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Clare Stark has 20 years of experience working in international relations and strategic planning. As UN Coordination Officer in the Priority Africa and External Relations Sector at UNESCO, she is responsible for enhancing UN system wide coordination on emerging technologies, including on artificial intelligence, biotechnology and neurotechnology and developing strategic partnerships with UN entities and the private and public sector.  She co-chairs the High-Level Committee on Programmes Interagency Group on AI, bringing together 40 UN entities to strengthen the ethical development and deployment of AI to support the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Prior to this position, she served as Strategic Planning Officer in the Bureau of Strategic Planning at UNESCO where she supported the development of the Organization's Medium-Term Strategy and Programme and Budget, and led on issues related to UN reform, sustainable development and multilateral cooperation. She has coordinated and contributed to a number of UNESCO's publications. She holds a Master's degree in International Environmental Policy  from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California and a Bachelor's degree in Political Science from the College of Charleston. She is bilingual in French and English.
 

Mr. Jan Willem Kappes, Senior Vice President Global Sales - ASSAIA

Jan Willem Kappes has more than ten years of experience in various positions in the aviation industry, primarily in the Aviation-IT domain. Having worked for Hahn Air Lines and INFORM Software before, he now belongs to the senior management team at Assaia International AG, the global leader in computer-vision-based aircraft turnaround management, as Senior Vice President Global Sales. Jan Willem's academic background (M.Sc. in Air Transport Management from Cranfield University) coupled with his work experience has gained him a very strong knowledge of the challenges, processes and particularities of many global players in the aviation industry and what can help solving them.
 

Mr. Christian Gagné, Associate member of Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute and Professor at Université Laval in Quebec City

Christian Gagné is a professor at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering Department of Université Laval since 2008. He holds a Canada-CIFAR Artificial Intelligence Chair and is an associate member to Mila. He is the director (on leave) of the Institute Intelligence and Data (IID) of Université Laval. He is also a member of the Computer Vision and Systems Laboratory (CVSL), a component of the Robotics, Vision and Machine Intelligence Research Centre (CeRVIM), and the Big Data Research Centre (BDRC) of Université Laval. He is participating to the REPARTI and UNIQUE strategic clusters of the FRQNT, the VITAM FRQS center and the International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of AI (OBVIA). He completed a PhD in Electrical Engineering (Université Laval) in 2005 and then had a postdoctoral stay jointly at INRIA Saclay (France) and the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) in 2005-2006. He worked as research associate in the industry between 2006 and 2008. He is a member of executive board the ACM Special Interest Group on Evolutionary Computation (SIGEVO) since 2017. His research interests are on the development of methods for machine learning and stochastic optimization. In particular, he is interested by deep neural networks, representation learning and transfer, meta-learning and multitask learning. He is also interested by optimization approaches based on probabilistic models and evolutionary algorithms for black-box optimization and automatic programming, among others. A significant share of his research work is on the practical use of these techniques in domains such as computer vision, microscopy, health, energy and transportation.