Timotheus Höttges, born in 1962, has been Chairman of the Board of Management of Deutsche Telekom AG since January 2014. From 2009 until his appointment as Chairman of the Board of Management, he was responsible for Finance and Controlling as a member of the Group Board of Management.

Under Tim Höttges, Deutsche Telekom achieved a landmark move in the U.S. market with the 2020 merger of T-Mobile US and Sprint; at the same time, he significantly accelerated the rollout of 5G and fiber-optics and increased global investments to EUR 19.3 billion most recently. Under his leadership, Deutsche Telekom became one of the world’s most valuable brands.

Ferri Abolhassan is a member of the Board of Management of Deutsche Telekom AG and CEO of T-Systems. He holds a PhD in computer science from Saarland University and has more than 30 years of experience in the IT sector including various management roles at SAP, IDS Scheer and Telekom Deutschland. With T-Systems & Deutsche Telekom Ferri Abolhassan boosts digital sovereignty and AI applications for industry by building Germany’s first AI factory, the Industrial AI Cloud in Munich. He is a member of the Supervisory Board of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and until recently was a member of the Expert Commission “Competition & AI” of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs.

Stefanie Kemp has served as Chief Transformation Officer (CTO) of Sana Kliniken AG since September 1, 2022, leading the Executive Board’s Transformation division and driving the group’s evolution into an integrated healthcare service provider. She began her professional career as a pediatric nurse. Over 35 years ago, she transitioned into the information technology sector via the pharmaceutical industry. In addition to RWE/innogySE, she has worked at Lowell Financial Services, operated her own consulting firm, and held positions at Oracle. She also holds supervisory board mandates, serves as Executive Sponsor of the Rotonda Business Club Düsseldorf, and is actively involved as a mentor for the Women into Leadership e. V. (IWiL) initiative.

Stefan Wrobel is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bonn, Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS and Director of the Lamarr Institute. As one of the leading AI researchers in Germany, Stefan has been engaged for many years in scientific, technical and economic aspects of AI, with a particular focus on Data Mining and Machine Learning. His research focuses on intelligent algorithms and large-scale data analysis. Stefan has published widely in international top-tier conferences and journals and is recognized as one of the most influential figures in German AI.

Sylvain Baillet, PhD, FRSC, is Director of Research & Innovation at University of Montreal Health Centre (CHUM), Director of the CHUM Research Centre, and Full Professor of Neuroscience at U of Montreal. A physicist with an international career in Europe and the USA, he holds the Tier-1 Canada Research Chair in Neural Dynamics of Brain Systems. His work advances time-resolved brain imaging and predictive modeling, including the use of AI models to probe predictive processes underlying perception and cognition. He develops widely used neuroimaging methods, open-source software, and data resources. He previously served as Associate Dean at McGill University and was elected Chair of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping.

Prof. Ingmar Posner leads the Applied Artificial Intelligence Lab (A2I) at the University of Oxford. As founding director of the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI), Ingmar’s research is shaped by a vision to create machines that constantly improve through experience. His work has produced seminal contributions to the foundations of robot learning, including large-scale learning from demonstration, unsupervised learning of scene dynamics, object-centric generative modelling, and 3D object detection. His recent work focuses on a novel class of structured, mechanistic world models designed to enable machines to discover re-usable and interpretable insights through observation, action, and interaction. These models help robots, and increasingly scientists, uncover the underlying structure of complex systems to improve generalisation across environments and application domains ranging from robot manipulation to the natural sciences. His research has been recognised with multiple Best Paper Awards at leading international venues such as ICAPS, IROS, and ISER. He co-led the team behind the UK’s first autonomous car, the Oxford RobotCar (now part of the permanent collection of the London Science Museum), and is a co-founder of Oxa, an award-winning provider of autonomous vehicle software. In 2024, the ORI was awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize, the highest national honour for UK educational institutions. An ELLIS Fellow, Ingmar currently also serves as an Amazon Scholar.

Axel Ngonga studied computer science and physics at Leipzig University, where he earned his PhD and completed his habilitation. After leading the Agile Knowledge Engineering group in Leipzig, he became Professor for Data Science at Paderborn University in 2017. He also serves as one of the directors of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Institute and is a Lamarr Fellow. His research focuses on knowledge graphs. He is the thankful recipient of over 30 international awards, including a Next Einstein Fellowship, and the 2024 NRW innovation award for his works on neurosymbolic machine learning. He is also a co-founder of the Tentris GmbH, a deep tech startup that develops the leading-edge tensor-based graph database TentrisDB.

Maren Bennewitz is a Professor of Humanoid Robots, Vice Rector for Digitalization at the University of Bonn, Principal Investigator at the Lamarr Institute and a member of the Executive Board of the Cluster of Excellence PhenoRob – Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production. A renowned expert in AI-driven Robotics, her research focuses on robots operating in human environments, with emphasis on human-robot interaction. She has developed innovative Machine Learning solutions, among them navigation, manipulation and active perception techniques for legged and wheeled robots and the generation of foresighted, personalized robot behavior.

Jens Kleesiek studied medicine in Heidelberg, earning his MD, before completing a PhD in computer science in Hamburg. He is a qualified specialist in radiology and medical informatics. In addition, Jens worked for several years in an executive role in industrial software development. Currently, he is Director of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (IKIM) at Essen University Hospital and heads the Machine Learning in Medicine department. He holds faculty positions at the University of Duisburg-Essen and TU Dortmund University. His research focuses on clinical pattern recognition and multimodal data integration to improve decision-making at the point of care.

Romina Medici leads Digital Platforms & Data Strategy at ERGO Group AG, part of Munich Re Group. She oversees enterprise AI and automation platforms, data architecture, and data governance across global insurance markets. Previously, she spent nearly 16 years at E.ON, building a global data platform spanning 40+ business units in 17 countries with a €25M+ portfolio. Her focus: deploying agentic AI systems at scale, with measurable business outcomes. She is developing the Agentic Operating Model — a governance framework for organisations integrating AI agents as workforce members.