Main Stage

Samantha Payne is the co-founder of Open Bionics – an award-winning robotics company turning children with limb differences into bionic superheroes. Open Bionics works with companies like Disney, Star Wars, Marvel and Fox to turn science fiction into reality. The startup builds affordable assistive technologies that enhance the human body. Open Bionics has won the global Robotics & AI for Good award, the James Dyson award for innovative engineering and two British Engineering Excellence awards. Samantha has been recognised as an entrepreneur to watch by Forbes30under30, Bloomberg, and Fast Company. Samantha is a WIRED innovation fellow.

Andy Lark is a globally awarded leader and entrepreneur with significant experience of building the world’s technology, online and consumer businesses. He has built one of the most successful SaaS start-ups into a global software powerhouse; launched apps used by millions every day; lead the transformation of Australia’s most vibrant financial services brand; and, built one of the largest eCommerce sites in the world. Today he is a highly sought-after speaker, futurist and consultant on brand, marketing, digital and customer experience.

He has held multiple C-Suite roles – and worked with leading brands – including, Air New Zealand, Commonwealth Bank, Dell, Emirates Team New Zealand, Foxtel, Southwest Airlines, Foxtel, and Xero. Today Andy chairs Group Lark – a global consultancy driving brand and digital transformations for the world’s leading countries and enterprises. He is a non-executive director of Mercury Energy. He has held directorships with Argent Networks, No8 Ventures, Endace Systems, Simple (chair), SLI Systems, and Fronde. He and invests in and advises numerous start-ups.

Andy is regularly rated in the Top 100 CMOs and digital leaders globally; writes one of the leading marketing blogs – The Daily Lark; and recently co-authored NYTimes and Amazon best-seller, Augmented – cited by China’s President Xi Jinping as recommended reading on Artificial Intelligence.

A Sr. Manager -Global Product Management and Marketing professional. She comes with expertise in introducing and driving thought-leadership on the latest cutting edge technology solutions like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Quantum Computing.

She is an artificial intelligence enthusiast who is motivated to drive and communicate the science and applications of AI which would radically change the way we work and live. She comes with over 12 years of experience in IT industry. Prior to Fujitsu, she was in Global Product Management and strategy roles with Hewlett Packard Enterprise driving the design and roadmap. Manju holds an MBA and Bachelor’s degree in Technology.

Dimitrios Prodromou is the founder and technical director of Humanizing Technologies GmbH, a company that consistently pursues the goal of integrating robots into everyday life in society and creating meaningful application scenarios.

Under the “FernArbeiter” brand, the portfolio is expanded to include the “Telepresence robot” Double. Together with his co-founder Tim Schuster, the team comprises 14 clever and bright minds in three locations in Germany and Austria.

The company is one of the leading software and solution provider for Pepper, the most advanced humanoid robot (by Softbank Robotics). Their ready-to-use core software enables everybody to manage multiple robots, create content and develop use cases in no-time, everything without a single line of code. This Robot Management System drives 110+ robots, and it is considered as the biggest robotic fleet in Europe in private administration. Dimitrios Prodromou holds a master degree in Mechatronics/Robotics and is actively working since 15years in the robotic business.

Jason Yim is the CEO and Executive Creative Director of Trigger – The Mixed Reality Agency with offices in Los Angeles and Aarhus, Denmark. He has creatively led over 150,000 hours of development in mixed reality, including as a Snap Lens Studio Partner, showcase developer for Vuforia and Google, and as an early developer for Magic Leap.

Jason’s recent high-profile work incorporates mixed reality in marketing (Star Wars: The Last Jedi), product development (Hotwheels – Augmoto), location-based experiences (Fish Designer for LEGO House) and Enterprise tools (AR Design Evaluation tool for Honda), all of which demonstrates the wide spectrum of use cases for mixed reality across all industries.

In 2015, Jason returned to his childhood home to speak at TEDx Hong Kong on “Computer Vision Bringing Toys to Life” Additionally, Jason has 4 assigned Patents in AR/MR with several more pending.

Jason was also featured in Apple’s first TV show: Planet of the Apps and won two LA Auto Show Design Challenges back-to-back with his partners at Honda Advanced Design.

M.Sc., Ph.D. in Robotics & AI. 30+ years of experience with Professional Service Robots. Created one of Europe’s largest robotics innovator companies with more than 80 experts. Has given more than 250 talks about robotics around the world, incl. TED-x talks. EU reviewer, evaluator, advisor. Several awards & prizes. Dedicated to robotic entrepreneurship, innovation and business.

Jean-Pierre Bienaimé is the Chairman of IREST (Economic and Social Research Institute on Telecommunications), a think tank of influence based in Paris.

Jean-Pierre has been Secretary General of the 5G Infrastructure Association (5G-IA), representing the digital telecommunications industry (operators, manufacturers, research and academic institutes,
verticals, SMEs) in the Public-Private Partnership (5G PPP) with the European Commission, from 2016 until 2019. He has also been Chairman of the 5G PPP Steering Board.

Jean-Pierre has been Chairman of mobile industry association The UMTS Forum from 2003 until 2016, with a mission to promote a common vision of the development of 3G UMTS and 4G LTE and evolutions, and to ensure their worldwide commercial success.

Joining France Telecom (FT) in 1979, Bienaimé has had responsibilities including Director Planning Department at FT, Advisor to the Director General of Moroccan Telecommunications in Rabat, Director
of Marketing and Product Development for International Networks Services at FT, Chief Executive Officer of Nexus International, and Vice-President Group Mobile Support at Orange. From 2010 until 2016, Jean-Pierre has been Senior Vice-President at Orange Wholesale.

Jean-Pierre is graduated from ESSEC Business School (Master in Management), from Sciences-Po Paris, from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Postes Télécommunications – Paris, and from INSEAD
Executive MBA.

Ruben Horbach is spearheading Innovation for German digital agency ETECTURE and works closely with C-level management to develop the long term digital strategy of the agency.

ETECTURE is always using the latest technologies available while delivering digital transformation projects through a proven method for some of the leading companies in Germany including Daimler, Volkswagen and ING.

Before his current role, Ruben worked as Head of Innovation for the London based Digital Innovation agency Somo. During his time with Somo he worked with many global brands including Audi, BP, Goldman Sachs and The New York Times.

Furthermore, he worked for Apple, founded two start-ups and is a frequent international keynote speaker.

Ruben currently lives in Amsterdam.

Bert Martin Ohnemüller is a high performance business coach, sought-after speaker and author.

He has three decades of experience in leadership, marketing, and communication under his belt.

In his work, he combines the knowledge gained from brain research, evolutionary biology, and positive psychology with the subjects of leadership, communication, and inspiration with the goal of helping people to discover their “best self“ and uniting them with their true emotional strength in mind.

Most recently, he published Mehr Erfolg am Point of Sale and Neues Denken. Neues Handeln. As a lecturer of neuromerchandising® and leadership, he shares his experiences at the Steinbeis-Hochschule in Berlin, the Hochschule Furtwangen University, the American University of Iraq, as well as the Institute for Marketing and Communication in Wiesbaden (IMK).

Bert is married and a father of four.

An experienced adviser for companies on market entry, innovation scouting and growth strategies, Idan has worked with some of Israel’s most innovative early-stage startups in the fields of AI, computer vision and cyber security. With a prior focus on Smart Cities, Idan recently became Director of the UK Israel Tech Hub.

Based at the British Embassy in Tel Aviv, the Hub drives economic growth by establishing tech partnerships that have helped boost the UK economy by as much as £1 billion since it was launched in 2011.

As the Director of the Hub, Idan is using strategic skills and creativity to enable British companies to access Israel’s tech cluster and further develop projects such as smart cities and smart industries, incorporating AI, Computer vision, IoT and other emerging tech to address problems, add value and map future directions in the fields of education, healthcare, communications, transportation, energy and others.

Oskari is a serial entrepreneur with several successful exits and an IPO, more than ten years of experience of startup accelerating & co-operation between startups and corporations. I

n the past, he was Partner at seed fund and venture accelerator Pivot5 and behind such ventures as RTS Networks (IPO), Reippailupuisto Huimala (exit HopLop), Offerium (exit Sanoma), KoppiCatch, and Tabletkoulu.

Oskari has a Ph.D. in Venture Capital with studies in Stanford and the National University of Singapore.  He is currently Partner at Redstone based in Helsinki and covers Redstone’s activities in the Nordic and Baltic countries.

Justin Hendrix is Executive Director of NYC Media Lab, a public-private partnership between the City’s industry and its universities to drive emerging media and technology innovation and entrepreneurship, and the founding Executive Director of RLab, a new 16,500 square foot facility including co-working labs, classrooms, studios, and more in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. RLab is the nation’s first city-funded center for research, entrepreneurship and education in virtual and augmented-reality, spatial computing and other emerging media technologies.

Previously he was Vice President, Business Development & Innovation for The Economist. He holds a BA from the College of William & Mary and an MSc in Technology Commercialization from the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin

Jakub Olek is a communications strategist with over 10 years’ experience of working with new technology and financial companies on government relations, public policy, corporate communications and regulatory affairs.

As Senior Government Relations Director for Lime – the scooter sharing company – he leads market entry and governmental affairs at central and local level in Eastern European countries and Russia. He has successfully led the launch of Lime in seven cities and secured its first to market position as well as introduced Lime to unique partnerships opportunities with cities across the region.

In previous roles, Jakub served as policy and public affairs regional lead for Ofo and Santander Group. With several years in consulting business he also gained an international business development experience while working in Guangzhou, China and Bangalore, India.

Jakub is a corporate lawyer by training, and a graduate of the Warsaw University.

Maria Pocovi is CEO and founder of Emotion Research LAB, a computer vision company which explores how machines understand human emotions. Since 2014 the company has provided facial emotion recognition algorithms with on-line and on-premises solutions for real-time applications.

Maria is passionate about human-technology interaction and the process of bringing new applications to the market which help companies empower emotional sensing on devices to prepare brands to provide the next generation of services, products and experiences to their customers.

Guest speaker “Artificial Intelligence: Cloud and Edge Implementations” Oxford University and MBA, IESE Business School University of Navarra (Barcelona, Spain)

Razvan Sighinas joined ING Bank Romania management Board in March as CIO.
Răzvan is active in the IT field for more than 18 years, having started as a software engineer and moving on to operations and senior management roles in US and Europe for major players including Oracle, Vodafone and Electronic Arts.

He holds an engineer’s degree from the Bucharest Polytechnic University, an MBA from HEC France and several major certifications in software and project management.

Prior to his joining ING he operated as Senior Director for Electronic Arts, running an organization spanning across US, Canada, Romania, Ireland and India in charge of providing technology solutions and services such as game engines, big data and real-time analytics solutions running behind all Electronic Arts’ digital offerings.

In the past 10 years he also headed the IT Operations for Vodafone Romania and created the IT Shared Service Center in Bucharest for Vodafone Group.

Octavian is a tech journalist and the Events & Contents Strategist of start-up.ro, Romania’s finest startups & entrepreneurship publication. Previously, he was the editor-in-chief of the top tech news website in the country and he has written stories about technology and startups for two of the leading newspapers in Romania, Adevărul & România Liberă. He is an avid social media user, with over 10.000 followers, a passionate video creator and SEO Consultant.