Science Fiction
Alex Shvartsman is the author of Kakistocracy (2023), The Middling Affliction (2022), and Eridani’s Crown (2019) fantasy novels. Over 120 of his stories have appeared in Analog, Nature, Strange Horizons, etc. He won the WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction and was a three-time finalist for the Canopus Award for Excellence in Interstellar Fiction.
His translations from Russian have appeared in F&SF, Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Analog, Asimov’s, etc. Alex has edited over a dozen anthologies, including the long-running Unidentified Funny Objects series.
Alex resides in Brooklyn, NY. His website is http://www.alexshvartsman.com.
Josh Gellers is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of North Florida, Research Fellow of the Earth System Governance Project, and Expert with the Global AI Ethics Institute. He is also a former U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Sri Lanka. Josh has published over two dozen articles and chapters on environmental politics, rights, and technology. He is the author of The Global Emergence of Constitutional Environmental Rights (Routledge 2017) and Rights for Robots: Artificial Intelligence, Animal and Environmental Law (Routledge 2020).
Merve Hickok is the Senior Research Director of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, and the Founder of AIethicist.org. She is a social researcher, consultant and trainer on AI ethics & policy. Her work on AI is focused on bias, social justice, DE&I, public interest and participatory development and governance. She aims to create awareness, build capacity, and advocate for ethical and responsible development & use of AI. She has been recognized by a number of organizations - most recently as one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ – 2021.
Merve is also a Data Ethics Lecturer at University of Michigan, School of Information; Member of the Advisory Board of Turkish Policy Quarterly Journal; Member of the Founding Editorial Board at Springer Nature AI & Ethics journal; Advisor at The Civic Data Library of Context; Member at IEEE work groups on AI standard setting and Open Community for Ethics in Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (OCEANIS) alongside national institutions. Merve is also a member of the Board of Directors at Northern Nevada International Center. NNIC serves as a refugee resettlement agency to help displaced persons and victims of human trafficking, as well as organizing programs for international delegations through the U.S. Department of State
Christopher is one of the Senior Lead Designer for Watson Customer Engagement with IBM, bringing IBM Design goodness to products and clients. He also teaches, speaks about, and evangelizes design internationally. His spidey-sense goes off semi-randomly, leading him to investigate and speak about a range of things from interactive narrative to ethnographic user research, interaction design to generative randomness, and designing for the future. He is co-author of Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction (Rosenfeld Media, 2012), co-author of About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, 4th Edition (Wiley, 2015), keeper of the blog scifiinterfaces.com, and author of Designing Agentive Technology: AI That Works for People (Rosenfeld Media, 2017) He is currently contemplating books about meaning machines and interfaces that improve their users.
Lydia is a digital anthropologist and writer whose interests include data, artificial intelligence, bodies, health and culture. She works in the areas where these themes meet; researching workflows and practice in order to design new tools for research, and inform digital debate. In recent work she’s enjoyed exploring the ethical and regulatory frame of artificial intelligence in government decisions; writing stories as part of a plausible, optimistic future of the NHS; writing and editing a collection of stories and essays which explore a post-antibiotic apocalypse.
Calum Chace:
Calum Chace is a best-selling author of fiction and non-fiction books and articles, focusing on the subject of artificial intelligence. His books include “Pandora's Brain”, a techno-thriller about the first superintelligence, and “Surviving AI”, a non-fiction book about the promise and the challenges of AI.
He is a regular speaker on artificial intelligence and related technologies and runs a blog on the subject at www.pandoras-brain.com. He also serves as chairman and coach for a selection of growing companies.
A long time ago, Calum studied philosophy at Oxford University, where he discovered that the science fiction he had been reading since boyhood was actually philosophy in fancy dress.
