Aad van Moorsel is a Chair in Decentralised Systems and Head of the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham as well as interim Director of Birmingham’s Institute of Interdisciplinary Data Science and AI. He has been active in cloud computing and its predecessors for three decades, in industry, academia, and as an entrepreneur. He received his PhD in computer science from Universiteit Twente and has a Master’s in mathematics from Universiteit Leiden, both in The Netherlands. After finishing his PhD he was a postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA, and worked in industry, first as a researcher at Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill and then as a research manager at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, both in the United States. At HP Labs, his research and innovation group worked on various aspects of utility computing (now called cloud computing), from energy management to virtualisation middleware and business-level Service Level Agreement management. He continued and broadened this line of research, always considering quantitative methods, authoring over 200 peer-reviewed research papers and resulting in three US patents. He co-founded the user-managed access software company CloudIdentity Ltd. in 2011, since successfully merged into industrial partners. His current research group at the University of Birmingham conducts research in the security, privacy and trust of distributed information systems, with applications in payment, trustworthy AI, federated learning, blockchain and smart systems.

Manish Parashar is Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute, Chair in Computational Science and Engineering, and Presidential Professor, Kalhert School of Computing at the University of Utah. He recently completed an IPA appointment at the National Science Foundation as Office Director of the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure where he oversaw investments in national cyberinfrastructure. He also served as co-chair of the National Science and Technology Council’s Subcommittee on the Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem and the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force. Manish’s expertise is in high performance parallel and distributed computing and cyberinfrastructure, and he has made pioneering contributions towards enabling new insights through large-scale computations and data in a range of science and engineering domains. Manish has received a number of awards for his research and leadership, including most recently the 2023 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award and the 2024 CRA Distinguished Service Award. Manish is the founding chair of the IEEE Technical Consortium on High Performance Computing (TCHPC), and is Fellow of AAAS, ACM, and IEEE/IEEE Computer Society. For more information, please visit http://manishparashar.org

Mérouane Debbah is a researcher, educator and technology entrepreneur. Over his career, he has founded several public and industrial research centers, start-ups and is now Professor at Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi and founding Director of the KU 6G Research Center. He is also the Chief Scientific AI Advisor at the Technology Innovation Institute. He is a frequent keynote speaker at international events in the field of telecommunication and AI. His research has been lying at the interface of fundamental mathematics, algorithms, statistics, information and communication sciences with a special focus on random matrix theory and learning algorithms. In the Communication field, he has been at the heart of the development of small cells (4G), Massive MIMO (5G) and Large Intelligent Surfaces (6G) technologies. In the AI field, he is known for his work on Large Language Models, distributed AI systems for networks and semantic communications. He received multiple prestigious distinctions, prizes and best paper awards (more than 40 IEEE best paper awards) for his contributions to both fields and according to research.com is ranked as the best scientist in France in the field of Electronics and Electrical Engineering. He is an IEEE Fellow, a WWRF Fellow, a Eurasip Fellow, an AAIA Fellow, an Institut Louis Bachelier Fellow and a Membre émérite SEE. His recent work led to the development of NOOR (upon it release, largest language model in Arabic) released in 2022, Falcon LLM (upon its release, top ranked open source large language model) released in 2023 and the Falcon Foundation in 2024. The Falcon Model Series and The Falcon Foundation have positioned the UAE as a global leader in the generative AI field. He is a member of the Marconi Prize Selection Advisory Committee.

Georgios Theodoropoulos is a Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen, China’s Silicon Valley. He moved to Shenzhen from Durham University in the UK where he was Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Research Computing and held a Chair in the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences. Prior to that he was a Senior Research Scientist with IBM Research where he played a strategic role in the establishment of IBM’s Exascale Systems research roadmap for Europe at the company’s Smart City Technology Centre in Ireland. He has held an honorary Chair the Trinity College Dublin and senior appointments at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and the University of Birmingham, UK where he was Director of one of the UK’s e-Science Centres of Excellence. His research work spans more than 30 years with contributions in Info-Symbiotic Systems, Distributed Simulation and Distributed Virtual Environments, Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems, Complex and Multi-agent systems and workload optimised systems for data-driven analytics. He has been an apostle of interdisciplinary research and over the years he has spearheaded numerous interdisciplinary initiatives and projects aimed at tackling major global societal problems aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). He is an Ordinary Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, Board Member and the Chief Operating Officer of the Info-Symbiotics Systems Society, an Accredited Board Director by the Singapore Institute of Directors, a Chartered Engineer, and holds a PhD from the University of Manchester, UK.

Mattie Yeta is a Chief Sustainability Officer for CGI in the UK. She is responsible for working with members across the organization to achieve common sustainability goals. Mattie provides key support to CGI’s external facing engagements in this area, continuing to develop a strong relationship with the United Nations and COP summits. Mattie has substantial experience in sustainable development at strategic and delivery levels across the public and private sectors. She has led substantive change in the sustainable development arena through various boards she sits on. She has obtained significant experience in stakeholder engagement throughout her career, including at senior executive levels, strategy development, influencing and drafting industry policy, project and program management, people management, and development experience. Mattie led the creation of the e-Sustainability Alliance, a network of 300 private sector organizations she chaired, working in partnership with the United Nations and other stakeholders. She also led the creation of the Cabinet Office One Government Cloud Strategy Sustainability Workstream, the UK Government’s Sustainable Technology Report 2017, and the Sustainability Industry Guide to help businesses achieve sustainable outcomes. Mattie has extensive experience of working with the United Nations (UNFCCC, UNEP, UNGC, UNICEF, UNDP). She received the “Industry Sustainability Leader of the year” award, “digital leader impact award” the Civil Service award as “highly commended”, Defra’s Corporate Services award for “leading through change,” and was a nominee for “the most influential women in UK tech.” She has received Her Majesty’s Royal Honour for her contribution to sustainability in the UK and globally and was recently announced in the top 100 sustainability power leaders. The former Head of Sustainability for Defra IT/UK Government, and a PhD researcher specializing in corporate sustainability, green economics, and national recovery, she is also a tutor on the University of Oxford Climate Change Programme.