishing and building the European

business unit that he grew from zero to over $500m in annual revenues.

Nigel has an extensive network of connections in the global technology industry

spanning USA, China, Asia and Europe. He is often called upon to speak at major

industry events and has been recognized with numerous industry awards including,

Icon of the Year at the Barclays Entrepreneurs Awards and ranked #1 on Business

Insiders 100 most influential people shaping British technology.

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Nigel has served as a Board Member and Chairman at a number of technology

businesses including as non-executive director and head of the technical advisory

board at Imagination Technologies PLC, a FTSE LSE listed business, until its

acquisition in 2017. He currently sits as a non-executive director on the main board

of UK Research and Innovation, a non-departmental public body of the UK

Government that directs research and innovation funding for the UK. On the UKRI

board, he chairs the Organizational Change Committee. Nigel has also been a

member of the UK Prime Ministers Business Council and has advised the UK

Government on innovation policy.

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Nigel is the author on 3 granted patents. He lives in Somerset, UK with his wife and

two boys. He has recently written a book titled ‘How AI Thinks’ which is being

published by Transworld/Penguin Random House.

Manager of Technical Staff at Cohere

Dr. Edward Kim

Dr. Edward Kim is a Manager of Technical Staff at Cohere, leading a cross-functional team building interfaces for dialogue-centric applications of large language models (LLMs). He is also appointed as an Adjunct Research Professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, where he guides research at the intersection of materials informatics and LLMs.

Edward’s PhD in Materials Science and Engineering was awarded from MIT, where his work focused on leveraging natural language processing and generative modelling for advanced materials discovery. His research has been featured in outlets including MIT News and The Verge.

Prior to his time at Cohere, Edward has also worked in ML systems for accounting software (Xero), AI for chemicals and materials (Citrine Informatics), and natural language processing for pharmaceuticals (Pfizer).

Partner, Solaris Fund Management

Ren Ito

Ren is an entrepreneur, investor and former diplomat.

Ren took the lead on the global expansion of Mercari, Japan's first unicorn start-up running the fastest-growing marketplace app.  Ren served as CEO of Mercari Europe, as well as successfully orchestrated its IPO valuing the company at $6bn.  Ren founded Solaris Fund Management and has invested in a number of leading unicorn start-ups in fintech and AI space, including AI unicorns like Afiniti and Stability AI. 

Prior to venturing into the entrepreneurial challenges, Ren spent 15 years in diplomacy.  He held key positions in the Japanese Foreign Service where he worked on the security alliance with the US, negotiated a free trade agreement with the EU, and represented Japan at the World Bank board. 

Ren continues to be involved in public policy debates on technological innovation and international politics as Senior Fellow at New York University (NYU) School of Law.  Ren is the youngest member of the Trilateral Commission.  

Leading AI researcher

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt is a leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and was one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science.  He is Principal of Jesus College Oxford and a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Oxford. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee.  He was knighted in 2013 for ‘services to science and engineering’.  

Nigel has a degree in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Newcastle and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. In 1983 he joined the Department of Psychology at Nottingham and in 1992 he became the Allan Standen Professor of Intelligent Systems. He moved to Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science in 2000, where he researched the next generation of the World Wide Web and was the first Head of the Web and Internet Science Group.  At Oxford he has focused his research in human centred AI in a wide range of applications.  

With over 500 publications, he has researched and published on topics ranging from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web.  In 2018 he published The Digital Ape: how to live (in peace) with smart machines, described as a ‘landmark book’.

He is a Fellow of The Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society.

Global Head of Data & AI, WPP CTO Office

Di Mayze

WPP’s resident data geek has over 25 years of technology and data experience across media, FMCG, finance and retail consulting at companies such as Hearst UK, dunnhumby & Walgreens Boots Alliance.

She joined WPP in 2014 as MD of Acceleration (part of Wunderman Thompson) and left in 2017 to become a freelance Data Strategy Consultant.  She didn’t go very far away and having consulted for Wavemaker, VML, Geometry, Wunderman Thompson and MediaCom, Di joined the WPP CTO team and became Global Head of Data and AI for WPP in January 2020 setting the data strategy, building data and AI literacy and curating data across WPP.

Di is a creative thinker with proven success in finding new solutions and revenue streams for traditional companies.   She is particularly passionate about getting non-analysts excited about the possibilities of data and AI.

Di has an MBA from Cranfield School of Management and is a qualified Project Manager and a Neurolinguistic Programme Practitioner. In 2021 she joined Gartner’s Chief Data Officer Group as a Governing Body member and was delighted to be included in the Data IQ Top 100 data leaders list in 2020, 2021 and 2022.

Vice President Communications and Marketing at NewsGuard

Veena McCoole

Veena McCoole is Vice President Communications and Marketing at NewsGuard, where she leads the development and implementation of the company's marketing strategy across editorial products and commercial partnerships in the advertising, technology, non-profit and education industries. Previously, she served as VP for Strategic Partnerships. 

Prior to joining NewsGuard, McCoole was a senior associate at global strategic communications firm Finsbury Glover Hering, where she worked on capital markets, M&A, and ESG mandates for FTSE 100 and consumer-facing clients. McCoole has previous editorial experience at Forbes in New York, the Business of Fashion in London, and the Yale Daily News. She graduated from Yale University as a Yale Journalism Scholar.

Director and founder of PrivacyX Consulting

Steve Wood

Steve is director and founder of PrivacyX Consulting, a special advisor to the law firm Allen and Overy and a visiting policy fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. Steve previously worked for the ICO, the UK DP regulator, for 15 years, 6 of those as Deputy Commissioner responsible for policy and strategy.  He was also Chair of the OECD Working Party on Data Governance and Privacy between 2019 and 2022.

Investment Partner at Chapter One

Jamesin Seidel

Jamesin Seidel is an investment partner at Chapter One, an early-stage venture capital fund. She invests in emerging startups focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Data, and Infrastructure.

Jamesin didn't follow the conventional path to venture capital. Her skillset comes from experience in combating coordinated online attacks, safeguarding online interactions, and professional sports betting. She was previously Twitter's tech lead for their platform manipulation team, where she developed algorithms to tackle large-scale spam attacks, led high-profile investigations, and was instrumental in investigating malicious online activities during the 2016 and 2020 US Elections.

Before Twitter, she was a professional sports bettor on a team led by Haralabos Voulgarious. Here, she used data and automation to gain a competitive edge.

She received her undergraduate degrees in Economics and Philosophy from Boston College.

Deputy Executive Editor, The Economist

Kenneth Cukier

Kenneth Cukier is the Deputy Executive Editor of The Economist. He is the coauthor of Framers” on the power of mental models and the limits of AI, with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of the Oxford Internet Institute and Francis de Véricourt of ESMT Berlin. His earlier book, “Big Data,” with Mayer-Schönberger, was a NYT bestseller translated into over 20 languages. Earlier, Kenn was a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a board director of Chatham House and an associate fellow at Oxford’s Saïd Business School. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

CEO, Optmatik

Mandela Patrick

Mandela Patrick is the Chief Executive Officer of Optmatik. Previously, he did a PhD at the University of Oxford, as Rhodes Scholar, in the world famous VGG computer vision group, where he pioneered research in multi-modal AI video and image representation learning. During his PhD, he was a research collaborator with Meta in their AI research department, where he researched core AI multi-modal algorithms for the IG Reels Recommendation system. His work has been cited over 1000 times, and he has published at the major AI/ML conferences including NeurIPS, ICCV, ICLR, and NAACL. Before Oxford, he earned a BA honors degree in Computer Science from Harvard College in 2018 with a specialization in machine learning.

Human rights lawyer and Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council

Rayhan Asat

Rayhan Asat is an internationally recognized human rights lawyer, named in Vox’s Inaugural FuturePerfect50 as one of 50 visionary changemakers alongside Nobel-prize-winning scientists and Pulitzer-winning journalists. As a lawyer and policy expert, she works on many pressing human rights concerns, including the persecution of the Uyghur people in China and broader Asia-related human rights issues. Her tech policy research delves into the intersection of human rights and technology, disinformation, exploring surveillance mechanisms, AI governance, and relevant legal standards surrounding AI technology. 

Rayhan's human rights advocacy has been featured in numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, BBC, Foreign Policy, The Hill, CNN, and many others. She has testified before the US Congress, the UK House of Commons, the Canadian House of Commons, the European Parliament, and the Lithuanian Parliament, and her policy recommendations have been adopted by respective countries. 

For her human rights work, Rayhan was awarded the Stanford Democracy Fellowship and named a Yale World Fellow, a fellowship awarded to sixteen exceptional leaders making a positive impact on the world. Since then, she has worked with the Yale Law School Orville Schell Center Human Rights Clinic for the past two years. A sought-after speaker, Rayhan has appeared at many global summits and forums, including the Summit for Democracy at the invitation of President Biden and the Jeju Forum at the invitation of the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Last year, Rayhan also made a presentation at the World Ethical Data Forum on AI Ethics and International Laws.

Director of Media Provenance at Microsoft

Andrew Jenks

Director of Media Provenance for Microsoft, Andrew Jenks has spent more than 30 years in the computer science industry creating, incubating, and releasing new solutions to complex problems.  Currently, he leads the Azure Media Security and directs Microsoft's media provenance investments across the company. He is honored to serve as the Chair for the Coalition for Content Authenticity and Provenance and lead a cross-company team of experts in developing the next evolution of authentic media.

Senior Fellow at the Saïd Business School

Dr. Alex Connock

Dr Alex Connock is an Oxford academic in the media business and author of the book ‘Media Management and Artificial Intelligence.’ 

Academically, Alex is Senior Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, teaching Marketing and Media Business courses at BA, MBA and EMBA level.  He co-launched and ran Oxford postgraduate diploma in Artificial Intelligence for Business from 2021-3. and is Lecturer at St Hugh’s College, Oxford in Management.  Alex is also Professor in Media and Artificial Intelligence at Exeter University, and Head of Department in Creative Business at the UK’s National Film and Television School.  He has a PhD in video optimisation for e-commerce and degrees from Oxford (PPE) Columbia (Journalism) and INSEAD (MBA).  

Entrepreneurially, Alex has created and grown multiple media companies.  Most recently he is non-exec at Shoreditch-based digital/social agency The Tree.   From 2012-17 he was Managing Director of TV and digital production business Endemol Shine North (now Workerbee) through a period of substantial growth.  Between 1998 and 2011 he co-founded, and ran as CEO, the media group Ten Alps (now Zinc Media) with Bob Geldof - producing hundreds of programmes for UK and international broadcasters, as well as substantial digital and branded content output, including the UK government's Teachers TV project. He has worked directly for BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and PEOPLE Magazine. He has been six times shortlisted as Entrepreneur of the Year.  

In the charity sector Alex is Vice Chair at UNICEF UK and a director at the The Halle Orchestra.  

Communication Researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute

Felix Simon

Felix M. Simon is a communication researcher and doctoral student at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), where he has been researching the effects of AI in journalism and the news industry for the last four years. Investigating the use of AI at more than 30 international news organisations including The Guardian, the New York Times, the BBC, and Der Spiegel, his research seeks to understand the structural implications of AI—including forms of generative AI—for news organisations’ production and distribution processes as well as the public sphere.

Felix has published and presented at a number of leading journals and conferences and has co-authored various research reports and papers on topics ranging from innovation in the media to COVID-19 misinformation. His research and commentary has appeared, among others, in The Guardian, The Washington Post, Politico, and the Financial Times and he has given evidence to inquiries of the UK House of Lords and House of Commons, press regulator IMPRESS, and the United Nations. In May 2023, he was awarded the Hans Bausch Media Prize by German public broadcaster SWR in cooperation with the Institute for Media Studies at the University of Tübingen for his work on AI, news, and platform companies.

Felix is a Knight News Innovation Fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and an affiliate at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also works as a research assistant at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ). He graduated with a BA in Film and Media Studies as well as English Studies (Distinction) from Goethe-University Frankfurt, and he holds an MSc in Social Science of the Internet from the OII. He is currently a fellow at the Salzburg Global Seminar and an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy and sits on the AI and Local News Steering Committee of Partnership on AI.

CEO and co-founder of Jack Fertility

Lily Elsner

Lily Elsner is CEO and co-founder of Jack Fertility, the UK's first postal sperm test. After her MBA at Oxford Saïd, where she met co-founder Nick Shipley, she was Head of Strategy for AI drug discovery biotech Arctoris. Shocked by the dire statistics of plummeting sperm count and the lack of male fertility testing options, she left to start Jack Fertility, quickly winning an Innovate UK Young Innovator Award in 2022 along with a shout out from the Prime Minister and press coverage in the Sunday Times, the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and New York Magazine among others. She has been supported in developing Jack by FemTech Lab, SETSquared Bristol’s Enterprising Women, and the BarclaysEagle Labs' first UK Female Founders Accelerator. Prior to her MBA she gained operational and strategic expertise in M&A at Shearman & Sterling LLP, then working for the Board of Directors of Capital One Bank, and as a chief of staff for the Capital One Card Analytics and Infrastructure (Card.AI) team (~600 headcount across Data Science, Digital Marketing infrastructure, Card Acquisition, and Fraud). Lily holds a BA in Philosophy and Biological Sciences from Wellesley College.

Principal, Mosaic Ventures

Chandar Lal

Chandar Lal is a Principal at Mosaic Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in London with $300 million under management. Chandar invests in early-stage software startups across Europe, with a focus on enterprise AI / ML applications. In the last year, he has backed multiple founders building generative AI applications at Seed and Series A.

Before Mosaic, he worked at Sequoia Capital in Silicon Valley, focusing on M&A, research, and strategic partnerships. He started his career as a strategy consultant, where he advised CxOs of large enterprises on adoption of emerging technology.

He holds degrees from Cambridge (MPhil, Distinction) and Durham (BA, First Class), and is a Rising Leaders Fellow at the Aspen Institute.

Principal, Neural Transform

Bruce MacCormack

Bruce is focussed on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on news operations, with a particular emphasis on mitigating the threat of misinformation.   

He is a member of the Partnership on AI steering committee on AI and Media Integrity. He is also a founder and co-lead of Project Origin; The BBC, New York Times, CBC/Radio-Canada and Microsoft media provenance initiative.  Bruce is a member of the steering committee of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).

While at CBC/Radio-Canada, he was the Head of Business Strategy for Technology and the Executive Architect of the Enterprise Media Asset Management system.  He has served as the President of digital media for the largest Canadian newspaper chain and as the President and COO of Manitoba Telecom Services’ Advanced Media division.   He began his career in engineering, marketing, sales and global corporate strategy roles in the telecom equipment sector at Nortel.

Bruce has been a member of the Young President’s Organization, a Past President of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and the former Chair of The Atlantic International Film Festival.

His background includes an MBA (York University - Toronto) and an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering (McGill – Montreal).   

Bruce@NeuralTransform.com

Senior Research Lead at Adobe and PhD student at the Oxford Internet Institute

Laura Herman

Laura Herman specializes in emerging technologies’ impact on artistic & creative practices. Currently, she is an AHRC PhD student at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute and a Senior Research Lead at Adobe, where she manages AI research. Laura has previously held research roles at Harvard, Princeton, and Intel Labs and has worked with arts institutions such as the Serpentine Galleries, the Tate, Studio Olafur Eliasson, and Ars Electronica. Laura’s curatorial and research work has been covered by venues including the BBC, Forbes, Artnet, New Scientist, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal. 

Research Lecturer in AI & Work at the Oxford Internet Institute

Fabian Stephany

Fabian Stephany is a Departmental Research Lecturer in AI & Work at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford, a Research Affiliate at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin and a Fellow at the Brussels-based Think Tank Bruegel. Leading the SkillScale Project, Fabian investigates the emergence of new skills and sustainability of novel occupations in times of technological disruption.

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He is a co-creator of the Online Labour Observatory – a digital data hub, hosted by the OII and the International Labour Organisation, for researchers, policy makers, journalists, and the public interested in online platform work. His research has been published in leading academic journals and was covered by Washington Post, The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Statesman, Nikkei Asia, and other popular media around the world.

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Fabian holds a PhD and degrees in Economics and Social Sciences from different European institutions, including Universitá Bocconi Milan and University of Cambridge. As an Economist and Senior Data Scientist, Fabian has been working in the private sector and for various actors in the international policy landscape, such as the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank or the OECD in Paris.

Graduate Researcher on Disinformation in MENA and a Human Rights Advocate

Ana-Diamond Aba Atach

Ana Diamond is an Iranian-born British human rights advocate, researcher, and a writer. She was held hostage in Iran from 2014 to 2018. Since her release and recovery, she has led global campaigns to free arbitrarily detained individuals, hostages, and has worked with torture survivors. 

Ana co-founded the Alliance Against State Hostage-Taking at the 2019 UN General Assembly, and her work has appeared on many international news outlets, including the New York Times, the Telegraph, CNN, Al Jazeera, Sky News, Marie Claire, Channel4 News, BBC, Forbes, so on.

At Oxford, Ana is a Clarendon Scholar and studies the contemporary proliferation of disinformation in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Her expertise also extends to digital governance and surveillance, with a growing interest in the use of AI in advancing state surveillance networks.

In addition to her advocacy, she is an occassional political commentator and a non-fiction writer. She is currently an Emerging Writers' Fellow at the London Library.

Founding Partner of Applied Data Science Partners and Author of 'Generative Deep Learning'

David Foster

David Foster is author of the bestselling O'Reilly textbook Generative Deep Learning: Teaching Machines To Paint, Write, Compose, and Play. As co-founder of London based consultancy Applied Data Science Partners (ADSP), he inspires and empowers organisations to harness the transformative power of data and AI.  He holds an MA in Mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge, an MSc in Operational Research from the University of Warwick and is a faculty member of the Machine Learning Institute, with a focus on the practical applications of AI and real-world problem-solving. His research interests include enhancing the transparency and interpretability of AI algorithms, and he has published literature on explainable machine learning within healthcare.

News editor, MIT Technology Review

Charlotte Jee

Charlotte is MIT Technology Review's news editor. She has extensive experience as a writer, editor and journalist covering tech, and crops up regularly on broadcast media.