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2022 Rhodes Technology & Society Forum

 
  • 12 November 2022 - 12 November 2022
  • 09:00 - 17:30 (GMT+00:00)
  • Institute of Engineering and Technology

Description

Join us for the inaugural hybrid Rhodes Forum on Technology & Society at the Institute of Engineering and Technology in London

Rhodes Technology & Society Forum

'The Realignment Problem: Aligning Technology with our Values'              

Saturday 12th November 2022

IET, 2 Savoy Place, London

ABOUT:

Advancements in technology often focus on speed and scale. AI is automating tasks both menial and creative, advancements in biotech are beginning to enable precision medicine for all, and communications platforms let societies interact near the speed of light. It seems like we’re on the precipice of radical innovations — but amid those leaps forward in speed and scale, how should we consider the direction of innovation? Are technologies value-neutral, or value-laden? How should innovation engage with moral and social decisions? And what are the roles of governments, entrepreneurs, corporations, and the public in directing the present and future of technology?

This year’s Rhodes Technology and Society Forum will consider the relationship between technology and values, exploring how innovations shape us and how we can shape them. We will question how (and which) values are represented in our technology today, and how to shape future technology to support dignity, equity, and governance accountable to all. Through keynotes, panel discussions, and opportunities to connect, the Forum will explore a range of perspectives from across cultures and disciplines, creating a conversation that welcomes technologists, policymakers, and leaders from around the globe.

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS INCLUDE:

  • Rahul Bajaj (India & Linacre 2018), Co-Founder, Mission Accessibility
  • Abeba Birhane, Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI - Mozilla
  • Rumman Chowdhury, Director of Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency & Accountability, Twitter
  • Stephanie Hare, Researcher, Broadcaster & Author
  • Sarah Herrlinger, Director, Global Accessibility Policy & Initiatives at Apple
  • Johannes Kleijssen, Director, Information Society - Action Against Crime, Council of Europe
  • Matthew Might, Professor and Director, Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at UAB
  • Elaine Nsoesie, Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health
  • Julie Owono, Executive Director, Internet without Borders
  • David Robinson (Maryland & Balliol 2004), Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley and Faculty, Apple University
  • Anasuya Sengupta (India & St Peter's 1996), Co-Founder and Co-Director, Whose Knowledge?

VIEW THE LATEST PROGRAMME HERE

REGISTRATION:

Tickets are on a first-come, first-served basis and are available today! If you have any questions please contact conferences@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk.

After purchasing your ticket on this page, you will be invited to register on our Forum event platform and app closer to the conference date.

CONTACT:

Confirmed Speakers and the programme will be updated on our website.

Delegates are responsible for organising their own accommodation. Book early to avoid disappointment!

Please contact conferences@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk if you have any questions or have any difficulties booking.

Dress Code: Business Casual - No Ties

*Please note that your attendance fee helps to partially cover the cost of the Forum. We rely on the generosity of individual donors and other sponsors to cover the rest of the costs. This particular event was made possible through the generous support of our donor, Kevin Xu as part of the Kevin Xu Initiative on Science, Technology, and Society at the Rhodes Trust . Your ticket cost includes lunch, refreshments and snacks throughout the day, a full day of conferencing *

Programme

Download full programme

Speakers

Forum Speaker

  • Rahul Bajaj is a practicing lawyer, a Rhodes Scholar, a legal policymaker and a young legal academic and a disability rights activist. His areas of interest are intellectual property law, constitutional law and disability rights law. Rahul has co-founded an organization called the RPwD Mission Accessibility foundation. This organization seeks to make the right to digital accessibility real for persons with disabilities. Being blind since birth, Rahul believes that every disabled person has the right to an accessible world.
  • Tamsin Berry is a co-founder and partner of Population Health Partners. Tamsin has extensive experience in government and expertise in health policy. As the former Director of the UK Office for Life Sciences, she worked with Sir John Bell to write the UK’s Life Sciences Industrial Strategy, which led to £3 billion of investment into UK biotech across several public and private partnership projects. Tamsin held a number of leadership positions in government, spanning policy, corporate, and communications roles at the Cabinet Office, Department of Health, and Public Health England. Her final role was in the COVID Taskforce, where Tamsin was the senior responsible officer for serology and seroprevalence surveys at the start of the pandemic.
  • Abeba Birhane (PhD) is a cognitive scientist researching human behaviour, social systems, and responsible and ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI). She is a Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation. Her interdisciplinary research explores various broad themes in cognitive science, AI, complexity science, and theories of decoloniality.
  • Emma is the Research Manager at GovAI, where she is responsible for helping researchers conduct and disseminate their research effectively. She has a background in medical physics, privacy preserving technologies, and machine learning applications for medical imaging. She holds a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Oxford focused on mathematical modelling of MRI physics.
  • Eleanor Brown is a Co-Founder of DiversiBoard, a Techstars company. DiversiBoard is a rapidly growing platform that enables companies to source diverse technical talent from both her native Caribbean and West Africa. She is also a Professor of Law at Penn State Law, a Professor of International Affairs at the Penn State School of International Affairs, and a Senior Scientist at Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute. She also recently served as an Associate Dean of External Affairs and Corporate Partnerships for Penn State Law. Brown, a Canadian, Jamaican and U.S. national, was previously a chair of the Jamaica Trade Board. Brown was appointed by Andrew Holness, the Prime Minister of Jamaica, to the CARICOM Commission.
  • Dr. Rumman Chowdhury’s passion lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and humanity. She is a pioneer in the field of applied algorithmic ethics, creating cutting-edge socio-technical solutions for ethical, explainable and transparent AI. She is currently the Director of META (ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability) team at Twitter, leading a team of applied researchers and engineers to identify and mitigate algorithmic harms on the platform. Previously, she was CEO and founder of Parity, an enterprise algorithmic audit platform company. She formerly served as Global Lead for Responsible AI at Accenture Applied Intelligence. In her work as Accenture’s Responsible AI lead, she led the design of the Fairness Tool, a first-in-industry algorithmic tool to identify and mitigate bias in AI systems. Dr. Chowdhury co-authored a Harvard Business Review piece on it’s influences and impact. Dr. Chowdhury is dedicated to cultivating and growing the next wave of technology-forward companies enabling the responsible use of emerging technologies. She is a General Partner (and founder) of the Parity Responsible Innovation venture capital fund. She also serves as a mentor for the Creative Destruction Lab and as a board member of Startups and Society.
  • Anuradha Gupta is the President of Global Immunization at the Sabin Vaccine Institute. A veteran public health leader, Ms. Gupta has in her previous roles spearheaded a host of successful global initiatives to improve the health of women and children and harness the full power of vaccines. Her work has created profound impact at a global scale, saving and improving millions of lives. Prior to Sabin, Ms. Gupta spent several years at Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, as its deputy CEO, where she pioneered the concept of zero-dose children – focusing on children who have not received even a single dose of the most basic vaccines. She also led efforts to roll out a new framework for a country-centric engagement immunization strategy with remarkable success. Before her time at Gavi, Anuradha served as Mission Director of the National Health Mission of India, where she ran the largest public health program in the world and played a leading role in the country’s efforts to eradicate polio, reduce maternal and child mortality, and revitalize primary health care. Anuradha holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Wollongong in Australia.
  • Stephanie Hare is a researcher, broadcaster and author focused on technology, politics and history. Selected for the BBC Expert Women programme and the Foreign Policy Interrupted fellowship, she contributes frequently to radio and television and has published in the Financial Times, The Washington Post, the Guardian/Observer, the Harvard Business Review, and WIRED. Previously she worked at Accenture, Palantir, and Oxford Analytica and held the Alistair Horne Visiting Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford. She earned a PhD and MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, including a year at the Université de la Sorbonne (Paris IV).
  • Sarah Herrlinger is Apple’s senior director of Global Accessibility Policy & Initiatives. Sarah leads accessibility programs for Apple — including support for disability communities worldwide, the accessibility technologies built into all Apple hardware, software, and services, as well as other initiatives that promote Apple’s culture of inclusion. At Apple, Accessibility is championed as a basic human right and influences all Apple platforms and every customer experience. Since joining Apple in 2003, Sarah has served in several key accessibility roles, including in Apple’s Education organization, focusing on the use of Apple technology to support all learners, as well as defining the accessibility product strategy across the Apple ecosystem. Sarah holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from DePauw University and a Master of Business Administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She serves on the board of directors for the American Foundation for the Blind.
  • Dr Sara Khalid is a Senior Research Fellow in Biomedical Data Science and University Research Lecturer at the University of Oxford, where she heads the Planetary Health Informatics lab. Her areas of interest include artificial intelligence and intelligent remote monitoring with applications in biomedical and planetary health informatics towards equitable health solutions. She is a National Geographic Explorer in machine learning and remote monitoring and a UKRI NERC Fellow in Digital Environment. Sara studied Engineering Science as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, UK and at National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan. She is a National Geographic Society Explorer in Tracking Plastic Pollution with Remote Monitoring and Machine Learning, and a UKRI NERC Fellow in Creating Digital Environments. Sara previously served as an Oxford Ambassador for Women in Data Science.
  • Elizabeth Kiss (pronounced ‘quiche’) became Warden of Rhodes House and CEO of the Rhodes Trust in August 2018, the first woman to hold this position. She oversees the world’s oldest graduate scholarship, the Rhodes Scholarship, as well as several partnership programs. Before joining the Rhodes Trust, Dr. Kiss served for twelve years as president of Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia. During her tenure, Agnes Scott broke records for enrollment and retention and was named the second “Most Diversified College in America” by Time, the country’s most successful liberal arts college for graduating low-income students by the U.S. Department of Education, and the #1 Most Innovative National Liberal Arts College by U.S. News and World Report. From 1997 to 2006 Dr. Kiss served as the founding director of Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, building a university-wide interdisciplinary center focused on promoting moral reflection and commitment in personal, professional, organizational, and civic life. She has also taught at Randolph-Macon College (Virginia), at Deep Springs College (California), and at Princeton University for eight years. Dr. Kiss is a scholar of moral and political philosophy who has published on moral education, human rights, ethnic conflict and nationalism, feminist theory, and transitional justice. She received her B.A. in philosophy from Davidson College in North Carolina, becoming Davidson’s first female Rhodes Scholar and received a BPhil and DPhil in philosophy from the University of Oxford.
  • Jan joined the Council of Europe in 1983 as a Lawyer with the European Commission of Human Rights. Subsequently he served in the Parliamentary Assembly and as Director of the Secretary General's Private Office. He is currently Director of Information Society - Action against Crime. His Directorate carries out standard-setting, monitoring and co-operation activities on Freedom of expression, Data protection, Artificial Intelligence, Internet governance, Cybercrime, Terrorism, Criminal law, Fighting corruption and money laundering… Jan has been Council of Europe Internet Governance Coordinator since 2018. Onalytica, a marketing software platform, in July 2019 included Jan among the Top 100 influencers on the regulation of new technologies. Jan regularly presents his directorate’s work to universities worldwide. Besides his mother tongue Dutch, Jan is fully fluent in English, French, German and Italian.
  • Kate Klonick is an Associate Professor at St. John's University Law School, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Her writing on online speech, freedom of expression, and private internet platform governance has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post and numerous other publications. For the 2022-2023 academic year, she is in residence in Cambridge as a Visiting Scholar at the Rebooting Social Media Institute at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center.
  • Dr. Alex Lachapelle works at the nexus of medicine and technology. After training as a medical doctor at McGill University, he completed a PhD in biomedical engineering at the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His research focused on applications of machine learning for tuberculosis antimicrobial resistance prevention. Alex currently leads product development for Genomics plc, a British start-up that aims to prevent cancers and chronic diseases through the power of genomics. Before Genomics he worked on product and strategy at Imagen, a New York start-up applying artificial intelligence to radiology. He currently serves on the board of directors of the Terry Fox Humanitarian Award Program, one of Canada’s largest scholarship and educational programmes, and previously served on the executive boards of two international medical education associations.
  • Vili Lehdonvirta is Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He is a former member of the European Commission’s Expert Group on the Online Platform Economy and the High-Level Expert Group on Digital Transformation and EU Labour Markets. Before his academic career Lehdonvirta worked as a software developer. His major new book “Cloud Empires: How digital platforms are overtaking the state and how we can regain control” has just been published by MIT Press/Penguin.
  • Dr Milagros Miceli is a sociologist and computer scientist who investigates how ground-truth data for machine learning is produced. The focus of her research are labor conditions and power dynamics in data generation and labeling. Broadly, she is interested in questions of meaning-making, knowledge production, and symbolic power encoded in ML data. Milagros leads the newly funded research group Data, Algorithmic Systems, and Ethics at Weizenbaum Institute. She also works as a researcher at DAIR Institute where she is thinking through ways of engaging communities of data workers in AI research.
  • Matt Might has been the Director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) since 2017. At UAB, Matt is the Hugh Kaul Endowed Chair of Personalized Medicine, a Professor of Internal Medicine and a Professor of Computer Science. From 2016 to 2018, Matt was a Strategist in the Executive Office of the President in The White House. In 2015, Matt joined the faculty of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the Harvard Medical School, first as Visiting Professor and since 2017 as Senior Lecturer. Matt is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of NGLY1.org, and he was a co-founder and Scientific Advisor to Pairnomix. Q State Biosciences acquired Pairnomix in October 2018 and Matt remains a Scientific Advisor and Board Member.
  • Dan Mount is responsible for leading the development of Ofcom’s regulatory approach for tackling online fraud and scams linked to their forthcoming duties under the UK Online Safety Bill. He has previously worked on internet, technology and digital inclusion policy issues in Parliament, the third sector, a digital trade association and private sector consultancy. He holds an MA in International Relations from the Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and a BA in Politics from Durham University.
  • Vinay is the CEO and co-founder of Lightful, a leading technology company for social good. He believes those doing the greatest good deserve the best technology. As CEO, Vinay sets and communicates Lightful’s vision and strategy, partnering with clients and stakeholders, and leads an exceptional team of charity sector and technology professionals. Prior to Lightful, he was a director at Social and Sustainable Capital (SASC) and has held senior positions at Acumen Fund and the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative. Vinay started his career at J.P. Morgan, where was an Executive Director. He holds a BA from Trinity College Dublin and MPA from the London School of Economics. He is involved as a Trustee and advisor to a number of charities, acts as an Industry Advisor at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University, and is the doting father to two young children.
  • Raluca Negulescu-Balaci is the Executive Director of UiPath Foundation, a global non-profit organization, founded by UiPath in January 2019 to support underprivileged children from Romania and India to reach their potential through access to 21st century-oriented education. Raluca has almost 14 years of experience in designing and implementing innovative programs in vulnerable communities, linking education to technology, arts, sport, and community organizing, with a particular focus on digital inclusion. In 2013, Raluca was a Legislative Fellow in the US Department of State professional program “Building grassroots democracy in minority communities” and she received the Annual Human Rights Award of the Embassy of France in Romania for her local women civic initiative – Mothers’ Club. From 2017 to 2019, Raluca was the Chair of the board of Fare network, an international organization with more than 150 members in nearly 40 European countries that works to advance via football social inclusion of marginalized and disenfranchised groups and to engage policymakers, key players and governing bodies in the anti-discrimination movement. She is an alumna of the Global Shapers Community, an initiative of the World Economic Forum, and a 2015 Fellow of the Young Leaders Program of Aspen Institute Romania. Since June 2022, Raluca is also a member of the board of the European Citizen Action Service (ECAS) an international, Brussels-based non-profit organisation with a pan-European membership and nearly 30 years of experience, with the mission to empower citizens in order to create a more inclusive and stronger European Union by promoting and defending citizens’ rights and by developing and supporting mechanisms to increase citizens and citizen organisations’ democratic participation in, and engagement with, the EU.
  • Elaine Nsoesie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. She also leads the Racial Data Tracker project at the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. She is a Data Science Faculty Fellow and was a Founding Faculty of the Boston University Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences. Her research is primarily focused on the use of technology and data to advance health equity. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed literature about opportunities and challenges involved in the use of data from social media, search engines, mobile phones, and other digital technologies for public health surveillance. Her work approaches health equity from multiple angles, including increasing representation of communities typically underrepresented in data science through programs like Data Science Africa and NIH’s AIM-AHEAD; addressing bias in health data and algorithms; and using data and policy to advance racial equity. Nsoesie was born and raised in Cameroon.
  • Julie Owono is the executive director of Internet Sans Frontieres, an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and an inaugural member of the Meta Oversight Board. She founded the Content Policy and Society Lab at Stanford University, which prototyped a novel approach to multistakeholder collaborations, to tackle major content policy challenges. Through her work, Julie Owono explores democratic paths to better governance of online content, on traditional social platforms, as well as for emerging ones, including in immersive spaces. she recently published this analysis on Content Governance in the Metaverse.
  • Emma Pierson is an assistant professor of computer science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion, and a computer science field member at Cornell University. She holds a secondary joint appointment as an Assistant Professor of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medical College. She develops data science and machine learning methods to study inequality and healthcare. Her work has been recognized by best paper, poster, and talk awards, an NSF CAREER award, a Rhodes Scholarship, Hertz Fellowship, Rising Star in EECS, MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35, and Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science. Her research has been published at venues including ICML, KDD, WWW, Nature, and Nature Medicine, and she has also written for The New York Times, FiveThirtyEight, Wired, and various other publications.
  • David G. Robinson is a visiting scholar at the Social Science Matrix at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the faculty at Apple University. From 2018 to 2021, he wrote his first book, Voices in the Code, as a Visiting Scientist at Cornell’s AI Policy and Practice Project.
  • Shefali is a Founding Partner of First Look, a London based venture fund investing in women and diverse entrepreneurs building technology in finance, health, the future of work, and real estate. Prior to that, she was the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Compliance Officer of TrueLayer from June 2017 to September 2020. She was an early employee at Stripe where she was their Chief Compliance Officer and MLRO for Europe, and responsible for the licensing, regulatory oversight including risk, and compliance of Stripe’s operations in Europe. Prior to Stripe, she led ethics, compliance, business conduct, and risk across Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa for Apple, was the Chief Compliance & Ethics Officer for Christie's worldwide, and was in private wealth compliance for Goldman Sachs across Europe and the Middle East. Shefali is an Associate Fellow at Said Business School, Oxford and teaches on startups, organisation behaviour and ethics, leadership, and defi and crypto. She sits on the Board of Tyro (AUS; ASX: TYR), and holds strategic advisory positions at the Barefoot College (India), and Nye Health (UK). Until 2021 she sat on the Board of the Maker Foundation, the entity behind the DAI stablecoin. Shefali is a graduate of RMIT, LSE, and Oxford University where she gained undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in law, economics and finance, and management.
  • Eleanor is a skilled public policy, internet access and digital inclusion global thought leader, working at the intersection of internet, telecommunications and development. In her current role she leads global public policy and advocacy efforts to increase affordable internet access and use, driven by evidence based policy . With over 20 years’ experience in the corporate , public and nonprofit sectors , Eleanor has led national ICT policy development and worked with over 15 countries.She's advised regional governments (ECOWAS, SADC, COMTELCA, UNESCAP) as well as intergovernmental and multilateral organisations (UN, OECD, UNESCO, ITU, World Bank, EIB ) on strategic ICT reforms for digital development. She's a keen advocate for affordable, competitive, inclusive and safe broadband access for communities. Eleanor is an alum of the Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education Program, has a certificate in Public Policy Analysis from London School of Economics and holds an MBA from the Warwick Business School as well as a Bachelor in Science from the University of Ghana . She speaks 4 languages.
  • Anasuya Sengupta is Co-Director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities (the minoritised majority of the world) online. She has led initiatives across the global South, and internationally for over 25 years, to collectively create feminist presents and futures of love, justice, and liberation. She is committed to unpacking issues of power, privilege, and access, including her own as an anti-caste savarna woman. She is a co-founder and advisor to Numun Fund (the first feminist tech fund for and from the Global South), the former Chief Grantmaking Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and the former Regional Program Director at the Global Fund for Women. Anasuya is a 2017 Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and received a 2018 Internet and Society award from the Oxford Internet Institute. She is on the Scholars’ Council for UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, and the advisory committee for MIT’s Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS). Anasuya holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She also has a BA in Economics (Honours) from Delhi University. When not rabble-rousing online, Anasuya makes and breaks pots and poems, takes long walks by the water and in the forest, and contorts herself into yoga poses.
  • Philip Sheppard is a composer, producer, virtuoso cellist, and inventor. He has worked with some of the biggest names in music, tech, sport and film. Philip is CEO of LifeScore, an award-winning music technology company. He has produced many global events, including the Beijing 2008 & London 2012 Olympic ceremonies, Cop21 Paris Climate Summit, Rugby World Cup, Tour de France Grand Départ, Dubai New Year’s ceremonies, as well as scores for dance productions starring Sylvie Guillem & Akram Khan, theatre scores for Juliette Binoche, Cirque du Soleil and Theatre de Complicité, as well as 65 soundtracks for film and video games. He writes with many bands including Odesza, UNKLE, Queens of the Stone Age and his discography includes collaborations with David Bowie, Stanley Kubrick’s estate, Scott Walker and Alexander McQueen. Philip was awarded a place in the AMPAS (Oscars) Academy, a Webby award for LifeScore’s work with Twitch, and a Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Music for lifetime services to the music industry.
  • Divya Siddarth is the co-founder of the Collective Intelligence Project, which advances collective intelligence capabilities for the democratic and effective governance of transformative technologies. She is Associate Political Economist and Social Technologist at Microsoft’s Office of the CTO, and also holds positions as a research director at Metagov and at the RadicalXChange foundation.
  • Fred Swaniker is on a mission to bring better leadership to Africa and the world. He is the founder and CEO of the African Leadership Group—an ecosystem of organizations that are catalyzing a new era of ethical, entrepreneurial African leaders. Over the past 15 years, he has founded and led the pre-university African Leadership Academy, the African Leadership University, the African Leadership Network, and The Room—a community of global leaders committed to unlocking opportunities for undiscovered talent, starting in Africa. Collectively, these endeavors aim to transform African by developing 3 million African leaders by 2035. Fred previously worked as a McKinsey consultant before earning an MBA from Stanford and becoming an entrepreneur. He has been recognized as one of the top 15 emerging social entrepreneurs in the world by Echoing Green; as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Form; as a TED Fellow, and as an Aspen Institute Fellow. In 2019 he was named by TIME Magazine as one of the ‘100 Most Influential People in the World’.
  • Charlie Turrell is a business transformation and change expert, specializing in accessibility and diversity networking, with an ability to understand and navigate business structures and processes. She has been the Manager of the Accessibility Champions Network at the BBC for three years and has moved to the Ministry of Justice to continue that work. Charlie is also founder of the Global Champions of Accessibility Network (CAN), and is a regular public speaker promoting Accessibility culture in all organisations.
  • Kevin Xu serves as the Chairman of MEBO Group and CEO of MEBO International Inc. & Skingenix. He is also the owner of LA weekly. In addition, Kevin Xu serves as member of the Clinton Global Initiative, the Forbes Non-Profit Council, the Fortune CEO Initiative and the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC). He is the founder of National Rongxiang Xu Foundation, Human Heritage Project, California Fight Against Coronavirus (CFAC) and Kevin Xu Initiative at Harris School of Public Policy at University of Chicago. Xu also serves on the advisory board of Rongxiang Xu MD Center for Regenerative Therapeutics at Beth Israel Deaconess Center of Harvard Medical School; the advisory board of Kevin Xu Neurotechnology Center at California Institute of Technology; the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology Asian Advisory Board; and the Presidential Council of California State University, Los Angeles. In 2016, the USC Davis School of Gerontology installed Kevin Xu Professor of Gerontology. Kevin Xu is a contributing author for Wired, Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, Business Insider and numerous other publications. In 2014, Xu received Empact 100 recognition at the United Nations. In 2019, Xu was awarded USC Young Alumni Merit Award.

Forum Moderator

  • Peter is a journalist and technologist interested in how structural changes in technology, policy, and law impact the way we produce and consume the news. He is currently completing an MSc in Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute (2021-22), where he’s writing a thesis exploring how email newsletters change the relationship between journalists and audiences on the internet. Next year, Peter will be pursuing a Masters in Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government (2022-23), where he hopes to explore how technology policy targeted at tech platforms impacts news organisations. Prior to coming to Oxford on the Rhodes, he worked as a data visualisation journalist at The Washington Post and The Guardian, and studied at the University of North Carolina (B.A., Journalism & Computer Science) and Duke University as a Robertson Scholar. In his free time, Peter enjoys playing tennis, sailing, and attempting to picnic in every college garden in Oxford.
  • Tech entrepreneur and Rhodes Scholar, Amer holds two degrees from the University of Oxford and is a governance, policy, and finance expert. He co-founded award-winning international companies, built properties in Europe, served as the founding president of the Oxford Syria Society, and advised clients ranging from government authorities to a Premier League FC. Amer is CEO of Masref; a fintech on a mission to enable the middle-class in distressed economies protect their savings and grow their wealth. He is a tireless optimist, an expert problem solver, and, secretly, a music composer.
  • Anupriya Dhonchak is an Indian Lawyer currently reading for the MPhil in Law at the University of Oxford. Her thesis explores whether feminist theory can be used to reimagine a property model of image rights, based on contract and assignment, by accounting for personhood, bodily integrity, relational autonomy, and privacy concerns. She recently completed her Bachelor of Civil Law at Oxford securing prizes for best performance in two of her courses. She works as a consultant for feminist research organisations, and is also a Salzburg Global Seminar Fellow, and Co-Convenor of the Oxford Feminist Jurisprudence Group. Her interests include feminist theory, intellectual property, and technology law.
  • Flora Graham is a science and technology journalist based in London. She writes the Nature Briefing, the influential daily email newsletter for Nature. Flora was previously Digital Editor at New Scientist, and wrote for the BBC, CBC, and CNET, among others. She has appeared as a commentator on technology for news outlets in the UK, Europe and North America. As a speaker and chair, she has appeared at events at the Royal Institution, Imperial College and the Shanghai Science Hall.
  • Malone is an award-winning founder and Forbes 30U30 recipient. He is building a company called Black and Brown Skin which focuses on health solutions for ethnic minorities. The ethos of the company is that the quality of your healthcare should not be compromised due to the colour of your skin. Malone is also the co-author of 'Mind the Gap', a Clinical handbook of signs and symptoms on darker skin tones. The book has been read over 400,000 times since release. Malone has also spoken at organisations such as Google, TedX and prestigious universities globally.
  • Nayana is a doctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute. Her work is interested in how Indian women use locally-made Indian online storytelling platforms , and the kinds of narratives these platforms promote in modern India. She is interested more broadly in decolonisation, race, identity and oppression as it pertains to technology, as well as the stories we tell about these issues. Beyond her own research, she also runs a successful podcast, 'Skeptechs', on tech news and politics globally. She has written about and presented on a range of topics for a vast array of audiences, from AI to feminist cybersecurity to children and misinformation. She also teaches at the University of Oxford.

Forum Committee Member

  • Peter is a journalist and technologist interested in how structural changes in technology, policy, and law impact the way we produce and consume the news. He is currently completing an MSc in Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute (2021-22), where he's writing a thesis exploring how email newsletters change the relationship between journalists and audiences on the internet. Next year, he'll be pursuing a Masters in Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government (2022-23), where he hopes to explore how technology policy targeted at tech platforms impacts news organisations. Prior to coming to Oxford on the Rhodes, he worked as a data visualisation journalist at The Washington Post and The Guardian, and studied at the University of North Carolina (B.A., Journalism & Computer Science) and Duke University as a Robertson Scholar. In his free time, he enjoys playing tennis, sailing, and attempting to picnic in every college garden in Oxford.
  • Vidal is a humanitarian-scientist working on advanced technologies for biological data science. This fall, he will be starting his PhD in Biophysics at Stanford University as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, where he will build tech at the intersection of experimental quantum physics and neuroscience. In the meanwhile, he is working as a Data Scientist back home in Orange County, California. In 2021, he completed an MSc by Research in Statistics at Oxford as Chapman University’s first Rhodes Scholar, studying adipogenesis with Professor Cecilia Lindgren and Professor Thomas Nichols at the Oxford Big Data Institute. In May 2019, he graduated from Chapman with a BSc in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Whilst at Chapman, he pursued research in genomics, molecular epidemiology, cancer survivorship, bioinformatics, and artificial intelligence. Outside of science, Vidal is a bodybuilder, musician, poet, and tinkerer of things big and small.
  • Hatim is a lawyer interested in the intersection of law, finance and technology. Previously, he obtained dual degrees in commerce and law (B.Com. LL.B. (Hons.)) from National Law University, Gandhinagar, India and has completed postgraduate training in international relations at Tsinghua University, China on the Schwarzman Fellowship and in law at University of Oxford, UK on Rhodes Fellowship (Bachelor of Civil Law) . he is currently a doctoral student in law at University of Oxford, exploring proprietary implications of natively digital assets in insolvency contexts. He currently teaches regulatory innovation at Judge Business School and is presently working on developing an experimental regulatory intelligence platform at Regulatory Genome Project at University of Cambridge.
  • Khansa is currently pursuing an MPhil in Development Studies at Oxford. Her research focuses on investigating the role and evolution of different educational systems in Pakistan and their engagement with the disability community. At Oxford, she is heavily engaged with various efforts to make the University itself more accessible and to campaign for Disability Rights. Prior to coming to Oxford, she obtained a bachelors in the science of Foreign Services from Georgetown University in Qatar with a concentration in Media, Politics and Culture. Her main interest is in advocating for Disability Rights and reducing systemic barriers which exclude people with disabilities from educational institutions and the workforce. She spends her free time exploring different coffee places and trying different kinds of scones.
  • Munib obtained his Bachelor's degree from New York University Abu Dhabi majoring in Electrical Engineering summa cum laude with his senior thesis on developing a wearable armband for alert prediction of heart attack. He received the Rhodes Scholarship as the first Bosnian in the award's history and completed his Masters in Computer Science at Oxford before starting his DPhil in Engineering Science in 2022. His master's thesis, which was awarded a distinction, concerned developing robust AI models for increasing CRISPR genetic engineering specificity. He is passionate about utilising the power of artificial intelligence for the improvement of human health conditions, specifically focused on cardiovascular disease and acute medicine. Outside of his immediate research interests, he keeps involved in the AI ethics debate and has been a member of the Mozilla Foundation Working Group on Building Trustworthy AI among other engagements. He loves spending his time swimming, rowing, and reading murder mystery novels.
  • Muhammed is reading for a DPhil in Computer Science at the University of Oxford, supervised by Yarin Gal in the Oxford Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning (OATML) Group. He is interested in developing robust machine learning systems that would enable applications in heterogeneous resource-constrained environments; specifically around sustainability and healthcare. This includes designing machine learning solutions to enable deployment in these settings and developing novel machine learning techniques that solve associated fundamental challenges. Previously, he has worked on AI Governance and Justice in Africa at the Centre of Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford, as a researcher at the Frontier Development Lab and the European Space Agency. He was MSc Student & Research Intern at Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, working with Kris Sankaran and Yoshua Bengio (ACM Turing Award 2018). He completed my BSc in Electrical Engineering at the University of Cape Town. In his spare time, you’ll catch him playing or watching a ball sport (tennis, squash, cricket, croquet and on the look-out for more!), winning at board games or watching trashy TV.
  • Mneera recently completed the MSc program in the Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute, where her thesis analysed Saudi feminist mobilizations against interlocking systems of patriarchal, authoritarian, and technological oppression. Over the past year, Mneera has been a volunteer consultant at the Cornell Tech Clinic to End Tech Abuse (CETA), meeting with survivors of digitally mediated intimate partner violence to help uncover and end the abuse they are experiencing. At Oxford, she was heavily involved with student activism against sexual violence and established initiatives focused on building community through peer support for survivors at the university. Previously, she received her BA from Brown University where she studied Computer Science and Middle East Studies. In her spare time, she enjoys trying new bubble tea places and roaming around on her bike.
  • Shreya is a first year DPhil student on the BBSRC Interdisciplinary Biosciences DTP. I am most interested in microbiology and synthetic biology and my research focuses on understanding and engineering bacteriocins for application as antibiotics to combat multidrug resistant disease causing bacteria. Before coming to Oxford, she received her undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences from Imperial College London. Shreya hopes to work towards bridging the gap between research in the lab and solutions in the real world. To this end, she co-founded a startup called Synthesea that is building a bacterial platform to synthesise omega-3 in order to make fish farming more sustainable. Outside of the lab, she loves to paint, dance and doodle.
  • Lillian graduated and was commissioned from the United States Naval Academy with a BSc in electrical engineering. She then joined the Physical Acoustics Lab reading for an MSc in Engineering Science (by research) under the direction of Dr. Ronald Roy and Dr. James Kwan at the University of Oxford. She is currently researching the phenomena of acoustic cavitation- bubble formation in liquid in the presence of a sound field. Following her time at Oxford, she will go on to the United States Navy as a submarine officer. Her long term career goals include the pursuit of the advancement of science and technology through my work in the submarine community and beyond. In her free time, Lillian enjoys playing violin in the university orchestra and hiking with her friends.

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