CERN Accelerating science

Dr. Eng Lim Goh is senior vice president and chief technology officer for artificial intelligence at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Prior to this, he was CTO for majority of his 27 years at Silicon Graphics, now part of HPE. His research interests include humanity’s differentiation as we progress from analytics to inductive machine learning, deductive reasoning, and specific to general artificial intelligence. He continues his studies in human perception for virtual and augmented reality.

As principal investigator of the experiment aboard the International Space Station to operate autonomous supercomputers on long duration space travel, Dr. Goh was awarded NASA’s Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal. His other work includes co-inventing blockchain-based swarm learning applications, which also landed on the cover of Nature; overseeing deployment of AI to Formula 1 racing; industrial application of technologies behind a champion poker bot; co-designing the systems architecture for simulating a biologically detailed mammalian brain; and predicting predisposition to vaccine side effects by machine learning of gene expression data. He has ten U.S. patents, with three others pending.

A Singapore Visionary Award recipient, Dr. Goh is a Scientific Advisory Board member of the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office. In 2005, InfoWorld named him one of the World's 25 Most Influential CTOs. He was included twice in the HPCwire list of "People to Watch” and received the HPC Community Recognition Award. His work for Stephen Hawking included a symposium invitation to introduce the discoveries of Professor Saul Perlmutter, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

A Shell Cambridge University Scholar, Dr. Goh completed his PhD research and dissertation on parallel architectures and computer graphics, and holds a first-class honors degree in mechanical engineering from Birmingham University in the U.K.

Dr Arianna Traviglia is the Coordinator of the Centre for Cultural Heritage Technology (CCHT), part of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). Dr Traviglia’s work is placed at the intersection of technology and humanities and most of her research focuses on mediating the inclusion of digital practices within the study and management of cultural heritage. Within CCHT, she contributes to develop AI applications for the analysis of cultural landscapes and material culture.

Dr Traviglia is part of the Executive Steering Committee of the International Computer Application and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) association and has chaired the 41st international Computer Applications in Archaeology Conference (CAA2013 Perth, Across space and time). She has been until recently a member of the Management Committee of the COST Action Archaeological practices and knowledge work in the digital environment (Arkwork). She is currently a Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator of several EC funded projects centred around the use of digital technologies for cultural heritage analysis and protection (NETCHER, REPAIR), and coordinator of two projects funded by the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency focused on the use of satellite imagery and AI for detecting buried archaeological sites.

Anja Kaspersen is a Senior Fellow at Carnegie Council of Ethics in International Affairs. She is the former Director of the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs in Geneva and Deputy Secretary General of the Conference on Disarmament. Previously, she held the role as the head of strategic engagement and new technologies at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Prior to joining the ICRC she served as a senior director for geopolitics and international security and a member of the executive committee at the World Economic Forum. Kaspersen has also worked in business and has had a rich diplomatic and academic career. She is a published author and speaker. Kaspersen is a strong believer in multilateralism and in the power of science and technology diplomacy to ensure responsible innovation and applications. She is an alumni International Gender Champion, a member of the IEEE Council on Extended Intelligence and Industry Activity on Life Science Innovation and AI and member of the Council of the International Military Council on Climate and Security.

Sofia is a researcher in the fields of Scientific Computing, Machine Learning and Quantum Computing with applications in High Energy Physics at CERN. PhD in Physics, she has expertise in Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Currently, she focuses on the intersection between AI and Quantum Computing. Since 2020, she is coordinator of the Quantum Computing area within the CERN Quantum Technology Initiative, leading a team dedicated to the investigation of the potential impact of quantum algorithms in High Energy Physics. 

Charlotte Warakaulle has held a variety of posts at the United Nations and was a key focal point for relations between CERN and the UN Office at Geneva. Since 2001 Charlotte Warakaulle has held a variety of posts at the United Nations, from associate speechwriter to chief of the Political Affairs and Partnerships Section at the United Nations Office at Geneva. Most recently she held the position of chief of the United Nations Library in Geneva, where she was responsible for library services, knowledge management, cultural diplomacy and intellectual outreach. Prior to her work with the United Nations, Warakaulle held a Carlsberg Visiting Research Fellowship at Lucy Cavendish College at the University of Cambridge from 1998 to 2001. During her time at the University of Cambridge, she also served as editor-in-chief of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, a peer-reviewed international affairs journal then published by the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge. She gained her M.Phil in international relations at the University of Cambridge (Pembroke College) and also holds an MA in history (cand.mag.) from the University of Copenhagen, as well as an MA in history (coursework) from the University of Sydney and a BA in history from the University of Copenhagen. Warakaulle speaks English, French, German and Danish.

Jennifer Ngadiuba is a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology developing novel methods in the search for new physics at the LHC. As a member of the CMS collaboration, she has produced several physics results that pushed forward the urgent quest for new physics and coordinated physics analyses groups. Her main interest is now focused on enabling new discoveries at the LHC with modern artificial intelligence methods, applied at all stages of the data processing: from their real-time analysis on experimental hardware to the offline reconstruction.

Dr. Michael Kagan is a Panofsky Fellow at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University. His work on the ATLAS experiment focuses on understanding the rare interactions of the Higgs boson and how it gives mass to other particles. Dr. Kagan and his team work at the interface of physics and machine learning to develop new methods to better understand and extract insights from the large and complex data generated by the LHC. Dr. Kagan holds a Ph. D. in Particle Physics from Harvard University.

Bruno is the Global Curator of TED, the organization behind the TED conferences and the popular online TEDTalks, and the co-organizer and Lead Curator of TED's climate initiative, Countdown.

Bruno is also the former Chairman of the Geneva International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH), which takes place every year in March (see teaser) and a member of the Board of Directors of Tinext Group, a Swiss software firm he co-founded. In 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2015, the magazine Wired UK selected him as one of the "Wired 100", the 100 most influential Europeans. In January 2016 he received the "SwissAward/Person of the year 2015" in the category Economy.

Y-Lan is Research Scientist Lead for East Coast at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) Labs and a director of the Natural Intelligence European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) program, with Matthias Bethge and Peter Dayan. 

She has been serving as online experience chair / virtual chair for NeurIPS and ICML to try and help the research community better connect remotely.

She received her PhD from New York University and École Normale Supérieure (within the INRIA Willow project team), working in machine learning and computer vision, under the guidance of Yann LeCun and Jean Ponce. She went on to do postdoctoral research in experimental psychology and neuroscience, investigating self-control and meta decision making, as a Junior Fellow of the Simons Society of Fellows.

Her research strives to foster stronger people orientation in AI by integrating insights from psychology. She focuses on understanding dialogue, and making conversational agents more helpful and engaging to people.

Hao Li is CEO and Co-Founder of Pinscreen, a startup that builds cutting edge AI-driven virtual avatar technologies. He is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Computer Vision Group at UC Berkeley. Before that, he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, as well as the director of the Vision and Graphics Lab at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. Hao's work in Computer Graphics and Computer Vision focuses on digitizing humans and capturing their performances for immersive communication, telepresence in virtual worlds, and entertainment. His research involves the development of novel deep learning, data-driven, and geometry processing algorithms. He is known for his seminal work in avatar creation, facial animation, hair digitization, dynamic shape processing, as well as his recent efforts in preventing the spread of malicious deep fakes. He was previously a visiting professor at Weta Digital, a research lead at Industrial Light & Magic / Lucasfilm, and a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia and Princeton Universities. He was named top 35 innovator under 35 by MIT Technology Review in 2013 and was also awarded the Google Faculty Award, the Okawa Foundation Research Grant, as well as the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair. He won the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award in 2018 and was named named to the DARPA ISAT Study Group in 2019. In 2020, he won the ACM SIGGRAPH Real-Time Live! “Best in Show” award. Hao obtained his PhD at ETH Zurich and his MSc at the University of Karlsruhe (TH).