Effy Vayena
Effy Vayena is Associate Vice President for Digital Transformation and Governance at ETH Zurich and professor of Bioethics. Her work focuses on how emerging technologies in biomedicine and data analytics including AI affect our society and what ethical safeguards we should put in place to avoid negative consequences. To address these questions, she uses different research methodologies. She is the founder and director of the Health Ethics and Policy Lab, an interdisciplinary research lab including philosophers, social scientists, lawyers, biologists and engineers.
Vayena has been appointed Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, where she was previously a Fellow. She has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and co-edited several books. Vayena is also an elected member of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences. She currently co-chairs the WHO’s expert advisory group on Artificial Intelligence health ethics and governance. Vayena frequently advises governments and public policy organizations on matters of digitization and ethics.
Mariana Bustamante
Mariana started her career in Argentina, where she earned her degree in biochemistry from the University of Buenos Aires. She furthered her education at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, from which she obtained both her master's degree and PhD in molecular biology with a focus on developmental biology. During this time, she engaged extensively in omics research, which sparked her interest in bioinformatics, data analysis and machine learning. Having transferred to data science, she worked for Sky, where she honed her analytical and business skills. Mariana then joined Roche as a data scientist, concentrating on omics, biomarkers and real-world data analysis within clinical and preclinical programmes. Currently, she serves as the Research Data Insights Value Stream Lead in Pharma Research and Early Development (pRED) Data & Analytics, leading a matrix team of scientists who work on various aspects of drug development, including bioinformatics, imaging, AI/ML, scientific application development and MLOps.
Jeannine Pilloud
35 year of corporate experience in companies like IBM, Deutsche Telekom, SBB , Ascom and others. C-Level experience up until CEO of a stock listed company. Today working for ETH and holding several board mandates in and outside of Switzerland.
Georg M. V. Olowson
Georg Olowson is IBM´s AI Governance Leader for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Georg has specialized in AI for 6 years and is building AI partnerships with leading companies in the market.
Martin Vetterli
Researcher, teacher and expert of the Swiss education and research landscape, Martin Vetterli was appointed president of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2017. He was formerly the president of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Martin Vetterli has made numerous research contributions in digital signal processing and is best known for his work on wavelets. His research has earned him numerous national and international awards, including the National Latsis Prize in 1996.
Mennatallah El-Assady
Mennatallah El-Assady is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, ETH Zürich. She heads the Interactive Visualization and Intelligence Augmentation (IVIA) lab. Prior to that, she was a research fellow at the ETH AI Center; and before that, she was a research associate in the group for Data Analysis and Visualization at the University of Konstanz (Germany) and in the Visualization for Information Analysis lab at the OntarioTech University (Canada). She works at the intersection of data analysis, visualization, computational linguistics, and explainable artificial intelligence. Her main research interest is studying interactive human-AI collaboration interfaces for effective problem-solving and decision-making. In particular, she is interested in empowering humans by teaming them up with AI agents in co-adaptive processes. She has gained experience working in close collaboration with political science and linguistic scholars over several years, which led to the development of the LingVis.io platform. El-Assady has co-founded and co-organized several workshop series, notably Vis4DH and VISxAI.
Mark Fuge
Professor Mark Fuge is the Chair of Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design in the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich. His staff and students study fundamental scientific and mathematical questions behind how humans and computers can work together to design better complex engineered systems, from the molecular scale to systems as large as aircraft and ships, using tools from computer science and applied mathematics.
Robert Giezendanner-Thoben
Robert Giezendanner-Thoben holds a diploma in mechanical engineering from EPFL and a PhD from the University of Stuttgart. He began working in laser diagnostics at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) in 1999. In 2005, he moved to Robert Bosch Corporate Research GmbH, where he held various positions until 2018. In parallel, he lectured in fluid dynamics at the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW). In 2018, he joined the École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (EPFL) and became its Director of Industry Affairs in 2021. His role involves fostering partnerships between academia and industry and supporting EPFL's innovation ecosystem. He also serves on several boards.
Maria Brbic
Maria Brbic is Assistant Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Life Sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (EPFL). She develops new machine-learning methods and applies these to advance biology and biomedicine. Her methods have been used by global cell atlas consortia such as the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) and the Fly Cell Atlas consortium in their efforts to create reference maps of all cell types, which have the potential to transform biomedicine. Prior to joining the EPFL faculty in 2022, Maria was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science and a member of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub at Stanford. Maria received her PhD from the University of Zagreb in 2019, while also researching at Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar and at the University of Tokyo. Among other awards and recognitions, she was named a rising star in EECS by MIT in 2021 and she received the Early Career Bioinformatics Award from SIB in 2023.
Bernhard Kratzwald
Bernhard Kratzwald is the Co-Founder and CTO of EthonAI. This fast-growing tech company is developing a powerful software suite, the Manufacturing Analytics System, designed to achieve operational excellence at scale. EthonAI's products are trusted by Fortune 500 companies and industry leaders across Europe and the US. Bernhard holds a PhD from ETH Zurich, where he conducted research on human-AI interaction, continuous learning and domain adaptation using large language models (LLMs). His award-winning work has been published in leading scientific outlets in the fields of manufacturing and computer science.