Professor Amit Basu

Professor Amit Basu is the Carr P. Collins Endowed Chair at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he also chairs the IT and Operations Management department.He served as the President of the INFORMS Information Systems Society in 2012 and 2013.

Professor Basu has also been a faculty member at Vanderbilt University and the University of Maryland at College Park, and a visiting professor at INSEAD, the Vlerick Management School in Belgium and the Indian Institute of Management.Professor Basu’s research and teaching interests are in the areas of knowledge and data base systems, decision support systems, digital strategy, electronic commerce, and workflow management. He has published technical papers on these topics in a variety of leading publications, both major academic journals and business publications such as the Sloan Management Review and the Wall Street Journal. He has chaired the organizing committees and program committees for several international conferences and served on the editorial boards of the top academic journals in the Information Systems field.

In addition to his research and teaching, Professor Basu has been a consultant and advisor to a number of private and public sector organizations, both in the USA and Western Europe, including Dow Corning, Cisco, Accenture, IBM, Belgacom, Merck, eTex, Leonidas, State Industries, the State of Maryland and the Government of Flanders in Belgium. He has also served as an expert witness in e-Commerce and IT, and as an advisor to several technology ventures. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester, his M.B.A. from Southern Illinois University, and his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi.

Professor Soumitra Dutta

Soumitra Dutta is a Professor of Management at and the former founding dean of the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University, New York.He is also the founder and President of Portulans Institute, a non-partisan nonprofit research and education institution based in Washington DC.He is also the Chief Academic Advisor to the Artificial Intelligence Forum of the Confederation of Indian Industry.

He is the founder of the Global Innovation Index, published by the World Intellectual Property Organization and was the co-editor of the Global Information Technology Report, published by the World Economic Forum – two influential reports in technology and innovation policy.Dutta is on the global boards of Sodexo and Dassault Systemes. He is also a member of the Shareholder Council of Chicago-based healthcare consulting company ZS Associates. Dutta is a member of the Davos Circle, an association of long-time participants in the Annual Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum. He was the co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Innovation Ecosystems.

Professor Yorick Wilks

Yorick Wilks is Visiting Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Gresham College, London, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield, and a Senior Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.He led the team that won the Loebner Prize for the best computer conversationalist in New York in 1997.

He writes and researches in the fields of artificial intelligence and the computer processing of language, knowledge, and belief, in particular on the possibility of software agents with identifiable personalities.He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and of the European and American Societies for Artificial Intelligence, a recipient of the British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal (for research); of The European Commission’s Zampolli Prize, and of the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.He has written or edited ten books of which the most recent (2019) is “Artificial Intelligence: Modern Magic or Dangerous Future?”.