Utility + Function

Chris Miller is Associate Professor of International History at Tufts University, where his research focuses on technology, geopolitics, economics, international affairs, and Russia.   He is author of Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, a geopolitical history of the computer chip.   He is the author of three other books on Russia, including Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia; We Shall Be Masters: Russia's Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin; and The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR. He has previously served as the Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, a lecturer at the New Economic School in Moscow, a visiting researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research associate at the Brookings Institution, and as a fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Academy. He received his PhD and MA from Yale University and his BA in history from Harvard University. For more information, see www.christophermiller.net.

Anwaar Al Mahmeed is the Managing Director of Republic MENA, Board Member at CubeFabs Inc, and a Venture Capitalist. She founded Menaverse Ventures to invest in early stage deep tech, and had previously co-founded the East Chain Co. focused solely on blockchain infrastructure investments. She was also the lead organizer of The East Chain Open Hub (ECOH) Conference in Kuwait. Prior to that, Anwaar was product development manager at Boursa Kuwait. She started her career in the Kuwait Investment Authority’s training program where she interned at State Street London, and later joined the Hedge Fund department at the KIA. Anwaar is a CFA Charterholder since 2015

Zoe Weinberg is the founder & managing partner of ex/ante, an early-stage fund that works to counter surveillance capitalism and digital authoritarianism by investing in technology that is more private, secure, and decentralized. Prior, Zoe worked on ethics and policy at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and at Google AI. Previously she focused on fragile and conflict-affected states, working on the emergency response in Mosul, Iraq during the counter-ISIL operation in 2017, and at the World Bank (IFC) in over a dozen countries, including Somalia, South Sudan, and Liberia. Prior to the World Bank, she worked in Goldman Sachs’s alternative investment group. Her research and writing has been published in the New York Times and Foreign Affairs, among other publications. She is also a host of the podcast Next in Foreign Policy. Zoe earned her B.A. from Harvard University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and an M.B.A from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where she was a Knight Hennessy Scholar.

Dr. Thomas Irvine is a global historian of music from 1500 CE to the present. After studying viola at conservatoire (at the Shepherd School of Rice University and Indiana University Jacobs School of Music) he moved to Germany and played professionally, mostly in Early Music ensembles but also in symphony orchestras. He also taught for a year at the Frankfurt International School and worked as a manager for a large Early Music organization. In 1999 he found his way to musicology and back to the US, studying performance practice and musicology at Cornell University, where he took his PhD in 2005. His current research focuses on global music history, historical sound studies and the use of machine learning techniques in jazz. He is the author of Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter 1770-1839 (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and the co-editor, with Neil Gregor, of Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor (Berghahn, 2019).

Dr. Björn Lomborg is an academic and author of the bestselling titles "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet", "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and "Cool It". He is currently a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and President of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank convening the world’s top economists to conduct research on the most effective methods for resolving global humanitarian crises. Dr. Lomborg’s primary area of research interest is climate change, and his work is dedicated towards edification of the general public as well as policymakers. He is a contributor to preeminent publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Economist, Washington Post, Forbes Magazine, Globe & Mail, The Guardian, The Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Times, The Australian, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and Der Spiegel.

Serge Faguet is a Russian-Ukrainian entrepreneur and thinker. He has founded multiple tech companies including multi-billion-dollar B2B online travel company Emerging Travel Group, concierge medicine care delivery company Novami, AI drug discovery company Multiomic Health, automated clinical trial recruitment company Nexus and Web2 ⇒ Web3 onboarding product Identix. A proponent of biohacking, his vision is to build a large-scale commercial data/biobank that gathers healthcare data to make major progress in increasing productivity, longevity, and quality of life.  As a philosopher-entrepreneur, Serge believes that we need to adopt a syncretic approach to innovation; he uses entrepreneurial ideation to enact enduring material change and eventually construct a more hospitable future for all of humanity. Serge is interested in implementing the principles of Web3 and crypto to build decentralized institutions, govern ourselves, and control our own data. His greatest passions lie in inspiring others to discover their authentic selves through communal collaboration and encouraging political action by creating a healthier, more self-aware society.

K. Eric Drexler is a senior research fellow at Oxford University and widely regarded as the father of nanotechnology. He has authored several seminal texts including Engines of Creation and Radical Abundance, his previous research focuses on scalable atomically precise manufacturing (APM) for the purpose of manipulating matter from the bottom up. He is currently examining the potential applications of AI-enabled automation in AI research and continues to challenge conventional approaches to AI by proposing a pluri-functional, decentralized intelligent system, Comprehensive AI Services (CAIS). CAIS rejects the notion that superintelligence must be modeled after the human mind, and instead composes broad AI systems out of many diverse, narrower-purpose components. Dr. Drexler has worked to democratize an understanding of nanotechnology and is directing a software development project based in top-down progressive refinement, adopting simulative environments and encouraging users to envision multiple futures for advanced systems.

Andre Watson is Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Ligandal, an industry pioneer in precision genetic medicine. Andre has a background in biomedical engineering and is using his knowledge of nanomaterials to develop next-generation technologies for personalized gene therapy with the ultimate goal of curing chronic illnesses and rare diseases, revolutionizing pandemic defense strategies, and increasing longevity for all. Ligandal’s expertise is grounded in an innovative delivery system similar to a molecular GPS that scales AI, computational biology, and machine learning to target specific cells for the precise delivery of gene-editing tools such as CRISPR and TALEN. Andre is currently working to build a better future for mankind by perfecting regenerative medicine and enabling equal access to quality healthcare, setting a new standard for 21st century medicine.

Ranjit Singh is currently a researcher at Data & Society’s AI on the Ground Initiative, a nonprofit research center that convenes experts in industry and academia to address interdisciplinary questions surrounding the development of new technologies with the goal of advancing an understanding of the social relationships governing and governed by data and automation. As a qualitative sociologist, Ranjit treats technology as an object of its own so that he may study the cultural implications of it and how it is appropriated in contemporary society. Ranjit is currently writing on Big Data, and his work is often centered around Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based identification system. Aadhaar is unique in its massive scale, and its purpose is to allow the Indian government to determine who is eligible for their services. By questioning issues of data representation and shifting definitions of citizenship, Ranjit’s research examines data infrastructures as a collection of relationships, to both one another and to governments.

George Kurtz, CEO and co-founder of CrowdStrike, shares insights on revenue growth, cybersecurity, and entrepreneurship. They discuss the fascination and challenges of Formula One racing, sponsoring a sportsman, and learning from respected guests. The speakers explore the balance between technology and efficiency in learning, and the evolution of security measures from traditional firewalls to endpoint security.