Hilel Dridi is a data expert currently serving as a Program Manager Data at the Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, a leading philanthropic foundation in Turin, Italy. He has a strong background in data analysis, management, and strategic implementation, transforming complex datasets into actionable insights. His experience of over 15 years spans the tech, informative, and medical industries, working in multinationals, public, non-profit, and startup environments. He holds an engineering degree in telecommunications from Telecom ParisTech and a COS in Applied Data Science from EPFL. At the Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, he oversees data-driven projects that support the foundation's goals of sustainable development and social inclusion through a data-driven strategy.

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Stefan Schäfers has been working for the King Baudouin Foundation since 2008 first as Head of European Affairs and since 2019 as Director responsible for the European and International programme of the Foundation. Stefan is member of the Governing Board of the European Policy Centre (EPC), the Network of European Foundations and Alliance Publishing Trust (until 07/2023). He is the Chair of Civitates, a philanthropic initiative for democracy and solidarity in Europe and the European Fund for the Balkans. He worked from 2003 to 2007 as a senior consultant for IFOK, a German communication consultancy specialized in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), stakeholder and citizens participation, and was since 2004 head of the IFOK Brussels office. He studied Business Economics at the Catholic University of Eichstätt/Germany and the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Nice/France with a focus on International Business Administration. In 2003, he received a PhD in International Business Ethics.

Jessica Bither is a Senior Expert for Migration at the Robert Bosch Stiftung in Berlin. She leads the foundation’s work on digital technologies & human mobility. Her expertise includes the intersection of tech and migration, the international dimension of German migration policy, and the geopolitics of managing human mobility across borders.

Jessica has served as an analyst, advisor and member of strategy processes for government ministries, international organizations, think tanks, and civil society stakeholders, including as a Migration Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF). She frequently speaks and writes on current migration and refugee policy issues. She is also a trained moderator and policy dialogue facilitator. Jessica holds a master’s degree in international relations from the Free University of Berlin, the Humboldt University, and the University of Potsdam, and a bachelor’s in international studies from Vassar College (USA).

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Carla Hustedt is the director of the “Centre for Digital Society” at the Mercator Foundation. Her work focuses on the impact of digitalization on democratic structures and questions of (in-)equality. Since the start of the program in 2021 she has developed and funded more than 25 projects with partners from civil society and science on issues such as AI-regulation, the design of a healthy digital public sphere, the digitization of the public sector and open innovation. Until April 2021 she was the head of the Bertelsmann Foundation’s “Ethics of Algorithms” project. In this position she led the development of the Algo.Rules, 9 rules for the ethical design of algorithmic systems and coordinated an interdisciplinary scientific alliance, the “AI Ethics Impact Group” in their development of an AI Ethics label. In 2021 Capital Magazin awarded her as one of Germany’s “top 40 under 40” talents in the category “societal issues”.

Parminder is Executive Director of IT for Change, an Indian NGO in Special Consultative Status with the UN. Parminder has been a Special Advisor to the UN Internet Governance Forum and to the UN Global Alliance on ICTs for Development. He was a member of the UN’s Working Group on Improvements to the Internet Governance Forum, and of the UN’s Working Group on international Internet-related policies. He was involved with development of UNCTAD’s inaugural Digital Economy Report in 2019.At India level, he has been a part of many committees and working groups of the government on digital issues; e.g. the Indian government’s committee that developed the first draft an e-commerce policy, and National Security Council’s committee on cyber-security. Parminder is currently a member of Government of India’s Committee on Data Governance Framework. He is also a member of G 20’s Think20 Task Force on Digital Public Infrastructure.

Marietje Schaake is international policy director at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.Between 2009 and 2019, Marietje served as a Member of European Parliament for the Dutch liberal democratic party where she focused on trade, foreign affairs, and technology policies. Marietje is and (Advisory) Board Member with a number of non-profits including MERICS, ECFR, ORF and AccessNow. She writes a monthly column for the Financial Times and a bi-weekly column for the Dutch NRC newspaper.

Bitange Ndemo is Kenya’s Ambassador to Belgium and Mission to the European Union. Prior to his new assignment, he was Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Nairobi’s Faculty of Business and Management Sciences. He also served as the Chairman of the Kenya Distributed Ledgers and Artificial Intelligence Taskforce that developed a digital transformation road map. He is an advisor and Board member to several organisations, including Safaricom, a member of: MIT Artificial Intelligence Policy Forum (MIT AIPF) Panel member, OECD Expert Panel on Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain, World Economic Forum’s Global Blockchain Council.Ndemo is former Permanent Secretary of Kenya’s Ministry of Information and Communication in Kenya. He facilitated many transformative ICT projects, including the undersea cables, open data initiatives, and the Silicon Savanah, a technology city under construction in Kenya. His other assignments include Senior Advisor to UN’s Global Pulse (Big Data initiatives), the UNCDF’s Better than Cash Alliance, and UNESCO’s Innovation Council. He is an Open Data/Big Data evangelist dedicated to simplifying (visualization) data for ordinary citizens to consume. He writes two columns every week for Business Daily and Nation online. He co-edited the book Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making.

Brandeis Marshall is founder and CEO of DataedX Group, LLC. DataedX provides learning and development training to help educators, scholars and practitioners humanize their data practices. She is the author of Data Conscience: Algorithmic Siege on our Humanity (Wiley, 2022). Marshall speaks, writes, and consults on how to move slower and build better human-centered tech by highlighting the impact of data practices on technology and society. She has been a Stanford PACS Practitioner Fellow and Partner Research Fellow at Siegel Family Endowment. Marshall has served as a tenure-track faculty member at Purdue University and Spelman College. Her research work in data education and data science has been supported by the National Science Foundation and philanthropy organizations. She holds a Ph.D. and Master of Science in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Rochester.

Eniola Mafe Abaga is the Founder and Principal of EMA Advisory and member of the Rural Opportunities for Universal Transportation Equity (ROUTE) coalition. Prior to joining ROUTE coalition, Eniola led the growth and development of a number of advocacy coalitions/initiatives at the World Economic Forum (WEF). She developed the OneMap Initiative, a cooperation and co-creation mechanism to help governments use geospatial data together with farmer data and other data to improve planning and decision making on agriculture and land use topic. Eniola also led the WEF’s development of the 2030 Vision Initiative, focused on harnessing 4IR technologies to accelerate progress on the Sustainable Development Goals within the next decade.Eniola was the Co-Founder of #TheNewNigerian, an online community born out of #Endsars movement, now with a community of over 50,000, to reimagine, redefine, and shape a New Nigerian future through collaboration and collective action. In 2018, Eniola was named one of OkayAfrica 100 Women in Africa.

Olivia is an AI Ethicist who specializes in the practical application of ethics to technological and artificial intelligence innovation. She is the founder of Ethical Intelligence, an AI Ethics advisory firm providing Ethics-as-a-Service through the world’s largest network of Responsible AI practitioners. Olivia works directly with business leaders on the operational and strategic development of Responsible AI, and has advised various organizations from Fortune 500 to Series A startups across the healthcare, financial, and media sectors in utilizing ethics as a decision-making tool. In addition to her work as an ethicist, she is on the Founding Editorial Board for Springer Nature’s AI and Ethics Journal, Co-Chair of IEEE’s AI Expert Network Criteria Committee, and is on the Advisory Board of the Ethical AI Governance Group (EAIGG). Olivia splits her year between San Francisco, where she is an active member of Silicon Valley’s ecosystem of startups and investors, and Brussels, where she advises on AI policy and regulation.

Silvana Fumega is a specialist on the intersection between data and inclusion. She is the co-founder of Data Against Feminicide together with Catherine D’Ignazio and Helena Suárez Val, as well as a Research Affiliate at the Data + Feminism Lab, MIT.During her career she served as a consultant for numerous international organizations, governments, and civil society groups. She acted as Research and Policy Director of ILDA until December 2022. As part of her work at ILDA, she led projects such as “Regional Standardization of Data on Feminicide” and “Mapping of Data on Violence against LGTBQ+ people”. Since January 2023, she has been an independent consultant while also acting as Global Data Barometer project’s Director. Silvana holds a PhD from University of Tasmania, Australia. She also holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and a degree in Political Science from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Claudia Chwalisz is the Founder and CEO of DemocracyNext, an international non-profit, non-partisan research and action institute with a mission to shift political and legislative power to people through empowered Citizens’ Assemblies. She works to build new democratic institutions that give people agency and dignity through participation, that distribute political power equally through selection by lot (sortition), and that channel collective intelligence and enable people to find common ground through deliberation. Previously, Claudia served as the Innovative Citizen Participation Lead at the OECD, where she established and analysed an evidence base of around 600 examples of deliberative assemblies around the world, co-authored the “Catching the Deliberative Wave” report, and set standards for implementation and institutionalisation. She was involved in designing the world’s first permanent deliberative bodies made up of people drawn by a lottery in Ostbelgien, Paris, and Brussels. Claudia is an Obama Leader Europe 2023.

Ciro Cattuto is the Scientific Director of ISI Foundation, a non-profit research institute based in Turin, Italy, focusing on data science, complex systems, and their applications to public health and social impact. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Perugia, Italy and has worked at the University of Michigan in USA, at the Enrico Fermi Center in Rome, at the Frontier Research System of RIKEN in Japan, and more. He is a former Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Torino, a former Expert in the Italian Department of Digital Transformation, and served in the COVID-19 task force of the Italian Ministry of Innovation. He is a founder and principal investigator of the SocioPatterns project, an international collaboration measuring and modeling human proximity networks. He is an editorial board member of EPJ Data Science, Scientific Data and the Journal of Computational Social Science. He is a Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning & Intelligent Systems and member of the Steering Committee of CRT Foundation.

Jean-Claude Burgelman is professor of Open Science at the Free University of Brussels. He retired in March 2020 from the European Commission where he was in charge, from 2014 onwards, of Open Science at DG RTD. He and his team designed and developed the EC’s polices on open science, the European Open Science Cloud, open data, and open access.Until 2000, he was full professor of communication technology policy at the Free University of Brussels, as well as director of its Centre for Studies on Media, Information and Telecommunication, and was involved in science and technology assessment. He has been visiting professor at the University of Antwerp, the European College of Brughes, and the University of South Africa, and sits on several academic journals. He chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Innovation and was a member of its Science Advisory Committee.He recently joined the advisory board of Open Knowledge Maps, Scimagine, and became the editor in chief of Frontiers Policy Lab. In 2022, he became the director of the Frontiers Planet Prize, a new prize to stimulate science that can save the planet.

Anil Ananthaswamy is an award-winning science journalist, and former staff writer and deputy news editor for New Scientist magazine. He is a 2019-20 MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow. He organizes and teaches an annual science writing workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India. He writes regularly for Quanta, Scientific American, Nature, and New Scientist, among others.His first book, The Edge of Physics, was voted book of the year in 2010 by UK’s Physics World, and his second book, The Man Who Wasn’t There, was long-listed for the 2016 Pen/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. His most recent book, Through Two Doors at Once, was named one of Smithsonian’s Favorite Books of 2018, and one of Forbes’s 2018 Best Books About Astronomy, Physics and Mathematics. Anil’s next book, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI, will be published by Dutton, Penguin Random House, in Jan 2024.

Dr. Stefaan G. Verhulst is an expert in using data and technology for social impact. He is the Co-Founder of several research organizations including the Governance Laboratory (GovLab) at New York University, which focuses on using advances in science and technology to improve decision-making and problem-solving. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the open-access journal Data & Policy and has served as a member of several expert groups on data and technology, including the High-Level Expert Group to the European Commission on Business-to-Government Data Sharing and the Expert Group to Eurostat on using Private Sector data for Official Statistics. 

Stefaan has been recognized as one of the 10 Most Influential Academics in Digital Government globally. He has published extensively on these topics, including several books, and has been invited to speak at international conferences, including TED and the UN World Data Forum. He is asked regularly to provide counsel on data stewardship to a variety of public and private organizations.

Marta is Senior Research Lead at the Data Tank and Adjunct Professor at RMIT University. Prior to that, she was a Professor at RMIT University’s Graduate School of Business and Law. She is one of the co-founders of the Institute of Law and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and past researcher at ICREA (Catalonia). She holds a JSD in law (Stanford University 2002) and a Master in International Legal Studies (Stanford University 2000). Her research interests cover different areas at the intersection of law, political sciences, and technology, with a focus on  data, AI, distributed technologies, human-computer interaction, and the different theories of democracy and citizenship. She has been the PI of a number of national and international research projects and has published over 80 scientific articles and book chapters on these topics.

Anna is a political and social scientist working at the intersections of democratic processes, data and AI, climate, and public health. As The Data Tank’s Senior Policy Lead, Anna is based between London and Barcelona and visits Brussels regularly.

Anna formerly led the public participation research at the Ada Lovelace Institute. Prior to that, Anna managed the research on democratic innovations at Democratic Society, including the evaluation of deliberative mini-publics across the European Union and the UK. She was Director of Innovations and Learning at Africa’s Voices Foundation and also worked as a Senior Research Manager at BBC Media Action, leading teams across South Asia, and East and West Africa. Anna holds a PhD from The Open University, where she applied an intersectional lens to understanding how instant messaging mediates citizenship capabilities. The thesis was awarded by the Development Studies Association in 2024. She completed her MSc in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London. Anna was formerly a journalist, documentary filmmaker and participatory video facilitator.

Vasty is a communications expert and manager with extensive experience working in both national and international organizations, most recently at the Belgian Federal Parliament. She has a strong interest in digital issues, digital ethics, and emerging technologies, bringing a forward-thinking approach to communication strategies. Holding degrees in Political Science and Marketing & Political Communication, she combines strategic insight with a deep understanding of public affairs and digital transformation.

An experienced professional in the areas of data governance and change management, Moiz Shaikh has led large scale systems transformation projects, enabling operational excellence in partnership with government departments, philanthropic institutions and civil society organizations. Prior to joining The Data Tank, Moiz worked for Aam Digital, a technology-for-good startup in Berlin, as their Head of Partnership and supported NGOs in the global south to adopt digital technology and be data driven.Moiz holds a Master of Public Administration from Hertie School, Berlin, a management degree from Symbiosis University and an engineering degree from University of Pune, India. He is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP).

Natalia Mejia Pardo is a political scientist with a keen interest in data-driven policies. She holds a Master’s in Public Policy from the Hertie School in Berlin, Germany, and a BA in Political Science and Government from Rosario University, Colombia. Natalia has previous experience in public finances, formulation, and evaluation of investment projects, gained through her work in the Colombian National Planning Department. 

In Berlin, Natalia has worked as a researcher and project leader with different NGOs on projects related to the health sector, blockchain, social innovation, and the SDGs. In 2022, she was a cohort member of the Vision Health Pioneers Incubator, working as a data analyst in a digital health startup. Natalia is interested in the intersection between innovation, technology, and social impact, especially in the health and education sectors.

Paulina Behluli

Paulina Behuli is a digital governance specialist, specifically, public sector innovation & transformation. She had led several open data projects in Kosovo and across the Western Balkans, varying from measuring the institutional openness of key public administration bodies, increasing civil servants data capacities, and empowering youth with the necessary tech skills to bridge the market skills gap.

Prior to joining the Data Tank, Paulina worked for the Berlin Innovation Agency supporting their B2B programs as well as the pre-seed tech accelerator program, which got her closer to the tech and data startup ecosystem in Berlin. Paulina holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the Hertie School in Berlin with a concentration in Management & Organizations and research focus in Digital Governance. She is a Bachelor of Applied Arts & Sciences from the Rochester Institute of Technology in Kosovo with concentrations in Public Policy & Management.

Elena Murray has an interest in how data can be harnessed as a powerful tool for addressing complex challenges and driving positive change. Her background reaches across both public and private organizations within the higher education sector across Australia and Colombia, gaining valuable insights into the transformative potential of data.

Elena holds a Bachelor of International Studies from the University of Queensland, Australia, and is currently pursuing a Master of Public Policy at the Hertie School in Berlin. She is eager to continue her experiences in the field of public policy, where her focus is on expanding her knowledge and technical capabilities to leverage data effectively in this domain.

Jasmin Menten is a project and event manager holding a Bachelor of Arts in Corporate Communication from the University of Applied Sciences for Management & Communication in Vienna. She also studied Business Communication, International Marketing and Cross-Cultural Management at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada. Jasmin gained valuable professional experience as an executive assistant and project manager at Controller Institut Austria. Since moving to Belgium in 2018, she mainly focused on project leadership in event management, personal assistance and admin support. She is fluent in German, English and Dutch.