Ian Goldin is the Oxford University Professor of Globalisation and Development, the Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technological and Economic Change and the founding Director of the Oxford Martin School. Ian previously was World Bank Vice President and the Group’s Director of Policy, after serving as Chief Executive of the Development Bank of Southern Africa and Advisor to President Nelson Mandela.

Ian has served as Principal Economist at the EBRD and Programme Director at the OECD. Ian has an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a MA and DPhil from the University of Oxford. Ian has been knighted by the French Government and has published 21 books, including Age of Discovery: Navigating the Storms of Our Second Renaissance; The Butterfly Defect: How Globalisation Creates Systemic Risks and What to Do; Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped our World and Will Define our Future; and, Is the Planet Full? His report Migration and The Economy was published by Citi. He wrote and presented the BBC Five Part Series ‘After the Crash’ and BBC Documentary on ‘The Impact of Artificial Intelligence’.

He has been a non-executive Director on numerous boards, including CDC, Implenia; Metropolitan, Old Mutual and Skandia, chairing and serving on all Board Committees. He is an Honorary Trustee of Comic Relief and the Chair of the https://www.core-econ.org/ initiative to modernise the teaching of economics.

He lectures at Oxford, Harvard and Tsinghua Universities and provides advisory and consultancy services to governments and over 30 leading global companies, including leading strategy discussions for Boards. His recent speaking engagements include the opening keynote at Google Zeitgeist, the Microsoft CEO forum, TED, and for the past 21 years has provided keynotes at the WEF Davos meetings. His twitter address is and @ian_goldin and website is https://iangoldin.org/.

Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus is the father of both Social business and microfinance, the founder of Grameen Bank, and of more than 50 other companies in Bangladesh. For his constant innovation and enterprise, Fortune Magazine named Professor Yunus in March 2012 as “one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time”.

In 2006, Professor Yunus and Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He is the recipient of 63 honorary degrees from universities across 24 countries. He has received 136 awards from 33 countries including state honours from 10 countries. He is one of only seven individuals to have received the Nobel Peace Prize, the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom and the United States Congressional Gold Medal.

He has appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, Newsweek and Forbes Magazine.

Parag Khanna is a leading global strategy advisor, world traveler, and best-selling author. He is Founder & Managing Partner of FutureMap, a data and scenario based strategic advisory firm. Parag's newest book is The Future is Asian: Commerce, Conflict & Culture in the 21st Century (2019). He is author of a trilogy of books on the future of world order beginning with The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (2008), followed by How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (2011), and concluding with Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (2016). He is also author of Technocracy in America: Rise of the Info-State (2017) and co-author of Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (2012).

In 2008, Parag was named one of Esquire’s “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century,” and featured in WIRED magazine’s “Smart List.” He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, and Bachelors and Masters degrees from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He has traveled to nearly 150 countries and is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.

A Renaissance Man for the 21st century, Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, artist, and author who writes on numerous topics, including high-technology business, the social impact of technology, the philosophy of consciousness and information, Internet politics, and the future of humanism.

Lanier’s first book, You Are Not a Gadget, A Manifesto, is held dear by readers as an expression of spiritual sensibility in high tech times and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by Time Magazine and The New York Times.

Lanier’s other books – including Who Owns the Future?, Wenn Träume Erwachsen Werden (When Dreams Grow Up), Dawn of the New Everything (a memoire of his unusual childhood, early Silicon Valley, and the origins of Virtual Reality) and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now – have become international best sellers and have won varied awards, including the 2014 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, one of the highest literary honors in the world, Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize, and best book of the year at book festivals such as the San Francisco Book Festival.

A pioneer in virtual reality (a term he coined), Lanier founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products, and led teams originating VR applications for medicine, design, and numerous other fields. He is currently the “octopus” (which stands for Office of the Chief Technology Officer Prime Unifying Scientist) at Microsoft. He was a founder or principal of startups that were acquired by Google, Adobe, Oracle, and Pfizer.

In 2018, Lanier was named one of the 25 most influential people in the previous 25 years of tech history by Wired Magazine. He’s also been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, top one hundred public intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy magazine, top 50 World Thinkers by Prospect magazine, and one of history’s 300 or so greatest inventors in the Encyclopedia Britannica. In 2009 Jaron Lanier received a Lifetime Career Award from the IEEE, the preeminent international engineering society.

Jaron Lanier is also a musician and artist and has performed or recorded with a wide range of musicians, including Philip Glass, Yoko Ono, Ornette Coleman, George Clinton, T Bone Burnett, Steve Reich, and Sara Bareilles. He composes and performs on film soundtracks. Credits include composer on Sean Penn’s 2010 documentary, The Third Wave, and principle instrumental performer for Richard Horowitz’s score for Three Seasons (1999).