Charity Wayua
Head IBM Research Public Sector Kenya, IBM Research Africa
Dr. Charity Wayua is a senior research manager at IBM research Africa, an organization whose mission is to develop innovative and commercially viable technologies that impact people’s lives. In her role today, she spends her time developing her team’s research strategy and driving execution in the team’s areas of focus: applications of cloud and artificial intelligence technologies in healthcare, climate and agriculture.
She obtained her undergraduate degree from Xavier University, (Ohio, US) and a PhD in Chemistry at Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana, US) where her research was focused on developing targeted therapeutics and imaging agents for lung, pancreatic and colon cancers.
Moustapha Cisse
Head Google AI Ghana, Member ETH4D Advisory Board, Co-Founder AIMS
Moustapha Cisse is a research scientist at Google and head of the Google AI center in Accra, Ghana, where he leads research efforts in foundational machine learning and its applications to solving complex societal challenges. Moustapha is also a professor of machine learning at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where where he is the founder and director of the African Master’s of Machine Intelligence program. He was previously a research scientist at Facebook AI Research. Before that, he completed his PhD at University Pierre and Marie Curie in France.
Jan Dirk Wegner
Head EcoVision Lab, ETH Zurich
Jan Dirk Wegner is founder and head of the EcoVision Lab, which does research at the frontier of machine learning and computer vision to solve ecological questions. Its objective is to invent original, data-driven methods at the interface of computer science, ecology, and engineering that analyse environmental data at very large scale automatically. Jan joined the Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing group at ETH in 2012 after completing his PhD (with distinction) at Leibniz Universität Hannover in 2011.
He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and established new lines of research in geospatial computer vision and deep machine learning and was granted multiple awards.
Massimo Selmo
Head of Global Sourcing Barry Callebaut
Massimo Selmo started to work for Barry Callebaut Italia as CFO in 1996 at the Milan offices. In 1999 he moved to Switzerland to lead the centralization of Sourcing as Head of Global Sourcing. As of 2016 he is a member of the Board of Directors of Masschallenge, a global start-up accelerator sponsored by Barry Callebaut. Massimo Selmo graduated in 1992 at the “Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi” in Milan and holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration.
Chris Luebkeman
Head Strategic Foresight Hub, President Office ETH Zurich
Chris Luebkeman is the leader of the Strategic Foresight Hub in the Office of the President at ETH Zurich. He and his team engage a broad range of stakeholders concerning future-focused drivers of change. He combines an attitude of pragmatic optimism with curiosity and a deep sense of planetary responsibility to all of his collaborations. Dr. Luebkeman’s career has spanned professions and geographies. His multidisciplinary education (geology, civil engineering, structural engineering, entrepreneurship, and a Doctorate in Architecture) was encouraged by his Mid-Western family of educators. His journey included Vanderbilt, Cornell, and the ETH Zurich. He became an academic nomad teaching Studios on Design and courses on Technology at the University of Oregon, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and at MIT. He joined a global engineering consultancy Arup in London to lead the Research and Development group in 1999. He became a corporate intrapreneur by founding the Foresight, Innovation and Incubation teams. He is deeply passionate about constructive dialogue and positive solutions to the profound challenges we face today.