Prof. Dr. Maja Göpel

Expert in sustainability policy and transformation research, co-founder of Scientists4Future

Prof. Dr. Maja Göpel has been working as a political economist, transformation expert, and sustainability scientist at the intersection of science, politics, and society for 25 years. Until October 2020, she advised the German government on global environmental changes as Secretary General of the scientific advisory board.

For her work, Maja Göpel has already received numerous awards, including the Science Communication Medal from the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen and the Theodor Heuss Prize in 2021. In 2020, she was awarded the B.A.U.M. Environmental and Sustainability Prize and the ZEIT WISSEN Prize for "Courage for Sustainability," as well as the Adam Smith Prize in 2019.

© Photo: AnjaWeber

Richard Socher

AI expert and founder of you.com

Richard Socher is the founder and CEO of You.com. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO/CTO of AI startup MetaMind, acquired by Salesforce in 2016. Richard received his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford. He is widely recognized as having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing, inventing the most widely used word vectors, contextual vectors and prompt engineering. He has over 150,000 citations and served as an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Stanford. Outside of work, Richard enjoys paramotor adventures and photography.

Dr Andreas Liebl

Managing Director appliedAI

Dr Andreas Liebl is Managing Director of the appliedAI Initiative and the appliedAI Institute for Europe with the goal to "Shape Europe's innovative power in AI" by working on advancing organizations to highest levels of AI maturity and by creating state of the art AI applications. He is Steering Committee member in the Global Partnership on AI and serves as expert regarding innovation and commercialization next to other advisory roles. He previously was one of the Managing Directors of UnternehmerTUM, worked for McKinsey and did his PhD at the Technical University of Munich. 

Carsten Knop

Editor Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Carsten Knop was born in Dortmund in 1969. An internship in the editorial office of the "Westfälische Rundschau" led to freelance work in the local editorial offices of this newspaper even before graduating from high school. Knop studied business administration at the University of Münster. This was followed in 1993 by a traineeship at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His journalistic training was followed by his first editorial position in 1995: He was quickly transferred to Düsseldorf as a correspondent for the "Börsen-Zeitung". The change of location made it possible to return to the Düsseldorf office of the F.A.Z. in 1996, which had already been the outstation of the traineeship. After the time in Düsseldorf, business correspondent first in New York and then in San Francisco. Since 2003 back in Frankfurt, for many years head of corporate reporting, later also responsible for business news. From the beginning of 2018 until March 2020 editor-in-chief for digital products. Editor since April 2020.

Oliver Burkeman

New York Times bestselling author and journalist

Oliver Burkeman is a journalist and best-selling author. For 14 years he was writing the popular weekly column called ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’ in The Guardian and online where he investigated routes to mental wellbeing.

His book Four Thousand Weeks (the average lifespan of a human) is a New York Times best-seller and named one of the best books of 2021 by the Financial Times, The Times, The Observer, Audible, Time and Barnes & Noble. Here, Oliver explores why the central challenge of time management isn't becoming more efficient, but deciding what to neglect; why, in an accelerating world, patience is a superpower and why, in conditions of limitless choice, burning your bridges beats keeping your options open.

His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian US, Esquire, Psychologies and New Philosopher.