Sam Gregoryis an award-winning technologist and advocate who is currently the Program Director ofWITNESS, an organization which supports anyone, anywhere to use video and technology to fight for human rights.Sam leads work around emerging opportunities and threats like artificial intelligence, proactive approaches tomalicious ‘deepfakes',innovation in eyewitness video, and challenges to trust and evidence. He also supervises WITNESS’ Tech Advocacy work, which advocates to technology companies on how products protect human rights and develops tools such as ProofMode for better authentication of contentious video.

”it’s a profoundly human act to give feedback to each other on our creative work”Mark d’Inverno is not only a professor of computer science– he is also an accomplished jazz musician with both skill and feeling. His talk is more concerned with the latter: the craft of creative production. He believes the discourse has focussed too much on creativity as a power in the mind which leads to us trying to create computer systems which simulate ’heroic agency' where what matters is the final product. He believes that the modern understandings of creativity from psychology which lead to this way of designing and envisaging AI is a mistake. He subscribes instead to Dewey’s notion that art is not about the final piece itself but about the human experience of making and experiencing it. In his background as a teacher, d’Inverno works a lot with creative feedback – creating safe environments – physical and virtual - where feedback can be motivational and personalised. And he believes this is where AI can help. If we want to approach the world with the curiousity of a musician or artist, then rigorously designed AI can help us get a stronger sense of our shared world.

”An inferno of will and intentions, all suppressed feelings, two dogs and a speed lane. Things that leads up to Need For Speed a two man gang from Malmö Sweden.” Need for Speed is a Malmö duo consisting of the fabulous Martin Nilsson Felix Mårtensson.It is chill pop music with a healthy dose of dark indie electronic RnB. They both have their roots in noir punk band RA. Soft touch can be found on Spotify together with their other releases.

Industrial designer and co-founder of non-agencyPetra Lilja speaks about the weight of human influence on the earth and how to design for a better future for all species. Can we go from a human centered to a multi-species centered future?

Paul Soulellis is an artist and educator based in Providence, RI. His practice includes teaching, writing and experimental publishing, with a focus on queer methodologies and network culture.Paul poses important questions about history and erasure and has long been using publishing as a form of resistance. Innovation and creation is about power, but so is the act of deciding what to maintain and preserve, not least in the digital world. What is signal and what is noise?

“You can have weird and dangerous features in a platform if the core is that you are never gonna scale.”Internet artist Darius Kazemi is known for his many (and funny) Twitterbots under the moniker Tiny Subversions. He is also the founder of Friendscamp, a Twitter like social networkwithonly 50 users which is run from a server in his own home.A more human scale social network built upon the input from the users.At The Conference 2019, Darius shared his visionof aradical new direction for social network sites.

Xiaowei Wang is a designer, engineer and researcher who focuses on the centrality of landscape and ecology in the digital world, building inquiry and community through public art, data visualization and writing. At The Conference 2019, they shared their research on consumerism in China, with an extra focus on the rural Taobao villages.

Open source investigatorGabi Ivensworks as a human rights researcher focusing largely on visual documentation of human rights abuses. She locates, analyses and preserves publicly available information to use in human rights investigations and researches the ethical and social implications, as well as the technical challenges, of this work.

“If you think of your most favorite or least favorite social network, and then try and imagine what it would look like as a physical space. It’s really easy to imagine if it’s a space you would like to go to every day or not.”How can we sort out the good attributions from existing platforms and create new ones? Social networks have been deeply criticized over the years, but Are.na founder Charles Broskoski wants to turn the subject on how to develop and improve them instead. He wants to start a conversation about the important questions, What is a good platform and what patterns does it have? He describes Are.na as a platform for connecting ideas and building knowledge and explains that the users have a lot of power and influence over the platform.

At The Conference 2019,Lisa Ding, product designer at Twitter's“Design for Conversation” department shared insights and considerations on how to design for a healthy public conversation in a digital universe. Drawing from her actual work and experiences at Twitter.