2019 MIT Europe Conference in Vienna

Aude Oliva, PhD is the MIT director in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and director of strategic industry engagement in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, leading collaborations with industry to translate natural and artificial intelligence research into tools for the wider world. She is also a senior research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where she heads the Computational Perception and Cognition group. Oliva has received an NSF Career Award in computational neuroscience, a Guggenheim fellowship in computer science and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship in cognitive neuroscience. She has served as an expert to the NSF Directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering on the topic of human and artificial intelligence. She is currently a member of the scientific advisory board for the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Her research is cross-disciplinary, spanning human perception and cognition, computer vision  and cognitive neuroscience, and focuses on research questions at the intersection of all three domains. She earned a MS and PhD in cognitive science from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, France.

Charlotte Stix is a Research Associate on the AI Policy and Responsible Innovation project. She was formerly at the European Commission's Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Unit, where she oversaw a total of €18 million in projects and contributed to the formulation of EU-wide AI strategy as its youngest ever team member. Previously, she was a Policy Officer at the World Future Council, and before that founded an award winning culture magazine while managing a team of 15 freelancers. She holds a MSc in Philosophy with a focus on cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind, as well as additional degrees in philosophy, fashion design, and the performing arts.

Stephanie Woerner is a Research Scientist at the Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Stephanie is an expert on how companies use technology and data to create more effective business models and her research centers on how companies manage organizational change caused by the digitization of the economy. In 2016, she was a subject matter expert on enterprise digitization for the Wall Street Journal CEO Council Conference. She has a passion for measuring hard-to-assess digital factors such as connectivity and customer experience, and linking them to firm performance. Recent articles (with Peter Weill) include "Thriving in an Increasingly Digital Ecosystem,” and “Is Your Company Ready for a Digital Future?”, in Sloan Management Review. Stephanie is the coauthor, with Peter, of What’s Your Digital Business Model? Six questions to help you build the next generation enterprise, (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018). 

Munther Dahleh was appointed director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, effective July 1, 2015. (See MIT News article with full details.) He was previously the associate department head of EECS. He is also a member MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).

Prof. Dahleh joined LIDS as an assistant professor of EECS in 1987 and became a full professor in 1998. He spent the spring of 1993 as a visiting professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, and has held consulting positions with several companies in the U.S. and abroad.

Prof. Dahleh is internationally known for his fundamental contributions to robust control theory, computational methods for controller design, the interplay between information and control, the fundamental limits of learning and decision in networked systems, and the detection and mitigation of systemic risk in interconnected and networked systems.

Hyunjun Park is passionate about using biology to address complex challenges. As cofounder and CEO of CATALOG, he is leading the effort to handle the explosion of digital information, using cutting edge tools of synthetic biology. Park obtained his BS at Seoul National University, PhD in microbiology at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and conducted postdoctoral research in synthetic biology at MIT.

Daisy Zhuo is a cofounding partner of Interpretable AI. She has extensive experience developing business solutions using advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics and AI systems in a variety of industries, including healthcare, banking, insurance, and information technology. She holds a PhD in operations research from MIT, during which she developed a range of cutting-edge machine learning techniques such as Optimal Imputation and Robust Classifications, with publications in top academic journals.

Sid Henderson is responsible for sales at Osaro, a San Francisco based company that makes AI-enabled vision and control software solutions for industrial robots. Osaro partners with top global system integrators and robot manufacturers to help introduce automation for tasks where automation was previously not possible, specifically in distribution centers for picking and placing tasks. Before joining Osaro, Sid worked at Deutsche Bank for 10 years where he was Head of Counterparty Risk for the Americas. He graduated from MIT in 2013 with degrees in Economics and Management.

Ethan Zuckerman is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and an Associate Professor of the Practice at the MIT Media Lab. His research focuses on the use of media as a tool for social change, the role of technology in international development, and the use of new media technologies by activists. He is the author of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (W. W. Norton, 2013).

With Rebecca MacKinnon, Zuckerman co-founded the international blogging community Global Voices. It showcases news and opinions from citizen media in more than 150 nations and 30 languages, publishing editions in 20 languages. Through Global Voices and through the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where he served as a researcher and fellow for eight years, Zuckerman is active in efforts to promote freedom of expression and fight censorship in online spaces.

In 2000, Zuckerman founded Geekcorps, a technology volunteer organization that sends IT specialists to work on projects in developing nations, with a focus on West Africa. Previously, he helped found Tripod.com, one of the web's first "personal publishing" sites. Zuckerman blogs at ethanzuckerman.com/blog. He received his bachelor's degree from Williams College, and as a Fulbright scholar, studied at the University of Ghana at Legon.

Eric Steinberger is a Computer Science student at University of Cambridge. Next to his studies, he is currently conducting research - mainly independently - on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. Over the past few years Eric worked at TU Vienna as a Research Intern, at the University of Luxembourg as a Research Assistant and offered consulting to Austrian Start-Ups on conceptual planning and development of AI applications, the integration into existing systems, as well as teaching managers and engineers how machine learning works. Additionally, he was a speaker at TEDx, WeAreDevelopers 2018, the 6th IOT Forum, Digital Austria 2018 and The Cybersecurity Forum.

Michael Casey is a senior advisor at the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative and a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. He and his colleagues are seeking to build awareness around digital currencies and their underlying blockchain technology, helping shape scholarship around the topic and exploring dedicated research projects that use this emerging technology to achieve social impact goals.

Before joining MIT, Michael was a senior columnist covering global finance at The Wall Street Journal, where he culminated a two-decade career in print journalism that spanned various roles and stints on five continents. He also hosted online TV shows for WSJ Live and frequently appeared on various networks as a commentator, including CNBC, CNN, Fox Business, and the BBC. He recently revived his involvement with media, taking on a role as Chairman of the Advisory Board at blockchain news outlet CoinDesk and this year founded his own media company, Streambed Media, which focuses on themes of innovation and society.

Michael is the author of five books on the digital economy and Internet culture. In 2015, he and co-author Paul Vigna published the critically acclaimed The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order and three years later published its sequel, The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything. He has also collaborated with documentary filmmakers on the same topic and is frequently called on to speak about these issues at conferences and other public events.

Michael has written three other books: The Social Organism: A Radical Understanding of Social Media to Transform Your Business and Life, which he co-wrote with social media entrepreneur Oliver Luckett, The Unfair Trade: How our Broken Global Financial System Destroys the Middle Class, an analysis of the global dimensions of the 2008 financial crisis, and Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image, about the famous photo of Ernesto "Che" Guevara by Alberto Korda.

A native of Perth, Australia, Michael is a graduate of the University of Western in Australia and has higher degrees from Cornell University and Curtin University.

Karl Koster is the Executive Director of MIT Corporate Relations. MIT Corporate Relations includes the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and MIT Startup Exchange.

In that capacity, Koster and his staff work with the leadership of MIT and senior corporate executives to design and implement strategies for fostering corporate partnerships with the Institute. Koster and his team have also worked to identify and design a number of major international programs for MIT, which have been characterized by the establishment of strong, programmatic linkages among universities, industry, and governments. Most recently these efforts have been extended to engage the surrounding innovation ecosystem, including its vibrant startup and small company community, into MIT's global corporate and university networks.

Koster is also the Director of Alliance Management in the Office of Strategic Alliances and Technology Transfer (OSATT). OSATT was launched in Fall 2019 as part of a plan to reinvent MIT’s research administration infrastructure. OSATT develops agreements that facilitate MIT projects, programs and consortia with industrial, nonprofit, and international sponsors, partners and collaborators.

He is past chairman of the University-Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP), an organization that seeks to enhance the value of collaborative partnerships between universities and corporations.

He graduated from Brown University with a BA in geology and economics, and received an MS from MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to returning to MIT, Koster worked as a management consultant in Europe, Latin America, and the United States on projects for private and public sector organizations.

Since September 2017 Michael Otter is Director General of ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA, Austria’s official trade promotion organization at the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber. ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA, with its more than 100 offices in over 70 countries, provides a broad range of intelligence and business development services for both Austrian companies and their international business partners. The service centers are attached to Austria’s diplomatic and consular missions but are independently operated and financed.

Prior to his appointment in 2017, Michael Otter was Austrian Trade Commissioner to Japan and the Republic of Korea and Deputy Trade Commissioner in the USA, Japan and VAE. From September 2016 to September 2017 Mr. Otter served as Deputy Director General and Chief Strategy Officer of ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA.

Mr. Otter is a graduate of the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Dr. Anthony is Associate Director of MIT.nano, Faculty Lead for the Industry Immersion Program in Mechanical Engineering, and Co-Director of the MIT Clinical Research Center. With over 25 years’ experience in product realization—Dr. Anthony won an Emmy (from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) in broadcast technical innovation—Dr. Anthony designs instruments and techniques to monitor and control physical systems. His work involves systems analysis and design and calling upon mechanical, electrical, and optical engineering, along with computer science and optimization, to create solutions.

The focus of Dr. Anthony’s research is  computational instrumentation—the design of instruments and techniques to measure and control complex physical systems. His research includes the development of instrumentation and measurement solutions for manufacturing systems and medical diagnostics and imaging systems. In addition to his academic work, he has extensive experience in market-driven technology innovation, product realization, and business entrepreneurship and commercialization at the intersection between information technology and advanced manufacturing. His teaching interests include the modelling of large-scale systems in a wide variety of decision-making domains and the development of optimization algorithms and software for analyzing and designing such systems. He has extensive experience in market-driven technology innovation as well as business entrepreneurship.

Jennifer Rupp is the Thomas Lord Assistant Professor of Electrochemical Materials in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. Before she came to MIT, Prof. Rupp was a non-tenure-track assistant professor at ETH Zurich Switzerland where she held two prestigious, externally-funded career grants: an ERC Starting Grant (SNSF) and a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) professorship from 2012 on.

She previously was a visiting and senior scientist at MIT (2011-2012) and at the National Institute of Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba Japan (2011), and worked as a postdoc at ETH Zurich (2006-2010). Professor Rupp team's current research interests are on solid-state material design and tuning of structure-property relations for novel energy and information devices and operation schemes. This ranges from alternative energy storage via batteries or catalytic convertor systems processed by smart material design for solar light and CO2 to renewable synthetic fuels, or novel types of neuromorphic memories and computing logic entities for data storage and transfer beyond transistors. Her team at MIT works on material design, creating novel processing techniques, and making ceramics, cermets, and glass-type ceramic structures. Her team also works on device prototypes, specifically their operation and characteristics.

She has published more than 70 papers, holds 4 patents, and enjoys actively discussing material tech trends on the theme of energy with the public, economists and policy makers. She is a frequent speaker and member of the World Economic Forum (2015-2017), and contirbutes to CNN and other television programs.

Professor Rupp and her team received several honors and awards such as the keynote lecture at the Nature Energy Conference 2016, "Top 40 international scientist under the age of 40" by World Economic Forum in 2015, Spark Award for the most innovative and economically important invention of the year at ETH Zurich, and Gordon Research lecture in 2014, the Kepler award for “new materials in energy technology” by the European Academy of Science in 2012, and the Young Scientist Award by the Solid State Ionic Society.

Sinan Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management at MIT, where he is a Professor of IT & Marketing, and Professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society where he co-leads MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.

He was the chief scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (until its sale to Merkle in 2012), and at Humin, a social platform that the Wall Street Journal called the first “Social Operating System” (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). He is currently a founding partner at Manifest Capital and on the Advisory Board of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science, in London. Sinan was the scholar-in-residence at the New York Times R&D Lab in 2013, and has worked closely with Facebook, Twitter, Snap, AirBnB, Yahoo, Jet.com, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Oracle, SAP, and many other leading Fortune 500 firms on realizing business value from big data analytics, social media, and IT investments.

Sinan’s research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, and a Fulbright Scholarship. In 2014, he was named one of the “World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40” by Businessweek.

Sinan is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern University, holds Master’s degrees from the London School of Economics and Harvard University, and received his PhD from MIT.

He enjoys cooking, skiing, and telling jokes about his own cooking and skiing. His most recent hobby is learning from his four-year-old son. You can find Sinan on Twitter @sinanaral.

Maggie Childs has worked as a journalist, editor and Producer for TV, print and online media, for employers including Condé Nast Traveller and the Associated Press, as well as writing about business and startup-related topics for the Austrian daily Die Presse. In the fall of 2015, she founded the cross-media publishing company Home Town Media and launched its central product, Austria's leading English-language magazine Metropole. As the only English-language publisher in the region, Home Town Media creates digital content and print products for companies in the DACH countries, who want to reach an international audience. Since the summer of 2017, she has been on the board of the non-profit organization and think tank, AustrianStartups.

Sinan Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management at MIT, where he is a Professor of IT & Marketing, and Professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society where he co-leads MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.

He was the chief scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (until its sale to Merkle in 2012), and at Humin, a social platform that the Wall Street Journal called the first “Social Operating System” (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). He is currently a founding partner at Manifest Capital and on the Advisory Board of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science, in London. Sinan was the scholar-in-residence at the New York Times R&D Lab in 2013, and has worked closely with Facebook, Twitter, Snap, AirBnB, Yahoo, Jet.com, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Oracle, SAP, and many other leading Fortune 500 firms on realizing business value from big data analytics, social media, and IT investments.

Sinan’s research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, and a Fulbright Scholarship. In 2014, he was named one of the “World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40” by Businessweek.

Sinan is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern University, holds Master’s degrees from the London School of Economics and Harvard University, and received his PhD from MIT.

He enjoys cooking, skiing, and telling jokes about his own cooking and skiing. His most recent hobby is learning from his four-year-old son. You can find Sinan on Twitter @sinanaral.

Frank Schweitzer has been Full Professor for Systems Design at ETH Zurich since 2004. He is also associated member of the Department of Physics at the ETH Zurich.

Frank Schweitzer received his first Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) in theoretical physics at the age of 26, and his second Ph.D. (Dr. phil.) in philosophy of science at the age of 29, he further earned a habilitation/Venia Legendi in Physics. In his professional career, he worked for different research institutions (Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Fraunhofer Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems, Sankt Augustin) and universities (Humboldt University Berlin, Cornell University Ithaca NY, Emory University, Atlanta GA).

The research of Frank Schweitzer focuses on applications of complex systems theory in the dynamics of social and economic organizations. He is interested in phenomena as diverse as user interaction in online social networks, collective decisions in animal groups, failure cascades and systemic risk in economic networks, and the rise and fall of collaborations in socio-technical systems. His methodological approach can be best described as data-driven modeling, i.e., it combines the insights from big data analysis with the power of agent-based computer simulations and the strength of rigorous mathematical models.

Frank Schweitzer is a founding member of the ETH Risk Center and Editor-in-Chief of ACS - Advances in Complex Systems (ongoing) and EPJ Data Science (until end of 2017).

Shermin is the director of the Research Institute for Crypto Economics at the Vienna University of Economics, and the founder of BlockchainHub. She is also advisor of Jolocom, a blockchain based identity protocol. In the past, she was a curator of TheDAO, on the advisory board of the Estonian E-residency, and an advisor to Wunder, a decentralized Art Museum. She regularly speaks at conferences and consults on Blockchains especially in the context of sustainability and social impact of future technologies. Shermin did her PhD in IT-Management at the Vienna University of Economics. Furthermore, she studied film and drama in Madrid. Her past work experience ranges from internet start-ups, IT consulting & filmmaking. She is Austrian, with Iranian roots, and lives between Vienna and Berlin.

Michael Friedl has been the Austrian Trade Commissioner for the US since September 2014. In this function he heads the office of ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA for the US, which is based in New York. Prior to this posting, he was Deputy Trade Commissioner in Johannesburg and Abu Dhabi. Later he headed the offices in Washington DC and Tehran before being in charge of HR and personnel development at the ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA head office in Vienna. Michael holds an MBA from the Vienna University of Economics and a Master degree in International Public Policy from Johns Hopkins, SAIS in Washington DC. In his spare time Michael loves to cook, run and read books on architecture.

ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA is Austria's official trade promotion authority. Outside of Austria, it operates with more than 110 offices in over 70 countries. ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA provides a broad range of intelligence and business development services for Austrian companies and their international business partners. Its goal is to generate more international business opportunities by promoting the products and services of Austrian businesses around the world, by helping companies and organizations outside of Austria to build strong relationships with Austrian companies and by promoting Austria as a place to invest in. The offices of ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA in the U.S. (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Atlanta) support Austrian companies in doing business in the U.S. For U.S. partners, ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA provides the local link to Austrian companies, products and services and Austria as an investment location in the heart of Europe. As official trade representations, ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA offices provide a reliable source of information and help to reduce time, cost and risk of doing business with Austrian companies (see www.advantageaustria.org/us).