Theme: On The Edge

“On The Edge” is a sign of the times. On the one hand, humanity is experiencing exponential growth in ideas at the cutting edge of technology and science. On the other hand, society has seemingly been driven to the edge, with divisions rapidly spreading across the world.

Our conference will blend advances on the edge of a breakthrough in fields like AI, blockchain or gene editing with personal stories of living on the edge and ideas for getting an edge on pressing global issues like climate change and inequality.

Volkstheater Vienna
Neustiftgasse 1
Vienna, Wien, 1070
Austria

The Clairvoyants

Mental Magicians

The Clairvoyants were awarded “The German Champions of Mentalism”, “Magicians of the Year 2015” and were chosen as the “World Champions of Mentalism 2015-2018”. In 2016 they took part in the biggest talent show in the world, “America’s Got Talent”. America voted them second place. In April 2017 the Academy of Magical Arts & The Magic Castle Hollywood awarded Thommy Ten & Amélie van Tass "Stage Magicians of the Year 2016" for their extraordinary art.

The Vienna Songwriting Circle

Songwriting Collective

The Vienna Songwriting Circle is an informal non profit group of Singer Songwriters based in Vienna. The VSC get together once every month to network, support, talk and learn about songs. They have even been known to write some! Formed in February 2015 by Irish Singer Songwriter Shane Ó Fearghail, along with Stuart Neville (SCO) and Mark Peters (ENG), the Vienna Songwriting Circle was founded to develop the art and craft of songwriting.

Anders Sandberg

Futurist Philosopher

Anders Sandberg is a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University. His research centres on management of low-probability high-impact risks, estimating the capabilities of future technologies, and very long-range futures. He has a background in computational neuroscience, transhumanism, and future studies.

Asha Siad

Journalist & Filmmaker

Asha Siad is an award-winning Somali-Canadian journalist and documentary filmmaker. She shares under-reported stories that expand dialogue and allow people to connect with the world in a more meaningful way. She has reported for Shaw TV, CBC News and Frontiere News. Asha co-produced Living at the Border, a web documentary that shares the realities of African migrants and asylum-seekers in Italy. The project won the Amnesty International Canada Media Award for Best Online Journalism in 2014.Asha’s latest documentary film for the National Film Board of Canada called 19 Days reveals the human side of the refugee resettlement process. She was recently in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina providing multimedia journalism training to Bosnian youth and empowering them to share their own stories through the Mostar Summer Youth Programme.

Chenthur Raaghav Naagendran

Graphene Architect

Chenthur Raaghav Naagendran is an architect who explored the ideas of material, research and design computation that harmoniously culminated in a thesis about Graphene and its Architectural Application in flexible skin for architecture and its variants. He has written various research papers on Graphene Architecture and 3d printing uncooked clay.

Christian Waldner

Highline Slackliner

Christian discovered his passion for slacklining during a climbing vacation in Italy, in 2003. In 2008, he turned his passion into a profession and became one of the first professional slackliners in Europe. In 2013, Christian highlined from the South Tower of Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral to the cathedral’s Southern Heiden Tower, at a height of 60 metres from the ground. The biggest challenge in highlining, according to Christian, is the mental component.

David Buss

Evolutionary Psychologist

American psychologist David M. Buss is a leading researcher and author in the field of evolutionary psychology and human sex differences in partner selection. The 2005/2016 book The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, edited by Buss, is considered the definitive text on the subject.

David Jay

Portrait Photographer

David Jay has been shooting fashion and beauty professionally for over 15 years. Like so many others personally touched by the disease, Jay was inspired to act when a dear friend was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 32. Like the subjects themselves, Jay's stark, bold portraits challenge traditional perceptions of the disease and capture the raw beauty, strength and character of so many extraordinary young women. The scar project is a series of large scale portraits of young breast cancer survivors.

Dean Buonomano

Neuroscientist

Dean Buonomano is a neuroscientist at UCLA. He is a leading researcher on how the brain tells time. His latest book is Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time. His previous book was Brain Bugs: How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives.

Dina Zielinski

Bioinformatics Researcher

Dina recently joined the Institut Curie as a bioinformatics scientist. She is fascinated by bringing biological data to life, from decoding mutations in cancer to encoding movies in DNA.

Dori Adar

Game Designer

Dori Adar is a Game Designer and Educator based in Tel Aviv. Dori has been working on commercial mobile games for the past seven years and recently began working on games for impact. He has released five political games to date, which all tackle different aspects of racism. Dori is a firm believer in the power of games to change perceptions and habits and is now focusing on creating collaborative game experiences.

Fabio Wibmer

Trials Rider

In 2016, Fabio Wibmer's YouTube clips of riding a line on the thin railing of a 200m high dam and showing off his downhill ability on an old lady's bikewent viral. But Fabio was already on a journey to trials stardom. He's been a permanent member of the Drop and Roll Tour with Danny MacAskill since 2014, won the 'GoPro of the World – Best Line Contest' in 2015 (with more than 44m views on Facebook) and the German Web Video Award 2015 in the Best Sport Video category. These are just a few highlights from along the way. He's a successful downhiller and freerider too: winner of the Austrian Whip-Off Contest 2015, Austrian Downhill Champion 2016, winner of the Innsbruck Downhill Cup 2016 and 2017, and winner of the Whip Off at the Dirt Masters Festival in Winterberg.

Gavin Wood

Blockchain Expert

Dr. Wood is a co-founder and CTO of Ethereum. He co-designed the Ethereum Protocol and wrote its formal specification, created and wrote the first functional Ethereum implementation, designed the Solidity language and implemented the Whisper protocol. Dr Wood created Parity, the first truly industrial blockchain implementation. Recently, he has been working on Polkadot, which could have a significant impact on the development of blockchain.

Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman

Computer Scientist

Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman is a computer scientist and entrepreneur. She holds positions at UW and Facebook. Her research is in the intersection of Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, and AI. In particular she and her team pioneered modeling humans from photographs and videos "in the wild".

Islam Mosa

Bioelectronics Researcher

Islam Mosa is a senior Ph.D. student at the University of Connecticut, USA. He is most passionate about working at the interface between chemistry, biology, and electronics to create novel solutions to pressing health problems. He created biodevices ranging from cancer diagnostics to new power sources for cardiac pacemakers. His work has been featured in world news media such as Fox News, Yahoo News, and Digital trends, and has been recognized with 8 local, national and international awards.

Jake Roper

Science Communicator

Jake Roper hosts, produces and writes Vsauce3 - a science YouTube channel with over 3.3 million subscribers, where he shares his excitement for the real-life science behind gaming, movies, comics, and more via ultra-cinematic explorations. To truly blend those worlds, Jake has been known to enlist the help of guests such as Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Muppets, Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Steve Martin and Rihanna.

Karen Dolva

Interaction Designer

Karen Dolva is the CEO and co-founder at No Isolation, a company that aims to help people out of loneliness and social isolation. She has a background in computer science and interaction design.

Linda Kaye

Cyberpsychology Expert

Dr. Linda K. Kaye is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Edge Hill University. Her research is in the area of cyberpsychology; the study of our psychological experiences and impacts associated with new and emerging technology and the Internet. She is interested in the psychology of online behaviour, and how this varies across individuals and different virtual contexts.

Maanasa Mendu

Student Inventor

On a family visit to India, Maanasa saw the challenges of energy scarcity. A high school freshman in Ohio, she created a piezoelectric "leaf" device that harvests energy from sun, wind and rain. She's working to commercialize her device.

Max Hawkins

Computational Artist

Max Hawkins is an artist and computer scientist working at the boundary between computation and culture. His projects deal with information, chance, automation, and atypical forms of communication. He is a graduate of the Computer Science & Art program at Carnegie Mellon University and an alumnus of Google’s Data Arts Team. Since 2015 he has been nomadic, traveling the world based on the output of a random number generator.

Nicholas McCarthy

One-Handed Pianist

Born without his right hand, piano star Nicholas McCarthy is at the forefront of British music talent, championing accessibility to music for all. Nicholas McCarthy’s musical journey begins at age 14 when he was told he'd never achieve his dream of becoming a concert pianist. Ignoring this advice and undeterred he became the first one-handed pianist to win a place at London's prestigious Royal College of Music. Recognising his exceptional talent and inspirational reach Nicholas was invited to perform to a worldwide audience of half a billion when he played alongside the British Paraorchestra and Coldplay at the closing ceremony of London's Paralympics in 2016.

Pablo Garcia

Artist & Designer

Pablo Garcia is Associate Professor in Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Born in 1975, Garcia was in college when the first internet browser launched. Composite training in traditional analog and then-nascent digital technologies inspired a research practice into the intersection and overlap of art and technology, obsolescence and the cutting edge, the real and the virtual. Garcia’s work ranges from scholarly contributions to art historical studies to contemporary artworks examining digital culture.

Peter Emerson

Political Analyst

Peter Emerson is the director of the de Borda Institute. He has written ten books on voting systems and published several articles on democracy in peer reviewed journals. A vocal critic of the Majority Rule, he has helped design an app for multi-option voting.

Shahak Shapira

Artist & Comedian

Shahak Shapira is Israeli, Berliner, a white belt in Karate and the proud owner of a regular-sized penis. His hobbies are Hummus, Death Metal and not using Snapchat. He's a comedian, "artist", bestseller author, but first and foremost a sex symbol. He's also really into witty bios, meta-jokes and enumerations. Shahak is mostly known for his projects YOLOCAUST and "#HeyTwitter", both gaining major attention all over the world.

Stephanie Wehner

Quantum Physicist

Stephanie Wehner is an Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor at QuTech, Delft University of Technology, where she leads the Quantum Internet efforts. Her passion is the theory of quantum information in all its facets, and she has written numerous scientific articles in both physics and computer science. In a former life, she worked as a professional hacker in industry.