Pierre-Alexandre Balland is a French economist and one of Europe’s leading experts on complex systems, the future of cities, artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies. He is a Professor at Utrecht University and previously held positions at MIT and UCLA. He is a Visiting Professor at the Center for Collective Learning of the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute and a research fellow at the Center for Complex Systems Studies. Pierre-Alex is also a high-level policy expert that currently serves in the ESIR group to advise the European Commission on innovation policy.

Mr. Nair is a Co-Founder of Avesha, the industry's first technology platform that enables application workloads to be placed and content routed without boundaries across cloud, edge or any heterogeneous network. He has over 20 years of experience in various areas of Computer and Telecommunications Networks including Application Overlay Networks, Edge Inference, IPTV, Premium Media Delivery, TVE/OTT Content Protection, Security, CDNs, Network Routing, Switching and Load Balancing.

Mr. Nair was previously a CTO and Co-Founder of Azuki Systems which was acquired by Ericsson in 2014. Prior to that, he was the Founding Engineer for Arrowpoint Communications, which also exited through a successful acquisition by Cisco Systems in 2000.

Mr. Nair has a Ph.D in Computer Science from University of Maryland, a Master Degree in Mechanical Engineer and Computer Science from Iowa State University, and a Bachler in Technology and Mechanical Engineer from Indian Institute of Technology..

As the CEO of Powerley, Manoj is delivering a vision of a clean energy future. Through his leadership, Powerley has partnered with global utilities to give households instant access to energy data and insights to make the right energy decisions to reduce their bills and make the world greener. Today, over 300,000 households are interacting over 100 million times a year with the Powerley home energy management platform – controlling energy waste from smartphones, the web and voice assistants.

Prior to Powerley, Manoj was a Partner at McKinsey & Co.’s Silicon Valley office, a Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and Partner at PRTM Management Consulting (acquired by PwC) in Silicon Valley. He played key leadership roles in each firm and led to more than 30 enterprise level transformations from start-ups to Fortune 5 companies across the world – delivering significant growth, profitability and EPS improvements for his clients. Earlier in his career held engineering roles at Cypress Semiconductor and Allied Signal.

Vladimir Bulović is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, holding the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology. He directs the Organic and Nanostructured Electronics Laboratory, co-leads the MIT-Eni Solar Frontiers Center, leads the Tata GridEdge program, and is the Founding Director of MIT.nano, MIT's new nano-fabrication, nano-characterization, and prototyping facility. He is an author of over 250 research articles (cited over 50,000 times and recognized as the top 1% of the most highly cited in the Web of Science).

He is an inventor of over 120 U.S. patents in areas of light emitting diodes, lasers, photovoltaics, photodetectors, chemical sensors, programmable memories, and micro-electro machines, majority of which have been licensed and utilized by both start-up and multinational companies. The three start-up companies Bulović co-founded jointly employ over 350 people, and include Ubiquitous Energy, Inc., developing nanostructured solar technologies, Kateeva, Inc., focused on development of printed electronics, and QD Vision, Inc. (acquired in 2016) that produced quantum dot optoelectronic components. Products of these companies have been used by millions. Bulović was the first Associate Dean for Innovation of the School of Engineering and the Inaugural co-Director of MIT’s Innovation Initiative, which he co-led from 2013 to 2018. For his passion for teaching Bulović has been recognized with the MacVicar Fellowship, MIT’s highest teaching honor. He completed his Electrical Engineering B.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees at Princeton University..

Mitchell Dong is the CEO of Pythagoras Investment Management, a hedge fund which trades cryptocurrencies. He has run previous funds which have traded electric power and uranium and has started companies which have developed solar, hydro and cogeneration power plants. He also runs his family office investing in hedge funds, PE and VC funds and real estate. Mitchell is an economics graduate of Harvard College and of the OPM program at Harvard Business School. He previously served on Board Committees of the Harvard Alumni Association and was a member of the Visiting Committee of the Harvard Chan School of Public Health.

Tricia Lin is the Sales Lead at Anchorage Digital, a premium digital assets platform for institutions to take custody of crypto. Prior to joining Anchorage, Tricia spent over 15 years in technology and finance, with experience on the buy-side as a hedge fund and venture capital fund investor responsible for TMT equity and blockchain research/due diligence; and business development/capital raising roles at Morgan Stanley and hedge funds. Before she joined Wall Street, Tricia sold Bloomberg's full suite of data and infrastructure products to capital markets investors. Tricia holds an MBA from INSEAD, a BS in Finance from the Rutgers School of Business and FINRA licenses 7, 66, and 3.

Ms. Yudan Zhang is an EY Strategy and Transactions Partner based in Boston with a focus on cross-border investments and transactions. Over the past 15 years, Ms. Zhang has assisted many Chinese and other Asian strategic and financial investors with their investment projects in the US, as well as advised US clients on matters relating to their investments and operations in China.

Ms. Zhang has worked on both buy and sell side M&A transactions ranging from $20M to $30B with various due diligence, negotiation assistance, data preparation and analysis. Her experience includes add-on acquisitions, carve-out transactions, leveraged buyouts, public-to-private transactions, cross-border, accounting consultations and other contract issues. Her experiences are primarily in Technology, Health and Consumer sectors.

Ms. Zhang has a BA from Beijing Normal University (北京师范大学) and an MSA from Boston College.