Philippe Aghion is an expert in the economics of growth and in contract theory. His Schumpeterian Growth paradigm, which he developed together with Peter Howitt, has been used to analyze the design of growth policies and the role of the state in economic growth. Among other prestigious awards and honors, he has been awarded the Yrjo Jahnsson Award of the best European economist under 45 in 2001, the John Von Neumann Award in 2009, and the BBVA “Frontier of Knowledge Award” in 2020. He is a Professor at the College de France and at the London School of Economics, and a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Robert Aumann is widely recognized for his fundamental contributions to game theory, mathematical economics, and related areas. Together with mathematician Michael Bahir Maschler, he applied game theory to analyze Talmudic dilemmas. Laureate of the 1994 Israel Prize in economics and 2005 Jon Von Neumann Theory Prize, he was awarded a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2005. Robert Aumann is Professor at the Center for the Study of Rationality in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Jack Copeland’s expertise lies in cognitive science, mathematical logic, and philosophy of computation. In 2020 he was awarded the Te Apārangi Humanities Aronui Medal ‘for research into the foundations, philosophy and history of computing’. The citation for the American Philosophical Association’s Barwise Prize, awarded in 2017, describes him as ‘the world-wide expert on Alan Turing and a leading philosopher of AI, computing and information’. He received the Covey Award from the International Association of Computing and Philosophy in 2016 and his name has been on the IT History Society Honor Roll since 2017. Jack was John Findlay Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Boston University in 2018 and the Royden Davis Visiting Chair in Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington DC, in 2012. He is Co-Director and Permanent International Fellow of the Turing Centre at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zürich, and Honorary Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland. Jack is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, where he is Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing.
Toshio Fukuda is a world-leading researcher in robotics, with special interest in intelligent robotic systems, micro-nano robotics, bio-robotic system and neuromorphic intelligent control. Among his greatest achievements are the development of continuous movement in robots and his pioneering microrobotics technology that has been a decisive contribution to medical technology. Laureate of the 1997 Dr.-Ing. Eugene Mittelmann Achievement Award, 2000 IEEE Third Millennium Medal, and 2010 IEEE Technical Field Award on Robotics and Automation, he is Emeritus professor at Nagoya University, and 2020 President of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers."
William Hopkins is a developmental and comparative psychologist who has made significant contributions to research on cognition and the brain in primates with a particular focus on the evolution of neural systems underlying language and communication in chimpanzees and other great apes. He also uses quantitative genetic analyses to explore the co-evolution of different cognitive and brain systems in chimpanzees and other primates. He is currently Chair of the Department of Comparative Medicine at the MD Anderson Cancer Center and a Blaise-Pascal laureate at Paris-Saclay Université and a former fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Universite Aix-Marseille.
He holds a degree at Stanford University School of Medicine (MD, 1985) and UCLA School of Medicine (PhD, 1997). Professor In Residence and Director of the Epilepsy Surgery Program at UCLA. Dr. Fried’s research and clinical work is dedicated to the treatment of intractable seizure disorders and epilepsy. He has performed more than 1,000 surgeries on patients with epilepsy, with many patients living seizure-free today. His precision in tailoring an individual approach to each surgery is why patients travel from around the world to UCLA.
James McClelland is a cognitive psychologist best known for his work on parallel distributed processing (PDP) and applying neural networks to explain cognitive phenomena such as spoken word recognition, language processing, and memory. Currently, his work focuses on the development of mathematical cognition. He teaches on the PDP approach to cognition and its neural underpinnings and is a consulting research scientist at DeepMind. Laureate of the 2005 Mind & Brain Prize, 2010 Rumelhart Prize, and 2014 de Carvalho-Heineken Prize, he is the Lucie Stern Professor at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Center for Mind, Brain, Computation, and Technology.
Marc Mézard is a physicist whose research is rooted in statistical physics with broad applications in physics and beyond, including spin glass theory, biology, neural networks or information theory. His current work is at the heart of progress made in AI in recent years, covering questions of deep learning and task solving in deep neural networks. Laureate of the 1996 Ampère Prize of the French Academy of Sciences, 2009 Humboldt Prize, and 2016 Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society, he has been director of the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris since 2012.
Zaven Paré is a new media artist and an expert in robotics, internationally known for his artwork on electronic marionettes and robots. He designed his first electronic marionette in 1996 from a source of video retroprojection in Canada, followed in 1999 by the digital version at the Cotsen Center for Puppetry of CalArts (California Institute of the Arts). Currently he is a fellow collaborator in “interaction design” at the Institut d'études avancées - Aix Marseille Université, where he builds upon other fellowships he has held in engineering, notably in robotics for the Robot Actors Project, in the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory of Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro at Osaka University.
Martin Rees (Lord Rees of Ludlow, OM FRS) is an astrophysicist and cosmologist, and the UK's Astronomer Royal. President of the Royal Society (2005-2010), laureate of the 1984 Heineman Prize, 2005 Crafoord Prize and 2011 Templeton Prize, Sir Martin Rees was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 2004 to 2012. His main research interests have been galaxy formation, cosmic jets, black holes, and gamma ray bursts. More speculatively, he is interested in the question of whether we live in a multiverse and the prospects of detecting extraterrestrial life. He is a thought leader on long-term global issues, notably the pressures that a growing and more demanding population are placing on environment, sustainability, and biodiversity, and the impact of powerful recent technologies. He co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge with a focus on these issues.
Oron Shagrir is a philosopher with a background in mathematics and computer science. His research is in philosophy of mind, foundations of cognitive and brain sciences, and philosophy of computing. His book on The Nature of Physical Computation is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. He is Schulman Chair of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Shimon Ullman is a computer scientist whose general area of research is the study of vision. He studies the processing of visual information by the human visual system, and computer vision with the aim of understanding how our own visual system operates, and how to construct artificial systems with visual capabilities. Among his many awards and distinctions are the 2008 David E. Rumelhart Prize in human cognition, the Israel Prize in Computer Science in 2015, and the Azriel Rozenfeld Achievement Award in Computer vision in 2019. He is Samy and Ruth Cohn Professor of Computer Science at The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot (Israel) and Director of the Weizmann AI center.
Xiao-Jing Wang is Distinguished Global Professor of Neural Science, director of the Swartz Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at New York University. Previously he was Professor at Brandeis University and Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Wang’s research focuses on theory and neural mechanisms of cognitive functions such as working memory and decision-making, with a special interest in the prefrontal cortex (often called the “CEO of the brain”). More recently, his group developed biologically-based modeling of large-scale brain circuits. His work bridges neurobiology, cognitive science and AI in the areas of training recurrent neural networks to perform many cognitive tasks and learning to learn. He was awarded the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience in 2017 and the Goldman-Rakic Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2018.
Karen Yeung’s research has been at the forefront of understanding the challenges associated with the regulation and governance of emerging technologies. Her recent and on-going work particularly focuses on the legal, ethical, social, and democratic implications of a suite of technologies associated with automation and the ‘computational turn,’ including big data analytics, artificial intelligence (including various forms of machine learning), distributed ledger technologies (including blockchain) and robotics. She is actively involved in several technology policy and related initiatives at the national, European, and international levels, including the UN’s Global Judicial Integrity Network and as a former member of the EU High Level Expert Group on AI and the Council of Europe’s Expert Committee on human rights dimensions of automated data processing and different forms of artificial intelligence (MSI-AUT). Karen occupies several strategic and advisory roles for various non-profit organizations and research programs concerned with responsible governance of technology. She is on the editorial boards of the Modern Law Review, Big Data & Society, Public Law and Technology and Regulation.
Ada Yonath is a member of several academies, including US national Academy, the British Royal Society, the Israeli Academy. Among other distinctions, she holds honorary doctorate from over 40 worldwide universities. Her pioneering studies focus on the structure and functions of the ribosome – the cell’s protein factory. She has been at the forefront of key scientific developments, revealing in detail how genetic information is decoded, how the ribosome's inherent flexibility enables its performance, how antibiotics target it selectively and the secrets of antibiotic cross-resistance, findings that are crucial for designing next generation eco-friendly antibiotics. She also investigates human diseases associated with mutated ribosomes, and attempts discovering the origin of life. Yonath is the Martin and Helen Kimmel Professor and heads the Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly at the Weizmann Institute.
Robert Zatorre is a cognitive neuroscientist who is an expert in auditory cognition, focusing on human understanding of speech and music. He has worked on many, if not all, aspects of human auditory processing using modern brain-imaging techniques like functional and structural MRI, MEG and EEG, and brain stimulation techniques, together with cognitive and psychophysical measures. Professor at McGill University, he is co-founder of the international laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound research (BRAMS). Among other prestigious awards that he has earned, he was awarded the C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize in Cognitive Sciences in 2020.