Participants
All Participants
Sparks! participants are invited from a wide range of backgrounds to collaborate on themes that affect not only CERN and the world of STEM in general, but also their applications and impact on society at large. Particular attention is brought to curating a diverse set of participants who we believe will benefit most from the serendipitous design of the Sparks! products.
Participants for the 3rd edition Future Quantum will be announced later in 2023.
Below, you can find a compiled list of our past Sparks! Podcast guests, speakers at the Talks! and participants of the Forum.
Sparks! contributors (all editions)
Sparks! Forum
Sparks! Second Edition
The theme for the second edition of the Sparks! Forum was Future Technology for Health. CERN has actively pursued medical applications of its technologies since as far back as the 1970s. The tools of experimental particle physics are ubiquitous in hospitals and biomedical research. However, Sparks! goes beyond what we do here at CERN. Spanning the domains of prevention, diagnosis and treatment, the topics for this edition of Sparks! sparked new questions about the links between medical technologies and fundamental science, globalisation, accessibility, trust, ethics and more. We called on doctors, tech developers, economists, policy makers, ethicists, patient associations, medical researchers, humanitarian organisations, medical foundations, UN agencies, data specialists, climate modellers, AI developers and journalists to discuss the topics listed below – and any others that arose in the process!
Sparks! Serendipity Forum | 18 November 2022 | CERN
The Forum part of Sparks! happened behind closed doors at CERN and was an opportunity for up to 50 experts from different fields to come together to discuss the year’s theme. Different sessions were organised and designed in such a way to leave space for serendipity to happen.
While the forum was not open to the public, the various discussions and sessions were consigned by a team of CERN scribes and will result in at least one published paper. You will also find insights into the Forum discussions on social media .
Sparks! Forum academic partner
This year, Sparks! is collaborating with the innovative Frontiers for Young Minds journal for the academic output of the forum. Find out more about the project here and under our "Partners" tab - and look out for the article to come later on!
2nd edition participants
Sparks! Launch
The Sparks! Forum was originally planned to take place in 2020, however due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Sparks! Launch took place virtually on 26 November 2020.
Professors Anima Anandkumar, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Francesca Rossi and Stuart Russell, talked about the current status of the field of AI research today, setting the scene for the discussion about the future of the field during the event in 2021. Host Bruno Giussani, Global Curator of TED, interviewed CERN AI experts Jennifer Ngadiuba, Sofia Vallecorsa and Micheal Kagan on how CERN and other big science can benefit from AI and the topics we then adressed during the first edition in 2021.
You can watch the launch here to give you an insight into the world of future intelligence, and to find out more about what attending a Sparks! Public Event might be like.