BIOGRAPHY

Co-founder & CEO at Deepmind.

Demis Hassabis is a child chess prodigy from the age of 4. He designed and programmed the multi-million selling, award-winning game Theme Park at the age of 17. Following graduation from Cambridge University (1994-1997), with a Double First in Computer Science he founded the pioneering videogames company Elixir Studios (1998-2005) producing award winning games for global publishers. After a decade of experience leading successful technology startups, Demis returned to academia to complete a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London (2005-2009), followed by postdocs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT and Harvard. The journal Science listed his research on imagination and memory as one of 2007’s top ten breakthroughs. Demis is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society of Arts. In 2010, Demis co-founded Deepmind, a neuroscience-inspired AI company, bought by Google in Jan 2014 in their largest European acquisition to date. In December 2018, DeepMind’s tool AlphaFold won the 13th Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) by successfully predicting the most accurate structure for 25 out of 43 proteins.

In 2017 he featured in the Time 100 list of most influential people, and in 2018 he was awarded a CBE for services to science and technology. CBE stands for Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the CBE is the highest-ranking Order of the British Empire award. Hassabis is now Vice President of Engineering at Google DeepMind and leads Google’s general AI efforts, including the development of AlphaGo, the first program to ever beat a professional player at the game of Go

Hassabis has won many pretigous awards including Mullard Award (2014), Nature’s 10 (2016), Golden Joystick Award, Dan David Prize (2020), Wiley Prize (2021), IRI Medal (2021), Princess of Asturias Award (2022), and Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2023).

SUMMARY OF WINNING ENTRY

Proteins do most of the work in cells and are required for the structure, function, and regulation of all body’s tissues and organs. All living things on Earth are made from proteins including animals, bacteria, plants, yeast, virus and so on. They are simple strings of amino acids that fold up from a linear chain into complex, compact 3D shapes. A protein can fold in a near infinite number of ways before reaching its final structure which determines the functions of the protein. A tiny change in the structure can dramatically change the functions of a protein. Therefore, determining the folding structures of the proteins are super important to understand their functions and more importantly, generate the suggestions for drug discovery. The structure of protein was thought to be determined by its amino acid sequence. But proving that was a whole different ball game, and the protein folding problem has been a headache that has plagued and puzzled scientists for 50 years. With the team DeepMind, Jumper and Hassabis conceived and constructed a novel machine learning approach that incorporates physical and biological knowledge about protein structure, leveraging multi-sequence alignments, into the design of the deep learning algorithm, that accurately and rapidly models the structure of proteins.

With AlphaFold, AI (artificial intelligence) was proved that it could accurately predict the shape of a protein down to atomic accuracy, at scale and in minutes. AlphaFold not only provided a solution to a 50-year grand challenge, but it also became the first big proof point of our founding thesis: that artificial intelligence can dramatically accelerate scientific discovery, and in turn advance humanity. AlphaFold is accelerating drug discovery by providing a better understanding of newly identified proteins that could be drug targets, and helping scientists to more quickly find potential medicines that bind to them. The AlphaFold DB serves as a ‘google search’ for protein structures, providing researchers with instant access to predicted models of the proteins they’re studying, enabling them to focus their effort and expedite experimental work.

SCALE OF IMPACT

A system that can accurately predict protein structure has an enormous potential on benefiting many areas. It can help increase our understanding on neglected tropical diseases, the unknown protein structure of which is a barrier of curing them. Such diseases affect millions of people every year, causing tens of thousands of deaths. Due to limited information about human involved protein structures, the process of drug discovery is slow and costly, taking about 10 years and 2,5 billion dollars. In addition, a system like AlphaFold could help finding proteins and enzymes that can break down industrial plastic waste or efficiently capturing carbon from the atmosphere. Thus, the potential of using the protein structure for breaking down industrial plastic waste is very promising on assisting the global need for reducing the global material footprint.

Just after 12 months, AlphaFold has been accessed by more than half a million researchers and used to accelerate progress on important real-world problems ranging from plastic pollution to antibiotic resistance. The database of AlphaFold today has 300+ million of protein structures (nearly every known protein from across the tree of life) while the experimental protein database has only 190,000 structures. AlphaFold is free for everyone. Jumper and Hassabis decided to open source AlphaFold’s code and published two in-depth articles in Nature, which have already been cited more than 4000 times in just more than a year. To date, more than 500,000 researchers from 190 countries have accessed the AlphaFold database to view over 2 million structures.

Traditionally, research has relied on expensive and time-consuming methods to work out structures, such as X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy. It can take from a few months to several years for a biologist to crack the puzzle. “Even then, success is not guaranteed – some proteins are notoriously difficult to find structures of” says Pushmeet Kohli, head of AI for science at DeepMind. With AlphaFold, any researcher will be able to get a protein structure in mere minutes. The Universal Protein database, a collection of all the proteins that science has uncovered thus far, contains over 180 million protein sequences. These protein sequences tell us how the amino acids in a protein are ordered. But, to really understand how proteins function in the body, we need to know how that sequence determines the 3D structure of the protein – and that is a much more difficult task than simply knowing the right order of amino acids. Of those 180 million protein sequences, scientists have so far worked out the structure of just 180,000 proteins. AlphaFold provides predictions for more than double the number of known protein structures to date. Now biologists will be able to work on understanding how proteins interact and function – and beyond that, designing new proteins, enabling quicker drug discovery, deciphering disease-causing gene variations and more.

BIOGRAPHY

Affiliation at the time of the award: Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center, University of Califonia, Davis, University of Califonia, Berkeley, the Joint BioEnergy Institute, Emeryville CA, Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division, Lawrence Berkley National Lab

Pamela Christine Ronald is a United States researcher recognized for studies in infectious disease biology and environmental stress tolerance. She is a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis and a member of the Innovative Genomics Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. She also serves as Director of Grass Genetics at the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, California and a Faculty scientist in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division, Lawrence Berkley National Lab.

Ronald graduated from Reed College with a B.A. in Biology, from Stanford University with a M.S. in Biology, from Uppsala University with a M.S. in Physiological Botany and from UC Berkeley with a Ph.D. in Molecular and Physiological Plant Biology. She was a postdoctoral fellow in plant breeding at Cornell University and joined the faculty of UC Davis in 1992

Ronald was named a National Geographic Innovator and one of Grist’s 50 innovators who will lead us toward a more sustainable future. With her colleagues, she received the USDA National Research Institute Discovery Award and the Tech Award for innovative use of technology to benefit humanity. She was named one of the world’s most influential scientific minds by Thomson Reuters and one of the world’s 100 most influential people in biotechnology by Scientific American. In 2012, she received the Louis Malassis International Scientific Prize for Agriculture and Food. In 2019, she received the American Society of Plant Biologists Leadership Award. In 2020 she was named a World Agricultural Prize Laureate by the Global Confederation of Higher Education Associations for Agricultural and Life Sciences. In 2022 Ronald was named the UC Davis Faculty Distinguished Researcher and awarded the Wolf Prize in Agriculture.

She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry.

She is coauthor with her husband, Raoul Adamchak, an organic farmer, of “Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetic and the Future of Food” which was selected as one of the 25 most powerful and influential books with the power to inspire college readers to change the world. Her 2015 TED talk has been viewed more than 2 million times.

SUMMARY OF WINNING ENTRY

The Special Prize dedicated to “Female Innovators” was awarded to Professor Pamela Christine Ronald for her breakthroughs in isolating the Sub1A gene which facilitated the development of submergence tolerant rice varieties, helping feed millions of people in South and Southeast Asia.

Pamela C. Ronald is an outstanding plant and microbial geneticist. Her contributions to science include:

– Isolation, in 1995, of the rice XA21 gene that is critical for the innate response of plants, and confers resistance to the bacterial pathogen Xanthomonas oryzae pv oryzae (Xoo). XA21 was the first member of this important class of immune receptors to be identified. Subsequent discoveries in flies, humans, mice, and Arabidopsis revealed that animals and other plant species also carry membrane‐anchored receptors with striking structural similarities to XA21 and that these receptors also play key roles in the immune response. This work created platforms necessary for subsequent isolation of the Sub1A gene, central to the VinFuture Prize. Ronald also identified the microbial ligand recognized by XA21, which is a sulfated peptide called RaxX.

– Demonstration of the molecular basis for submergence tolerance in rice. After teaming up with David Mackill who had demonstrated the importance of the locus Sub1 to tolerance to complete submergence, she and her collaborators were successful in the isolation of the Sub1 genetic region, which they showed encodes three ethylene-responsive factor (ERF) transcriptional regulators. Ronald’s team demonstrated that one of these genes, that they designated Sub1A, was upregulated rapidly in response to submergence and conferred robust tolerance to prolonged submergence in transgenic plants. This key discovery facilitated the breeding of submergence tolerant rice by researchers at the International Rice Ressearch Institute. The new “Sub1” varieties provide a 60% yield advantage compared to conventional rice varieties following submergence.

SCALE OF IMPACT

Ronald’s laboratory led the positional cloning of the Sub1 QTL, revealed that it carried three ethylene response transcription factors and demonstrated that one of the ERFs, which she designated Sub1A, was upregulated rapidly in response to submergence and conferred robust tolerance to submergence in transgenic plants. This work revealed an important mechanism with which plants control tolerance to abiotic stress and set the stage for in-depth molecular-genetic analyses of Sub1A-mediated processes with her collaborator. Sub1 rice has reached over six million farmers as of 2017.

MEANINGFUL CHANGE

The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and collaborators generated and released several Sub1A varieties (developed through marker-assisted breeding) in seven countries including India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Bangladesh, where submergence destroys four million tons of rice each year, enough to feed 30 million people.

BIOGRAPHY

• Institute Professor
• Deepak Parekh Institute Chair Professor and Professor of Chemistry
• Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Madras

Prof. Thalappil Pradeep is an Institute Professor* and Professor of Chemistry. He is also an Institute Chair Professor.

He has conceptualized and built the International Centre for Clean Water (www.iccwindia.org), a new initiative of IIT Madras.

Pradeep was born on July 8, 1963. He received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from Calicut University. He earned a Ph. D degree in chemical physics working with Professors C. N. R. Rao and M. S. Hegde at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Subsequently, he spent about two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and Purdue University, Indiana. Since then, he has been working at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He also held visiting positions at Purdue University, Leiden University (Netherlands), EPFL (Switzerland), Institute of Chemistry (Taiwan), Pohang University of Science and Technology (South Korea) and University of Hyogo (Japan).

In 2020 he received the fourth highest civilian award of India, the Padma Shri for his distinguished work in the field of Science and Technology. He has received the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (2022), the Nikkei Asia Prize (2020), The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) prize (2018), and the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (2008) by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.

He is an elected Fellow of all the science and engineering academies of India, a member of several committees of Central and State governments, funding agencies such as Department of Science and Technology (DST) and is the Chairman, Board of Governors of Institute of Nano Science and Technology, Mohali (under DST).

(*) Institute Professor is the highest title a professor can earn in an institute/university. Prof. Pradeep is the second faculty member to earn this title at IIT Madras, among a faculty of 600. There are seven Institute Professors at IIT Madras currently.

SUMMARY OF WINNING ENTRY

The Special Prize dedicated to “Innovators from Developing Countries” was awarded to Professor Thalappil Pradeep for his development of a low-cost filtration system to remove arsenic and other heavy metals from groundwater, helping hundreds of millions of people around the world living with contaminated water get access to clean water.

Pradeep’s work is in the area of molecular materials and surfaces.

His group discovered that noble metal nanoparticles degrade halocarbons efficiently to amorphous carbon and metal halides at room temperature and at low concentrations. This discovery has led to the world’s first nanochemistry based water filter for pesticide removal as many pesticides of relevance are halocarbons. This technology is estimated to have reached about 10 million people.

His group developed several technologies to remove other contaminants from drinking water. Combining several such materials, an all-inclusive affordable drinking water purifier has been developed. An exciting aspect of this technology is the creation of advanced materials by simple and environment-friendly methods. This technology, named AMRIT, is being implemented now in the arsenic affected regions of India. About 1.3 million people are being served every day with arsenic free water by these installations. Several other drinking water technologies have been rolled out from his lab. ​ To take such technologies forward, six companies have been incubated with the participation of IIT Madras. This activity is now being expanded globally.

SCALE OF IMPACT

‘Nanomaterials for water purification’ is now recognized as one of the major themes of research in the area. Pradeep has shown that completely home-grown nanotechnology, from lab to market is possible in India. His recent discovery of ultrasensitive single-particle sensors with the capacity to detect a few tens of molecules and ions may be combined with new materials to make simultaneous sensing and scavenging at ultra-trace levels possible. The new materials he has developed have been put together to make community purifiers in arsenic affected areas of West Bengal which have been running for seven years. Arsenic-free water is now being delivered to about 13,00,000 people using these technologies. The technology has now been approved for national implementation.

MEANINGFUL CHANGE

Pradeep’s work has been to find appropriate and most advanced materials to scavenge specific contaminants in water, unaffected by the presence of others, in the most cost-effective fashion, sustainably. These technologies help the poorest people in rural areas. For technology translation, he co-founded seven companies around advanced materials, capacitive deionization, atmospheric water harvesting, and advanced sensors. He founded the International Centre for Clean Water (https://iccw.world/) for the creation and dissemination of technologies in this area, with the objective of building a water-secure world. The incubated companies of Pradeep helped set up water sensor networks across the country as part of government programs, and the project is rapidly expanding. In the next ten years, it is expected that over 100 million water sensor networks will be deployed cumulatively at homes and in treatment plants.

BIOGRAPHY

• Professor at the University of Southampton and Director of the Zepler Institute for Photonics/Optoelectronics Research Centre.
• Co-Director, the Photonics Institute, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Chairman Emeritus of the Marconi Society
• PI of the National Manufacturing Hub in Future Photonics

Prof. Payne is an internationally distinguished research pioneer in photonics, having been in the field for over 50 years. Optical fibre technology is one of the greatest scientific successes of the last three decades and Payne’s contributions are acknowledged as seminal in many areas. Optical fibres underpin the internet, provide new laser capability and environmental sensing, and drive growth to the benefit of all nations.

Payne’s work spans many diverse areas of photonics, from telecommunications and optical sensors to nanophotonics and optical materials. As others have noted, with his colleagues he has made many of the key technical achievements in almost every area of optical fibre technologies and his work has had a direct impact on worldwide telecommunications, as well as nearly all fields of optical R&D. As a result, he is one of the most highly honored UK scientists in photonics.

David’s pioneering work in fibre fabrication in the 70’s resulted in almost all the special fibres in use today. He led the team that in 1985 discovered the silica fibre laser and the Erbium-Doped Optical Amplifier (EDFA), the device that fueled an explosive growth on the internet through its ability to transmit and amplify vast amounts of data. It enabled the internet to be scaled to global dimensions. The EDFA is widely regarded as being one of the foremost and most significant developments in modern telecommunications.

His current main research interest is high-power fibre lasers. With US funding, he led the team that broke the kilowatt barrier for fibre laster ouput to international acclaim, and now holds many other fibre laser performance records. The fibre laser has revolutionized industrial processing and scientific applications and has seen rapid growth for application in manufacturing. Payne has made numerous leading contributions to these diverse fields.

Payne has published over 650 Conference and Journal papers and been awarded the top American, European and Japanese prizes in photonics. As well as the UK Rank Prize for Optics and the prestigious IEEE Tyndall Award, he is a Franklin Laureate (USA) (with Emmanuel Desurvire), an Eduard Rhein Laureate (Europe) and a Millennium Prize Laureate (with Emmanuel Desurvire & Randy Giles). In 2013, he was Knighted for services to photonics in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours and in 2018 with his colleagues won the Queen’s Anniversary Prize that celebrates excellence, innovation and public benefit in work carried out by UK universities.

Prof Payne is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Indian Academy of Engineering, the Russian, Indian and Norwegian Academy of Sciences, the IET (UK), the IoP (UK) and the Optical Society of America (Optica). Among many prizes, he has been awarded the Mountbatten Medal of the IEE (2001), the Kelvin Medal of the eight major engineering institutions for distinction in the application of science to engineering (2004), the IEEE Photonics Award (2007), the Marconi Prize (2008), the IEEE James Clerk Maxwell Award (2014) and the Leibinger Zukunftspreis (2022).

In addition to his Academic achievements, Payne is a leading entrepreneur. He combines world-leading science with commercial activities and has been the driving force behind a cluster of 10 spinout companies in the Southampton area, creating wealth and employment.

An award that reflects his dual role in academia and industry is the AILU (Association of Laser Users) Award (2010). The Award recognises the major contribution that David has made in the development of industrial laser materials processing in the UK, both in his inventions in the field of fibre lasers and for his role in the establishment of Southampton Photonics Inc (SPI Lasers) in 2000 to exploit the technology developed by the Southampton Universities Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC).

SUMMARY OF WINNING ENTRY | THE GLOBAL NETWORK TECHNOLOGY

By the early 1980’s optical fibres were seen as the future for telecommunications. However, while their loss is low, the optical signal still fades significantly and becomes undetectable after about 100km. Consequently, the fibre had to be terminated, the optical signal detected and converted to an electrical one. It was then amplified in a conventional electrical amplifier before being converted back to an optical signal in another laser transmitter. This electrical ‘repeater’ acted rather like a tollgate on a freeway and limited the transmission to one optical channel only. It was well known that optical fibres could simultaneously carry many independent optical wavelengths (or ‘colours’) without mixing them up, a process called Wavelength Division Multiplexing, or WDM. But the electrical repeater saw all the channels as only one optical signal and would therefore scramble them, making the signals indistinguishable. To overcome this serious drawback, a practical all-optical amplifier was needed that could maintain the integrity of each optical channel and allow the full capacity of the fibre to be exploited.

To solve this problem, in 1985 the field of rare-earth-doped fibres, with focus on the 1.55µm telecom wavelength was revived under D. Payne’s leadership at the University of Southampton. Motivated by early reports from the Southampton group, and as an expert in (Raman) optical fibre amplification, E. Desurvire initiated research on Erbium-Doped Fibre Amplifiers (EDFA) at AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 1987, these teams published the first three seminal papers on the EDFA that clearly showed its remarkable potential as a high gain booster amplifier for use in the nascent optical fibre internet.

The effect of the Southampton/Bell Labs reports, continuously expanding at a breathtaking pace then rapidly joined by the international community, were electric; work virtually stopped on all competing technologies and turned to a worldwide race to commercialise the new amplifier. One should also recognise the key contributions made by NTT – Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Japan in making the EDFA into a practical reality through their work on diode pumping.

The discovery, invention and early development of practical fibre amplifiers revolutionized modern telecommunications, both in capacity (bandwidth) and global reach. The Internet could not have been deployed without the nearly one billion kms of optical fibres that today carry 99% of internet traffic. Not only did the EDFA promise to fully exploit fibre bandwidth (some 100 THz or about 500 Tbit/s coherent signalling) opening “de facto” the way to WDM, but also its energy consumption is minimal, close to the limits set by physics.

The backbone of the internet was made physically possible by transoceanic and continental fibre-optic links in which in-line EDFAs regenerate the information signals every 50-100 km, without distortion nor capacity bottleneck of the huge fibre bandwidth. In remote islands or coastal areas, special configurations of EDFA boosters and preamplifiers permit internet transmission over more than 300 km of passive fibre, thus allowing remote populations to communicate at speeds enormously greater than that of previous satellite or submarine cables.

Currently, new fibre links with EDFA repeaters are being deployed at a rate of over 400M km per year, connecting urban, suburban and village areas to the rest of the world.

SCALE OF IMPACT

On a global scale, both transcontinental and transoceanic (except for small and sparsely populated areas covered by satellites), all the way to Fibre-to-the-Home and Enterprise. Even wireless (5G) networks depend upon local-area fiber-optic networks for access and antenna feeds. Humankind and societal, governmental, economical, security and defence, for all telecom services (public, private, corporate or restricted) provided by the World Wide Web.

MEANINGFUL CHANGE

The EDFA allowed the transformation of previous global networks using old-fashioned electrical repeaters by super-fast all-optical repeaters that do not require light to electrical conversion. The EDFA is capable of boosting optical signals by as much as 10,000 times with a capacity of 200 Tbit/s in a single fibre strand. Without the EDFA, the Internet would have been limited to some 40-100 Gbit/s cable capacity between continents, leading to a horrendous or unaffordable Worldwide Wait! Despite being 35 years old, no technology is yet in sight that can compete with the EDFA. The WWW has transformed both society and the economy, from TCP/IP to upper service layers such as email, attachments, clouds, data centers, web pages and web services. None of this would be possible without the EDFA that is essential to the hardware that transports the internet. Today, new optical fibre links are being deployed worldwide at an annual rate in excess of 400 million kilometers – twenty times the speed of sound! And each year the WWW transmits nearly 5,000 Petabytes (5 million Gigabytes) that traverses the EDFA every 50-100 km of any fibre path.

BIOGRAPHY

Chairman, CEO and President of Corporation for National Research Initiatives

Dr. Robert Elliot (Bob) Kahn, born 23 December 1938, is an American internet pioneer, engineer, and computer scientist who, together with Vint Cerf, invented the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), which make up the fundamental architecture at the heart of the Internet. Kahn laid the open architecture foundations for the TCP/IP protocol, providing the Internet with one of its most distinctive features and what has proven to be a key advantage.

He first worked at AT&T Bell Labs, and, after getting a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1964, joined the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering. He took a leave of absence from MIT in 1966 to join Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), where he later became responsible for the system design of ARPANET, which is considered the predecessor of the Internet. ARPANET was named for its sponsor, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The network was based on a radically different architecture known as packet switching, in which messages were split into multiple “packets” that traveled independently over many different circuits to their common destination.

Starting in 1968 Dr. Kahn worked on the ARPANET project at BBN, before joining the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at DARPA in 1972. He organized the first public demonstration of the ARPANET at the ICCC conference in Washington, D.C. by connecting dozens of different and diverse computers, a watershed event that showed that packet switching technology was a reality and a new age of computer communication was born. Dr. Kahn conceived the idea of open-architecture networking. He is a co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols and was responsible for originating DARPA’s Internet Program. Dr. Kahn also coined the term National Information Infrastructure in the mid-1980s which later became more widely known as the Information SuperHighway. Dr. Kahn subsequently became the Director of IPTO where during a tenure of 13 years he led the US government’s major research efforts in information processing. In 1986 Dr. Kahn left DARPA to found the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), a not for profit corporation, where he is currently Chairman, CEO and President.

In his recent work, Dr. Kahn has been developing the concept of a digital object architecture as a basic approach to managing information in digital form. This notion is providing a framework for interoperability of heterogeneous information systems and is being used in many applications such as the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). He is a co-inventor of Knowbot programs, mobile software agents in the network environment.

Dr. Kahn has been widely recognized as an internet pioneer. He is the recipient of the 1997 National Medal of Technology, the 2001 Charles Stark Draper Prize, and the 2002 Prince of Asturias Award. In 2004 he shared the ACM Turing Award with Dr. Cerf. In 2005 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and in 2008 he received the Japan Prize. In 2013 Kahn was one of five Internet and Web pioneers awarded the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. He has received numerous awards and is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Computer History Museum amongst others. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the Internet Hall of Fame.

SUMMARY OF WINNING ENTRY | THE GLOBAL NETWORK TECHNOLOGY

Together with Dr. Vinton Cerf, Dr. Kahn led the design and implementation of the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) that are the basis for the current internet. They formulated fundamental design principles of networking, specified and prototyped TCP/IP to meet these requirements, and oversaw several implementations of the protocol that enabled to become the global standard for the internet.

SCALE OF IMPACT

The impact of the internet is global and universal across all domains and walks of life. It is the backbone for all information processing, and communication activities across the world, and many of today’s socio-economic activities are built on the the internet.

MEANINGFUL CHANGE

The internet has enabled global collaboration on all aspects of society, industry, economic development, media and communication and governance. It is the engine that underlies our daily activities both at the personal and societal level. It is no exaggeration to say that, without the internet, the world would not be as it is today.

BIOGRAPHY

VP Thales Technical Fellow and Scientific Advisor at Thales Research and Technology. Previously, he held positions at Stanford University, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbia University, and Alcatel.

Emmanuel Desurvire (Ph.D, Sc.D, IEEE Fellow, Alcatel-Lucent Fellow and VP Thales Technical Fellow) has obtained a M.S. degree in theoretical physics at the university of Pierre & Marie Curie in Paris, then a Ph. D. and Sc.D. in applied Physics from the University of Nice, France. His PhD Thesis concerned Germanium-doped Raman fiber amplifiers at near-infrared wavelengths in view of future telecom applications. He is currently Scientific Advisor at Thales Research & Technology (TRT), France, after having directed for five years the Physics Research Department of TRT. He has held previous positions, first as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Ginzton Laboratories (pioneering on Raman-amplified fiber-optic delay lines and recirculating Sagnac-interferometer fiber gyroscopes); then as a Principal Investigator at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Crawford Hill Labs (where he initiated the first research of EDFA, based upon Murray Hill’s know-how in rare-Earth-doped fibers for sensors applications), as Associate Professor in Columbia University Electrical Engineering Department (where in particular, he taught the first academic courses on long-haul amplified lightwave systems) and in Alcatel, first as Head of the Submarine Transmissions Lab in the Corporate Research Center, then Project Manager of the 40Gbit/s WDM – wavelength division multiplexing development in the Optics Division, then Director of Alcatel Technical Academy. He has authored over 200 technical publications, 39 patents, and five reference books on Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifiers (EDFA), Global Telecommunications, and Classical/Quantum Information Theory, and he is the Founding Editor of the technical journal ‘Optical Fiber Technology’ published since 1994

For his pioneering work on EDFAs, he has received numerous recognitions including the 1994 prize of the International Commission for Optics, the 1998 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Engineering (together with David Payne), the 2005 William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award; in 2007, the IEEE/LEOS John Tyndall Award, the France’s National Council of Engineers and Scientists “Engineers of the Year” Award, and the France-Telecom Prize of (France) National Science Academy. He is also Laureate of the 2008 Millennium Technology Prize (with Payne/Giles), and of the 2011 European Inventor Award.

SUMMARY OF WINNING ENTRY | THE GLOBAL NETWORK TECHNOLOGY
By the early 1980’s optical fibres were seen as the future for telecommunications. However, while their loss is low, the optical signal still fades significantly and becomes undetectable after about 100km. Consequently, the fibre had to be terminated, the optical signal detected and converted to an electrical one. It was then amplified in a conventional electrical amplifier before being converted back to an optical signal in another laser transmitter. This electrical ‘repeater’ acted rather like a tollgate on a freeway and limited the transmission to one optical channel only. It was well known that optical fibres could simultaneously carry many independent optical wavelengths (or ‘colours’) without mixing them up, a process called Wavelength Division Multiplexing, or WDM. But the electrical repeater saw all the channels as only one optical signal and would therefore scramble them, making the signals indistinguishable. To overcome this serious drawback, a practical all-optical amplifier was needed that could maintain the integrity of each optical channel and allow the full capacity of the fibre to be exploited.

To solve this problem, in 1985 the field of rare-earth-doped fibres, with focus on the 1.55µm telecom wavelength was revived under D. Payne’s leadership at the University of Southampton. Motivated by early reports from the Southampton group, and as an expert in (Raman) optical fibre amplification, E. Desurvire initiated research on Erbium-Doped Fibre Amplifiers (EDFA) at AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 1987, these teams published the first three seminal papers on the EDFA that clearly showed its remarkable potential as a high gain booster amplifier for use in the nascent optical fibre internet.

The effect of the Southampton/Bell Labs reports, continuously expanding at a breathtaking pace then rapidly joined by the international community, were electric; work virtually stopped on all competing technologies and turned to a worldwide race to commercialise the new amplifier. One should also recognise the key contributions made by NTT – Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Japan in making the EDFA into a practical reality through their work on diode pumping.

The discovery, invention and early development of practical fibre amplifiers revolutionized modern telecommunications, both in capacity (bandwidth) and global reach. The Internet could not have been deployed without the nearly one billion kms of optical fibres that today carry 99% of internet traffic. Not only did the EDFA promise to fully exploit fibre bandwidth (some 100 THz or about 500 Tbit/s coherent signalling) opening “de facto” the way to WDM, but also its energy consumption is minimal, close to the limits set by physics.

The backbone of the internet was made physically possible by transoceanic and continental fibre-optic links in which in-line EDFAs regenerate the information signals every 50-100 km, without distortion nor capacity bottleneck of the huge fibre bandwidth. In remote islands or coastal areas, special configurations of EDFA boosters and preamplifiers permit internet transmission over more than 300 km of passive fibre, thus allowing remote populations to communicate at speeds enormously greater than that of previous satellite or submarine cables.

Currently, new fibre links with EDFA repeaters are being deployed at a rate of over 400M km per year, connecting urban, suburban and village areas to the rest of the world.

SCALE OF IMPACT

On a global scale, both transcontinental and transoceanic (except for small and sparsely populated areas covered by satellites), all the way to Fibre-to-the-Home and Enterprise. Even wireless (5G) networks depend upon local-area fiber-optic networks for access and antenna feeds. Humankind and societal, governmental, economical, security and defence, for all telecom services (public, private, corporate or restricted) provided by the World Wide Web.

MEANINGFUL CHANGE

The EDFA allowed the transformation of previous global networks using old-fashioned electrical repeaters by super-fast all-optical repeaters that do not require light to electrical conversion. The EDFA is capable of boosting optical signals by as much as 10,000 times with a capacity of 200 Tbit/s in a single fibre strand. Without the EDFA, the Internet would have been limited to some 40-100 Gbit/s cable capacity between continents, leading to a horrendous or unaffordable Worldwide Wait! Despite being 35 years old, no technology is yet in sight that can compete with the EDFA. The WWW has transformed both society and the economy, from TCP/IP to upper service layers such as email, attachments, clouds, data centers, web pages and web services. None of this would be possible without the EDFA that is essential to the hardware that transports the internet. Today, new optical fibre links are being deployed worldwide at an annual rate in excess of 400 million kilometers – twenty times the speed of sound! And each year the WWW transmits nearly 5,000 Petabytes (5 million Gigabytes) that traverses the EDFA every 50-100 km of any fibre path.

BIOGRAPHY

Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google; former President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Dr. Vinton (Vint) Gray Cerf, born 23 June 1943 in New Haven, Connecticut, is an American computer scientist who is considered one of the ‘Fathers of the Internet’. He obtained a BSc in mathematics at Stanford University and a Masters (in 1970) and Ph.D. (in 1972) in Computer Science from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As a graduate student at UCLA, Cerf became deeply involved in the ongoing discussion and development of the ARPANET. Dr. Cerf first met Dr. Kahn when Dr. Kahn came to UCLA in 1969 to help test the nascent ARPANET.

Dr. Cerf joined Stanford as an assistant professor from 1972 to 1976 where he conducted research on packet network interconnection protocols. Dr. Cerf worked together with Dr. Kahn to formulate the fundamental design principles of internetworking, specified the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) to meet these requirements, prototyped TCP/IP, and coordinated several early TCP/IP implementations. Together with many others, they led TCP/IP to become the global standard that powers the Internet today.

In 1976 he joined the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a program manager at the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). He worked there until 1982 where he funded various groups to develop TCP/IP, packet radio (PRNET), packet satellite (SATNET) and packet security technologies.

Dr. Cerf left ARPA in 1982 to become Vice President of Digital Information Services at MCI Communications Corp., where he engineered MCI Mail. In 1986, Cerf joined Kahn again at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), founded by Robert Kahn. While there, Cerf arranged for MCI Mail to become the first commercial email service to connect to the Internet in 1989. Cerf later returned to MCI as Senior Vice President from 1994-2005. In 2005 Dr. Cerf joined Google as Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist. He was appointed by President Obama to serve a term on the National Science Board beginning in February 2013. Cerf is a Fellow of many institutions including the US National Academy of Engineering, US National Academy of Science, Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the British Royal Society and the Swedish Royal Academy of Engineering. Cerf has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and has many awards recognising his leadership and contributions to the Internet. https://www.nist.gov/director/vcat/biography-dr-vinton-g-cerf

Cerf has also served as Vice President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), founded by Robert Kahn. He was Founding President of the Internet Society and served as Chair of the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. He was a member of the US Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) and continues to attend various national committees focused on cyber-technology.

SUMMARY OF WINNING ENTRY | THE GLOBAL NETWORK TECHNOLOGY

Together with Dr. Kahn, Dr. Cerf led the design and implementation of the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) that are the basis for the current Internet. They formulated fundamental design principles of networking, specified and prototyped TCP/IP to meet these requirements, and oversaw several implementations of the protocol that enabled TCP/IP to become the global standard for the Internet.

SCALE OF IMPACT

The impact of the Internet is global and universal across all domains and walks of life. It is the backbone for much of the information processing and communication activities across the world. The World Wide Web, developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is an application platform supported by the Internet. Many, if not most, socio-economic activities today are built on the Web.

MEANINGFUL CHANGE

The Internet has enabled global collaboration on all aspects of society, industry, economic development, media and communication and governance. It is the engine that underlies our daily activities both at the personal and societal level. It is no exaggeration to say that without the Internet and the World Wide Web the world would not be as it is today.

BIOGRAPHY

• CoFounder and CTO, Inrupt Inc
• Professor of Computer Science, University of Oxford, UK
• Founding Director of the World Wide Web Foundation
• Professor Emeritus in Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Co-Founder, Open Data Institute
• Director of World Wide Web Consortium

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, an Oxford graduate and British computer scientist, invented the World Wide Web in 1989. Named one of Time Magazine’s ‘100 Most Important People of the 20th Century,’ he is the co-founder and CTO of Inrupt, which uses pioneering Solid technology to put individuals in control of their data, and give organisations new opportunities to create value for customers in an open marketplace of innovation. Sir Tim is the Founder and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the Web Foundation whose mission is to ensure that the World Wide Web serves humanity. He co-founded and is President of the Open Data Institute in London and is a Professor of Computer Science at Oxford University, and an Emeritus Professor of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In April 2017, Sir Tim was awarded the Turing Prize which is considered the “Nobel Prize of Computing”. In 2004, Sir Tim was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth and in 2007, he was awarded the Order of Merit. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the National Academy of Science. He has been the recipient of several honorary degrees.

SUMMARY OF WINNING ENTRY | THE GLOBAL NETWORK TECHNOLOGY

Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, wrote the first web browser, and led the design and establishment of three critical web standards – namely, HTML, HTTP and URIs. These have enabled the seamless sharing and use of all information resources across the world on the web.

In 1980, while working as an independent contractor at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, Berners-Lee built a prototype information tracking system called ENQUIRE. In 1989 Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web (WWW) – a global hypertext system to allow sharing information across a wide range of different networks, computers, and countries. He then successfully developed the first web server and web browser in 1990.

In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international standards organization that oversees the continued development of the Web and develops interoperable technologies to lead the Web to its full potential. In 2009, he co-founded and is Director of the World Wide Web Foundation to coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity. In 2012, he co-founded and is president of the London’s Open Data Institute, a non-profit private company with the mission to connect, equip and inspire people around the world to innovate with data.

Sir Tim has long promoted open government data globally and spends time fighting for rights such as net neutrality, privacy, and the openness of the Web.

He is the co-founder and CTO of Inrupt.com, a tech start-up which uses, promotes and helps develop the open-source Solid platform. Solid (from SOcial LInked Data) aims to give people control and agency over their data and forms the next layer of the web (https://solid.mit.edu/). Socially, Solid is a movement toward a world in which users are in control, and empowered by controlling their own data: private, shared, and public. Solid is interested in investigating decentralized techniques and technologies that effect social change. It is exploring how to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in decentralized architectures that enable true data ownership; working on frameworks that ensure information can be shared, used, and manipulated in a way that is compliant with regulation, business rules, social norms, and user preferences; investigating methodologies to make algorithms trustworthy and accountable, as well as harnessing mobile technologies for disaster relief.

SCALE OF IMPACT

The impact of the World Wide Web is global and universal across all domains and walks of life. It is the backbone for all information processing, and communication activities across the world, and all socio-economic activities today are built on the web.

MEANINGFUL CHANGE

The World Wide Web has enabled global collaboration on all aspects of society, industry, economic development, media and communication and governance. It is the engine that underlies our daily activities both at the personal and societal level. It is no exaggeration to say that without the web the world would not be as it is today.

Ha-Van Vu is the Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Data Science at Yale University. He is well known for his work in additive and probabilistic combinatorics, random matrix theory, and their applications in computational science. In 2010, he and Terence Tao, in full generality, established the Circular Law.

Known as the non-symmetric analog of Wigner Semicircle Law, this was one of the most famous open questions in the theory of random matrix. Since 2018, he has also served as the scientific director of VinBigdata Institute.

Professor Vu received the Polya Prize from the Society of Applied and Industrial Mathematics and the Fulkerson Prize from the American Mathematical Society. He has been named a Medallion Lecturer by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He was also a recipient of an NSF Career Award and a Sloan fellowship. Professor Vu is an inaugural fellow of the AMS and a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS).

Born in Hanoi, Professor Vu attended classes for gifted students at Chu Van An and Hanoi-Amsterdam high schools. In 1987, he went to Budapest (Hungary) for his undergraduate studies and in 1994, moved to Yale for his graduate studies, obtaining a Ph.D. in 1998. He did his postdoc at IAS (Princeton) and Microsoft Research (Redmond). Before going to Yale in 2011, he taught at UC San Diego and Rutgers.

Professor Leslie Gabriel Valiant is a British-American computer scientist and computational theorist who is currently the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University.

Professor Valiant is well-known for his work in theoretical computer science. He was awarded the A.M. Turing Award in 2010 for work in machine learning, computational complexity and parallel computation, having been described by the ACM as a heroic figure in theoretical computer science and a role model for his courage and creativity in addressing some of the deepest unsolved problems in science.

Professor Valiant also received the Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematical Union in 1986, the Knuth Prize in 1997, and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science Award in 2008. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1991, and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2001.

Professor Valiant was educated at King’s College, University of Cambridge, followed by Imperial College London, and finally at the University of Warwick, where he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1974. He started teaching at Harvard University in 1982, prior to which he taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Leeds University, and the University of Edinburgh.

Michael Porter is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at the Harvard Business School. He is an economist, researcher, author, teacher, strategy advisor, and speaker.

Throughout his career at Harvard Business School, he has brought economic theory and strategy concepts to address many of the most challenging problems facing corporations, economies, and societies, including competition and company strategy, economic development, health care, and most recently, America’s dysfunctional political system. His extensive research is widely recognized in governments, corporations, health care organizations, NGOs, and academic circles around the globe. His research has received numerous awards, and he is the most cited scholar today in economics and business. While Professor Porter is, at the core, a scholar, his work has also achieved remarkable acceptance by practitioners across multiple fields. His principal goal is to influence actual practice in the fields in which he works.

Professor Porter is an unprecedented nine-time winner of the McKinsey Award for the best Harvard Business Review article of the year. He is also the recipient of twenty-six honorary doctorates as well as national and state honors.

Professor Porter’s initial training was in aerospace engineering at Princeton University. He then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard’s Department of Economics. His research approach—applying economic theory and management concepts to address complex systemic problems—reflects these multidisciplinary foundations.

Professor Porter is the author of twenty books and more than 130 articles. For further information, please visit the website of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness (www.isc.hbs.edu).

Professor Sir Konstantin ‘Kostya’ Novoselov FRS was born in Russia in August 1974 and has dual British and Russian citizenship. He is best known for isolating graphene at The University of Manchester in 2004 and is an expert in condensed matter physics, mesoscopic physics, and nanotechnology.

Every year since 2014, Professor Novoselov has been included in the list of the most highly cited researchers in the world. Kostya holds the position of Tan Chin Tuan Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore. He is also the part-time Langworthy Professor of Physics and the Royal Society Research Professor at The University of Manchester. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 for his achievements with graphene.

He was awarded with numerous prizes, including Nicholas Kurti Prize (2007), International Union of Pure and Applied Science Prize (2008), MIT Technology Review young innovator (2008), Europhysics Prize (2008), Bragg Lecture Prize from the Union of Crystallography (2011), the Kohn Award Lecture (2012), Leverhulme Medal from the Royal Society (2013), Onsager medal (2014), Carbon medal (2016), Dalton medal (2016), and Otto Warburg Prize (2019) among many others. He was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and undertook his PhD studies at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands before moving to The University of Manchester in 2001. Later Professor Novoselov joined the National University of Singapore in 2019.

Professor Novoselov has published more than 400 peer-reviewed research papers.

Professor Gérard Albert Mourou is a French scientist and pioneer in the field of electrical engineering and lasers. He is a professor and member of Haut Collège at the École Polytechnique, and A. D. Moore Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. He is the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with his doctoral student, Donna Strickland, on generating ultrashort high-intensity laser pulses without destroying the amplifying material.

Professor Mourou has made numerous contributions to the fields of ultrafast lasers, high-speed electronics, and medicine. He has been honored with several notable awards for his breakthrough scientific inventions, including Charles Hard Townes Award by the OSA (2009), and Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science by the American Physical Society (2018). Professor Mourou was the founding director of the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science at the University of Michigan in 1990. He was director of the Laboratoire d’optique appliquée at the ENSTA from 2005 to 2009.

Professor Mourou studied physics at the University of Grenoble, and then at the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie in Paris, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1973. He later moved to the United States and became a professor at the University of Rochester and University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where he did his Nobel Prize awarded work.

Professor Daniel Kammen serves as James and Katherine Lau Distinguished Professor of Sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley (USA) with parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources, the Goldman School of Public Policy, and the Department of Nuclear Engineering.

He was appointed the first Environment and Climate Partnership for the Americas (ECPA) Fellow by Secretary of State Hilary R. Clinton in April 2010. Professor Kammen is currently on leave from the University of California while serving in the Biden Administration as the Senior Advisor for Energy Innovation at the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

He is a Permanent Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In the United States, he serves on two National Academy of Sciences boards and panels.

Doctor Xuedong Huang is a leading computer scientist and technology executive in AI and Spoken Language Processing. He is currently a Microsoft Technical Fellow and Chief Technology Officer overseeing Microsoft Azure AI engineering and research, covering Microsoft’s core perceptive and cognitive AI pillars (Speech, Computer Vision, Natural Language, and Decision).

Dr. Huang has co-authored over 170 US patents, two books, and over 100 papers, including a historical speech recognition review with Raj Reddy and James K. Baker for Communications of the ACM reflecting several generations of spoken language R&D. His notable achievements include receiving the Allen Newell research excellence medal in 1992, and IEEE Speech Processing Best Paper in 1993. In 2016, Wired Magazine named him as one of “25 Geniuses Who Are Creating the Future of Business”.

He was recognized as an IEEE Fellow in 2000, and ACM Fellow in 2017 for his contributions to spoken language processing.

Dr. Huang was on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University from 1989 to 1993. He received his Ph.D., MS, and BS from the University of Edinburgh, Tsinghua University, and Hunan University respectively.

Professor Văn-Chí Đặng received his BS in Chemistry (highest honors) from the University of Michigan and was awarded a Ph.D. in Chemistry (high distinction) from Georgetown University.

He received his MD (inducted to Alpha Omega Alpha and Phi Beta Kappa) and internal medicine residency training at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He trained in hematology-oncology at UCSF, where he did postdoctoral work on the MYC oncogene. Professor Đặng then returned to Johns Hopkins in 1987 where he established the first mechanistic link between a cancer gene (MYC) and cellular energy metabolism, contributing to the concept that genetic alterations in cancers re-program fuel utilization by tumors and render cancers addicted to certain fuel sources. This conceptual framework contributes to strategies for therapeutic targeting of cancer cell metabolism. His current work extends the role of MYC in cancer metabolism and the role of the circadian clock in metabolism and cancer.

He was Director of the Division of Hematology at Johns Hopkins Hospital (1993-2003) and was appointed Johns Hopkins Family Professor in Oncology Research and Vice Dean for Research at Johns Hopkins. In 2011, he became director of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and on July 1, 2017, he assumed the position of Scientific Director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, overseeing Ludwig branches located in the United States, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research Academy. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Cancer Research, an AACR journal.

Professor Pascale Cossart is a pioneering cellular microbiologist who has made significant contributions to our understanding of how bacteria both infect, and survive within, host cells. She uses the food-borne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes as a model, with her research paving the way for future therapeutics.

She is currently a Professor and Head of the Unité des Interactions Bactéries Cellules at the Pasteur Institute. She was also a Professor of Biochemistry at the Royal School of Medicine in Vientiane, Laos from 1974 – 1975 before working at Pasteur Institute in Paris from 1988 until the present.

Professor Cossart’s research provides a detailed picture of the factors which make Listeria such an effective infectious agent. She identified different proteins that Listeria uses to enter cells, move, and disseminate in tissues. Through the creation of a transgenic mouse model, she paved the way for in vivo studies. Professor Cossart has also unveiled new regulatory mechanisms in bacteria and is now deciphering how bacteria induce epigenetic changes during infection.

Professor Cossart has received several prestigious awards and recognitions, not only for her research but also for her role as a mentor and promoter of interdisciplinary collaboration. These awards include the Robert Koch Prize for biomedical science in 2007 in Germany, the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2008 in Switzerland, the Balzan Prize in 2013 in Italy, the 2014 FEBS | EMBO Women in Science Award, and most recently, the FEMS-Lwoff Award in 2019 in the UK. She became the Honorary Doctor of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden in 2020.

Professor Jennifer Chayes is Associate Provost of Computing, Data Science, and Society, and Dean of the School of Information at UC Berkeley, as well as Professor in four UC Berkeley departments: Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Information, Mathematics, and Statistics. For 23 years, she was at Microsoft Research where she was Technical Fellow and where she co-founded and led three interdisciplinary labs: Microsoft Research New England, New York City, and Montreal. She is the co-author of about 140 scientific papers and the co-inventor of about 30 patents.

Professor Chayes has received numerous awards for both leadership and scientific contributions, including the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Leadership Award, the John von Neumann Lecture Award of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (the highest honor of SIAM), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and an honorary doctorate from Leiden University.

Professor Chayes is a Fellow of many societies including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society, the Association of Computing Machinery, the Association of Women in Mathematics, and the Fields Institute.

Professor Chayes’ research areas include phase transitions in computer science, structural and dynamical properties of networks including graph algorithms, and applications of machine learning. She is one of the inventors of the field of graphons, which are widely used for the machine learning of large-scale networks. Her recent work focuses on machine learning, including applications in cancer immunotherapy, ethical decision-making, and climate change. Professor Chayes is deeply committed to increasing racial and gender diversity in STEM.

Doctor Anandan is a renowned researcher in Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence with more than 60 publications and over 14,500 citations in Google Scholar. His career spans over 30 years in academia and industry in the US and India with research areas including visual motion analysis, video surveillance, and 3D scene modeling from images and video.
Dr. Anandan is currently Founder of US-based AI Matters Advisors LLC and Chairman of the Governing Board at Telangana AI Mission (T-AIM).

Between September 2017 and March 2021, he was CEO of Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence, an independent not-for-profit research institute focused on developing artificial intelligence-based applications for social good. Before Wadhwani Institute, Dr. Anandan was the Founder and Managing Director of Microsoft Research India, and a Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. He was also Vice President at Adobe Research, responsible for developing Adobe’s research strategy, and leading the Adobe India Research lab.
Dr. Anandan holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, an M.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Dr. Anandan has received multiple awards for his work, including Distinguished Alumni Award, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Alumni Award, IIT Madras; Microsoft Distinguished Scientist; Microsoft Emeritus Researcher; and Hall of Computing, University of Nebraska, 2010.
His papers have won multiple awards including the Helmholtz Prize for long term fundamental contributions to computer vision research.

Professor Sir Richard Henry Friend, FRS holds the Cavendish Professorship of Physics at the University of Cambridge. He is Director of the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability and of the Maxwell Centre. He is also a Tan Chin Tuan Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore and serves as Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Singapore. In addition, he is one of the principal investigators in the new Cambridge-based Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) on nanotechnology and co-founder of Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) and Plastic Logic.

Owning more than 140 patents and having written or co-authored over 1,100 prestigious scientific publications worldwide, Professor Sir Richard Henry Friend, FRS is one of the most influential physicists in the world. He also serves as a Council member of many prestigious global Prizes.

He and his group have developed polymer-processing techniques for conjugated polymers and demonstrated non-linear electronic excitations through electrical and optical measurements. He is credited for the first construction of MOSFET (Metal Insulator Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor) with polyacetylene as the active semiconductor; the demonstration of novel mechanisms of operation with novel behavior; and the first construction of the efficient, large-area, polymeric semiconductor LED’s (Light Emitting Diodes), based on polyphenylene-vinylene. His research on OLED has been used to develop flat screens, scroll screens, and motion screens for the future with the most well-known application of his research being the OLED TV. His work has also been applied to develop polymer field-effect transistors, light-emitting diodes, photoelectric diodes, optical pump-proof tubes, and direct-printed polymer transistors.

With a world-renowned reputation and numerous achievements in both research and teaching, Professor Sir Richard Henry Friend, FRS was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2002. His notable honors and awards include the IEE’s Faraday Medal in 2003, the Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 2006, the Institute of Physics Katharine Burr Blodgett Medal, Prize with Dr. David Ffye in 2009, and the Millennium Technology Prize for the development of plastic electronics in 2010. He was knighted for “Services to Physics” in the 2003 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

Vivian Yam is the Philip Wong Wilson Wong Professor in Chemistry and Energy and Chair Professor of Chemistry at The University of Hong Kong. She was elected a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, International Member (Foreign Associate) of US National Academy of Sciences, Foreign Member of Academia Europaea, Fellow of TWAS and Founding Member of Hong Kong Academy of Sciences.

She was Laureate of the 2011 L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award. Professor Yam has also received a number of prestigious awards, including the RSC Centenary Medal, RSC Ludwig Mond Award, Porter Medal, FACS Foundation Lectureship Award, APA Masuhara Lectureship Award, JPA Eikohsha Award, JSCC International Award, State Natural Science Award, CCS-China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec) Chemistry Contribution Prize, CCS Huang Yao-Zeng Organometallic Chemistry Award, Croucher Senior Research Fellowship, and others.

Her research interests include inorganic/organometallic chemistry, supramolecular chemistry, photophysics and photochemistry, and metal-based molecular functional materials for sensing, organic optoelectronics and energy research.

More information about Prof. Yam can be found at http://web.hku.hk/~wwyam/yam/homepage/

Alta (Aletta E.) Schutte is Professor and Principal Lead of the Cardiac, Vascular and Metabolic Medicine Theme in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, with a joint appointment as Professorial Fellow at the George Institute for Global Health. She is also Extraordinary Professor at the North-West University, South Africa. She has over 350 publications in the field of hypertension and cardiovascular disease. She is involved in numerous international consortia, such as the Global Burden of Disease study (Washington DC), the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (London), May Measurement Month initiative of the International Society of Hypertension, IDACO/IDCARS studies (Belgium), and is an invited author of the Lancet Commission of Hypertension.

She has been acknowledged for her work as winner of the Distinguished Woman Scientist in the Natural, Engineering and Life Sciences award, presented by the South African Department of Science and Technology; the NSTF South 32 TW Kambule Award; the British Association Medal from the Southern Africa Association for the Advancement of Science (S2A3), the Meiring Naude Medal from the Royal Society of South Africa, the AU-TWAS (African Union & The World Academy of Sciences) Award, and the 2019 African Union Kwame Nkrumah Regional Award for Scientific Excellence. She is a Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology, the International Society of Hypertension and the Royal Society of South Africa; the Past President of the Southern African Hypertension Society (SAHS); and Immediate Past President of the International Society of Hypertension (ISH).

Professor Molly Shoichet is University Professor, the University of Toronto’s highest academic rank and a distinction held by less than 2% of the faculty.

She has actively engaged in translational research and science outreach. She co-Founded AmacaThera in 2016 and serves as CSO, taking an invention from her lab into clinical trials in 2021. She served as Ontario’s first Chief Scientist in 2018 where she worked to enhance the culture of science.

Professor Shoichet has published over 650 papers, patents, and abstracts and has given over 420 lectures worldwide. She currently leads a laboratory of 30 and has graduated 220 researchers. Her research is focused on drug and cell delivery strategies in the central nervous system (brain, spinal cord, retina) and 3D hydrogel culture systems to model cancer.

Professor Shoichet is the recipient of over 50 prestigious distinctions and the only person to be inducted into all three of Canada’s National Academies of Science of the Royal Society of Canada, Engineering, and Health Sciences.

In 2018, Professor Shoichet was inducted as an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 2011, she was awarded the Order of Ontario. She was the recipient of the L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Laureate for North America in 2015, elected Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2016, winner of the Killam Prize in Engineering in 2017, elected to the Royal Society (UK) in 2019, and awarded the NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal in 2020. Dr. Shoichet received her SB from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1987) and her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Polymer Science and Engineering (1992).

Professor Duc Thu Nguyen is Professor of Computer Science and Dean of the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University (USA). He joined the Rutgers faculty in 1999 and served as associate chair for five years and chair for two, overseeing a crucial expansion of computer science faculty during a time of rapid technological change.

His research focuses on building efficient, sustainable, and dependable computer systems and improving computer science education.

His honors and awards include Rutgers Big Ten Academic Alliance Department Executive Officers Fellow (2018), FAST 2016 Best paper award, IEEE Micro Top Picks 2014, “Best Papers From The Last 20 Years of HPDC”(2012), IGCC Best paper award (2010), IEEE Sustainable Computing Register’s Pick of the Month (2012), NSF CNS (2005-2010), and Faculty of the Year Award for Excellence in Teaching – Computer Science Graduate Student Society of Rutgers University, awarded in 2000 and 2002. He obtained his PhD degree in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in 1999.

Mr. Akihisa Kakimoto is currently the Chief Technology Officer at Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation. He has been part of the Mitsubishi group since 1984 and has covered various functions in sales and marketing, operations, research and development.

Mr. Kakimoto graduated with a Bachelor of Economics from Keio University, Japan and a Master of Business Administration from the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Switzerland.

Professor Ngoc-Minh Do is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and is currently serving as the Vice Provost of VinUniversity.

Since 2002, he has been a faculty at UIUC, where he is currently the Thomas and Margaret Huang Endowed Professor in Signal Processing & Data Science in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and holds affiliate appointments with the Coordinated Science Laboratory, the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the Department of Bioengineering, and the Department of Computer Science.

He was previously the Vice editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and member of IEEE Technical Committees on Signal Processing. In 2014, he was appointed IEEE Fellow for his contribution in image representation and computerized images. Professor Do believes that modern researchers need to have both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary understanding to develop novel ideas. With this in mind, he has made significant contributions in technology transfer as the Chief Technology Officer of Personify, scientific lead of Misfit, and Beckman Fellow at Center for Advanced Study, UIUC. Prof. Do has a strong research foundation with an H-Index of 60.

In addition to 70 scientific publications and 63 presentations at international conferences, Prof. Do has been honored with prestigious awards such as the NSF Career Award by the National Science Fund; Best Student Paper Award in the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP); Most Innovative Paper Award at IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP); Xerox Award for researching Faculty, Technology University, UIUC and IEEE Best Paper Award.

He is also the recipient of the Best Doctoral Thesis Award from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in 2001, University Medal from the University of Canberra, Australia in 1997, and Silver Medal in the 32nd International Mathematical Olympiad, Sweden (1991).

Professor Mônica Alonso Cotta obtained her B.Sc. and PhD in Physics from University of Campinas, Brazil and was a postdoctoral fellow at AT&T Bell Laboratories, USA. She is a full professor and currently associate director of the Institute of Physics “Gleb Wataghin” at the University of Campinas, Brazil, where she also heads research at the Nano and Biosystems Laboratory.

She is the author of over 140 articles published in scientific journals and works as associate editor for ACS Applied Nano Materials.

Her research interests include semiconductor nanomaterials, from synthesis to biosensor fabrication, and applications of optical, electronic and scanning microscopy in the investigation of biomaterials and biological systems. She was a member of the Brazilian Physical Society Gender Relations Committee, ombudsperson for the Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory and served two terms as scientific director for the Brazilian Materials Research Society, before assuming the role of president in 2020.

Professor Quarraisha Abdool Karim is an infectious disease epidemiologist whose primary research focuses on understanding the evolving HIV epidemic in South Africa and preventing HIV in women.

She is the Scientific Director of CAPRISA and Pro-Vice Chancellor for African Health at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, and a Professor in Clinical Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, USA. She is a Fellow of The World Academy of Science; African Academy of Science; Academy of Science of South Africa, Royal Society of South Africa, and elected Member of the US National Academy of Medicine.

She was awarded the inaugural VinFuture Special Prize for Innovators from Developing Countries, in recognition of her ground-breaking research on HIV prevention.

Professor Ermias Kebreab is Associate Dean for Global Engagement in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, as well as Director of the World Food Center. He is a renowned scholar and skilled administrator with extensive experience in sustainable agriculture and animal science.

Professor Kebreab is the Sesnon Endowed Chair in the Department of Animal Science. He has conducted extensive research in developing strategies for using feed additives to reduce methane emissions from livestock and has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications.

He is the Chair of the United Nations FAO Technical Working Group on Feed Additives, a Committee Member for the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Panel on Anthropogenic Methane Emissions in the United States, and also serves on the NAS Committee for Nutrient Requirements of Dairy Cattle. He is a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2019, “Emissions from Livestock and Manure Management.”

Myles Allen is Professor of Geosystem Science in the School of Geography and the Environment and Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, and he is Director of the Oxford Net Zero initiative.

He is credited with first demonstrating, 15 years ago, the need for ‘Net Zero’ carbon dioxide emissions to stop global warming. His research focuses on how human and natural influences on climate contribute to observed climate change and risks of extreme weather and in quantifying their implications for long-range climate forecasts.

He was the Coordinating Lead Author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Special Report on 1.5 degrees including the Synthesis Report Core Writing Team in 2014. He proposed the use of Probabilistic Event Attribution to quantify the contribution of human and other external influences on climate to specific individual weather events and leads the www.climateprediction.net/ project, using distributed computing to run the world’s largest ensemble climate modelling experiments.

Professor Albert P. Pisano (born 1954) is an American academic who has served as Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) since September 2013. He is a co-inventor listed on more than 20 patents in MEMS and has co-authored more than 300 archival publications.

Professor Pisano is a co-founder of ten start-up companies in the areas of transdermal drug delivery, transvascular drug delivery, sensorized catheters, MEMS manufacturing equipment, MEMS RF devices and MEMS motion sensors.

In 2001, Pisano was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the design, fabrication, commercialization, and educational aspects of MEMS. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and an awardee of the Thomas Egleston Medal for Distinguished Engineering Achievement by notable alumni of Columbia University.

In 2008, he was named one of the 100 Notable People in the Medical Device Industry by Medical Devices and Diagnostic Industry (MD&DI) Magazine.

Prof. Thuc-Quyen Nguyen is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She joined the faculty of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at UCSB in summer 2004. Prior to that, she was a research associate in the Department of Chemistry and the Nano Center at Columbia University, working with Professors Louis Brus and Colin Nuckolls on molecular self-assembly, nanoscale characterization and devices. She also spent time at the IBM Research Center at T. J. Watson (Yorktown Heights, NY) working with Richard Martel and Phaedon Avouris on molecular electronics.

Her current research interests are electronic properties of conjugated polyelectrolytes, interfaces in optoelectronic devices, charge generation and transport in organic semiconductors, new materials for organic solar cell applications, molecular self-assemblies, materials processing, nanoscale characterization of organic solar cells, and device physics.

Prof. Thuc-Quyen Nguyen is among the Top 1% Highly Cited Researchers in Materials Science and Cross-Field by Thomson Reuters and Clarivate Analytics. In addition, she has received numerous prestigious honors and awards, including: The 2015-2019 World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds; The 2019 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; The 2019 Hall of Fame – Advanced Materials; The 2016 Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry; The 2015 Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Award; and many more.