Featured Speakers

Prof Sir Konstantin ‘Kostya’ Novoselov FRS was born in Russia in August 1974. He has both 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 Kostya Novoselov is included in the list of the most highly cited researchers in the world. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 for his achievements with graphene. Kostya holds positions of Langworthy Professor of Physics and the Royal Society Research Professor at The University of Manchester.

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. Professor Novoselov has published more than 250 peer-reviewed research papers. 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) among many others. He was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours.

John E. Hopcroft is the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics in Computer Science at Cornell University. From January 1994 until June 2001, he was the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering. After receiving both his M.S. (1962) and Ph.D. (1964) in electrical engineering from Stanford University, he spent three years on the faculty of Princeton University. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1967, was named professor in 1972 and the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Computer Science in 1985. He served as chairman of the Department of Computer Science from 1987 to 1992 and was the associate dean for college affairs in 1993. An undergraduate alumnus of Seattle University, Hopcroft was honored with a Doctor of Humanities Degree, Honoris Causa, in 1990.

Hopcroft's research centers on theoretical aspects of computing, especially analysis of algorithms, automata theory, and graph algorithms. He has coauthored four books on formal languages and algorithms with Jeffrey D. Ullman and Alfred V. Aho. His most recent work is on the study of information capture and access.

He was honored with the A. M. Turing Award in 1986. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). In 1992, he was appointed by President Bush to the National Science Board (NSB), which oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF), and served through May 1998. From 1995-98, Hopcroft served on the National Research Council's Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications.

In addition to these appointments, Hopcroft serves as a member of the SIAM financial management committee, IIIT New Delhi advisory board, Microsoft's technical advisory board for research Asia, and the Engineering Advisory Board, Seattle University.

Kai-Fu Lee is the Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures (www.sinovationventures.com) and President of Sinovation Venture’s Artificial Intelligence Institute. Sinovation Ventures, managing US$3 billion dual currency investment funds, is a leading venture capital firm focusing on developing the next generation deep tech companies in China. Prior to founding Sinovation in 2009, Dr. Lee was the President of Google China, and senior executives at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple. Dr. Lee received his Bachelor degree from Computer Science from Columbia University, Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as Honorary Doctorate Degrees from both Carnegie Mellon and the City University of Hong Kong. He is the Co-Chair of Artificial Intelligence Council for World Economic Forum Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Times 100 in 2013, WIRED 25 Icons, and followed by over 50 million audience on social media.

In the field of artificial intelligence, Dr. Lee built one of the first game playing programs to defeat a world champion (1988, Othello), as well as the world’s first large-vocabulary, speaker- independent continuous speech recognition system. Dr. Lee founded Microsoft Research China, later renamed Microsoft Research Asia, which was named as the hottest research lab by MIT Technology Review. While with Apple, Dr. Lee led AI projects in speech and natural language, which have been featured on Good Morning America on ABC Television and the front page of Wall Street Journal. He has authored 10 U.S. patents, and more than 100 journal and conference papers. Altogether, Dr. Lee has been in artificial intelligence research, development, and investment for more than 30 years. His New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling book AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (aisuperpowers.com) discusses US-China co-leadership in the age of AI as well as the greater societal impacts brought upon by the AI technology revolution. His new co-authored book AI 2041 published in fall 2021 explores how artificial intelligence will change our world over the next twenty years.

Prof. Joseph Sifakis is Emeritus Research Director at Verimag laboratory. His current area of interest is trustworthy autonomous systems design with focus on self-driving cars.

In 2007, he received the Turing Award for his contribution to the theory and application of model checking. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, of the French National Academy of Engineering, of Academia Europea, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the National Academy of Engineering, and of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is a Grand Officer of the French National Order of Merit, a Commander of the French Legion of Honor. He has received the Leonardo da Vinci Medal in 2012.

For more information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Sifakis

Professor Ke Lu (B. S. in materials science and engineering, Nanjing University of Science & Technology, 1985; PhD in MSE, Institute of metal Research of CAS, 1990) is a professor and the founding director of Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science (SYNL). He was a visiting professor in Max-Planck-Institut für Metallforschung (Stuttgart, Germany) and in University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA).

Professor Lu's icon scientific achievements include two parts:

(1) Discovery of nano-twinned materials and development of the nano-twin strengthening methodology. Traditional strengthening methodologies of materials (such as alloying, strain-hardening, dispersion strengthening, etc.) invariably suffer from an undesirable consequence that strength increases at an expense of ductility and thermal and/or electrical conductivity. Professor Lu and his co-workers discovered that by generating high density of nano-scale twins in grains, pure copper is strengthened by one order of magnitude while keeping its high electrical conductivity and a considerable ductility. They identified that the high density of twin boundaries may effectively block dislocation motions to strengthen materials, and at the same time, twin boundaries may act as dislocation slip planes to accommodate strains. With this discovery, Professor Lu and his collaborators developed a novel strengthening methodology, i.e., nano-twin strengthening, overcoming the conventional property trade-offs.

(2) Development of surface nanocrystallization of metals, from concept and principles to processing technology. Based on plastic deformation induced grain refinement mechanism, Professor Lu and his collaborators invented mechanically-driven surface nanocrystallization processes such as surface mechanical attrition treatment (SMAT) and surface mechanical grinding treatment (SMGT) techniques to transform the coarse-grained structures into gradient nano-grained structures in surface layers on bulk metals. Such an elastic-homogeneous and plastic-heterogeneous gradient architecture provides a unique structure to upgrade the overall properties and performance of the bulk materials, including mechanical properties, surface chemical reactivity, and tribological behaviors of engineering materials. They discovered that with a gradient nano-grained surface layer, strength of a pure Cu bar can be doubled while its tensile ductility remains unchanged. The extraordinary intrinsic plasticity of gradient nano-grained structures offers a great potential for use as advanced coatings of bulk materials. Recently, by means of SMGT processing of nickel Professor Lu discovered ultra-hard and ultra-stable nano-laminated structures with low-angle boundaries, which offers a novel strong-and-stable nanostructure in metals.

He authored and co-authored more than 380 international peer-reviewed journal publications, held 30 patents, and presented over 100 invited lectures at international conferences and symposia. His publications received more than 20000 ISI citations. He is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2003), a member of German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2005), and a member of TWAS (2004). He is an editor of Progress in Materials Science (Elsevier) and a reviewing editor of Science (AAAS). He received Humboldt Research Award (AvH Foundation, Germany, 2011), THERMEC Distinguished Award (Canada, 2006), TWNSO Award in Technology (TWAS, 2000), Kelly Lecturer (University of Cambridge, UK, 2010). He is a Fellow of the AAAS (USA), MRS (USA), and APAM.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is awarded the 2022 Tang Prize in Sustainable Development for leading transdisciplinary sustainability science and creating the multilateral movement for its applications from village to nation and the world. He is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Chair of the Lancet COVID19 Commission, Co-Chair of the UN Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition, Commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development, academician of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences at the Vatican, and Tan Sri Jeffrey Cheah Honorary Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Development at Sunway University. He has been Special Advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary General António Guterres. Sachs spent over twenty years as a professor at Harvard University, where he received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees, and has received 38 honorary doctorates. In 2021, Sachs received the TÜBA Academy Prize from the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the Legion of Honor by decree of the President of the Republic of France, the Order of the Cross from the President of Estonia, and honorary doctorates from Amrita University in Kerala, India; Macau University of Science and Technology; and the University of Siena, Italy. His most recent book is The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions (2020).

Dr. Semenza is the C. Michael Armstrong professor of genetic medicine, with joint appointments in pediatrics, radiation oncology, biological chemistry, medicine, and oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He serves as the founding director of the Vascular Program at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering and the founding director of the Armstrong Oxygen Biology Research Center.

Dr. Semenza received an A.B. (in Biology) from Harvard University and M.D. and Ph.D. (in Genetics) degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed pediatrics residency training at Duke University Medical Center and postdoctoral training in medical genetics at Johns Hopkins. He has been a member of the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1990.

Dr. Semenza’s lab discovered hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1), a transcription factor that controls the expression of thousands of genes in response to changes in oxygen availability, for which he was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. His current research interests include investigating the molecular mechanisms of oxygen homeostasis and the role of HIF-1 in cancer progression. He has authored more than 450 research articles and book chapters, and his work has been cited by other scientists more than 175,000 times. Dr. Semenza is co-founder of HIF Therapeutics Inc., which is focused on the development of HIF inhibitors for the treatment of cancer and blinding eye diseases.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Dr. Semenza has received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (2016), Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences (2014), Lefoulon-Delalande Grand Prize from the Institut de France (2012), and the Canada Gairdner International Award (2010).