Beat Kappeler has a background as a regulator, professor, journalist, and senior trade union administrator and member of public oversight bodies. Today he is a columnist for the NZZ on Sunday.

From 1997-2007 he was a member of the Federal Communications Commission (regulator). From 1996 – 2000 he was e.o. Professor for Social Policy at the University Institut de Hautes Etudes en Administration Publique (IDHEAP), Lausanne. And from 1977-1992 he was National Secretary of the Swiss Trade Union Confederation, a function in which he was also a member of the federal anti-monopolies commission and the ‘Conseil suisse de la science’. Furthermore, from 1977-1992 he was in charge of liberalization projects (de-cartelsisation, transparent company law etc.)

In his early career he was a freelance journalist specialising in economic issues. He studied at Geneva University (licence ès sciences politiques) and in 1970 he was a Graduate Institute of International Studies. He also studied at Freie Universität Berlin and College St. Antonius in Appenzell, federal maturity (latin, greek) 1966.

Federica Gregoratto is lecturer in philosophy in the School of Humanities and Social Science of the University of St Gall. Before joining the department in September 2015, she earned a PhD in philosophy from Ca’ Foscari University, Venice (2012) and was postdoc research fellow at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Normative Orders’ at Goethe University, Frankfurt a.M. (2013-2015). She has published in English, German, French and Italian on a variety of topics in social and political philosophy, such as the philosophy of love and sex, critical theory (especially Habermas and Adorno), pragmatism (especially Dewey and Addams), recognition and power theories, debt-guilt debates, gender and intersectionalist studies. One of her recent articles was titled ‘Love is a Losing Game: Power and Exploitation in Romantic Relationships’, published in The Journal of Political Power, 10:3, 2018.

Federica is now working on a book about erotic love as a social space of power, freedom and transformation. In the free time, she enjoys (and sometimes writes about) films, novels and photography.

Peter Studer is a lawyer and publicist. From 1978 to 1987 he was the chief editor of the Zurich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. From 1990 to 1999 he was the chief editor of Swiss Television. He then spent the next seven years at the Swiss Press Council. Peter taught media law at the University of St. Gallen.

Dr Michael Owens is a London-based researcher, writer and lecturer focusing on urban development and the life of cities. He teaches undergraduate programmes for students from the University of California who are studying abroad in London. He is a board member of Bow Arts Trust, one of the UK’s largest artist studio providers. He formerly worked for the Mayor of London and played a senior role in London planning and development. His book, Play the Game, about the development of the site for the 2012 London Olympic Games, was published by Machine Books in November 2022.

Norman Lewis is recognised worldwide as an expert on future trends and user behaviours with regard to technology innovation and adoption. He has spoken on these topics at events all over the world. Norman is a visiting research fellow at the newly established Hungarian think tank, MCC Brussels, where he concentrates on the EU’s digital sovereignty strategy and its increasing attacks on online content and speech.

Formerly a director at PwC, responsible for running their crowd-sourced innovation programme, he was also the director of technology research at Orange UK for a decade. He has played numerous advisory roles to startups, the latest as an Advisory Board Member of Bubbletone Blockchain in Telecom – the world’s first decentralised mobile roaming service.

He was also previously an executive board member of the MIT Communications Futures Programme, and a former chairman of the ITU TELECOM Forum Programme Committee.

He is a co-author of Big Potatoes: the London Manifesto for Innovation.

Philip Cunliffe is senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Kent, which he joined in 2009. He has written widely on a variety of political issues ranging from Balkan politics to Brexit, with a particular focus on questions of sovereignty and international politics in the twenty-first century. He helped to found the The Full Brexit, a pro-Brexit campaigning network. His most recent book is Lenin Lives! Reimagining the Russian Revolution (2017).

Dr. Prem Mahadevan is a senior researcher with the Global Security Team at the Center for Security Studies (CSS), Zurich. He specializes in the study of intelligence systems and sub-state conflict, and is responsible at the CSS for tracking geopolitical trends and jihadist terrorism in the Indo-Pacific region.

Mahadevan completed his undergraduate degree in War Studies from King’s College London, followed by postgraduate and doctoral degrees in Intelligence Studies. He has advised Indian government agencies on counter-terrorist operational management, provided political risk assessments to the private sector, and has been consulted by EUROPOL and NATO Headquarters on emerging security challenges. He has authored two books: The Politics of Counterterrorism in India, and An Eye for An Eye: Decoding Global Special Operations and Irregular Warfare, in which he examined the role of intelligence and commando raids in combating cross-border terrorism. He also has published extensively in edited volumes, peer-reviewed journals and CSS security analyses.

Swiss national Richard Olsen has combined academic research with hands on experience in financial markets. He founded Olsen & Associates in 1985, which developed and marketed a real time information system with forecasts and trading recommendations for financial markets, co-founder of OANDA, a successful internet market maker, and Olsen Ltd, a hedge fund. Richard is a pioneer of high frequency finance and has co- authored the book Introduction to High Frequency Finance, published at Academic Press in 2001. Together with a team of researchers he has recently discovered 12 new scaling laws of the foreign exchange markets continuing work on scaling laws that was first started in 1989. He is visiting professor at the Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents at the University of Essex.

Effy Vayena, Ph.D., leads the newly-established Health Ethics and Policy Lab in the Department of Public Health at the EBPI, University of Zurich.
Previously, she worked at the World Health Organization (WHO), focusing on ethical and policy issues relating to reproductive health, and assisted reproduction as well as on health research ethics. She remains at consultant to WHO and is visiting faculty at the Harvard Center for Bioethics, Harvard Medical School.
Her current research focus is on ethical and policy questions in personalized medicine and digital health. She is particularly interested in the issues of ethical oversight of research uses of big data, ethical uses of big data for global health, as well as the ethics of citizen science. Using the ethics lens in innovative ways, her work aims to provide concrete policy recommendations and frameworks that facilitate the use of new technologies for a better and more just health.

Eleanor “Tabi” Haller-Jorden, President and CEO of the Paradigm Forum GmbH, is a recognized voice in the fields of global leadership, workplace design, cross-cultural management and social justice within the organizational context. With over two decades of high-level experience in the public, private and academic sectors – most recently at Catalyst as Senior Vice President Global Learning and General Manager of Catalyst Europe – she is a frequent media contributor, lecturer and speaker.