Speakers

Speakers

Francesca Bria

Commissioner of Technology and Digital Innovation
City of Barcelona

Francesca Bria is the Commissioner of Digital Technology and Innovation for the city of Barcelona and the leader of the DECODE project, the biggest European effort on data sovereignty. She is a Senior Researcher and Expert on technology and digital policy and an adviser for the European Commission on Future Internet and Innovation Policy.

She has a PhD in Innovation Economics from Imperial College, London and MSc on Digital Economy from University of London, Birbeck. As Senior Programme Lead at Nesta, the UK Innovation Agency, she has led the EU D-CENT project, the biggest European Project on direct democracy and digital currencies. She also led the DSI project, advising the EU on digital social innovation policies. She has been teaching in several universities in the UK and Italy and she has advised Governments, public and private organizations and movements on technology and innovation policy, and its socio-economic impact.

Joan Subirats

Commissioner of Culture
Barcelona City Hall

Joan Subirats is a Professor of Political Science with a PhD in Economics. He founded and directed the Institute of Government and Public Policy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His research fields include policy analysis, democratic innovation and local and urban policies, having published many books on these subjects. His latest books include: The Power of Proximity. The Virtues of Municipalism (Catarata, 2016); Common Goods (Icaria, 2016); Ages in transition. Aging in the 21st Century (Ariel, 2016). Professor Subirats writes regularly for various media outlets. Since January 2018 he is the Commissioner of Culture of the Barcelona City Council. 

Evgeny Morozov

Writer, Technology Commentator

Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion and To Save Everything, Click Here. Morozov’s monthly column on technology and politics appears in The Observer (UK), Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), Internazionale (Italy), Le monde diplomatique (France) and several other newspapers.

His writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and other publications. Previously a senior editor at The New Republic, he has been a fellow at Georgetown University, Stanford University, Open Society Foundations, NewAmerica Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin.

Renata Avila

Executive Director
Smart Citizenship Foundation

She is the current Director of Smart Citizenship Foundation, with offices in Rio and Sao Paulo. International human rights lawyer and digital rights advocate. In her practice, she represented indigenous victims of genocide and other human rights abuses, including the prominent indigenous leader and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum.

She also represented awarded journalist Julian Assange and Wikileaks since 2009.  Avila sits on the Board of Creative Commons and a Coordinating Collective member of Diem25, a movement to democratise Europe launched by Yanis Varoufakis. Her book Women, Whistleblowing, Wikileaks was published by OR Books. She is currently writing a book on Digital Colonialism and regularly writes for several international newspapers.  

Sanya Reid Smith

Third World Network

Sanya Reid Smith is a Legal Advisor and Senior Researcher at the Third World Network, an international coalition specializing in development issues and North-South affairs. Sanya travels the world in tireless advocacy for poor people in developing nations, on topics including access to medicines, womens' rights and environmental sustainability.

Tulio Rosembuj

Universitá LUISS, Rome

Tulio Rosembuj is a former Professor of Financial and Tax Law at the University of Barcelona, currently guest professor at the Universitá LUISS, Rome, where he directs the course Diritto Fiscale Europeo. His most recent published book is Inteligencia Artificial e Impuesto (2018).

He is the author of several publications in his field of study. Among them: Intangibles. La fiscalidad del capital intelectual (2003); Intercambio internacional de información tributaria (2004); Medio Ambiente y Comercio Mundial. Los impuestos (2005); Los impuestos y la Organización Mundial del Comercio (2007); Minimización del impuesto y Responsabilidad Social Corporativa (2009); El impuesto ambiental (2009); El arbitraje fiscal internacional (2010); La crisis financiera y el arbitraje fiscal internacional (2011); Principios Globales de Fiscalidad Internacional (2012, 2013); El impuesto digital (2015), Digital Tax (2015), Bitcoin (2015), Tax Morale (2016), Tax Governance. Los principios de la Unión Europea y del G20 (2017), Inteligencia Artificial e Impuesto (2018).

Alexey Ivanov

HSE-Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development

Alexey Ivanov leads the HSE-Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development (https://ild.hse.ru/) in its academic and strategic pursuits. Ivanov has guided the HSE-Skolkovo joint venture since its inception, directs the Institute's research and progress, and engages the findings of the Institute at the forefront of leading domestic Russian and international legal and policy arenas. Ivanov also researches at the Centre for Law, Economics and Society at University College London, with particular contribution to their Social Media Unit. He is co-founder of the boutique law firm Nadmitov, Ivanov and Partners.

Ivanov graduated with a Masters Degree in Law from Harvard University in 2011, and he earned his first Masters from the Russian Presidential School of Private Law in 2004. Ivanov is a graduate of the Faculty of History and Political Science of the Russian State University for the Humanities (2002).

Maria Ptashkina

International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development

Associate Fellow at International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD), contributor to research group on services and digital economy.  Economics PhD candidate at University Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona, Spain. Former delegate and member of inter-government policy research groups on issues related to international trade and investment (APEC, G-20, BRICS, OBOR).

Wendy Liu

Journalist

Wendy Liu is a software developer and former startup founder who left the tech industry to study inequality at the London School of Economics. She now writes critically about the political economy of the tech industry for UK- based publications like Tribune, Novara Media and New Internationalist. She is an editor for the economics section of New Socialist.

Caroline Nevejan

Chief Science Officer
Amsterdam City Hall

Prof. dr. Caroline Nevejan is professor by special appointment with the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam (2018-2023). Her research is focused on Designing Urban Experience and she supervises 5 PhD candidates in this context. As of 20th of March 2017 Caroline Nevejan has been appointed Chief Science Officer of the City of Amsterdam. The Chief Science Officer orchestrates research between the municipality of Amsterdam and the different scientific, academic and artistic universities in the city. With a small team she makes sure that civil servants and researchers can find each other and invent different new ways of working together. Last year she was part of the editorial board of the conference Flying Money, on Investigating illicit financial flows in the city.

Andres Arauz

Former Minister for Knowledge and Human Talent of Ecuador

Andres Arauz is an Ecuadorian economist. He served as Minister of Knowledge, Deputy Minister for Planning and COO of the Central Bank in the Government of Ecuador. He is a member of the board of the Bank of the South. He has written extensively on geopolitics, procurement, money and technology. He is now pursuing a PhD at UNAM - Mexico.

Tony Norfield

Author

Tony Norfield worked for nearly twenty years in dealing rooms in the City of London, and became Executive Director and Global Head of Foreign Exchange Strategy for a major European bank. He travelled widely in Europe, Asia and the US, visiting corporate, financial and government clients. He has a PhD in Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University.

His blog is EconomicsofImperialism, and in 2016 Verso published his book, The City: London and the Global Power of Finance.

Vijay Prashad

Historian and journalist
Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of twenty-five books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and ten edited volumes, including Land of Blue Helmets: The United Nations in the Arab World.

As a journalist, he writes regularly for The Hindu (India), Frontline (India), BirGün (Turkey) and Alternet (USA) and appears regularly on The Real News Network and Democracy Now. He is the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi). He has appeared in two films – Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017). For twenty five years, he was a professor at Trinity College; he has also been the Edward Said Chair at the American University of Beirut, where he was a Senior Fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy.

Yu Hong

Zhejiang University

After having taught at the Annenberg School for Communication at University of Southern California for six plus years, Yu Hong joined Zhejiang University as a "100-Talents Program" Young Professor in Fall 2017 and is vice director of the ZJU Research Center on Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication.Yu Hong got her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Her research focuses on ICT development, Internet and media policy, and digital capitalism, with a regional focus on China. Yu Hong serves as the Book Review Editor for Global Media and Communication and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Chinese Journal of Communication. Yu Hong is the author of two books, including Networking China: The Digital Transformation of the Chinese Economy (U of I Press, 2017).

Yuezhi Zhao

Simon Fraser University

Dr. Yuezhi Zhao (Ph.D., 1996) is Professor and Tier I Canada Research Chair in Political Economy of Global Communication at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. A recipient of the C. Edwin Baker Award and the Dallas Smythe Award for her contributions to scholarship on communication and democracy, and SFU's Chris Dagg Award for International Impact.

Dr. Zhao's publications include Media, Market and Democracy in China, Communication in China, Global Communications, and Communication and Society (in Chinese). She served as the founding director of the Simon Fraser University - Communication University of China Global Communication M.A. Double Degree Program and is Executive Director of Heyang Institute for Rural Studies.

Fabrizio Sestini

Senior Expert in Digital Social Innovation
European Commission DG CONNECT

Fabrizio Sestini is Senior Expert in Digital Social Innovation with DG CONNECT of the European Commission, and responsible for the EIC Horizon Prize on “Blockchains for Social Good”. Within DG CONNECT, he is leading the multidisciplinary initiative CAPS “Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation”. In the framework of the Next-Generation Internet initiative, he has launched a new area of techno-social research on distributed architectures for decentralised data governance, leveraging on peer-to-peer and blockchains/distributed ledger technologies.
He has a PhD in Information and Communication Engineering and has published some 30 scientific papers. As an IEEE Senior Member, he has often served on boards organising scientific conferences. Fabrizio is an Internet Policy Fellow of the University of Cambridge.

Giovanni Buttarelli

European Data Protection Supervisor

Mr. Giovanni Buttarelli (1957) has been appointed European Data Protection Supervisor since 4 December 2014 by a joint decision of the European Parliament and the Council for a term of five years.

Before joining the EDPS, he worked as Secretary General to the Italian Data Protection Authority, a position he occupied between 1997 and 2009. A member of the Italian judiciary with the rank of Cassation judge, he has attended to many initiatives and committees on data protection and related issues at international level.

The experience on data protection includes the participation in many bodies at European Union level (including Art. 31 Committee of Directive n. 95/46/EC and Taiex programs), and at the Council of Europe (in particular, also as a consultant, T‐PD; CJ‐PD, DH‐S‐Ac, Venice Commission), as well as the contribution to many hearings, meetings and workshops held also by Parliaments and to specialized book journals and papers.  He currently teaches on privacy at the Luiss University, Rome.

Marleen Stikker

Founder
Waag

Marleen Stikker (1962) is founder of Waag and also founder of De Digitale Stad (The Digital City) in 1993, the first virtual community introducing free public access to the Internet. She leads Waag, a social enterprise that consists of a research institute for creative technologies and social innovation and Waag Products, which launched companies like Fairphone, the first fair smartphone in the world.

She is also member of the European H2020 Commission High-level Expert Group for SRIA on innovating Cities / DGResearch and the Dutch AcTI academy technology & innovation.

Ian Hogarth

Co-founder & ex-CEO
Songkick

Ian studied engineering at Cambridge, graduating with first class honours. His Masters project was a computer vision system to classify breast cancer biopsy images. He then lived in Beijing and studied Mandarin for a year. He co-founded Songkick, the concert service. Songkick is used by 17 million music fans every month to discover concerts. He served as CEO for 8 years, scaling the business to $100m in ticket sales and 120 people.

In 2015, Songkick sued TicketMaster for antitrust violations. The case was settled out of court in January 2018 for $130m. He is an angel investor in about 30 start-ups where the main focus of his investing is applied machine learning. He co-authored the State of AI report summarising major developments in machine learning over the past 12 months.

Denis Roio

Chief Technology Officer
Dyne.org

Denis Roio, better known as Jaromil, CTO and co-founder of the Dyne.org think&do tank. He received the Vilém Flusser Award at Transmediale (Berlin, 2009) while leading for 6 years the R&D department of the Netherlands Media art Institute (Montevideo/TBA).

He is a fellow of Waag (Amsterdam), included in the "Purpose Economy" list of top 100 social enterpreneurs in EU (2014) and the "40 under 40" European young leaders program. Jaromil is leading the design of DECODE's technical architecture.

Philipp Staab

Institute for the History and Future of Work

Dr. Philipp Staab, born 1983, sociologist, visiting Professor for Technology studies at University of St. Gallen, researcher at the institute for the history and future of work in Berlin.

His recent publications include: Finance Capitalism and the Digital Economy. An Explosive Symbiosis, Digital Capitalism – How China is challenging Silicon Valley, The Consumption Dilemma of Digital Capitalism, and Market and Labour Control in Digital Capitalism.

Yun Wen

Simon Frazer University

Yun Wen has a PhD in Communication from Simon Fraser University in Canada. She is a senior economist at Infinite-sum Modeling Inc. Her research interests include information and communication technologies (ICTs), Chinese communication and social change, and technology and innovation policy.

She has taught a range of courses in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University and at Columbia College in Vancouver. Yun Wen is the author of The Huawei Model: The Rise of China's ICT Giant in Global Digital Capitalism.

Paul Mason

Journalist and Author

Paul Mason is a British commentator and radio personality. He was Culture and Digital Editor of Channel 4 News becoming the programme's Economics Editor on 1 June 2014, a post he formerly held on BBC Two's Newsnight programme. He is the author of several books, and a visiting professor at the University of Wolverhampton.

Arnau Monterde

Barcelona City Council

Arnau Monterde is responsible for Research, Development and Innovation in Participation at the Barcelona City Council. He is one of the cofounders of the Decidim.barcelona and the Decidim.org projects.

He studies emerging forms of political participation and democracy in the network society. He has also promoted the Laboratory of Democratic Innovation in Barcelona. He was the coordinator of the Tecnopolitica project at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3-UOC). He holds a PhD in Information and Knowledge Society by the Open University of Catalunya.

Nick Srnicek

King's College London

Nick Srnicek is a Lecturer in Digital Economy at King's College London. He is the author of Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2016) and co-author with Alex Williams of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso, 2015). With Helen Hester he is currently writing After Work: The Fight For Free Time (Verso, 2019).

Dan Hill

Associate Director, Arup
UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

Dan Hill is an Associate Director at Arup, and Head of Arup Digital Studio, a multidisciplinary strategic and service design team. He is a Visiting Professor at UCL Bartlett Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose in London and an Adjunct Professor at RMIT University in Melbourne and University of Technology Sydney.

Oliver Nachtwey

University of Basel

Oliver Nachtwey, born 1975 in Unna, is Professor of Social Structure Analysis at the University of Basel. He studied economics at the University of Hamburg and received his doctorate from the University of Göttingen. He worked at the Universities of Jena, Trier, Darmstadt and Frankfurt and as a fellow at the Post-Growth Societies College in Jena and at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research.

His research is focused on work, inequality and social conflicts. More recently, he has dealt with the market orders and legitimation mechanisms of digital capitalism. His book Die Abstiegsgesellschaft. Über das Aufbegehren in der regressiven Moderne (2016) received several awards and has been translated into English and Spanish.

Shoshana Zuboff

Harvard Business School

Shoshana Zuboff is the author of the 2015 article that first theorized surveillance capitalism as a novel and extractive new economic order, "Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization." Her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, will be published in Germany (Campus: October 4, 2018) and in the US (Public Affairs: January 15, 2019).

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism offers a comprehensive analysis of the economic imperatives that drive this new economic order and its consequences for individuals, society, and democracy.