The mission of MIT Technology Review is to make technology a greater force for good by bringing about better-informed, more conscious technology decisions through authoritative, influential, and trustworthy journalism.
Michael Beck
Global Head of Threat Analysis, Darktrace
Mike Beck has 10 years of experience as operational advisor and delivery lead for a range of national security programmes in the UK government. With vast experience of consulting on tactical cyber defense, he oversees the support and training of Darktrace clients post-implementation. Prior to joining Darktrace in 2014, Mike also served as a GovCERT UK practitioner, defending against a wide range of cyber threats. Mike was also deployed as a civilian advisor to a number of active operational commands within the UK military. He holds a first-class degree in Computer Science from the University of Plymouth and is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and a GIAC Incident Handler.
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau
CEO and Publisher, MIT Technology Review
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau is the CEO and publisher of MIT Technology Review, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s media company. Elizabeth also serves as chair of the global entrepreneurial network MIT Enterprise Forum. Prior to joining MIT Technology Review, Elizabeth was the global managing director of the Economist Corporate Network (whose parent company publishes The Economist magazine), where she led editorial content creation, sales, marketing, and event operations. She also spent a decade working as a consultant. Elizabeth holds an executive MBA from the London Business School, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College.
Cansu Canca
Founder, Director, AI Ethics Lab
Cansu is a philosopher and the founder/director of the AI Ethics Lab, where she leads teams of computer scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars to provide ethics analysis and guidance to researchers and practitioners. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy specializing in applied ethics. She works on ethics of technology and population-level bioethics with an interest in policy questions. Prior to the AI Ethics Lab, she was a lecturer at the University of Hong Kong, and a researcher at the Harvard Law School, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, National University of Singapore, Osaka University, and the World Health Organization.
David Cox
IBM Director, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
David Cox is the IBM director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a first-of-its-kind industry-academic collaboration between IBM and MIT, focused on fundamental research in artificial intelligence. David's ongoing research is primarily focused on bringing insights from neuroscience into research on machine learning and computer vision. His work has spanned a variety of disciplines, with research including imaging and electrophysiology experiments in living brains, the development of machine-learning and computer-vision methods, and work in applied machine learning and high-performance computing.
Mia de Kuijper
Senior Vice President and Strategy Advisor at Salesforce, and Executive-in-Residence at Harvard Innovation Lab
Mia has successfully built and run companies and academic institutions. Her previous global corporate leadership positions have been at Royal Dutch Shell, PepsiCo, and AT&T, and she has been a senior managing director on Wall Street with careers at First Boston and Morgan Stanley. She has worked extensively in India, Brazil, Europe, and US. She speaks Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and very basic Bangla and Chinese. She is the author of Profit Power Economics: A New Competitive Strategy for Creating Sustainable Wealth (Oxford University Press). She advises and writes about digital transformation, customer engagement, AI, scenario strategy, business models, and M&A.
Nigel Dobson
Chairman, Lygon and Banking Services Business Domain Lead, ANZ
Nigel Dobson leads the Banking Services division for ANZ, one of Australia’s biggest banks. Banking Services delivers common end-to-end platform-based services and is responsible for shaping ANZ’s business services strategy to meet the demands of an open bank economy. Nigel also leads the bank’s blockchain strategy and associated activities, including fostering partnerships and industry pilots.
Eugene Fitzgerald
CEO and Director, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology
Eugene A. Fitzgerald’s research work resulted in the discovery of high-mobility strained silicon, the basis of his first company. He is a practicing researcher, serial innovator, and entrepreneur and has founded or cofounded seven enterprises, including one that specialized in industry-corporate innovation projects. He is coauthor of the book Inside Real Innovation. He received his undergraduate degree from MIT in 1985 and his PhD from Cornell University in 1989.
Cheryl Hung
Director of Ecosystem, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Linux Foundation
Cheryl Hung is a London-based software engineer, public speaker, and tech executive. She builds sustainable open-source communities around Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. Previously Cheryl was a software engineer and program manager at Google in London and New York. She is a computer science graduate of the University of Cambridge.
Leo Kärkkäinen
Fellow, Nokia Bell Labs; Member of High-Level Expert Group on AI, European Commission
Dr. Leo Kärkkäinen is a Bell Labs Fellow, research group leader in Nokia Bell Labs, a part-time professor of embedded systems in biomechanical technologies at Aalto University, and a member of the high-level expert group on artificial intelligence of the European Commission. Leo’s current interest are machine learning and artificial intelligence. He joined Nokia Research Center in 1996 and has since had multiple positions in research and research management at Nokia. Leo has a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Helsinki. He has over 80 academic publications and over 20 granted patents.
Axel Karlsson
Senior Partner, McKinsey and Company
Axel Karlsson is a senior partner in McKinsey & Company’s Hong Kong office and has led the Technology, Media, and Telecom Practice in Asia since 2015. During his nearly 20 years with McKinsey, Axel has been based in three continents and has held numerous senior leadership positions. He led McKinsey’s Scandinavian Technology, Media, and Telecom Practice in 2007-2010, was the managing partner for McKinsey’s Swedish Office in 2010-2013, and led the European High Tech/Internet Practice in 2013-2015. Axel has also co-chaired the committee that elects new partners to McKinsey since 2011.
Shonali Krishnaswamy
CTO, AIDA Technologies and Professor, Swinburne University of Technology
AIDA Technologies is a multi-award winning Machine Learning company, founded in Singapore (2016), delivering advanced Machine Learning products for Banking and Insurance. AIDA was selected for the Frost and Sullivan Best Practices in Machine Learning for Financial Services in ASEAN in 2019. AIDA was a winner of the Monetary Authority of Singapore Global Fintech Hackecelerator (2016) and the Fintech Innovation Awards (2017). Shonali was Head of Data Analytics at the Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR, Singapore. Shonali has held professorial positions at Monash University and Swinburne University of Technology, Australia.
Steve Leonard
Founding CEO, SGInnovate
Steve Leonard played key roles in building several global companies in areas such as software, hardware, and services. In his current role as the founding chief executive officer of SGInnovate, a private limited company wholly owned by the Singapore Government, Mr. Leonard has been chartered to lead an organization that builds “deep-tech” companies. Capitalizing on the science and technology research for which Singapore has gained a global reputation, his team works with local and international partners, including universities, venture capitalists, and major corporations, to help technical founders imagine, start, and scale globally relevant early-stage technology companies from Singapore.
Alan Lim
Asia Pacific Practice Leader, IBM Blockchain Labs
Alan Lim heads IBM's Blockchain development and expert labs for Asia Pacific. As one of the initial members of IBM's Worldwide Blockchain team, he was behind IBM’s first Blockchain foray in the region. He leads IBM's work across the different markets with regulators, large financial service organisations, government agencies, and start-ups to pioneer new business models and transform how they do business in areas such as Trade Finance, Payments, and Digital Identity.
Prior to this, Alan led the establishment of the IBM Bluemix Garage in Singapore in 2016. The garage is a consultancy that helps enterprises and start-ups explore new business models, rapidly turning ideas into production-ready applications with the IBM Cloud. Since its inception, the garage has grown into a multidisciplinary team of Software Engineers, Architects, and UX Designers serving the bustling Southeast Asian market today.
Alan serves as a mentor with Tribe Accelerator, a Singapore-based blockchain accelerator and is the co-chairperson of SGTech’s Blockchain Committee.
Alexander Ling
Associate Professor, National University of Singapore and Principal Investigator, Centre for Quantum Technologies
Alexander Ling has been a principal investigator at the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore since 2010. He leads a team that aims to bring quantum instruments out of the lab and into field deployment. His team has deployed instruments in diverse environments, ranging from Singapore’s urban fiber networks to satellites in space. Alexander received his PhD from the National University of Singapore and has worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States.
Deon Newman
VP Strategy, IBM AP
Deon Newman is the Vice President of Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer of IBM Asia Pacific. Deon currently works to build successful go-to-market strategy and talented teams that innovate, problem-solve, and drive outstanding results across Asia Pacific’s diverse markets. A regular public speaker, client evangelist, industry award winner, and company spokesperson, Deon has a held a number of local and global marketing and sales leadership positions across Asia Pacific, New York, London, and Paris. He is currently based in Singapore, where he is indulging in his love for chilli crab and developing ‘Singlish’ skills.
Loredana Padurean
Associate Dean and Faculty Director for Action Learning at Asia School of Business, MIT Sloan, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Loredana Padurean is professor of management and faculty director for action learning at the Asia School of Business (ASB) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a collaboration between the MIT Sloan School of Management and Bank Negara Malaysia. She is also an international faculty fellow at MIT. Her most recent research focuses on operations for entrepreneurs and principles that help entrepreneurial companies build operations strategies and capabilities consistent with their business objectives. Professor Padurean is a serial entrepreneur and a board member and advisor for start-ups. She is a passionate teacher and interested in creating innovative learning environments.
Prashant Pradhan
Vice President and CTO, Asia Pacific IBM
Prashant is a senior executive at IBM with experience spanning IBM Research, IBM Global Services, and IBM Global Markets. He currently runs technology for IBM's Asia Pacific region, comprising the five IBM markets of India–South Asia, Australia–New Zealand, Singapore, ASEAN, and Korea. He joined IBM in 2001 as a research scientist at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, after completing his PhD in computer science at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He has nanodegrees in deep learning, autonomous driving, and bioinformatics.
Janil Puthucheary
Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Communications and Information and Ministry of Transport, Singapore
Dr. Janil Puthucheary was elected Member of Parliament in 2011. He is currently Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Communications and Information and Ministry of Transport. He chairs OnePeople.sg, which works to promote racial harmony in Singapore, and the Young PAP, the youth wing of the People's Action Party.
Abhik Roychoudhury
Professor, School of Computing, National University of Singapore and Director, Cybersecurity Consortium
Abhik Roychoudhury received his PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2000 and has been a professor of computer science at the National University of Singapore since 2001. He is the director of the National Satellite of Excellence in Trustworthy Software Systems at Singapore (2019-23) and leads the Singapore Cybersecurity Consortium (2016-22), which includes more than 40 companies collaborating with academia. His research focuses on software security, trustworthy systems, and self-healing software.
Laurent Sauveur
Chief of External Relations, UN Human Rights
Laurent Sauveur is chief of external relations for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, a.k.a. UN Human Rights, overseeing its external communications and partnerships programs. Mr. Sauveur brings to the position considerable experience in mobilizing support to assist vulnerable people. Before joining the United Nations, he worked for the private sector as well as international NGOs like Doctors Without Borders and Care International for over two decades, focusing on humanitarian operations and the fight against extreme poverty.
Roland Turner
Chief Privacy Officer, TrustSphere; Organizer, FOSSASIA
Roland Turner is Chief Privacy Officer for TrustSphere, where he is responsible for the company's information policy and practices. He is a HackerspaceSG founding member and FOSSASIA organizer, holds a Computer Science degree from UTS, and is an avid dancer, runner, and ham radio operator with a particular interest in space.