Keynotes

Dr. H.E. Muhammadou M.O. Kah

The Gambia's Permanent Representative &
UN CSTD Data Governance Vice-Chair

His Excellency Ambassador Professor Muhammadou Kah is The Gambia's Ambassador to Switzerland and its Permanent Representative to the United Nations Office at Geneva and the World Trade Organization. He chairs the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development and the WIPO High-Level Conversations on Intellectual Property and Frontier Technologies, and he is a founding board member of the International Digital Health and AI Research Collaborative. Before diplomacy he was a professor, with a doctorate from the Stevens Institute of Technology, faculty posts at Rutgers, Howard, and George Washington, and a term as the first Gambian-born Vice Chancellor of the University of The Gambia. He has worked with BYU's International Center for Law and Religion Studies on the Punta del Este Declaration on human dignity. At the Data Sovereignty table, which he leads, the question is who owns data about a place and its people and who decides, and the people at it are a Lakota engineer, a Maori media organization, a data worker, a Ghanaian ministry adviser, and the person who wrote the multilateral rulebook. He closes the conference with the cohorts' report-out on Thursday.

Dr. Shaolei Ren

University of California, Riverside

Shaolei Ren is Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Riverside, and he i the researcher who first made the water cost of artificial intelligence countable. Before his work, the field talked about energy. After it, the industry had to answer for water: the paper Making AI Less Thirsty put a number on what a large model draws, and a TED talk and a United Nations Environment Programme panel followed. He grew up rationing water in China, which is part of why the question occurred to him. His position is an engineer's: measure honestly first, then engineer within the constraint. He neither promotes nor condemns the technology, and he has said he likes problems. That posture is why he opens the conference, in a state facing drought, a shrinking lake, and a nine gigawatt data center proposal, and why the Environmental table he anchors holds a water attorney, a dust scientist, and an economist who audits whether claims survive accounting.

Dr. Milind Tambe

Harvard & Google DeepMind

Milind Tambe is the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard and directs its AI for Social Good program. Much of the field's founding work is his. In India, working with the maternal health nonprofit ARMMAN, he faced a call center of a thousand health workers and two hundred thousand pregnant women who needed them. Rather than reaching the average mother, his team built a method that found the women most at risk and most likely to drop out of the program, and reached them first. That method, decision-focused learning, is now used with the World Food Programme to predict food insecurity sixty days out in countries like Cameroon, Niger, and Yemen. His earlier work protected wildlife in Uganda and airports in Los Angeles, and earned commendations from the US Coast Guard and the Federal Air Marshals Service. His question, which he brings to the Famine table with three Ghanaian operators and a ministry adviser, is the one he named himself: prediction exists, and what does not is the record of what was decided and what happened.

Dr. Hannah Kerner

Arizona State University &
NASA Harvest

Hannah Kerner is Assistant Professor of Computing and AI at Arizona State and leads AI for NASA Harvest, the agency's food security and agriculture program. Her work measures what the world's fields actually produce, from orbit, at the resolution of a single farm, and she has applied it from Iowa cornfields to smallholder plots across Africa and the runoff on Hawaiian islands. She will not take a project that lacks community stakeholders, and she has said publicly that satellite data without ground truth is not data. A field can look full from space while the people beside it go hungry, and the difference is whether someone on the ground was asked. That is why she sits at two tables: at Famine, where her measurements are the prediction layer, and at Environmental, where the question is what a claim about water or land can honestly be made to prove. She was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and is a frequent collaborator with Catherine Nakalembe of NASA Harvest Africa.

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