Christoph Guger – CEO, g.tec
Guger Christoph studied electrical and biomedical engineering at the University of Technology Graz in Austria and Johns Hopkins University in the USA and received his PhD in 1999. In 1999 he started the company g.tec which produces high-quality neurotechnology and real-time brain computer interfaces for the research, medical and consumer market. The company is active in many international research projects about brain-computer interfacing, neuromodulation, stroke rehabilitation, assessment and communication with patients with disorders of consciousness and high-gamma mapping in epilepsy and tumor patients.

Harry Halpin – CEO and Chairman of Scientific Board, Nym Technologies
Prior to founding Nym, a startup building a decentralized mixnet to end mass surveillance, Harry was a research scientist at W3C/MIT and Inria de Paris where he led the standardization of the Web Cryptography API across all browsers and initiated the Web Authentication work that led to passkeys and the federated social web standards like ActivityPub. He has a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh and completed his postdoctoral studies in philosophy under Bernard Stiegler. He teaches cryptocurrency at the American University of Beirut and crypto-anarchist theory at the New Centre for Research and Practice.

Solana Larsen (moderator) – Editor & AI Literacy Lead, Open Knowledge Foundation
Journalist and editor with two decades of experience at the intersection of technology and society. Before OKFN, she worked at Mozilla, where she led the annual Internet Health Report, a compilation of data and stories about the state of the internet, as well as two seasons of Mozilla’s podcast on AI, IRL: Online Life is Real Life. Before that, she served as the managing editor of Global Voices, a community of writers and translators who amplify the voices of grassroots and citizen media worldwide.

Zoe Steine-Hanson – Research Scientist at OpenBCI
Passionate about driving the future of human-computer interaction with brain-computer interfaces, Zoe works at the intersection of machine learning, human subjects research, physiological data analysis, and neurotechnology software. Prior to joining OpenBCI, Zoe completed her PhD at the University of Washington, where her research focused on developing generalized machine learning models to interpret brain data. Zoe also spent six months as an intern at Meta Reality Labs, where she developed machine learning models for Meta's Neural Band.

Iness Ben Guirat – Post-doctoral researcher, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Iness is a researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where her work is funded by the FNRS (Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique). She previously earned her PhD from KU Leuven under the supervision of Prof. Claudia Diaz. Her research interests include privacy-enhancing technologies, peer-to-peer systems, and smart city infrastructures. She is particularly interested in the socio-technical aspects of privacy, a perspective explored in her position paper 'Resistance Technologies: Moving Beyond Alternative Designs'.

Laura Cabrera – Advisory Board Member, IEEE Brain and IEEE TechEthics
Dr. Cabrera is the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Neuroethics. She is Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, and Philosophy at Penn State University. She received a BEng in Electrical and Communication Engineering from the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) in Mexico City, an MA in Applied Ethics from Linköping University in Sweden, and a PhD in Applied Ethics from Charles Sturt University in Australia. Dr. Cabrera's research interests focus on the ethical, societal, and cultural implications of the design, development and use of neurotechnologies and other disruptive technologies, as well as their governance strategies, working at the interface of normative, conceptual and empirical approaches. She is also chair of the P7700 -Recommended Practice for the Responsible Design and Development of Neurotechnologies - Standard Development Group.

Reinhold Scherer – Vice President, BCI Society
Professor of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) and Neural Engineering at the University of Essex and Head of the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering. For more than twenty years, Reinhold's work has focused on computational and systems level methods for decoding, modelling, and interacting with neural processes. He has concentrated on nonimplanted Brain-Computer Interfaces, developing algorithms that extract reliable information from electroencephalographic (EEG) and other neurophysiological signals and translate these signals into real time control, communication, and adaptive feedback mechanisms. His academic training spans engineering, computer science, and applied neuroscience.

Renata Ávila (moderator) – CEO, Open Knowledge Foundation
International human rights and technology lawyer and openness advocate. Renata is helping individuals and organisations access and use data to take action on the most pressing social problems, as well as preserving and enhancing human rights through open standards, policy and advocacy. In her previous practice, focused in strategic litigation for access to information and access to justice, she represented high profile human rights advocates, including Nobel Peace Prize Rigoberta Menchu Tum. A former fellow and affiliate of the Stanford Institute of Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence, she is currently associated with the Center for Internet and Society at CNRS, France. She participates on the boards of several organisations, including Open Future, the Center for the Advancement of Infrastructural Imagination and the Just Net Coalition. She co-founded the <A+> Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms and the Progressive International.

Christoph Bublitz – Legal Scholar, University of Hamburg
Bublitz works at the intersection of law, philosophy, and cognitive sciences. One of his main research interests is the legal regulation of the human mind and mind-affecting technologies. As a leading scholar on the human right to freedom of thought, he argues for the revitalisation of this neglected right. Currently, he is the PI of research projects on law and psychedelics as well as virtual reality. He has published extensively in legal and philosophical journals, is an associate editor of Neuroethics and co-editor of the Palgrave Series on Law, Neuroscience and Human Behavior. He has served as an expert adviser to numerous national and international institutions and received several academic awards for his work.

Renata Ávila – CEO, Open Knowledge Foundation

Susie Alegre – International Human Rights Lawyer, and Author
Dr Susie Alegre is a barrister and associate at Garden Court Chambers and a Senior Fellow at CIGI where she leads a research programme on the right to freedom of thought in the 21st Century. She is a pioneer in digital rights, elaborating a new perspective on freedom of thought in the modern era, and has advised civil society, international organisations and governments on the implications of technology for human rights. Her book, 'Freedom to Think' (2022), was a Financial Times and Daily Telegraph book of the year and shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Christopher Bland Prize. Her latest book, 'Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being Human in the Age of AI' (Atlantic Books 2024) is a seminal work on the latest wave of technological innovation.

Burcu Kilic – Principal Researcher, Open Knowledge Foundation
Burcu Kilic is a CIGI senior fellow and a scholar, strategist and expert in trade and technology policy. She also teaches technology policy and international affairs as a professorial lecturer at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.