Masaru Kitsuregawa is Director of the National Institute of Informatics and Professor at the Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo.
He received his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 1983. He has held various positions, including President of the Information Processing Society of Japan (2013-2015) and Chairman of the Committee for Computer Science of the Science Council of Japan (2014-2016). He has many research interests, especially in the field of database engineering.
He has received numerous awards, including the ACM SIGMOD E. F. Codd Contribution Award, IEICE Contribution Award, IPSJ Contribution Award, 21st Century Invention Award, National Commendation for Invention, Japan Award, and C&C Award. In 2013, he was awarded the Purple Ribbon Medal and in 2016, the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. He is a member of ACM, IEEE, IEICE and IPSJ.
Laure Lucchesi is the director of Etalab, the mission in charge of piloting the opening and sharing of public data (Open Data). This organization, placed under the authority of the Prime Minister, is responsible for promoting the opening and sharing of public data.
Etalab administers the data.gouv.fr portal, designed to gather and make freely available all public information from the State, its public establishments and, if they so wish, from local authorities and public or private entities entrusted with a public service mission.
Verena Rieser is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, where she is affiliated with the Interaction Lab and the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. Verena holds a PhD from Saarland University (2008) and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh (2008-11).
Her research focuses on statistical learning techniques for conversational AI, i.e. spoken dialogue systems and language generation. She is the author of over 100 peer-reviewed papers and has received several awards for her research. She has served the research community in a number of leadership roles, as well as a scientific advisor to government and public agencies.
For the past two years, Verena and her group have been the only UK team to reach the finals of the Amazon Alexa Prize.
John Shawe-Taylor is Professor of Computer Science at University College London. He has contributed to a fundamental renaissance in the field of statistical learning, with applications in new areas such as computer vision, document classification, and applications in biology and medicine focusing on brain scanning, immunity, and proteome analysis.
He has published over 250 papers and two books that have been cited over 66,000 times.
He has also contributed to the establishment of a series of influential European Networks of Excellence. His scientific coordination of these projects has influenced an entire generation of researchers and has fostered the widespread adoption of machine learning in both science and industry that we are currently witnessing.
He was appointed UNESCO Chair in Artificial Intelligence in November 2018 and is the lead trustee of the UK charitable foundation, Knowledge 4 All Foundation, which promotes open education and helps establish a network of artificial intelligence researchers and practitioners in sub-Saharan Africa.
A former student of the École normale supérieure, Henri Verdier was the founder and CEO of Odile Jacob Multimédia. He is co-founder, with Jean-Michel Lasry, Pierre-Louis Lions and Olivier Guéant, of MFG-Labs, which he left in 2012 and which was acquired by Havas Media in May 2013.
A founding member of the Cap Digital competitiveness cluster, he served as vice-president from 2006 to 2008, before becoming chairman of the board from 2008 to January 2013.
In January 2013, he became the head of Etalab, the mission in charge of opening up public data under the authority of the Prime Minister. Under his direction, Etalab is developing a new version, inaugurated on December 18, 2013, of the French open data portal "data.gouv.fr", which hosts a large amount of public data and is the first open data portal in the world to welcome data and reuses from citizens.
Henri Verdier is also a member of the scientific council of the Institut Mines-Télécom, as well as the ARCEP foresight committee and the CNIL foresight committee.
On September 19, 2014, he was appointed General Data Administrator by the French government. One year later, on September 23, 2015, Henri Verdier was appointed, by the Council of Ministers, as Inter-ministerial Director of Digital and State Information and Communication Systems (DINSIC).
Stefan Wrobel is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bonn and Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS.
He studied Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in Bonn and Atlanta, Georgia/USA (M.S.,Georgia Institute of Technology) and received his PhD at the University of Dortmund. After several years of study at the University of Dortmund, he obtained his Ph.
After a few years of research and as co-founder of a start-up, he was appointed professor at the University of Magdeburg, before taking up his current position. Furthermore, he is one of the directors of the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (b-it).
Professor Wrobel's work focuses on intelligent systems and their productive use in business applications, with particular emphasis on innovations in statistical learning, artificial intelligence, and the foundations of big data, data ecosystems, and enterprise structures. He has authored a large number of publications on data mining and statistical learning and serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals in his field. He is co-chair of ML2R, one of the German journals of excellence in statistical learning, and a Fraunhofer Alliance lecturer on statistical learning and AI.