Olga Baranova is the Secretary General of CH++, a Swiss NGO dedicated to ensuring that scientific and technological expertise effectively strengthens and implements democratic decisions. The organization plays a key role in shaping digital and research hub policies at the federal level in Switzerland. In addition, she is actively involved in advancing progressive media policy. With a background in political science and public administration, Olga has worked for the Swiss Social Democratic Party and led the campaign for the referendum on marriage equality in Switzerland. She was also a former member of the Geneva City Council.

Marjorie Buchser is currently a Senior Consultant with the UNESCO’s section of Freedom of Expression and Safety of Journalists, focusing on the implementation of the Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms with specific stakeholder groups.

She is also a Senior Advisor and Associate Fellow with Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, an independent policy institute based in London. For almost a decade, she developed and launched high priority strategic initiatives for Chatham House’s Director Office including its Sustainability Accelerator and Digital Society Programme (DSP), the institute first research programme on technology policy. In 2018, she became the Executive Director of DSP, managing a team of multidisciplinary researchers and overseeing research projects on data flows, artificial intelligence and digital platforms governance.

Prior to Chatham House, Marjorie was a Senior Strategist at Purpose, a social impact agency, where she developed various advocacy campaigns related to digital inclusion and climate change. She also worked as an Associate Director and Global Leadership Fellow at the World Economic Forum in Geneva and New York where she led the organisation’s digital innovation projects and managed the Technology Pioneer Programme.

Paul-Olivier is a mathematician by training who became interested in the role of personal data in society. He has most notably helped uncover the Cambridge Analytica scandal. He has led the NGO PersonalData.io and is the CEO of Hestia.ai, a generative AI company. With this double affiliation he builds fun citizen science projects such as with Geneva Uber drivers, reverse engineering Uber’s algorithms.

Emma Hoes is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich. At the UZH, she is involved in the ERC-funded project PRODIGI as well as the Digital Democracy Lab. Her research focuses on several challenges that came about with the advancement of digital technologies, such as  misinformation, micro-targeting, online content moderation, AI and LLM’s (ChatGPT), and – more broadly speaking – the role of social media in our daily media-diet. She is particularly interested in the extent to which the numerous interventions against these potentially harmful phenomena are effective, especially to what extent such interventions may cause unintended spill-over effects, and — more currently — how these negative effects can be prevented.

Anushka Jain is a lawyer and policy researcher based in India who has extensively worked on regulatory challenges surrounding artificial intelligence and its impacts on privacy and freedom of expression.She currently works as a Research Associate at Digital Futures Lab, Goa. In her work, she has examined issues related to the responsibilities of technology companies such as Facebook on moderating hateful and violent speech on their platforms, gendered impacts of mis-/dis-information as well as the impact emerging technologies such as Generative AI will have on democratic processes, specifically for politically active women.

She has been quoted in a Vice India documentary about the Sulli Deals/Bulli Bai incident which targeted politically active women belonging to the minority Muslim community by “auctioning” them on the internet. She has also been quoted in publications such as Al Jazeera, Independent, DW, and ABC, about the potential harms of deepfakes and AI-generated mis-/dis-information during the recent election cycle in India. She emphasises that the existing legal vacuum surrounding AI in India and globally is a primary concern that needs to be addressed as we continue to have discussions about the potential repercussions of these technologies.

Konstantinos Komaitis is a senior resident fellow and Internet governance lead at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. He has over a decade of experience in internet policy, previously serving as a senior director at the Internet Society and a senior lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. Dr. Komaitis has advised companies and international organizations on internet and AI governance and held speaking engagements worldwide, including TedX. He has written for outlets like Politico and Slate and authored a book on domain name regulation. He holds two master’s degrees and a doctorate, and serves on the boards of IP Justice and the Global Network Initiative. He also co-hosts the “Internet of Humans” podcast.

Chine Labbé is Managing Editor & Vice President of Partnerships for Europe and Canada at NewsGuard, a U.S. company that evaluates the reliability of news and information websites and combats mis- and disinformation. In April 2023, she was also appointed as a member of the Committee on Honesty, Independence and Pluralism for the programs of Radio France, France’s public radio. Labbé previously worked as the Editor-in-Chief and Host of Good Code, a podcast on ethics in the digital world that she created in September 2018 with Cornell Tech’s Digital Life Initiative. Before that, she worked as a reporter for Reuters in Paris, covering courts and terrorism and as a multimedia producer for The Economist in New York. In 2009, she won the Anna Lindh Journalist Award for a radio documentary broadcast on France Culture. She studied journalism at Columbia University and Sciences Po in Paris.

Lukas Mäder is editor for technology at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) AG. Born in St. Gallen, he studied Eastern European History, German Studies and Computer Science at the University of Zurich, and graduated in 2007 with a thesis on Yugoslavian labor migration to Switzerland. Already during his studies he started working as a journalist. From 2008 on he was responsible for covering Swiss politics at “20 Minuten Online”. After that, he worked for several years at Radio SRF as an editor and producer, and he also moderated the debate program “Politikum”. In 2017, Mäder moved to the Federal Parliament for the NZZ, where he focused on topics related to digitalization, among other things. Since November 2020, he has been writing as a technology editor, focusing primarily on cybersecurity, disinformation, and technology in warfare.

Albertina Piterbarg is an Electoral Expert and journalist working at UNESCO Freedom of Expression and Security of Journalists section. She has more than 20 years of experience working in the areas of communications, elections and women’s political participation in the Organization of the American States (OAS), UN Peacekeeping Operations, UNDP, UN Women and most recently, UNESCO ranging from head of office, team leader, field officer, government advisor, independent consultant, and certified BRIDGE trainer. She has participated in several missions in Niger, Ivory Coast, Tunisia, Libya, East-Timor, New Caledonia, Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Dominican Republic and Venezuela among others. She studied Philosophy and Literature in the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and a master’s in Journalism in Saint Andrews University of Argentina, where she was bestowed with the Outstanding University Graduate award 2018.

Sisi Wei is the Chief Impact Officer at CalMatters and The Markup, where she is forging new ways for journalism to restore readers’ sense of agency, serve communities, and drive real-world impact. Sisi was Editor-in-Chief of The Markup from 2022-2024. During that time, The Markup’s mission was updated to challenging technology to serve the public good, and the newsroom’s journalism had incredible impact: Dozens of companies removed the privacy-invading Meta Pixel from their websites, local and state governments across the country ended or fixed their usage of biased algorithms, and multiple class action lawsuits were filed. Under Sisi’s tenure, for the first time, The Markup published a citizen science guide for the public, story recipes for journalists, a digital zine, and service pieces directed by community needs.

Previously, Sisi was co-executive director of OpenNews, and assistant managing editor at ProPublica. At ProPublica, Sisi oversaw three editorial teams focused on news apps, interactive storytelling, and visual investigations. She also managed large, interdisciplinary investigations across the newsroom, one of which won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2020. Sisi worked at ProPublica for seven years, investigating abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust across a range of topics, including health care, higher education, government, and immigration. In 2024, Sisi won the Freedom of the Press Rising Star Award. In 2021, IWFM awarded Sisi the Gwen Ifill Award.

Jan Zilinsky is a research fellow and lecturer at the Munich School of Politics and Public Policy at the Technical University of Munich. His academic research deals with the impact of political information, including through foreign influence operations via social media, on electoral behavior. He received his doctoral degree from New York University, and his first degree in economics from Harvard University.