Aljoscha Burchardt

Aziz Al-Azmeh

Carsten Baldauf

Elif Akata

Johannes Schubert

full professor

Zeynep Akata

Federico Adolfi

Anna Ahlers

Baruch Barzel

Françoise Baylis

Sarah J. Becker

Irad Ben-Gal

Isaac Ben-Israel

Omer Benjakob

Christine Blaettler

Sebastian Bonhoeffer

Alejandro Tlaie Boria

Maarten Boudry

Jens Brandenburg

Eyal Brook

Aron Buchman

Moran Cerf

Gal Chechik

Chiara Cirelli

Jamie Cohen-Cole

Lorraine Daston

Ute Deichmann

Christian Doeller

Wenchao Dong

Gili Drob-Heistein

Amos Elkana

Niva Elkin-Koren

Hila Engelhard

Michael Esfeld

Ariel Ezrahi

Christina Ezrahi

Rivka Feldhay

Doron Feldman

Giovanni Frazzetto

Ofer Gal

Marina Garcés

Rubén García-Santos

Ehud Gazit

Gerd Gigerenzer

Gabriele Gramelsberger

Krishna P. Gummadi

Daphna Hacker

Nora Hageneier

Oren Harman

Henrike Hartmann

Dirk Hartung

Hans-Christian von Herrmann

Guy Hoffman

Jeanette Hofmann

Eran Horowitz

Roni Horowitz

Anthony A. Hyman

Eva Jablonka

Zhijing Jin

Daphna Joel

Andreas Kaminski

Denisa Reshef Kera

Mika Kerttunen

Daria Kim

Daniel Moshe Knebel

Sebastian Koth

Katja Krause

Mordechai Kremnitzer

Yuval Kremnitzer

Wilhelm Krull

Simone Kühn

Ehud Lamm

Rainer Lange

Shai Lavi

Michael Levitt

Lucas Mahler

Marko Weigert

Christoph Markschies

Sandra Matz-Cerf

Johannes Meier

Lucia Melloni

Thomas Metzinger

Volker Meyer-Guckel

Julia Mossbridge

Glenn Most

Adolf Muschg

Joachim Nettelbeck

Ariel Novoplansky

Jakob Ohme

François Pachet

Maria Paradiso

Ohad Parnes

Matteo Pasquinelli

Shahaf Peleg

Dan Pelleg

Corine Pelluchon

Alexander Polzin

Andreas Rahmatian

Iyad Rahwan

Aviad Raz

Jürgen Renn

Wolfgang Rohe

Matthias Röder

Jan Georg Schneider

Christian Schubert

Eric Schulz

Tomer Shadmy

Haya Shulman

Carl von Siemens

Judith Simon

Tomer Simon

Tania Singer

Tamara Stefanovich

Rudolf Stichweh

Martin Stratmann

Tom Sühr

Lior Tabansky

Eran Toch

Giulio Tononi

Éliane Ubalijoro

Dan Weinstein

Anina Woischnig

Cornelia Woll

Jaesurk Yang

Erdost Yildiz

Yossi Yovel

Torsten Zesch

Frederike Zufall

Aljoscha Burchardt

principal researcher, research fellow, and deputy site director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Berlin

Aljoscha Burchardt is principal researcher, research fellow, and deputy site director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Berlin. He is an expert in language technology and artificial intelligence. Aljoscha Burchardt is Senior Research Fellow of the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society and deputy chair of the Berlin Scientific Society (Berliner Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft). He was also a member of the German Federal Parliament’s Study Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

Aziz Al-Azmeh

Central European University, Austria

Aziz Al-Azmeh is emeritus professor of history at the Central European University, Vienna, with a special interest in religion. He has been a long-term fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and was twice Directeur de recherches associé at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris. He was a fellow at the institutes for advanced study in Uppsala, Budapest, and Marseille, a fellow of the Nuffield Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, and a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Center for Scholars in Bellagio. Among his books in English are Secularism in the Arab World (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Islams and Modernities (Verso, 2009), and Muslim Kingship (I.B. Tauris, 1996). He is presently writing a history of unbelief.

Carsten Baldauf

Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society (MPG), Berlin

Carsten Baldauf is Representative of the Board of Directors and Group Leader at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society (MPG), Berlin, with a special interest in research data in physical sciences, energy and fitness landscapes, and biomolecules. After studying biochemistry at universities in Bochum and Leipzig, he spent time as a postdoc at the TU Dresden’s biotechnology center BIOTEC and at the Chinese Academy of Sciences/MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai. He joined the Fritz Haber Institute in 2010.

Elif Akata

University of Tübingen

Elif Akata is a PhD candidate at the University of Tübingen and the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems. She is based at the Tübingen AI Center as part of the research groups “Scalable Trustworthy AI” and “Computational Neuroscience and Machine Learning.” She works towards analyzing the mechanism behind AI’s recognition and decisions and making these understandable to humans, combining methods from cognitive science and machine learning. She previously studied computer science in Saarbrücken and Tübingen and worked at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Saarbrücken, and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, as a student researcher.

Johannes Schubert

Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI, Munich

Johannes A. Schubert is a researcher at the Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI, Munich, where he investigates the learning dynamics of artificial agents and humans using tasks adapted from cognitive psychology. In the future, Johannes aims to explore how machine learning and mindfulness can be used to improve collective decision-making and resilience to navigate the transformations of the coming decades. He studied computer science and economics at the University of Jena, cognitive science at the University of Tübingen, and design thinking at the Hasso Plattner Institute, and was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (Jena) and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (Tübingen). Johannes A. Schubert is a co-founder of Economists for Future and a member of the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium.

Zeynep Akata

full professor , full professor of computer science in the Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning at the University of Tübingen

Zeynep Akata is full professor of computer science in the Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning at the University of Tübingen. After completing her PhD at the INRIA Rhône Alpes in 2014, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (2014–17) and University of California Berkeley (2016–17) and as an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam (2017–19). She received a Lise Meitner Award for Excellent Women in Computer Science from the Max Planck Society in 2014, a young scientist’s honor from the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring foundation in 2019, an ERC Starting Grant from the European Commission in 2019, the DAGM German Pattern Recognition Award in 2021, and the ECVA Young Researcher Award in 2022. Her research interests include multimodal learning and explainable AI.

Federico Adolfi

University of Bristol, UK & Ernst-Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience, Max-Planck Society, Frankfurt, Germany

Federico Adolfi is a research scientist at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience, Max Planck Society, Frankfurt. He earned his PhD in computational cognitive science at the University of Bristol, UK, where he worked at the intersection of theoretical computer science, psychology, neuroscience, and Artificial Intelligence. Among other things, his work explores the scope and limits of AI interpretability from a computational meta-theory perspective, in light of expectations of what it might afford for science, engineering, and society.

Anna Ahlers

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany

Anna L. Ahlers is the founder and head of the Lise Meitner Research Group at the MPIWG which explores the many facets of China’s rapid and extensive ascent in the global system of science. In her current research projects, she analyzes authoritarianism and democracy as environmental factors for science and academia, the evolution of science policy in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and science-policy interactions in China’s (local) governance. She does so with a general interest in the global structures of science and their local varieties in the twenty-first century.

Baruch Barzel

Bar- Ilan University, Israel

Baruch Barzel is the director of the Complex Network Dynamics lab at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and the cofounder of Opmed.ai. His research focuses on statistical-physics, complexity, and network science, with applications ranging from disease spreading, to brain, biological networks and infrastructure resilience. Barzel is also an active public lecturer on science and humanities and presents a regular segment on liberal Jewish thought on Israel National Radio. Barzel completed his Ph.D. in physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel as a Hoffman Fellow. He then pursued his postdoctoral training at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University and at the Channing Division of Network Medicine, Harvard Medical School. Prof. Barzel is the recipient of the Racah Prize (2007), the Rector Prize for Scientific Innovation (2018) and the Krill Prize on behalf of the Wolf Foundation (2019).

Françoise Baylis

Dalhousie University, Canada

Françoise Baylis, Distinguished Research Professor at Dalhousie University and member of the Governing Board of the International Science Council, is a philosopher whose innovative work in bioethics, at the intersection of policy and practice, has stretched the boundaries of the field. Her work challenges us to think broadly and deeply about the direction of health, science, and biotechnology. It aims to move the limits of mainstream bioethics and develop more effective ways to understand and tackle public policy. Baylis is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and the International Science Council. She is a member of the Order of Canada and the author of Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing (Harvard University Press, 2019). In 2022, she was awarded the Killam Prize in the Humanities .

Sarah J. Becker

Deloitte Consulting GmbH Düsseldorf, Germany

Sarah J. Becker is a renowned expert on the intersection of emerging technology, digital ethics, and governance, with experience in digital transformation, including as the inaugural member of the Digital Ethics Advisory Panel of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, and co-lead of the working group on digital ethics of Initiative D21, Germany’s largest non-profit network for the digital society. As a Partner and Lead for Digital Ethics at Deloitte, she develops strategies and programs to operationalize digital ethics and AI governance. Dr. Becker also teaches at Witten/Herdecke University. Recent publications include “The Principle-at-Risk Analysis (PaRA): Operationalising Digital Ethics” (Minds and Machines, 2023) and “A Code of Digital Ethics: Laying the Foundation for Digital Ethics in a Science and Technology Company” (AI & Society, 2023).

Irad Ben-Gal

Head, Laboratory of AI Business and Data Analytics (LAMBDA), Tel Aviv University, Israel

**Prof. Irad Ben-Gal (**PhD) iis professor and head of the Laboratory of AI Business and Data Analytics (LAMBDA), Tel Aviv University; visiting professor at Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University; and chairman of CB4 Analytics, a startup backed by Sequoia Capital providing AI solutions to retail organizations. Prof. Ben-Gal has published numerous books, scientific papers, and patents and received many awards for his work. He currently co-heads the Tel Aviv University/Stanford “Digital Living 2030” research initiative. A world-renowned expert in data science, AI, and machine , Prof. Ben-Gal has more than 25 years of experience in the field, including close R&D collaborations with companies including Oracle, Intel, GM, AT&T and more. He is a board member in several companies that focus on novel AI solutions.

Isaac Ben-Israel

Tel Aviv University, Israel

Isaac Ben-Israel graduated from Tel Aviv University with degrees in mathematics, physics, and philosophy, earning his PhD in 1988. A retired major-general in the Israel Air Force, Prof. Ben-Israel has served as director of defense R&D directorate of the Ministry of Defense. He twice received the Israel Defense Award, and was a member of Knesset in 2007–9. He is currently head of the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center and the Yuval Ne'eman Workshop for Science, Technology, and Security at Tel Aviv University, as well as holding key advisory roles in the field of cyber security and secured Artificial Intelligence. He has written widely on the philosophy of military intelligence, cyber security, and the interface between science, technology, and security, most recently a book on a journey in science and philosophy “from Kant to the quant.”

Omer Benjakob

Haaretz, Israel

Omer Benjakob, an investigative journalist and the cyber and disinformation reporter at Haaretz, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, has a special interest in the intersection of technology, national security and politics. He is an independent podcaster and public speaker about the history and politics of technology. He has participated in international investigations including Project Pegasus and Team Jorge, a groundbreaking undercover investigation into the private disinformation market. His investigation into the sale of spyware to a militia in Sudan was shortlisted for the EU’s European Press Prize for investigative journalism (2023). Omer Benjakob’s scholarship has been published in Wired UK and the Columbia Journalism Review, among other venues. He teaches in a local college in Israel and is an associate research fellow at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (LPI), Paris.

Christine Blaettler

Philosophischen Seminar der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel

Christine Blaettler has been professor of the philosophy of science at Kiel University, Germany, since 2011. After studying philosophy and Slavic languages and literatures in Switzerland and Eastern Europe, she was a research fellow in Berlin (ZfL), Vienna (IWM), Weimar (IKKM), and Stanford, and a visiting professor at the University of Vienna. She teaches and conducts research in the history of philosophy, history and philosophy of science, and science and technology studies. Her current research interests include theory and technology, paradigms and models, and discovery and justification. Among her recent publications are “Fear and Freedom in Technology” in Anxiety Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), Theoretische Neugierde: Horizonte Hans Blumenbergs (frommann-holzboog, 2023), and Benjamins Phantasmagorie: Wahrnehmung am Leitfaden der Technik (Dejavu Theorie, 2021).

Sebastian Bonhoeffer

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland

Sebastian Bonhoeffer is full professor of theoretical biology at the department of environmental systems science, ETH Zurich, becoming director of the Collegium Helveticum in 2021. He studied music in Basel and physics in Munich and Vienna, completing his doctorate at the University of Oxford. After postdoctoral stays at Oxford and Rockefeller University, he became junior group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel and held a research professorship at the Swiss National Science Foundation, ETH Zurich. His research focuses on the evolution and population biology of bacteria and viruses, and also on the development and analysis of mathematical or computer-oriented models that describe the dynamics of infectious diseases. In 2014, Prof. Bonhoeffer was elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Association. In 2019, he became an International Honorary Member of the American Academy for Arts and Science.

Alejandro Tlaie Boria

Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI) for Neuroscience, Frankfurt a/M, Germany

Alejandro Tlaie Boria is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience, with a special interest in behavioural neuroscience and in the intersection of ethics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). He has recently published a pre-print (Exploring and steering the moral compass of Large Language Models, arXiv 2024) in which he challenges the notion of AI-based language models to be morally aseptic. He has also co-authored an op-ed for the European Public Health Alliance (Large Language Models have a moral compass. What does this entail for public health?), where, in the context of healthcare, he discusses the potential implications for policy-makers and for society as a whole. After earning his PhD in Applied Mathematics at the Technical University of Madrid, Alejandro Tlaie held a postdoctoral fellowship in Information Theory at the Italian Institute of Technology and has been a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University. He has also been an independent contractor for OpenAI.

Maarten Boudry

Gent University, Belgium

Maarten Boudry is a philosopher of science and the first holder of the Etienne Vermeersch Chair of Critical Thinking at Ghent University. He has published over fifty papers in academic journals on pseudoscience, cultural evolution, conspiracy theories, climate policy, science and religion, AI, reasoning fallacies, metaphors in science, and evolutionary epistemology. With Massimo Pigliucci, he edited the University of Chicago Press collections Science Unlimited? On the Challenges of Scientism (2018) and Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem (2013). He has also written six books in Dutch on science and philosophy for the general audience, and essays for Quillette, The Independent, The Stone (New York Times), Areo Magazine, Le Point, Die Welt, and other newspapers.

Jens Brandenburg

State Secretary, Ministry of Education and Research, Germany

Dr Jens Brandenburg has been a Member of the German Bundestag representing the Rhine-Neckar region since 2017. In the Parliamentary Group of the Free Democratic Party, he was spokesperson on study, vocational training and lifelong learning as well as spokesperson on the Study Commission "Vocational Training in the Digital Work Environment" until 2021. In December 2021, he was appointed Parliamentary State Secretary to the Federal Minister of Education and Research. He studied political science and economics at the University of Mannheim and completed his PhD at the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences. Prior to becoming a Member of the German Bundestag, he worked for a global management consulting firm.

Eyal Brook

S. Horowitz & Co. Law Firm, Israel

Eyal Brook is a partner and head of the Artificial Intelligence practice at S. Horowitz & Co., one of Israel’s foremost law firms. A former musician, he has a special interest in copyright law, music, the media and entertainment industry, and AI. Eyal Brook is an adjunct professor, teaching at Reichman University and other academic institutions, and a senior research fellow at the Shamgar Center for Digital Law and Innovation, Tel Aviv University. He has won several prestigious scholarships in Israel and the UK. His PhD is on “Musical Authorship in the Digital and Algorithmic Age.” Brook holds an LLM from Tel Aviv University, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an LLB from the University of Warwick, where he was the Organ Scholar.

Aron Buchman

Rush University, USA

Aron S. Buchman is professor of neurological sciences at the Rush University Medical Center and an investigator in the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, Chicago. He leads efforts to collect and extract novel behavioral and physiologic indices from unobtrusive sensor recordings obtained from ongoing community-based cohort studies of older adults. These data are integrated with other novel antemortem as well as postmortem pathologies and genomic resources collected from decedents to advance mechanistic and drug discovery studies that catalyze innovative therapies to slow or prevent late-life cognitive and physical decline in aging adults.

Moran Cerf

Northwestern University, USA

Moran Cerf is professor of neuroscience and business at Northwestern University and the Sloan Professor of Screenwriting at the American Film Institute. He spent a decade working in cybersecurity as a hacker and consulted with the government and numerous companies across various other industries. His academic research uses neuroscience to understand the underlying mechanisms of our psychology, behavior, decisions, and dreams. He holds a PhD in neuroscience (Caltech), an MA in philosophy of science, and a BSc in physics (Tel Aviv University). Prof. Cerf holds multiple patents and has published in over seventy academic journals. His research is regularly portrayed in popular outlets and has been featured in venues such as the Venice Art Biennial. He has made much of his research accessible via public talks at TED, TEDx, DLD, and more, gathering millions of views and a large following.

Gal Chechik

Senior director of AI research, NVIDIA, Bar-Ilan university, Israel

Gal Chechik is professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University and senior director of AI at NVIDIA in Israel. His research, on learning in brains and machines, focuses on deep machine learning for perception and reasoning. Prof. Chechik earned his PhD from the Hebrew University; his postdoctoral research at Stanford was on computational principles of molecular biology pathways. In 2007, he joined Google research, where he worked on problems including large-scale machine learning for perception and search. In 2009, he founded the learning systems lab at the Gonda brain research center of Bar-Ilan University, where he was appointed full professor in 2019. Among Prof. Chechik’s numerous patents and publications are papers in Nature Biotechnology, Cell, and PNAS. His work won best-paper awards at NeurIPS and ICML, the world-leading conferences in machine learning.

Chiara Cirelli

University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Chiara Cirelli received her medical degree and PhD in neuroscience from the University of Pisa, Italy, where she investigated the role of the noradrenergic system in sleep regulation. She continued this work as a fellow in experimental neuroscience at the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego, California, and since 2001 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she is currently a professor at the Department of Psychiatry. She has published over 150 papers on sleep and is Associate Editor of SLEEP. With Giulio Tononi, she received the 2017 Farrell Prize in Sleep Medicine from Harvard Medical School. In 2018, Dr. Cirelli was awarded the Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award from the Sleep Research Society; in 2022, her outstanding contribution to sleep science was honored with the Pisa Sleep Award.

Jamie Cohen-Cole

Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University

Jamie Cohen-Cole is Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University and has held fellowships at the Fishbein Center for History of Science at the University of Chicago, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, and the Center for Humanities at Wesleyan University. His research examines culturally specific definitions of data ethics, scientific definitions of human and non-human intelligence, and the cultural history of developmental psychology and its interactions with the history and philosophy of science. His first book, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (University of Chicago Press, 2014) examines the conjunction of the computational, cognitive and social sciences, norms of scientific reason, and the cultural politics of post–World War II America. The book was awarded an honorable mention by the Organization of American Historians in 2015.

Lorraine Daston

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany

Lorraine Daston, director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, has published on a wide range of topics in the history of science. Among her recent books are Against Nature (MIT Press, 2019) and Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022). Her current projects include the origins of international governance in science and the history of diversity as an aesthetic, economic, and political value. Prof. Daston is the recipient of numerous awards including the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society and the Dan David Prize in the History of Science.

Ute Deichmann

Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

Ute Deichmann is director of the Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science and an adjunct professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Her current research is on mathematical models and basic principles in biology, mathematical-chemical self-organization versus genomic causality in morphogenesis, and the relationship between epigenetics and genomic causality. Her recent publications include “Contrasting Philosophical and Scientific Views in the Long History of Studying the Generation of Form in Development” (Biosystems, 2024), “Science, Race, and Scientific Truth, Past and Present” (European Review, 2023), “Chromatin Research and Epigenetics: Historical Perspectives, Current Research, Open Questions, and Misconceptions” (Medical Research Archives, 2023), and “The Idea of Constancy in Development and Evolution: Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives” (Biosystems, 2022).

Christian Doeller

cognitive neuroscientist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

Christian Doeller is a cognitive neuroscientist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany. He researches the fundamental question in neuroscience—What are the key coding principles of the human brain underlying higher level cognition?—using two model systems: human memory and the neural population code for space. Christian Doeller’s undergraduate training was in psychology and computer science. After finishing his PhD in Saarbrücken in 2005, he worked as a research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London and was appointed principal investigator at the Donders Institute at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands in 2010. In 2016, he became professor of medicine and neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and director of the Braathen-Kavli Centre at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Trondheim, Norway.

Wenchao Dong

Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Bochum, Germany

Wenchao, Dong is a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) in Bochum, Germany, with a special interest in machine psychology. His research lies at the intersection of human psychological bias and machine bias, aiming at understanding humanlike biased machine behaviors by leveraging data mining methods grounded in well-established social psychology theories. He also investigates how generative AI developments can be correctly adopted for public benefit, as well as their long-term impacts on existing inequality and society. During his MS at KAIST, he investigated the gender inequality conundrum computationally and sought a cultural explanation for gender wage gaps by capturing gender-stereotypical cultural expectations in workplaces.

Gili Drob-Heistein

Executive Director. The Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center (ICRC) & The Yuval Ne'eman Workshop for Science, Technology and Security. Tel Aviv University, Israel

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Amos Elkana

Composer, Germany

Amos Elkana studied jazz guitar at Berklee College of Music and composition at the New England Conservatory of Music. He then went on to Bard College, earning an MFA in electronic music and sound. Elkana has received numerous awards for his compositions, among them the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize for Music Composition, ACUM’s Golden Feather Award, and the Rozenblum Prize for Excellence in the Arts. He composes concert music for orchestras, ensembles, and individual performers as well as for dance, theater, and film. His works have been performed and recorded by ensembles and musicians all over the world. He also released several highly acclaimed albums of his music. Elkana regularly participates in concerts and performances as an electric guitar player and electronic music producer.

Niva Elkin-Koren

Tel Aviv University, Israel

Niva Elkin-Koren is a full professor at Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is the academic director of the Chief Justice Meir Shamgar Center for Digital Law and Innovation, and a member of the Academic Management Committee of TAU Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. Before joining Tel-Aviv University, she served as the Dean of the Law Faculty at the University of Haifa, and was the founding director of the Center for Cyber, Law and Policy (CCLP) and of the Haifa Center for Law & Technology (HCLT). Her research is located at the intersection between law and information technology, focusing on values in design, intellectual property, governance by AI and the governance of AI.

Hila Engelhard

Embassy of Israel to Germany, Berlin

The diplomat Hila Engelhard is head of economic and scientific affairs at the Embassy of Israel in Berlin.

Michael Esfeld

University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Michael Esfeld has been full professor of the philosophy of science at the University of Lausanne since 2002. His research lies at the intersection of the natural and the human sciences, with a focus on the ontology of physics, the philosophy of mind, and the limits of the applicability of natural science–based methods in the human sciences. Prof. Esfeld’s latest book is Science and Human Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; German version: Wissenschaft und Freiheit, Suhrkamp, 2019; French version: Sciences et liberté, Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 2020). Recent papers include “Super-Humeanism and Free Will,” Synthese 198 (2021), pp. 6245–58, and “A Persistent Particle Ontology for QFT in Terms of the Dirac Sea,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (2019), pp. 747–70 (with Dirk-André Deckert and Andrea Oldofredi.

Ariel Ezrahi

The Atlantic Council

Ariel Ezrahi, based in Berlin, is a Nonresident Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council, where he works on a range of Middle East and North Africa projects and initiatives. Previously, he was the first Director of Energy at the Office of the Quartet, where he designed and led all energy and sustainability initiatives. Ariel Ezrahi was the architect of the Gas for Gaza project, working closely with the key international actors and Israel on this cornerstone Palestinian project. He was the energy adviser to the Quartet Representative, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Prior to that, he worked for international law firms. The holder of an MPhil from the University of Oxford (St. Antony’s College), an LLM from Georgetown University, and an LLB from the University of Manchester, Ariel Ezrahi is also a member of the MENA 2050 Organization.

Christina Ezrahi

Historian and author, Berlin

Christina Ezrahi is a historian and author specializing in the relationship between dance, politics, and society in the Soviet Union. She is the author of Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) and Dancing for Stalin: A True Story of Extraordinary Courage and Survival in the Soviet Gulag (Elliott & Thompson, 2023). Her books have been translated into French, Italian, Czech, and Hungarian. She was educated at Princeton University, St. Antony’s College (University of Oxford), and University College London. Christina Ezrahi is the founder and editor of Teen World of Arts, an online magazine for teenagers and students about the performing and visual arts. She is a member of the family advisory board of the Werner Siemens-Stiftung.

Rivka Feldhay

Tel Aviv University, Israel

Rivka Feldhay is professor of the history and philosophy of science and ideas at the Cohn Institute and head of the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University. Her research and teaching focuses on knowledge, religion, and politics in the early modern era; intellectual currents in the Renaissance; science education in Catholic Europe; and the culture of Baroque and the New Science. Prof. Feldhay has co-directed research groups on “Jesuit Mechanics: Science Education in a Catholic Context” and “Before Copernicus” at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, and currently leads a Minerva Humanities Center project on migrating knowledge. Among her numerous publications are After Merton: Catholic and Protestant Science in the Seventeenth Century (ed. with Yehuda Elkana, Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Russians in Israel (ed. with Julia Lerner, Hakkibutz Hameuchad, 2012).

Doron Feldman

Tel Aviv University, Israel

Doron Feldman is a Ph.D. candidate and a researcher specializing in national cyber strategies at Tel-Aviv University, Israel. He is affiliated with the School of Political Science, Government and International Affairs, and the Yuval Ne'eman Workshop for Science, Technology, and Security. His research interests include international relations and security studies, focusing on the strategies of small states in conflict zones, such as Israel, Taiwan, Finland, and Estonia, as well as the countermeasures against cyber and disinformation threats faced by challenged democracies.

Giovanni Frazzetto

Author, Ireland

Giovanni Frazzetto was born and grew up in Sicily. He graduated from University College London and then conducted his doctoral studies at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. In 2007–8, he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where he later worked as Academic Coordinator of the College for Life Sciences. He is the author of Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love: What Neuroscience Can—and Can’t—Tell Us About How We Feel (Penguin, 2014) and Together, Closer: The Art and Science of Intimacy in Friendship, Love, and Family (Penguin, 2017). He lives in Ireland.

Ofer Gal

Sydney University, Australia

Ofer Gal has been a member and sometimes director of the School of History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney University since 2004, and has founded and directed a number of other institutions. His work concentrates on epistemological, ontological, and historiographical questions in early modern science, and he has also published extensively on global knowledge, eighteenth-century chemistry, and various philosophical themes. Ofer Gal’s latest monographs are Baroque Science (with Raz Chen-Morris, Chicago University Press, 2013) and Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He is currently working on the epistemological and ethical implications of the rise of the New Science, especially those entailed by the naturalization of the senses.

Marina Garcés

Open University of Catalonia, Spain

Marina Garcés directs the research program in Philosophy for Contemporary Challenges at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Her work focuses on politics and critical thinking, and expresses the need for a philosophical voice that is capable of challenging and engaging. In one of her best-known books, Nova il·lustració radical (“A new radical enlightenment,” Anagrama, 2017), she rethinks the relation of humans to the world and criticizes the ease with which humanity currently accepts forms of oppression instead of striving for dignity and freedom. Alongside her professorship, Marina Garcés is a member of the board of trustees of the Fundació l’ARC, devoted to arts as social transformation, and the founder of the collective project Espai en Blanc. Since summer 2022, she has been involved in the program “The Foundations of Value and Values” at THE NEW INSTITUTE.

Rubén García-Santos

NOMIS Foundation

Rubén García-Santos has served as the head of scientific affairs and innovation networks at the NOMIS foundation since 2017. García earned an MSc in international healthcare management, economics, and policy from SDA Bocconi University (Italy) and has further postgraduate education in strategy, innovation, and sustainability from Harvard Business School (US) and Cambridge University (UK). Prior to joining NOMIS, he spent nearly fifteen years in the life science, healthcare, and international development sectors. He has held global positions in the areas of market access, business development, and strategic alliance management in leading medtech and biopharmaceutical organizations, as well as at the United Nations. In his current role, García is spearheading NOMIS strategy, partnerships, innovation networks, and strategic communications.

Ehud Gazit

Tel Aviv University, Israel

Ehud Gazit is a professor and endowed chair at The Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Tel Aviv University, where he works on the molecular self-assembly of biological, bio-inspired, and other organic building blocks. He is the founding director of the Blavatnik Center for Drug Development, and was a member of the Israel National Council for Research and Development from 2014–2018. From 2008–2012, Prof. Gazit was vice president for research and development at Tel Aviv University and chaired the board of directors of the university’s technology transfer company. He has published widely in journals including Science, Cell, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Physics, Nature Catalysis, Nature Chemical Biology, and Advanced Materials, and is also a prolific inventor. Prof. Gazit has recently been chosen as the International Solvay Chair in Chemistry for 2023.

Gerd Gigerenzer

Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany

Gerd Gigerenzer, Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy, University of Potsdam, and Director emeritus, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, was formerly professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and John M. Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Law. He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the German Academy of Sciences, and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Awards for his work include the Association of American Publishers Award for the best book in the social and behavioral sciences, the German Psychology Award, and the Communicator Award of the German Research Foundation. His popular books Calculated Risks, Gut Feelings, Risk Savvy, and How to Stay Smart In A Smart World have been translated into twenty-one languages.

Gabriele Gramelsberger

RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Gabriele Gramelsberger is professor of the theory of science and technology at RWTH Aachen University, working on the digitalization of science, especially the introduction of new research methods such as computer simulation and machine learning. In 2018, she founded the Computational Science Studies Lab at RWTH. She is a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts, director of the Käte Hamburger Center “Cultures of Research,” and the recipient of the American Philosophical Association’s K. Jon Barwise Prize 2023. She has published widely in venues including PLoS Computational Biology, Journal of the History of Biology, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Her most recent book, Philosophie des Digitalen zur Einführung (Junius, 2023) gives a first systematic approach to digitality from perspective of philosophy.

Krishna P. Gummadi

Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Germany

Krishna P. Gummadi is a scientific director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany. He also holds a honorary professorship at the Saarland University. Krishna Gummadi’s research interests lie in the measurement, analysis, design, and implementation of Internet-scale systems. His current research focus is on understanding and building fair, accountable, transparent, and explainable 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 publications have received over ten best or outstanding papers awards, including the Test of Time Awards at ACM SIGCOMM and the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media of the AAAI and Privacy Awards at PETS and CNIL-Inria. In 2017, he received an ERC Advanced Grant to investigate “Foundations for Fair Social Computing.”

Daphna Hacker

Tel Aviv University, Israel

Daphna Hacker, a legal scholar and sociologist, is full professor at the Law Faculty and the Women and Gender Studies Program, Tel Aviv University. Her sociolegal research focuses on the intersection of law, families, and gender and provides both empirical and normative insights in relation to post-divorce parental arrangements, inheritance conflicts, filial piety towards elder parents, and transnational families. Prof. Hacker has published numerous articles in leading legal and sociolegal journals and is the author of three books. Her latest, Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2017), won the American Law & Society Association’s Best Book Award. Daphna Hacker was recently elected as a member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) for the term 2023–26.

Nora Hageneier

Dancer, wee dance company, Germany

Nora Hageneier (dancer, wee dance company, Germany) received her dance training at the ballet school of the Leipzig Opera and at the dance academy “balance1” in Berlin, where she graduated in 2005. Since then, she has been working with Dan Pelleg and Marko E. Weigert for the wee dance company. With the Israeli De De Dance Company, she also performed choreographies by Gundula Peuthert, Hanoch Ben Dror, Sommer Ulrickson, Amit Goldenberg, and Ya’ara Dolev. Nora Hagemeier has toured to countries including Israel, the Netherlands, Croatia, Russia, Zimbabwe, and the USA. Since 2010, she has also been working on the open air events of Freilichtspiele Schwäbisch Hall. She has been a member of the wee dance company, the company of the Gerhart Hauptmann Theater Görlitz-Zittau, since the season of 2011/12.

Oren Harman

Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Oren Harman studied biology and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Oxford, and Harvard. He is a historian and writer, and teaches at the STS Graduate Program at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. At the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Oren Harman is a senior research fellow, and hosts the lecture series Talking about Science in the 21st Century. Harman’s books include The Man Who Invented the Chromosome; the trilogy on Rebels, Outsiders, and Dreamers in biology; Evolutions: Fifteen Myths that Explain Our World; and the prizewinning study The Price of Altruism. Harman’s books have been translated into Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Turkish, Italian, Korean, Polish, and Malayalam. His fields of specialization include evolutionary theory, the history and philosophy of biology, scientific biography, and science and mythology. Oren is currently a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Henrike Hartmann

Volkswagen Foundation, Hannover

Henrike Hartmann is Deputy Secretary General of the Volkswagen Foundation, Hannover, and Head of the Funding Division. She joined the Volkswagen Foundation after her PhD in pharmacology at the University of Heidelberg and three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and the University of Frankfurt. Henrike Hartmann chairs the University Council of the University of Constance and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Frankfurt and of various Max Planck Institutes. The Volkswagen Foundation is dedicated to the support of the humanities, social sciences, and science and technology in higher education and research. In its work, the Foundation also seeks to improve the processes of research funding, including experimentation with innovative tools for peer review.

Dirk Hartung

Bucerius Law School, Hamburg

Dirk Hartung is the executive director of the Center for Legal Technology and Data Science at Bucerius Law School, Hamburg, with a special interest in computational legal studies, natural language processing, network science and regulation, and digitalization of the legal profession. He is a nonresidential fellow at CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. In his research, Dirk Hartung applies methods from complexity and computer science to the legal domain. He has most recently published on regulatory complexity and NLP in the legal domain including the LexGLUE benchmark and justice technology. The Center for Legal Technology and Data Science has recently co-published work on GPT-4 Passing the US Bar Exam, which was referenced in the official technical release report by OpenAI.

Hans-Christian von Herrmann

Technische Universität Berlin

Hans-Christian von Herrmann is professor of literary studies at the Technische Universität Berlin, with a special interest in the intersections of the history of literature with the history of science and technology. His research and publications include studies on the Zeiss Planetarium as a key epistemic object of the twentieth century and on machine-generated literature from the late nineteenth century to the more recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence.

Guy Hoffman

Cornell University

Guy Hoffman is associate professor and the Mills Family Faculty Fellow in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. Prior to that he was an assistant professor at IDC Herzliya, Israel, and co-director of the IDC Media Innovation Lab. Dr. Hoffman heads the Human-Robot Collaboration and Companionship (HRC²) group, studying the algorithms, interaction patterns, and designs that enable the co-existence of people and robots in the workplace and at home. Hoffman helped to develop the world’s first human-robot joint theater performance and the first real-time improvising human-robot jazz duet.

Jeanette Hofmann

Director, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, Germany

Jeanette Hofmann is a full professor at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, with a special interest in digitalization, regulation*,* and democracy. Head of the research group “Politics of Digitalization” at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), she is a founding co-director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, and principal investigator at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. Her research groups study the "politics of digitalization" and the changing formation of power and domination as manifested in the proliferation of digital platforms.

Eran Horowitz

Tel Aviv, Israel

Eran Horowitz is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Tel Aviv University, an invited researcher at the Sorbonne, and a Minerva Scholarship laureate at the Free University Berlin. The holder of a BSc in computer science, he has published award-winning novels in Hebrew and translations from French and German.

Roni Horowitz

Azrieli College of Engineering, Jerusalem

Roni Horowitz is a senior lecturer at the Azrieli College of Engineering, Jerusalem, with a special interest in creative problem solving. An influential figure in the realm of Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), he works on the understanding and application of inventive problem-solving methodologies. He is one of the co-founders of the SIT Institute in Tel Aviv, an institution that delivers workshops on inventive thinking to globally leading corporations. Recently, Roni Horowitz has begun to explore the application of innovation practices in the context of generative artificial intelligence.

Anthony A. Hyman

Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany

Anthony Hyman is a director and research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG), Dresden, with a special interest in understanding the roles of phase separation and intrinsically disordered proteins in organelle assembly. He received his BSc in zoology from University College London and his PhD at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge University. After postdoctoral research at UCSF, he was a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, then one of the founding directors of the MPI-CBG. Anthony Hyman is a fellow of the Royal Society, an international member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), and a member of the Leopoldina National Academy of Sciences.

Eva Jablonka

Tel Aviv University, Israel

Eva Jablonka is a retired professor at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, a member of the Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, and a research associate at the CPNSS, London School of Economics. She is interested in the understanding of evolution, especially evolution driven by non-genetic hereditary variations and the evolution of nervous systems and consciousness. Her books include Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution (Oxford University Press, 1995, with Marion Lamb), Evolution in Four Dimensions (MIT Press, 2005, with Marion Lamb), The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul (MIT Press, 2019, with Simona Ginsburg), and Inheritance Systems and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (Cambridge University Press, 2020, with Marion Lamb). An art-science book written with Simona Ginsburg and illustrated by Anna Zeligowski, Picturing the Mind Through the Lens of Evolution, appeared in 2022 (MIT Press).

Zhijing Jin

Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, and ETH Zurich

Zhijing Jin is a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, and ETH Zurich. Researching socially responsible NLP via causal and moral principles, she works on expanding the impact of NLP to other disciplines and developing robust, interpretable, and fair NLP models. Zhijing Jin has presented her work at numerous NLP and AI venues and it has been cited on the websites MIT News, ACM TechNews, Wevolver, VentureBeat, and Synced. She is actively involved in AI for social good, and has organized workshops on NLP for Positive Impact (ACL 2021 and EMNLP 2022) and RobustML (ICLR 2021). To foster the causality research community, she organized the tutorial on CausalNLP at EMNLP 2022 and served as publications chair for the 2022 conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning.

Daphna Joel

Tel Aviv University, Israel

Daphna Joel is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the School of Psychological Sciences and the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University. She studies questions related to brain, sex, and gender. In her research, Prof. Joel uses various analytical methods to analyze diverse datasets, from large collections of brain scans to information obtained with self-report questionnaires. In a series of papers, she has described and tested the “mosaic” hypothesis. Other studies focused on the perception of gender identity and its relation to sexuality, and her ongoing research attempts to characterize aspects of gender beyond the binary. She is also the author of Gender Mosaic: Beyond the Myth of the Male and Female Brain (Little, Brown, 2019; with Luba Vikhanski).

Andreas Kaminski

Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

Andreas Kaminsky studied philosophy and completed his PhD in Darmstadt in 2008 with a dissertation on Technology as Expectation. Since 2014, he has established and led a department for the philosophy of computational science, including two junior research groups, at the federal High-Performance Computing Center in Stuttgart (HLRS). Kaminsky habilitated in Marburg in 2021 with the thesis on The Entangled Simplicity of Trust – and Its Speculative Structure.

Denisa Reshef Kera

Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Denisa Reshef Kera is a senior lecturer in the Science, Technology, and Society program at Bar Ilan University, Israel, where she established a Design and Policy lab specializing in experimental governance of technological futures. Through design methods, Dr. Kera explores various attempts to align and integrate values into emerging infrastructures, discussed in her book Algorithms and Automation: Governance over Rituals, Machines, and Prototypes, from Sundial to Blockchain (2024). She is the alternate AI national expert appointed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic. Her pioneering collaborative work earned the Columbia University Digital Dozen prize in 2020 for a project that combined satellite and blockchain services with a design fiction scenario. Dr. Kera has held academic positions at universities in Malta, Israel, Spain, Singapore, the United States, and the Czech Republic.

Mika Kerttunen

National Defence University, Finland

Mika Kerttunen, DSocSc (Pol.), LTC (ret. FI A), is director of the Cyber Policy Institute, adjunct professor in military strategy at the Finnish National Defence University, member of the board of the Swedish Defence University, and, since October 2022, non-resident fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. Mika Kerttunen’s research focuses on cyber conflict prevention and on building national, societal, and organizational resilience through policies and strategies based on transparency and the rule of law. These themes and objectives are covered through his advisory role for various governments and training and education for academic and professional audiences with a particular focus on developing countries. His latest academic publications include a handbook on international cybersecurity (Routledge, 2020).

Daria Kim

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich

Daria Kim is a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, with a special interest in innovation and regulation. She holds Masters (Indiana University of Pennsylvania), LLM (Munich Intellectual Property Law Center), and Dr iur (University of Augsburg) degrees. Daria Kim has published on topics related to intellectual property law and policy, regulation of biomedical research and data-driven innovation, and normative and regulatory aspects of artificial intelligence. She has been actively involved in the MPI Research Group Regulation of the Digital Economy and contributed to the work of the Innovation & Commercialization Working Group of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence.

Daniel Moshe Knebel

Max Planck institute for the History of Science, Germany

Daniel Knebel earned his PhD in neuroscience in 2018 at Tel Aviv University. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher in mathematics and computer science (Bar-Ilan University) and at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology (Jena), combining empirical work with computational modeling of insects’ social behavior. His hands-on experience in neuroscience led him to ask how the emergence of neuroscience as a scientific discipline shaped the modern study of the nervous system. To this end, Dr. Knebel investigates how and under what scientific circumstances the traditional study of neuromotor control, specifically the concept of the reflex—instrumental for biology, psychology, and philosophy—changed in the last century.

Sebastian Koth

Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin

Sebastian Koth is a scholar in the field of Science and Technology Studies. He studied physics, philosophy, and sociology in Leipzig and Berlin. He is currently based at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin as part of the research group “Reorganizing Knowledge Practices,” where he is investigating changes in scientific institutions and practices in the context of the digital economy and technology innovation.

Katja Krause

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany

Katja Krause, professor of the history of science at the Technical University Berlin, leads the Max Planck Research Group “Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her research rethinks the relationship between experience and science in the premodern sciences of living beings. She is also interested in the continuities and discontinuities of scientific practices and ideals from premodernity to the present. Among her recent publications are Aquinas on Seeing God (Marquette University Press, 2020) and the edited collection Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation (Routledge, 2023). After earning her PhD in philosophy at King’s College London, Katja Krause held postdoctoral fellowships in the history of science at the MPIWG and Harvard University and an assistant professorship in medieval thought at Durham University.

Mordechai Kremnitzer

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Mordechai Kremnitzer is a Senior Research Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and professor emeritus of the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prof. Kremnitzer served as president of the Israeli Press Council and chaired several government committees, including the Committee to Examine the Use of Force by the Police, the Committee on Civic Education in Israel, and the Committee on Discipline in the Civil Service. With S. Z. Feller, he drafted the preliminary and general parts of Israel’s Criminal Code. He led the Ministry of Justice team to reform homicide offenses, a reform passed by the Knesset in 2019. Mordechai Kremnitzer’s areas of expertise are criminal law, public law, military law, corruption in government, and proportionality in public policy. His latest book is Proportionality in Action (Cambridge University Press, 2020, ed. with Talya Steiner and Andrej Lang).

Yuval Kremnitzer

Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design & The College of Management Academic Studies, Israel

Yuval Kremnitzer teaches at the Haim Striks School of law and the Brandeis Institute at the college of Managemnet Academic studies, in Rishon Leziyon and the Graduate program in theory and policy of art at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. He is a philosopher with a historical orientation, focusing on the intersection of authority and technology. He completed two manuscripts. His forthcoming book for the MIT Press, titled: “The Emperor’s New Nudity: The Return of Authoritarianism and The Digital Obscene”, deals with the deep historical and philosopical background of contemporary, new authoriterianism, and his “How to Believe in Nothing: Moses Mendelssohn’s Media Theory of Tradition and the Nihilism problem” offers a reavluation of the consequential “pantheism affair”, to account for the media conditions of the systemic crisis of enlightenment.

Wilhelm Krull

New Institute, Germany

Wilhelm Krull, previously Secretary General of the Volkswagen Foundation, has been the founding director of THE NEW INSTITUTE since January 2020. After graduating in German studies, philosophy, education, and political science, he worked as a DAAD lecturer at the University of Oxford, at the German Science and Humanities Council, and in the General Administration of the Max Planck Society. Alongside professional activities in science policy and research funding, he has held numerous positions in national and international supervisory and advisory bodies. Dr. Krull was awarded an honorary doctorate from Ilia State University, Tbilisi (2016), Foreign Membership of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering (2019), and an Honorary Fellowship from St. Edmund Hall, University of Oxford (2019). His most recent publications are Krieg—von allen Seiten (Wallstein, 2013) and Die vermessene Universität (Passagen, 2017).

Simone Kühn

Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany

Simone Kühn is head of the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, and professor of neural plasticity at the Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Clinic Hamburg Eppendorf. Her research focuses primarily on how the brain is shaped by the environment in health and in psychiatric patients. She has also studied habitual behavior and self-control and has a strong interest in brain imaging methods. Dr. Kühn studied psychology at Columbia University and Potsdam University, and received her doctorate in psychology from the University of Leipzig. She held postdoctoral positions at the University of Ghent, the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, and the university hospital Charité in Berlin.

Ehud Lamm

Tel Aviv University, Israel

Ehud Lamm, a philosopher and historian of biology and currently president of the Israeli Society for the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, studies foundational issues in biology using a combination of theoretical biology, modeling, and philosophical analysis. He also works on the history of evolutionary theory and genetics, with a focus on the evolution of human sociality, especially social polarization and social norms. With a background in computer science and software engineering, he has recently begun to investigate AI’s implications for society and for our views of human nature. Recent publications include “The Interplay of Social Identity and Norm Psychology in the Evolution of Human Groups” (with Kati Kish Bar-On; Philosophical Transactions, 2023) and “Distributed Adaptations” (with Oren Kolodny; Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 2022).

Rainer Lange

German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat), Cologne

Rainer Lange is head of the research policy department at the German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat), Cologne, which advises the German federal and state governments on issues of research and higher education policy. Before entering the Council’s office, he was trained in biology and philosophy, and holds a PhD in philosophy of science. His work as a policy adviser covers the organization and funding of scientific research, research infrastructures, and research assessment. In recent years, he has worked on open science with a focus on open access to publications and on research data. Currently, he also co-chairs the focus group on digitalization in science at the Alliance of Science Organizations in Germany.

Shai Lavi

Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Israel

Shai Lavi, head of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, is a professor of law at Tel Aviv University and the founder of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University. He specializes in sociology and jurisprudence and studies the interaction of technology, law, and ethics. His PhD is from the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, University of California Berkeley. Prof. Lavi’s book The Modern Art of Dying: A History of Euthanasia in the United States (Princeton University Press, 2005) won the 2006 Distinguished Book Award in the sociology of law from the American Sociological Association. He is currently working on medical authority over the body in Germany, Turkey, and Israel.

Michael Levitt

Stanford University, USA Nobel Laureate

Michael Levitt is a South African-born biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, a position he has held since 1987. Levitt received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems." In the 1970s, Michael Levitt, Martin Karplus, and Arieh Warshel successfully developed methods that combined quantum and classical mechanics to calculate the courses of chemical reactions using computers.

Lucas Mahler

Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany

Lucas Mahler is a PhD student in the Neuroinformatics Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen. His research investigates the intersection of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and consciousness, asking how intelligent systems process and represent information. Lucas Mahler uses ultra-high-resolution functional neuroimaging to investigate the cytoarchitectural features and processing paradigms that influence perception in both humans and machines. His interdisciplinary work aims to shed light on the ethical implications of AI, contributing to the broader discourse on technology and democracy. As such, his research is closely aligned with the Elkana Forum’s aim of exploring the complex relationships between technology, knowledge, and society.

Marko Weigert

Choreographer and Dancer, wee dance company, Germany

Marko E. Weigert (choreographer, wee dance company, Germany) trained as a dancer, choreographer, and dance teacher at the Palucca University of Dance Dresden and the University of Music and Theater “F. M. Bartholdy” Leipzig. After working for five years as a dancer and assistant choreographer with the toladá dance company under the artistic direction of Joseph Tmim from Tel Aviv, Marko Weigert co-founded the wee dance company with Dan Pelleg and Sommer Ulrickson. In 2011, when he and Pelleg were appointed as directors of the dance division at the Gerhart Hauptmann Theater Görlitz-Zittau, the wee dance company became that theater’s permanent dance company. Since it was founded, the company has made guest appearances in twenty-six German cities and in fourteen other countries, to enthusiastic acclaim from the press and audiences.

Christoph Markschies

Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Christoph Markschies is president of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and of the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. After studying theology, classics, and philosophy in Marburg, Munich, and Tübingen and at the Dormition Abbey in Jerusalem, he held chairs of Church History (Jena and Heidelberg) and Ancient Christianity (Humboldt University, Berlin, where he was also president of the university). Prof. Markschies is a member of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Europea. He serves on several advisory councils, such as the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology, and is a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute. Prof. Markschies was awarded the Leibniz Award of the German National Research Council in 2001. His numerous publications include a variety of introductory course books on theology and church history.

Sandra Matz-Cerf

Columbia Business School, USA

Sandra Matz is the David W. Zalaznick Associate Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. As a computational social scientist, she studies human behavior using a combination of Big Data analytics and experimental methods. Her research explores how psychological characteristics influence real-life outcomes in different business-related domains (for example financial well-being, consumer satisfaction, or team performance), with the goal of helping businesses and individuals make better and more ethical decisions. Dr. Matz’s research has been published in the world’s leading scientific journals and is frequently covered by major news outlets around the world. She has won numerous awards, including Data IQ’s most influential people in data-driven marketing, Pacific Standard’s Top 30 Thinkers under 30, and Poets&Quants Best 40 under 40 business school professors.

Johannes Meier

Mercator Foundation, Germany

Johannes Meier is chairman of the Mercator Foundation and serves on the supervisory boards of New Work SE, Nederlandse Gasunie NV, Meridian Foundation, and UNICEF Germany. He is an honorary professor of leadership at the HHL Graduate School of Management, Leipzig. Johannes Meier was CEO of the European Climate Foundation (2011–17), managing board member of the Bertelsmann Foundation (2003–9), CEO of GE CompuNet Computer AG (1998–2003), and partner at McKinsey & Co. (1990–97). In 2009, he founded a software start-up and developed a collaboration platform for the German Federal Employment Agency, the Labor Market Monitor. The platform won the 2011 award for most innovative e-government solution in Germany. He holds a MSc in Computer Science from RWTH Aachen and a PhD in Communication and Information Sciences from the University of Hawaii Manoa.

Lucia Melloni

Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Germany

**Lucia Melloni **is head of the “Neural Circuits, Consciousness, and Cognition” Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, and a research professor in the department of neurology, NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Her lab is broadly interested in understanding the neural underpinnings of how we see (perception), how and why we experience what we see (consciousness), and how those experiences become imprinted in our brain (learning and memory), as well as the interplay between these processes. Dr. Melloni’s novel approach aims to advance scientific discoveries on the neural basis of conscious perception resting on “adversarial collaboration” and open science. Her interdisciplinary project combines multiple imaging and electrophysiology approaches in a rigorous, large-scale project spanning multiple laboratories across the globe, and has been described recently by Dr. Melloni and colleagues in the leading journal Science.

Thomas Metzinger

University of Mainz, Germany

Thomas Metzinger was full professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Mainz until 2019. Past president of the German Cognitive Science Society and the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, he is a co-founder of the German Effective Altruism Foundation, president of the Barbara Wengeler Foundation, and on the advisory board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation. From 2018 to 2020, Thomas Metzinger served in the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence. Among his books in English are the collections Conscious Experience (Imprint Academic, 1995) and Neural Correlates of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2000) and the monograph Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (MIT Press, 2003). His The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (Basic Books, 2009) discusses the ethical, cultural, and social consequences of consciousness research.

Volker Meyer-Guckel

Donors' Association for the Promotion of Humanities and Sciences, Germany

Volker Meyer-Guckel is secretary general of the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft, an association of foundations for the promotion of the sciences and humanities. He studied English philology, chemistry, and philosophy in Kiel, Belfast, and New York, completing his PhD in American Studies at the University of Kiel in 1992. He served in the German National Scholarship Foundation Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and with Federal President Roman Herzog, focusing on international, cultural, and educational issues. At the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft, he was responsible for higher education reform and change management in science and research, themes on which he has published widely. Dr. Meyer-Guckel is a governing board member in foundations including the Europa Universität Viadrina, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the German Cancer Aid Foundation, and is a member of the Global Learning Council.

Julia Mossbridge

University of San Diego, USA

Julia Mossbridge is an affiliate professor in the Department of Biophysics and Physics at University of San Diego, a fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, the co-founder and co-founder of the nonprofit TILT: The Institute for Love and Time, and the founder of the for-profit Mossbridge Institute. The author or co-author of multiple books and scientific articles related to precognition, informational time travel, artificial intelligence, and unconditional love, Dr. Mossbridge also invented and patented Choice Compass, a physiologically based decision-making app, and created the Loving AI project with Hanson Robotics’ humanoid robot Sophia and SingularityNet’s OpenCog AI. She completed her PhD in communication sciences and disorders and her postdoc in psychology at Northwestern University. Her MA degree in neuroscience is from UC San Francisco, and she was awarded her BA in neuroscience with highest honors by Oberlin College.

Glenn Most

Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy

**Glenn W. Most **retired in November 2020 as professor of Greek philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and remains an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and a regular visiting professor on the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. He has published books on classics, ancient philosophy, the history and methodology of classical studies, comparative literature and literary theory, cultural studies, the history of religion, and the history of art, as well as numerous articles, reviews, and translations in these fields and others such as modern philosophy. He is currently working on various projects involving both ancient Greek philology and the comparison of philological practices in different periods and cultures throughout the world.

Adolf Muschg

Author, Former Full Professor of German Language and Literature at the ETH Zurich

Adolf Muschg, former full professor of German language and literature at the ETH Zurich, became the first director of the Collegium Helveticum at the Semper Observatory in 1997; he retired in 1999. His research focused on Gottfried Keller, Goethe, and Wolfram von Eschenbach and on the correlation between literature and therapy. He has served on several Swiss commissions, including the commission for the complete revision of the Swiss Federal Constitution (1974–77) and for the creation of the Swiss Foundation for Solidarity (1997). Adolf Muschg has been an author since 1965, and was awarded the Büchner Prize for his novel Der Rote Ritter: Eine Geschichte von Parzival (Suhrkamp, 1994). He is the recipient of numerous other international awards and a member of the Academies of Berlin, Mainz, Darmstadt, and Hamburg. His works have been translated into numerous languages.

Joachim Nettelbeck

Institute for Advanced Study Berlin, Germany

Joachim Nettelbeck was born in Mannheim in 1944. He studied jurisprudence and sociology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Berlin. From 1971 to 1978, he was administrative director of the Berlin School of Economics. During a research residency in France, he earned his doctorate in 1978/79 with a dissertation on the appointment of higher education instructors in the Federal Republic of Germany and France. From 1979 to 1981, Dr. Nettelbeck was Executive Board Assistant of the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD in Bonn, and in 1981 he became the Secretary of the newly founded Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where he continued to serve until 2012.

Ariel Novoplansky

Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

Ariel Novoplansky is professor of evolutionary ecology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and spent a postdoc period at the University of Michigan. His work focuses on the ecological and evolutionary implications of plant communication, behavior, and learning. Though the emphasis of his research is on adaptations of individual plants, he also studies the implications of these phenomena for population- and community-level interactions, as well as the philosophical foundations of learning, memory, agency, and intelligence. Prof. Novoplansky is the director of the Swiss Institute for Dryland Energy and Environmental Research at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, BGU. He initiated and organized the Camp Evolution conference series and participated in the founding group of the Society of Plant Signaling and Behavior.

Jakob Ohme

Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin

Jakob Ohme is Head of Research Group at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin, where he leads the “Digital News Dynamics” research group. The group examines the perception, distribution, and function of professional journalist news on digital platforms relative to other information being disseminated by, for example, political parties or influencers or through artificial intelligence. His research centers on the impact of digital and mobile communication on news exposure and political behavior in digital democracies, focusing on generational differences in media use and political socialization. Jakob Ohme has a special interest in developing digital methods in political communication and journalism research. Currently, he is a fellow at the Digital Communication Methods Lab at the University of Amsterdam.

François Pachet

Spotify Creator Technology Research Lab, Paris, France

François Pachet has been a pioneer in AI-Assisted music creation. He has developed many AI tools with the attempt to combine both the viewpoint of musicians and scientists. He was Principal Investigator of the Flow Machines ERC-funded project, which produced (with the musician SKYGGE) Daddy’s Car, a song in the style of the Beatles, and Hello World, the first mainstream music album composed with AI. He is also a musician and has published two music albums (jazz and pop) as composer and performer, as well as an augmented book about the ontogenesis of a musical ear, Histoire d’une Oreille (story of an ear). He was elected EurAI Fellow in 2014 and doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Pernambuco (Brazil) in 2017.

Maria Paradiso

University of Naples Federico II, Italy

Maria Paradiso, full professor of political and economic geography at the University of Naples Federico II and board member at the International Science Council, chairs the “Human Mobility, Governance, Environment and Space” section at Academia Europaea (London). She is Vice President of the International Geographical Union, and founded the IGU Commission on the Mediterranean Basin, the IGU’s first commission with a regional focus. Maria Paradiso’s main interest in recent years has been to explore changes in Mediterranean relationships through the narratives of people in motion, and to enhance understanding of cultural dialogue and human development. She is now starting new collaborations in marine studies (oceans and seas as social spaces), and continues her work on human life in the Internet Age. Prof. Paradiso is interested in developing methodologies and practices for science’s commitment to more equitable societies across the globe.

Ohad Parnes

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany

Ohad Parnes is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He studied biology, philosophy, and the history of science at Tel Aviv University. After completing his PhD with a dissertation on the concept of agency in modern biomedicine, he worked at the University of Berne, the Center for Cultural and Literary Research (ZfL) in Berlin, and the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine in London. He has held professorships at the Open University of Israel and the Central European University in Budapest, as well as an honorary professorship at the University of Sydney, Australia. Between 2015 and 2023, he served as the Research Coordinator of the MPIWG. Ohad’s research focuses on the history of the life sciences and modern medicine, with particular attention to epigenetics and the history of immunology. He is currently working on the history of the notion of forgetting, as well as researching and publishing the estate of his doctoral supervisor, Yehuda Elkana

Matteo Pasquinelli

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy

Matteo Pasquinelli is Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice where he is coordinating the ERC project AIMODELS. Among other publications, he wrote the book The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023),

Shahaf Peleg

Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology, Dummersdorf, Germany

Shahaf Peleg, group leader at FBN Dummerstorf and cofounder of Luminova Biotech, received his BSc from Ben Gurion University, Israel, in 2006 and his PhD from the University of Göttingen, Germany, in 2010. He carried out postdoctoral work at the University of Munich, where he focused on metabolism—epigenetic connectivity during early aging. Since 2018, at his laboratory at FBN, he has been researching molecular changes associated with the progression of aging. With Andrew Wojtovich, he is currently working on the concept of energy replacement to extend healthy longevity by enabling metazoans to harness the energy of light and translate it to chemical energy in their mitochondria.

Dan Pelleg

Choreographer and Dancer, wee dance company, Germany

Dan Pelleg's professional path began at the age of sixteen with multidisciplinary training in classical singing and as a dancer. Aged twenty-one, he was awarded the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program scholarship at Tel Aviv University for studies focusing on musicology and linguistics. After an employment with Ensemble Batsheva, he moved to Berlin and there, with Marko E. Weigert and Sommer Ulrickson, co-founded the wee dance company, which operated as an independent dance company for twelve years. In 2011, when he and Weigert were appointed as directors of the dance division at the Gerhart-Hauptmann Theater Görlitz-Zittau, the wee dance company became that theater’s permanent dance company. Since it was founded, the company has made guest appearances in twenty-six German cities and in fourteen other countries, to enthusiastic acclaim from the press and audiences.

Corine Pelluchon

Université Gustave Eiffel, France

Corine Pelluchon, professor at the Université Gustave Eiffel (Paris region), is currently a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. A specialist in moral and political philosophy, phenomenology, and applied ethics (bioethics, philosophy of the environment, and animal ethics), she has also published on Leo Strauss, Levinas, and Paul Ricœur. Corine Pelluchon’s recent publications include Les Lumières à l’âge du vivant (Seuil, 2021; Das Zeitalter des Lebendigen: Eine neue Philosophie der Ernährung und der Umwelt, WGB, 2021), L’espérance ou la traversée de l’impossible (Rivages, 2023; Die Durchquerung des Unmöglichen, Beck, 2023), and Réparons le monde. Humains, animaux, nature (Rivages, 2020; Verbessern wir die Welt. Sorge um Mensch, Tier, Natur, WBG, 2023). She was named Knight of the Legion of Honor in July 2021.

Alexander Polzin

Sculptor, Germany

Alexander Polzin is a sculptor, painter, and stage designer who was born in Berlin in 1973. His works are shown in public spaces around the world, and in galleries or museums such as the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Among other things, Polzin created a monument to Giordano Bruno that was installed at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and his sculptural Homage to Paul Celan was placed in the Anne Frank Garden in Paris. Again and again, his works are created in dialogue with literature, music, and philosophy. Part of this exchange are his stage designs for opera productions in Salzburg, New York, Madrid, Brussels, and Geneva.

Andreas Rahmatian

School of Law, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

Andreas Rahmatian is professor of commercial law at the University of Glasgow, UK, specializing in intellectual property law and commercial law, comparative intellectual property law, property law and property theory, and intellectual history and the law. He worked as an associate attorney at law in Vienna and qualified as a solicitor with a City firm in London before becoming a full-time academic. During the academic year 2014–15 he was a fellow (résident) at the Institut d’études avancées in Nantes, where he worked on a critical legal theory of money. His publications include Copyright and Creativity: The Making of Property Rights in Creative Works (Elgar, 2011) and Credit and Creed: A Critical Legal Theory of Money (Routledge, 2019).

Iyad Rahwan

Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin

Iyad Rahwan is the managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, with a special interest in the impact of artificial intelligence on society. He is also an honorary professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Technical University Berlin. Prior to joining the Max Planck Society, he was an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A native of Aleppo, Syria, Rahwan holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Aviad Raz

Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

Aviad Raz is professor of medical and organizational sociology at Ben-Gurion University (BGU) in Israel, where he is chair of the Department of Sociology & Anthropology and director of the Eitan program for interdisciplinary excellence. He works on the socio-ethical implications of disruptive medical technologies and their regulation. Among Prof. Raz’s numerous publications on medical sociology, health governance, and public understanding of science are Community Genetics and Genetic Alliances (Routledge, 2009) and Comparative Empirical Bioethics (with Silke Schicktanz , Springer, 2016). He was a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego, a visiting scholar at Kyoto University, SciencesPo, and the University of Leuven, and PI in several international research projects funded by agencies including the DFG, GIF, BSF, and ISF.

Jürgen Renn

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany

Jürgen Renn has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (MPIWG) since 1994 and worked closely with Yehuda Elkana from the 1980s onward. In 2022 he was additionally appointed director at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology (MPIGEA) in Jena. An honorary professor at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Freie Universität Berlin, he is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and a pioneer of the Digital Humanities and Open Access. At the MPIGEA, Jürgen Renn will focus on the impact of the human-made technosphere on the natural Earth system and the dynamics of this coupled system, shaping a transdisciplinary research setting in the spirit of Yehuda Elkana. Jürgen Renn’s most recent book is The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Wolfgang Rohe

Mercator Foundation, Berlin

Wolfgang Rohe joined the Mercator Foundation in 2008. He was appointed its executive director in 2014 and has chaired the executive board since 2021. He previously held various positions at two of the most influential science organizations in Germany: From 1992 to 2002, he worked with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) in Bonn, initially in the Department for Collaborative Research Centers and then as head of the strategic planning unit. In 2002, he moved to the Wissenschaftsrat (German Science and Humanities Council), where he served as head of the Research Policy Department and from 2005 also as vice secretary general. Wolfgang Rohe holds a PhD in German philology.

Matthias Röder

CEO, Eliette and Herbert von Karajan Institute, Salzburg, Austria

Dr. Matthias Röder is an award-winning music tech visionary from Salzburg, Austria. He is the CEO of the Karajan Institute, a board member of the Karajan Foundation and a trustee of the Mozarteum Foundation. Dr. Röder is the founder of the Karajan Music Tech Conference, held yearly in Salzburg, and co-founder of the Sonophilia Foundation. He is the director of the Beethoven AI project and Co-Founder and Managing Partner at The Mindshift, a consultancy on creative leadership and innovation strategy. Dr. Röder holds a PhD in music from Harvard University and is an alumnus of the Mozarteum University Salzburg. He is a sought-after speaker and lecturer who has taught at Harvard University, the Change & Innovation Management Program at the University of St. Gall and Salzburg University.

Jan Georg Schneider

University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany

Jan Georg Schneider is professor of German linguistics at the RPTU in Landau, with special interest in AI from a linguistic and semiotic perspective (partly in collaboration with Katharina A. Zweig) and in the mediality and multimodality of language in interaction. He studied at RWTH Aachen, where he also wrote his dissertation and habilitation. He has taught at the universities of Landau, Münster, Aachen, Leiden, Paris, Namur, and Maastricht. Since 2021, he has been president of the German Society for Semiotics (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Semiotik). His book Spielräume der Medialität (de Gruyter, 2008) considers the media-theory foundations of linguistics. Prof. Schneider is also the author and co-author of three other monographs and numerous articles, and co-edited the volume Media as Procedures of Communication (with Martin Luginbühl, Benjamins, in print) and other publications.

Christian Schubert

Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria

Christian Schubert, MD, PhD, MSc, is a physician, clinical and health psychologist, and medical psychotherapist (psychodynamic psychotherapy). He is a professor at the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics, and Medical Psychology at the Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria, where he has led a psychoneuroimmunology laboratory since 1995. The focus of his scientific work is the development of an integrative single case design for investigating psychosomatic complexity. He is the author of numerous German and English-language publications including books and papers. His latest book is Stresstest Corona (BoD, 2021), and his latest paper is “About-Weekly Pattern in the Dynamic Complexity of a Healthy Subject’s Cellular Immune Activity: A Biopsychosocial Analysis,” published in Frontiers in Psychiatry in 2022.

Eric Schulz

The Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

Eric Schulz studied psychology (Humboldt University, Berlin), cognitive science (UCL), statistics (Oxford), and computer science (UCL). He completed his PhD in experimental psychology in 2017, winning the Glushko Disertation Prize of the Cognitive Science Society. After postdoctoral research at Harvard University and MIT, he became a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen. There, his Computational Principles of Intelligence lab works on using machine learning to understand human cognition and using cognitive science to understand machine learning algorithms. Eric Schulz has received a Jacobs Research Fellowship and a Volkswagen AI Grant for his work on the intersection between human and machine learning.

Tomer Shadmy

The Federmann Cyber Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

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Haya Shulman

Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany

Haya Shulman is professor of computer science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and director of the Cybersecurity Analytics and Defenses department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT in Darmstadt. She also heads the Analytics-Based Cybersecurity research area of ATHENE, and directs the Fraunhofer Innovation Platform for Cybersecurity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The author of more than ninety scientific articles, in 2021 she received the Horst Goertz Foundation’s Deutsche IT-Sicherheitspreis, the most prestigious award for cybersecurity innovations in Germany. In addition to her personal research and technical work, she is strongly engaged in activities helping cybersecurity startups and in increasing the number of women in cybersecurity. Haya Shulman started the “Women in Cybersecurity” series at Fraunhofer SIT, and is a member of the advisory board of “She Transforms IT.”

Carl von Siemens

Author, Berlin

Carl von Siemens is a writer based in Berlin. He is the author of two books, the novel Kleine Herren (S. Fischer, 2011) and the travelogue Der Tempel der magischen Tiere (Malik, 2018). He has published in German-language media such as Rolling Stone, Lettre International, Der Freund, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Das Magazin (Switzerland), WELT, and DIE ZEIT. Most of his work is related to travel. It is located in the context of autofiction, narrative journalism, and the personal essay.

Judith Simon

University of Hamburg, Germany

Judith Simon is Full Professor of Ethics in Information Technologies at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She is interested in ethical, epistemological, and political questions arising in the context of digital technologies, in particular with regard to big data and artificial intelligence. Judith Simon chaired the German Ethics Council’s working group on human-machine relations, which published the report “Humans and Machines: Challenges of Artificial Intelligence” in March 2023. She is a member of various other advisory committees on science policy and has also served on the Data Ethics Commission of the German Federal Government (2018–19). Her Routledge Handbook of Trust and Philosophy was published in June 2020.

Tomer Simon

Head of R&D, IBM Israel

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Tania Singer

Social Neuroscience Lab of the Max Planck Society, Germany

Tania Singer, professor of social neuroscience and psychology, heads the Max Planck Society’s Social Neuroscience Lab, Berlin. After her PhD in psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, she worked at the Wellcome Centre for Imaging Neuroscience and the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London and held the inaugural Chair of Social Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich. She is a world expert on compassion and empathy, with a passion for creating bridges between fields that typically never interact. Prof. Singer developed the ReSource project, a large-scale longitudinal study on the effects of meditation on brain, behavior, and mental health. She is also working with micro- and macroeconomists on new models of caring economics. Recently, her CovSocial project tested the effect of short mental online training on mental health and resilience during the Covid19 pandemic.

Tamara Stefanovich

Pianist, Germany

Tamara Stefanovich is a concert pianist with the world’s leading orchestras. She has performed with the Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony and Philharmonic Orchestras, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and is a regular visitor to prestigious concert halls worldwide, such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Royal Albert Hall, Suntory Hall, and Carnegie Hall. Fruitful collaboration connects her with composers including Pierre Boulez, George Benjamin, Hans Abrahamsen, and György Kurtág and she regularly partners with conductors such as Kirill Petrenko, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Vladimir Jurowski. Tamara Stefanovich has recorded works from Bach to contemporaries that won the Edison Award, and has twice been nominated for a Grammy Award. She has recently accepted a position as visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She is a member of the jazz improvisation band SDLW.

Rudolf Stichweh

University of Bonn, Germany

Rudolf Stichweh is senior professor of sociology at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn, and director of the Department for Comparative Research on Democracies at the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft. After studying sociology and philosophy, Prof. Stichweh earned his doctoral degree with a dissertation on the history of physics in the modern system of scientific disciplines. He is a permanent visiting professor at the University of Lucerne and a member of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Prof. Stichweh’s main research fields are functional differentiation and theory of world society; structure and history of the modern system of science, 1750–2020; authoritarian and democratic political systems in the twenty-first century; inequality and asymmetrical dependency; university as a world organization; and sociological systems theory.

Martin Stratmann

President Emeritus of the Max Planck Society, Germany

Martin Stratmann is an Emeritus Scientific Member at the MPI for Sustainable Materials GmbH, Düsseldorf and President Emeritus of the Max Planck Society (President from 2014-2023) with a special interest in the fields of electrochemistry and corrosion research. He was the first to use the Scanning Kelvin Probe technique in corrosion research and was able to show that electrochemical reaction analysis is possible even under ultrathin electrolytic films and non-conducting coatings. Stratmann has been awarded, among others, the Otto Hahn Medal of the MPG, the UR Evans Award and the HH Uhlig Award. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Karl Winnacker Institute of DECHEMA, the HGI, the Academy of Science and Engineering - acatech, the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and is Chairman of the University Alliance Ruhr. He has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Buenos Aires and the Weizmann Award in the Sciences and Humanities.

Tom Sühr

Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany

Tom Sühr is a PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, with a special interest in human-AI collaboration and the evaluation of Large Language Models. One area of his research investigates how human-AI systems shape data-generating processes and influence the decisions of large and small businesses. His second line of research draws on measurement theory and psychological test theory to analyze and develop benchmarks for LLMs. Prior to his predoctoral appointment, he worked on algorithmic fairness as a student research fellow at Harvard Business School and as a research intern at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Saarbrücken.

Lior Tabansky

Tel Aviv University, Israel

Lior Tabansky offers a unique grasp of digital transformation, combining business experience in formulating cybersecurity strategies for nations and enterprises in Asia, Europe, and Africa with a PhD in political science and fifteen years of IT work. Dr. Tabansky’s lab develops a sectoral approach to critical infrastructure protection and digital resilience. The World Bank is already using our original methodology in large-scale infrastructure projects. Dr. Tabansky’s prior work ranges from comparative defense transformation to political aspects of digital technologies and hostile influence operations via social media. His Cybersecurity in Israel (with Isaac Ben-Israel, Springer, 2015) is the first comprehensive insider account of Israeli policy and operations. His doctoral dissertation analyzed the failed peacetime defense adaptation that left even the most developed nations exposed to destructive cyberattacks on strategic homeland targets by foreign states.

Eran Toch

Tel Aviv University, Israel

Eran Toch heads the Industrial Engineering Department at Tel Aviv University and is co-director of the Interacting with Technology (IWiT) Lab, which studies how human-computer interaction and machine learning can help people better manage their online experiences, privacy, and security. The group works on various projects around computational analysis of human behavior and applies this knowledge to enhance people’s online experience, safety, and productivity. The IWiT Lab’s projects are funded by the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF), Horizon 2020, DARPA, and the Israeli Ministry of Science. Previously, Eran was a visiting associate professor at Cornell Tech and a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. His PhD is from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

Giulio Tononi

University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Giulio Tononi is professor of psychiatry, Distinguished Professor in Consciousness Science, Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and Consciousness, and David P. White Chair in Sleep Medicine at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His scientific work on consciousness has centered on the development of the “integrated information theory” (IIT), a comprehensive theory of what consciousness is, its neural substrate, what determines its quantity and quality, and how it can be measured independent of report. The theory accounts for why certain parts of the brain are critical for consciousness, and why consciousness vanishes during deep slow wave sleep and seizures despite continuing neural activity. It has led to the development of measures of information integration to assess the quantity of consciousness in healthy humans and, by extrapolation, in unresponsive patients.

Éliane Ubalijoro

Future Earth Canada Hub

Éliane Ubalijoro, PhD, is the executive director of Sustainability in the Digital Age and the director of the Future Earth Canada Hub. She is a member of the Capitals Coalition Supervisory Board, the Crop Trust Executive Board of the Science for Africa Foundation, and Genome Canada. Éliane Ubalijoro is a Professor of Practice for Public-Private Sector Partnerships at McGill University’s Institute for the Study of International Development, where her research focuses on innovation and sustainable development for prosperity creation, and a research professor at Concordia University in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment. She is a member of Rwanda’s National Science and Technology Council. Dr. Ubalijoro is a member of the Impact Advisory Board of the Global Alliance for a Sustainable Planet. She recently co-edited the volume Building Resilient African Food Systems after COVID-19 (IFPRI, 2021).

Dan Weinstein

Naggar Multidisciplinary School of Art and Society, Israel

Dan Weinstein is a virtuoso musician, teacher, and lecturer, focusing mainly on contemporary and experimental music. As a cellist, he is dedicated to exploring new ways of interpreting contemporary music. Enthusiastic about the intersection between traditional and contemporary, closed and open forms, improvisation and written music, Dan has inspired composers and instrumentalists for collaborative work as soloist and chamber musician. He has collaborated with composers and musicians including Steve Reich, Betsy Jolas, John Zorn, Morton Subotnick, David Grubbs, and Amnon Wolman, and has performed and recorded on French and Israeli radio and television and for the European Broadcasting Union. Dan Weinstein regularly performs as soloist and with several ensembles. A senior lecturer in the New Music Department, Naggar Multidisciplinary School of Art and Society, Jerusalem, he conducts the open social “Scratch Orchestra” in the Israeli Center for Digital Art.

Anina Woischnig

Assistant & Digital Content Curator of the Max Planck Research Group „Premodern Sciences of Soul & Body" at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

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Cornelia Woll

The Hertie School, Berlin

Cornelia Woll is President of the Hertie School in Berlin. She has a special interest in international political economy and economic sociology, specifically the international and national dynamics of the economic order, European integration, and the role of business in politics. She is the author of Corporate Crime and Punishment: Negotiated Justice in Global Markets (Princeton, in press), The Power of Inaction: Bank Bailouts in Comparative Perspective (Cornell, 2014), and Firm Interest: How Governments Shape Business Lobbying on Global Trade (Cornell, 2008). Before joining the Hertie School in 2022, Cornelia Woll served in many roles at Sciences Po in Paris, including President of the Academic Board, Professor of Political Science, and Co-Director of the Max Planck Sciences Po Center. She received the Lipset Prize and the Max Planck Society’s Otto Hahn Medal for her binational dissertation.

Jaesurk Yang

Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Bochum, Germany

Jeasurk Yang, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) in Bochum, investigates climate change policies, urban poverty, and environmental hazards. His PhD dissertation at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, was on uneven climate change adaptation and the materiality of waste in urban slums of Jakarta. Dr. Yang’s projects leverage AI to analyze satellite imagery, aiming to predict social indicators such as climate vulnerabilities, economic development, and the impacts of natural disasters. This work is highlighted in his recent publication, “A Human-Machine Collaborative Approach Measures Economic Development Using Satellite Imagery” in Nature Communications (2023). He is interested in the ethical and social implications of AI-powered analysis of satellite imagery, including issues related to privacy, surveillance, and the contemporary conceptualization of human development as influenced by AI technologies.

Erdost Yildiz

Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, Germany

Erdost Yildiz is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, with a special interest in small-scale robotics for neuromodulation. He graduated from the medical faculty of Hacettepe University, Turkey. While working as a clinician, he completed his PhD in neuroscience at the Koç University Research Center for Translational Medicine, Istanbul. Dr. Yildiz won the ARVO Developing Country Eye Research Fellowship and the EVER Young Investigator Award in 2019, and received his European Commission Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship for work on microrobotic-based intraocular drug delivery systems. His main research areas are molecular pathogenesis of neural diseases and the development of micro- and nanomaterials for the therapy of neural disorders. He is currently working on microrobot-based neurostimulation platforms.

Yossi Yovel

Tel Aviv University, Israel

Yossi Yovel is a member of the School of Zoology and the head of the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University. He earned his BSc in biology and physics and MSc in neuroscience from Tel Aviv University, and his PhD from the University of Tübingen, Germany. Prof. Yovel studies animal behavior, with a focus on navigation, sensing, and communication. His research combines biology with technology, including the development of miniature GPS sensors that enable the tracking of small animals. His work on bats’ use of bio-sonar for navigation in the field while using MRI to study the bats’ brains in the lab prompted him to establish a new field, neuro-ecology, which brings together ideas from neuroscience and ecology.

Torsten Zesch

FernUniversität, Hagen, Germany

Torsten Zesch is a full professor of computational linguistics at the CATALPA Center of Advanced Technology for Assisted Learning and Predictive Analytics, FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. He holds a doctoral degree in computer science from Technische Universität Darmstadt. His research interests are in educational natural language processing, in particular the ways in which teaching and learning processes can be supported by language technology and AI. For this purpose, he develops methods for the automatic analysis of multimodal language data, with a focus on robust and explainable models. Torsten Zesch is currently the president of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology (GSCL).

Frederike Zufall

Center for Applied Legal Studies, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

Frederike Zufall is Professor of Public Law and Computer Science at the Center for Applied Legal Studies at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Her research interest lies in applied interdisciplinary and theoretical aspects of AI and law, with publications in legal science and natural language processing. Frederike Zufall holds the first and second German state examinations in law and a doctoral degree in law from Humboldt University, Berlin. She was an assistant professor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study at Waseda University, Tokyo, and a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, and is one of the main organizers of the Max Planck Law Tech Society Initiative.

All

Digital Trust

The Future of Science

Research With Generative AI?

Aljoscha Burchardt

Aziz Al-Azmeh

Carsten Baldauf

Elif Akata

Johannes Schubert

full professor

Zeynep Akata

Federico Adolfi

Anna Ahlers

Baruch Barzel

Françoise Baylis

Sarah J. Becker

Irad Ben-Gal

Isaac Ben-Israel

Omer Benjakob

Christine Blaettler

Sebastian Bonhoeffer

Alejandro Tlaie Boria

Maarten Boudry

Jens Brandenburg

Eyal Brook

Aron Buchman

Moran Cerf

Gal Chechik

Chiara Cirelli

Jamie Cohen-Cole

Lorraine Daston

Ute Deichmann

Christian Doeller

Wenchao Dong

Gili Drob-Heistein

Amos Elkana

Niva Elkin-Koren

Hila Engelhard

Michael Esfeld

Ariel Ezrahi

Christina Ezrahi

Rivka Feldhay

Doron Feldman

Giovanni Frazzetto

Ofer Gal

Marina Garcés

Rubén García-Santos

Ehud Gazit

Gerd Gigerenzer

Gabriele Gramelsberger

Krishna P. Gummadi

Daphna Hacker

Nora Hageneier

Oren Harman

Henrike Hartmann

Dirk Hartung

Hans-Christian von Herrmann

Guy Hoffman

Jeanette Hofmann

Eran Horowitz

Roni Horowitz

Anthony A. Hyman

Eva Jablonka

Zhijing Jin

Daphna Joel

Andreas Kaminski

Denisa Reshef Kera

Mika Kerttunen

Daria Kim

Daniel Moshe Knebel

Sebastian Koth

Katja Krause

Mordechai Kremnitzer

Yuval Kremnitzer

Wilhelm Krull

Simone Kühn

Ehud Lamm

Rainer Lange

Shai Lavi

Michael Levitt