Keynotes
Bob Metcalfe
Bob Metcalfe just entered his 6th career: COMPUTATIONAL ENGINEER. He's been appointed Research Affiliate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT, his alma mater. For 11 years Bob served as Professor of Innovation at the Cockrell School of Engineering, Professor of Entrepreneurship at the McCombs School of Business, and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise at The University of Texas at Austin. Bob retired from UTAustin as Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "My work here, on the Texas/Austin/UTAustin startup ecosystem, is done." Bob was an Internet pioneer beginning in 1970 at MIT, Harvard, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Parc), Stanford, and 3Com. He invented Ethernet at Parc on May 22, 1973. Today Ethernet is the Internet ' s standard plumbing, each year adding billions of ports, if we let Bob count Wireless Ethernet (Wi-Fi). Bob remains a champion of Ethernet and connectivity in general, according to Metcalfe's Law (V~N^2). The Internet turned 50 in 2019, just in time for COVID-19. The most important new fact about the human condition is that, and it ' s mostly good news, we are now suddenly connected. Among many other honors, Bob has won the Bell, Hopper, Japan C&C, Marconi, McCluskey, Shannon, and Stibitz Prizes. He has been inducted into the Internet, Consumer Electronics, and Computer History Museum Halls of Fame. He is Emeritus Life Trustee of MIT. Bob received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Medal of Honor in 1996 and the National Medal of Technology in 2005 for leadership in the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet. Bob founded Internet startup 3Com Corporation in Silicon Valley on June 4, 1979. 3Com went public on March 21, 1984. Bob " retired” from 3Com in 1990. In 1999, 3Com revenue was $5.7B, and its market capitalization peaked momentarily at an inflation-adjusted $52 billion, of which Bob didn’t even get half. 3Com was acquired by HP Enterprise in 2010. During the 1990s, Bob was CEO/Publisher/Pundit at IDG/InfoWorld Magazine. His Internet column, FROM THE ETHER, was read weekly by a million? information technologists among IDG ' s 90 countries. In his column he was famously wrong in predicting the Internet would suffer a gigalapse in 1996. Read all about this prediction in Bob ' s book, INTERNET COLLAPSES, still available on Amazon.com. During the 2000s, Bob was a limited, venture, general, and now emeritus Polaris Partner in Boston.
Barbara Poblete
Dr. Barbara Poblete is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Departmentof the University of Chile and an Amazon Visiting Academic at Alexa Shopping Research. She is Co-PI at IMFD and CENIA in Chile, the first large government funded research centers dedicated exclusively to Data and to AI, respectively. Formerly, she was at Yahoo! Labs. Her main research areas are Social Network Analysis, Web Data Mining and Information Retrieval. She co-authored a series of innovative works on the topic of online misinformation, including the article " Information Credibility on Twitter " (2011) awarded the 2021 IW3C2 Seoul Test of Time Award. This widely cited work, was pioneer in studying so-called " fake-news " and has been featured in SciAM, WSJ, Slate, The Huffington Post, BBC News and NPR, among others. Her research has also focused on the problem of multilingual and language agnostic approaches, specifically for online hate-speech and crisis informatics. In this regard, she has led initiatives such as Twicall.cl, a social-based real-time earthquake detection system, used by the National Seismology Center and other emergency response agencies in Chile. She has co-authored over 80 peer-reviewed articles, including top-tier venues such as TWC, SIGIR, EMNLP and ISWC. Other distinctions include the Google Latin American Research Award and being nominated among Chile ' s "； 100 Leaders under 35 " . Currently, she is among the top most cited women computer scientists in Latin America. She is Program Committee co-Chair for SIGIR 2023, and recent activities comprise Track co-Chair for TWC, Doctoral Consortium and DEI co-chair for SIGIR, Program Committee Chair for SPIRE, AMW, LA-WEB, and Editorial Board member for Foundations & Trends in IR, Associate Editor for TWeb. She is also co-founder of ChileWiC, local ACM-W chapter for women in Computer Science.
David Rand
David Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. David’s research combines survey experiments and social media field experiments to understand human decision-making online. His work focuses on illuminating why people believe and share misinformation and ·&qu o tfake news”; understanding political psychology and polarization; and promoting human cooperation. He has published over 170 articles in peer-reviewed journals such Nature, Science, PNAS, the American Economic Review, Psychological Science, Management Science, New England Journal of Medicine, and the American Journal of Political Science, and his work has received widespread media attention. David regularly advises technology companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter in their efforts to combat misinformation, and has provided testimony about misinformation to the US and UK governments. He has also written for popular press outlets including the New York Times, Wired, and New Scientist. He was named to Wired magazine’s Smart List 2012 of " 50 people who will change the world,” chosen as a 2012 Pop!Tech Science Fellow, awarded the 2015 Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Research, chosen as fact-checking researcher of the year in 2017 by the Poyner Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network, awarded the 2020 FABBS Early Career Impact Award from the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and selected as a 2021 Best 40-Under-40 Business School Professor by Poets & Quants. Papers he has coauthored have been awarded Best Paper of the Year in Experimental Economics, Social Cognition, and Political Methodology.
Payal Arora
Payal Arora is a digital anthropologist and an author, speaker, and professor. She holds the Chair in Technology, Values, and Global Media Cultures and is an Academic Director in UX and Inclusive Design at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is the co-founder of FemLab, a feminist future of work initiative. Her expertise lies in user experience of & inclusive design for low-income communities worldwide and comes with two decades of fieldwork experience in such contexts. She is the author of award-winning books including the ‘Leisure Commons,’ and “The Next Billion Users” with Harvard Press (PROSE award Winner for the best 2019 book in Business, Management and Finance). Engadget stated that her Harvard book is one of “the most interesting, thought-provoking books on science and technology we can find.” Forbes named her the “next billion champion” and “the right kind of person to reform tech.” Several international media outlets have covered her work including the BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, Quartz, Tech Crunch, The Boston Globe, F.A.Z, The Nation and CBC. She has consulted on tech innovation for diverse organizations such as Adobe, Spotify, Google, UNESCO, KPMG, GE, UNHCR, and HP. She has given more than 300+ talks in 115 cities in 67 countries alongside figures like Jimmy Wales and Steve Wozniak and TEDx talks on the future of the internet and frugal innovation. She sits on several boards such as Columbia University’s Earth Institute, World Women Global Council in New York, and the ICRIER Prosus Centre for Internet and Digital Economy. She has held Fellow positions at Bellagio Rockefeller, GE, ZEMKI, ITSRio, MICA, and NYU. She has an MA in international policy from Harvard University and a PhD in Language, Literacy and Technology from Columbia University. She is Indian, Irish, and American and currently lives in Amsterdam.
Zachary Elkins
Professor Elkins’ research focuses on issues of democracy, institutional reform, research methods, and national identity, with an emphasis on cases in Latin America. He is currently completing a book manuscript, Steal this Constitution: The Drift and Mastery of Constitutional Design, which examines the design and diffusion of democratic institutions. Much of his research is on the origins and consequences of national constitutions. With Tom Ginsburg (University of Chicago), Professor Elkins co-directs both the Comparative Constitutions Project , a NSF-funded initiative to understand the causes and consequences of constitutional choices, and the website Constitute , which provides resources and analysis for constitutional drafters in new democracies. Elkins earned his B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.