Speakers

• Paolo Budroni, TU Vienna

  "Protecting, Accessing and Sharing Information and Data. Why It Is Important to Reflect on the Meaning and Significance of Beauty. A Short Speech."

  Since 2019, Dr. Paolo Budroni has been a senior researcher at TU Wien and Head of the EOSC and International Liaison Office based at TU Wien Library. Before that, he worked at the University of Vienna from 1991 to 2019. (Dr. Budroni is currently on a long-term sabbatical from Uni-Vienna.)

  He holds a PhD in philosophy, art history, and Romance philology (University of Vienna, 1986). In 1988, he completed his education degree in foreign trade at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU). He also holds a postgraduate degree in European integration for public administration, received at the Austrian Federal European Academy in 1996. From 2002 to 2004, he was Professor for Marketing at the graduate level at the Università degli Studi di Perugia (Scienze della Comunicazione). Presently, he teaches at the master’s course “Intelligenza articiale, Mente, Impresa” at the University of Brescia, Italy. He is Chair of the European e-Infrastructure Reflection Group and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of CLARIN.

• Andrea Rapp, TU Darmstadt

  "Cultural Heritage and the Role of Digital Humanities Research"

  Andrea Rapp studied German language and literature, art history, and ethnology at the University of Trier, where she received her doctorate in 1996. She then worked in several research compounds, as managing director of the Trier Center for Digital Humanities, and as head of the digitization centre at the Göttingen State and University Library. Since 2010, she has been Professor of German Studies – Computational Philology and Medieval Studies at TU Darmstadt, where she was Vice President for Scientific Infrastructure from 2017 until 2019. She is a member of the Academies of Science and Literature - Mainz. In her research on German language, literature, and culture of the Middle Ages, digital transformation is part of the disciplinary identity so that traditional philological and digital procedures are integrated and combined. This includes not only the development of digital analysis technologies and the creation of digital editions and dictionaries, but also the sustainable development of research infrastructures as well as the reflection of digitality in philological research and in the field of cultural heritage. She is co-founder of TextGrid and DARIAH-DE as well as Scientific Vice-Speaker of the NFDI-consortium Text+.

• Krishna Gummadi, MPI for Software Systems

  "On Privacy and Fairness Concerns with Microtargeted Online Advertisements: or How Russia- Linked Ad Campaigns Tried to Influence 2016 US Presidential Elections on Facebook"

  Krishna Gummadi is a scientific director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI- SWS) in Germany. He also holds a professorship at the University of Saarland. He received his PhD (2005) and Bachelor of Technology (2000) degrees in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington and the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, respectively.

  Krishna’s current research focus is on understanding and building fair, accountable, and transparent social computing systems. His work on fair machine learning, online social networks and media, Internet access networks, and peer-to-peer systems has been widely cited and his papers have received numerous awards, including Test of Time Awards at ACM SIGCOMM and AAAI ICWSM. He received an ERC Advanced grant in 2017 to investigate his project Foundations for Fair Social Computing.

• Viola Priesemann, MPI for Dynamics and Self-Organization

  "Energy Efficiency and Neural Computing"

  Viola Priesemann is a physicist and neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen. After research projects at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris (France) and Caltech (USA), she obtained her PhD at the MPI for Brain Research and the University of Frankfurt. As postdoc and fellow at the Bernstein Center Göttingen, she applied for an independent Max Planck Research Group, which started in 2017 at the MPI in Göttingen. She studies self-organization and learning in living and artificial networks, illuminating the basic mechanisms that shape collective information processing. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, she has investigated the spread of SARS-CoV-2, quantified the effectiveness of interventions, and derived containment strategies. Viola Priesemann has coordinated several position and overview papers on the COVID-19 pandemic and is a member of the advisory board of the German government. Her work has been recognized by several awards, including the Communitas Award of the Max Planck Society, the “Niedersächsische Wissenschaftspreis”, and the Dannie Heineman Prize. She is a member of the Cluster of Excellence Multiscale Bioimaging, the Campus Institute for Data Science, the Max Planck - University of Toronto Centre for Neural Science and Technology, and “Die Junge Akademie”.

• Erwin Laure, MPCDF

  "More Computation Power at Reduced Energy Consumption? Approaches and Challenges"

  Prof. Erwin Laure is the Director of the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility (MPCDF) of the MPG in Garching, Germany and Honorary Professor at the Technical University of Munich. Before joining the MPG, he was Professor for High Performance Computing and Director of the PDC Center for High Performance Computing at KTH Stockholm. He holds a PhD from the University of Vienna and has more than twenty five years’ experience in high performance computing. Prof. Laure is also a member of EuroHPC - Infrastructure Advisory Group and is involved in major European Exascale projects (e.g., the BioExcel Centre of Excellence for Biomolecular Simulations). His research interests include programming environments, languages, compilers, and runtime systems for parallel and distributed computing, with a focus on exascale computing.

• Lynn Kaack, Hertie School. The University of Governance in Berlin

  "AI and Climate Change"

  Lynn Kaack is Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy at the Hertie School. Her work focuses on methods from statistics and machine learning to inform climate mitigation policy across the energy sector and on climate-related AI policy. She is also a co-founder and chair of the organization Climate Change AI. Previously, she was Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer in the Energy Politics Group at ETH Zürich.

  Website: https://www.hertie-school.org/en/research/faculty-and- researchers/profile/person/kaack

• Dirk Helbing, ETH Zurich

  "Digitization, Sustainability and Planetary Health: How to Avoid a Dystopian Future"

  Dirk Helbing is Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zurich and affiliate of its computer science department. Furthermore, he is a member of the external faculty of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. In January 2014, Prof. Helbing received an honorary PhD from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Shortly after, he also became an affiliate professor at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at TU Delft for some years, where he led the PhD school in its research initiative Engineering Social Technologies for a Responsible Digital Future.

  Dirk Helbing started as a physicist. With his diploma thesis, he initiated the area of pedestrian, crowd, and evacuation modeling and simulation. During his PhD and habilitation in physics, he helped establish the fields of socio-, econo-, and traffic physics. He was also co-founder of the Physics of Socio-Economic Systems Division of the German Physical Society (DPG).

  The work of Prof. Helbing is documented by hundreds of media reports and publications, among them more than 10 papers in Nature, Science, and PNAS. He won various prizes, including the Idee Suisse Award. He co-founded the Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems (CCSS), the Risk Center, the Institute for Science, Technology and Policy (ISTP), and the Decision Science Laboratory (DeSciL). While coordinating the FuturICT initiative, he helped establish both data science and computational social science in Europe, as well as global systems science.

• Felix Creutzig, TU Berlin, Mercator Research Institute

  "Digitalization and the Anthropocene"

  Felix Creutzig is Professor for Sustainability Economics of Human Settlements at the TU Berlin, and group leader at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change. He is a speaker and scientific coordinator of the Einstein Center Climate Change. Previously, he had been visiting fellow at Princeton University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Energy Foundation in Beijing. His groundbreaking research on climate change mitigation on urban scale has been recognized by the Piers Sellers Prize of the University of Leeds in 2017. Felix Creutzig coordinates a chapter on demand, services, and social aspects from the upcoming assessment report on climate solutions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He also leads a cross-cutting IPCC effort introducing digitalization and AI in the context of climate change mitigation. Felix was a fellow at the Studienkolleg zu Berlin and also served as president of Netzwerk Europa, its alumni organization.

• Kate Crawford

  "The Planetary Costs of AI"

  Professor Kate Crawford is a research professor at USC Annenberg, a senior principal researcher at MSR, and the inaugural visiting chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris. Over her twenty-year career, she has researched the social, political, and environmental contexts of artificial intelligence. Her collaborative project Excavating AI won the Ayrton Prize from the British Society for the History of Science in 2019. Crawford's latest monograph, Atlas of AI, has been described as “a fascinating history of data” by The New Yorker, and a “timely and urgent contribution” by Science. It was also named one of the best books in 2021 by New Scientist and the Financial Times.

• Iyad Rahwan, MPI for Human Development

  "The Promise and Challenge of 'Science Fiction Science'"

  Iyad Rahwan is the managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where he founded and directs the Center for Humans & Machines. Until June 2020, he was Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A native of Aleppo, Syria, Rahwan holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

  Website: https://rahwan.me/