Anthony Aguirre (born 1973) is a theoretical cosmologist. Aguirre is a professor and holds the Faggin Presidential Chair for the Physics of Information at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

He is the co-founder and associate scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute and is also a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute.  In 2015, he co-founded the aggregated prediction platform Metaculus with Greg Laughlin. In 2019, he published the pop science book Cosmological Koans.

Prior to embarking on his career in academia, Jörn held senior leadership positions in a range of commercial enterprises. In these positions, he spearheaded major initiatives such as the formation of entrepreneurial and intrepreneurial business efforts, expansions of enterprise into new markets, and launches of innovative startup companies. His experience includes work with a range of global business icons, including Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Toyota, BMW, and Bang & Olufsen A/S. Working across multiple geographies and cultures has given Jörn a truly international perspective, which informs his thinking about research, process, and execution.

Jörn’s commercial background ensures that his efforts are rooted in human-centered, consumer-focused values and innovations. He has a specific interest in factors that drive new markets, focus on experiential memory constructs and consumption, and leverage co-creation concepts that include various stakeholders.

Dr. Bühring’s current research explores Design Foresight, Strategic Innovation, Vision, and Fiction, within the context of Strategic Design, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation Management. Since 2010, he has conducted several major studies in the sectors of luxury hospitality, omnichannel retailing, and financial services; this includes a series of futures studies in wealth management and private banking to the year 2030.

Source: Website

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management and Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University. He is also the former President of the International Communication Association (ICA).

Additionally, he is the host of a podcast series titled “Untangling the Web,” where he engages in conversations with thought leaders to explore how the Web is shaping society, and how society in turns is shaping the Web.

Source: Kellogg School of Management webpage

Charles Ess is a distinguished Professor in Media Studies at the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo.

He is known for his extensive work at the intersection of philosophy, computational technologies, applied ethics, comparative philosophy and religion, and media studies.

Thomas Lombardo, Ph.D. is the Director of the Center for Future Consciousness, Editor of Future Consciousness Insights (previously Wisdom and the Future), and Professor Emeritus and Retired Faculty Chair of Psychology, Philosophy, and the Future at Rio Salado College, Tempe, Arizona. He is an Executive Board member and Fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation, a special honor given to members who have made a globally recognized original contribution to futures studies. He is also past Director of The Wisdom Page.

A national and internationally recognized researcher, writer, and speaker, he has published thirteen books and over sixty articles, and given roughly the same number of professional national and international presentations on topics including: the history of scientific and philosophical thought; wisdom, character virtues, and the future of education; future consciousness and contemporary futurist thought; dystopian and utopian thought; theories of the future; the evolution of science fiction; and the future evolution of consciousness and mind.

Source: Center for Future Consciousness

Dr. Colin W. P. Lewis, Ph.D. is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) researcher, although he prefers to call it Machine Intelligence (MI). Most of his work focuses on understanding human intelligence and creating solutions for artificial intelligence that benefits humanity.

He is also an Adjunct Professor and international business and policy advisor, specialized in the social and economic impact of technological change. With specific knowledge of the evolving conditions of technology for productivity growth, development, labor, (in)equality, and competitiveness

Source: Techerati

Dr. Thomas Mengel, APF
Retired Professor of Leadership Studies, Renaissance College (RC), University of New Brunswick, Canada

Thomas is a professional futurist, a writer, and a scholar of leadership studies. He has been facilitating learning around leadership and project management for over 30 years. His degrees are in theology, adult education and psychology, history, and computer science (minor in business administration).
Before joining academia, Thomas has held project management and leadership positions in Europe and North America. He is particularly interested in the connections between futures studies and leadership education. As an active member of the International Leadership Association (ILA), the World Future Society (WFS), the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF), and the Association of Professional Futurists (APF), Thomas tried to imagine and conceptualize what implications learning about the futures might have on learning about and preparing for leadership processes and positions.

At RC, Thomas had included futures perspectives and futures-oriented learning opportunities into his leadership courses. For example, in addition to imagining what leadership in the future might look like, learners engage in questioning their assumptions about the future and in creating personal and professional alternative scenarios.

After his recent retirement from the University of New Brunswick, Thomas co-founded the Killick Coast North Seniors Co-operative and the Sunrise Funeral Co-operative, thereby actively contributing to the implementation of futures-oriented community designs that he continues to reflect and write about.

Source: T. Mengel

Shehu is an accomplished administrator, teacher, and scholar. She currently serves as George Mason’s Inaugural VP and Chief AI Officer in which capacity she also continues to provide leadership for the Institute of Digital InnovAtion (IDIA) for which she served as Associate Vice President for Research during 2022 and 2024.

Shehu also serves as an Associate Dean for AI Innovation in the College of Engineering and Computing (CEC), where she is also a tenured Professor in the Department of Computer Science.

Source: CEC webpage

Eleanor ‘Nell’ Watson, a trailblazer in emerging technologies such as machine vision and A.I. ethics, dedicates her work to protecting human rights and infusing ethics, safety, and values that elevate the human spirit into technologies like Artificial Intelligence.

As IEEE Ethics Maestro, Chair IEEE’s ECPAIS Transparency Experts Focus Group, and Vice Chair of P7001 Transparency of Autonomous Systems committee on A.I. Ethics & Safety, Nell is engineering mechanisms into A.I. to help safeguard algorithmic trust.

She also leads several prominent organizations such as EthicsNet.org, teaching machines prosocial behaviors, CulturalPeace.org, crafting Geneva Conventions-style rules for cultural conflict, Endohazard.org, a hazard symbol project for informing consumers of endocrine disruptors, and Pacha.org, connecting a network of service providers to help enable the automated accounting of externalities (shifted costs) such as pollution.

Source: Website

Dr. Karina Vissonova is the founding director of the Advanced Design Studies Institute and a researcher in design philosophy, specialising in future material wellbeing, sustainable societies, and the evolution of design education. With a Ph.D. in Design from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and over 25 years of experience in research and development, her work contributes to advancing design education through transdisciplinary frameworks. She currently lectures at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest and serves as a research fellow at the MOME Foundation, where she bridges futures studies and speculative design methodologies.

Dr. Vissonova curates interdisciplinary art-science exhibitions, and her publications include peer-reviewed papers, contributions to journal special issues on sustainable design futures, book chapters, and two books published through her institute. A member of the World Futures Studies Federation, she researches at the intersection of speculative design, sustainability studies, and design philosophy.

David Weinberger (born 1950) is an American author, technologist, and speaker whose work explores how technology, particularly the internet and machine learning, shapes our ideas.

Trained as a philosopher with a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, Weinberger’s career has spanned academia, technology consulting, and writing. He taught philosophy before transitioning to the tech industry, where he held marketing and executive roles.

He is perhaps best known as a co-author of the influential Cluetrain Manifesto (2000), which offered early insights into the social nature of the internet.

Weinberger has been affiliated with Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society since 2004, holding positions as a Fellow, Senior Researcher, and member of the Fellows Advisory Board. He has also been involved with the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy.

More recently, his work has focused on the philosophical and ethical implications of machine learning, resulting in his 2019 book, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

Source: Gemini

Rabia is an expert on digital commerce and developing thought leadership relating to this dynamic and increasingly significant subject.

In addition to insights-based content, Rabia works as an internal expert on research design and innovation and has been global project lead for travel and digital consumer research, where she has crafted and managed various sector indices, ensured global data quality and driven thought leadership.

With experience in strategy, research, and insights, Rabia advises clients on digital commerce strategy across a wide range of industries, including retail, fmcg, travel and consumer finance. Her interest in digital technologies and innovation as a denominator to transform and accelerate wider industries enables her to offer cross-vertical strategic insight.

Source: Euromonitor

Amy Zalman is an internationally recognized futurist, author, and educator who advises government and business leaders on anticipating and navigating future change.

Current Roles:

• Advisory Specialist Leader, Defense, Security and Justice at Deloitte: She helps defense and civilian clients develop strategies to thrive in the evolving global information environment.
• Founder and CEO of Prescient LLC: A foresight consultancy that assists Fortune 500 companies, governments, and non-profit organizations in preparing for the future.
• Founder and Director of the Foresight Sandbox: An executive education program providing strategic foresight training.
• Part-time Professor of Strategic Foresight at Georgetown University.

Source: Gemini

Dr. Lior Zalmanson is a senior lecturer (assistant professor) at the Technology and Information Management Program, Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv University.

His research interests include social media, user engagement, internet business models, human-AI interaction, and algorithmic management. His research has won awards and grants from Fulbright Foundation, GIF (German-Israeli Foundations), Grant for the Web, Dan David Prize, Google, Marketing Science Institute, Social Informatics SIG, among others. His works were published in top venues such as MIS Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Information Systems, and MIT Sloan Review.

His studies were covered in The Times, Independent, HBR, PBS, Fast Company, including numerous mentions in the Israeli media. In 2021, he received the Association of Information Systems Researchers’ Early Career Award, acknowledging a combination of research, teaching, and service to the community. He also received multiple teaching awards for his experiential courses in user engagement and online communities. Formerly he was an assistant professor at the University of Haifa, a postdoctoral Fulbright fellow at NYU, and a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum Media Lab. Lior is also the founder of the Print Screen Festival, Israel’s digital culture festival, which connects internet researchers, activists, and artists. Furthermore, he is a grant and award-winning digital artist, playwright, and screenwriter. His most recent VR work (about the bystander syndrome) debuted at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.

Source: Coller webpage

Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (Founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience.

An Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is the author of five books, including, The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero. He has often contributed to The New Yorker, Wired, and The New York Times. His most recent book, Rebooting AI, with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI.

Source: Website

Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992.

Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultural and political divisions. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) and of the New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind (2012) and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff). He has given four TED talks. In 2019 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2018 he has been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. His most recent book is the New York Times #1 bestseller The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

Overview: Sylvie Delacroix is the Inaugural Jeff Price Chair in Digital Law and the director of the Centre for data Futures (King’s College London). She is also a visiting professor at the University of Tohoku (Japan). Her research focuses on the role played by habit within ethical agency, the role of humility markers as conversation enablers and the potential inherent in LLMs’ participatory interfaces. She also considers bottom-up data empowerment structures and the social sustainability of the data ecosystem that makes generative AI possible. The latter work led to the first data trusts pilots worldwide being launched in 2022 in the context of the Data Trusts initiative www.datatrusts.uk. Her latest book Habitual Ethics?  was published by Bloomsbury in 2022 (open-access).

Source: Website

Founder, Modern Polymaths Institute, Polymath’s Place, and Prison Transparency Project,
Author, Coach, Consultant
Ed.D George Washington University 
School of Education and Human Development  2015 – 2018

Dr. Angela Meyers is an internationally recognised as the creator of Modern Polymathy studies, at the core of my work is a deep-seated desire to reduce human suffering by enhancing human thriving. To me the key to that freedom is through actualising our innate human polymathy.

Through my career, which spans professional roles at the Executive Office of the President and managing educational programs and organizational development interventions for leaders from across the federal government, I have been fortunate to blend my passion for leadership, learning, innovation, and interdisciplinary thinking.

Having built an extensive network across government, academia, and among the world’s polymaths has allows me to engage with many of the world’s brightest minds.