IHTC Program

Her work primarily focuses on protecting human rights and putting ethics, safety, and the values of the human spirit into technologies such as Artificial Intelligence.

Nell serves as Chair & Vice-Chair respectively of the IEEE’s ECPAIS Transparency Experts Focus Group, and P7001 Transparency of Autonomous Systems committee on A.I. Ethics & Safety, engineering credit score-like mechanisms into A.I. to help safeguard algorithmic trust. She also chairs EthicsNet.org, a community teaching prosocial behaviors to machines, 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.

Nell serves as an Executive Consultant on philosophical matters for Apple, as well as serving as Senior Scientific Advisor to The Future Society, and Senior Fellow to The Atlantic Council. She also holds Fellowships with the British Computing Society and Royal Statistical Society, among others.

Her public speaking has inspired audiences to work towards a brighter future at venues such as The World Bank, The United Nations General Assembly, and The Royal Society.

Nelishia Pillay holds the Multichoice Joint-Chair in Machine Learning and SARChI Chair in Artificial Intelligence. She is chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Intelligent Systems Applications, IEEE Task Force on Hyper-Heuristics and the IEEE Task Force on Automated Algorithm Design, Configuration and Selection.

Her research areas include hyper-heuristics, automated design of machine learning and search techniques, combinatorial optimization, genetic programming, genetic algorithms and deep learning for and more generally machine learning and optimization for sustainable development. These are the focus areas of the NICOG (Nature-Inspired Computing Optimization) research group which she has established.

She has published in these areas in journals, national and international conference proceedings.

She has served on program committees for numerous national and international conferences and is a reviewer for various international journals.

Dora Kaufman holds a PhD in communication science at Universidade de São Paulo/USP with Internship Program at Université Paris-Sorbonne IV.

She is a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo in ethical and social impacts of AI. She has a post-doctorate in Production Engineering Program from the COPPE-Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and post-doctorate at TIDD/PUC-SP.

She has more than 30 years of professional experience working in financial institutions and as managing partner of digital communication agencies. She has published three books among them “Will artificial intelligence supplant human intelligence?” (2019).

Dr Sean Brophy is an Enterprise Fellow and Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan Business School where he manages the Greater Manchester AI Foundry, which is a £6m ERDF-funded project delivering AI business and R&D support to SMEs in Greater Manchester.

He is a multi-disciplinary researcher interested in economic development, human capital migration, skills, technology, and ethics.

He spent over 10 years at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, developing executive education programmes for leading organisations like Google, Twitter, KPMG, Accenture, Toyota, and Citi, as well as public sector organisations like the US Army, the Ministry of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China, and the Crown Prince Court of Abu Dhabi. He has also conducted research at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education on commercial practices at UK and US business schools.

Sean has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce.

Darlain Edeme holds a M.Sc. in Energy Engineering for Development at Polytechnic University of Milan and a postgraduate M.Sc. in ICT for Development at University of Turin.

He is currently a research fellow and Ph.D. student at Polytechnic University of Milan in the Electric Power Systems group within the Energy Department. His research focusses on GIS application for vast scale energy planning and rural electrification in Developing Countries.

Before entering the research field, he worked for more than two years as a consultant and program manager for an international NGO within the Mozambican Government’s “Energy for All by 2030” Program.

In particular, he had the responsibility on the implementation of projects for the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation in the frame of the “Ilumina: energy access for local development and women empowerment” Program.

Davide has achieved the PhD in Power Systems from the University of Pisa, where he currently holds a post-doctoral position in the same topics.

Davide has extensively worked in the power system modelling and the optimal multi-year and single-year planning and operation of microgrids for developing countries, also including stochastic uncertainties and multiple objectives.

He has been visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Giacomo Falchetta is a post-doc researcher at the Energy, Climate, and Environment program at IIASA (the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) and at the Free University of Bozen.

Giacomo is working on integrated energy-economy-environment analysis. He is involved in the H2020 LEAP-RE – RE4AFAGRI (Renewables for African Agriculture) project, while at UNIBZ I work on the HIPSTER project (HIgh-Performance statistical methods for Spatio-Temporal Environmental and econometRic data). He is also an Advisory Council Member at EarthArXiv.

His work consists of data-driven research, mostly through techno-economic and integrated environmental modelling and the therefrom derived policy discussion.

He believes in the power of data (in particular, GIS analysis and earth observation) for empowering both research and policy.

Contribution: Comprehensive energy solution planning for rural electrification

Nicolò Stevanato is a Doctoral Researcher at Politecnico di Milan. His field of research field locates in the framework of energy system modelling for policy support and long-term energy planning in developing countries, with particular focus on the issue of access to electricity in rural areas. In particular the research investigates the nexus between fundamental human needs and electricity demand, defined as Demand-Need Nexus.
Bottom-up energy modelling is used to investigate the impact of linking the electricity demand projections of unelectrified areas to the expected needs of the rural communities in the sizing of specific off-grid energy systems, all the way up to the investigation of long-term planning of national electrification strategies, studying the likely evolution of the latent electricity demand of developing countries. These analyses are then used to support scientifically informed national energy policies and energy planning strategies.

Contribution: Lateral electrification : Towards a viable technological, sociological and economical path to build smart power infrastructure in Africa from the bottom-up.