18 September 2019
18:30 – 21:00 | Welcoming Cocktail at the Switerzerland’s Ambassador Residence
Artificial Intelligence for Positive Change
From Urban Computing through Optimization of Healthcare, Sustainable Economic Growth Policies or Public Welfare, to Wildlife Security, this panel will immerse into the recent advances in AI and expose their impact on societal change.
✔︎ Urban Computing & Urban Planning for more effective Transportation, Communication, and Distribution Networks strategies
✔︎ AI and the Sustainable Management of Ecosystems
✔︎ Measuring, Monitoring & Implementing Large Scale National Health, Environmental, and Commercial Policies (with Little Cost)
✔︎ Modeling Human Behavior for the Protection of Wildlife
Fintech & Blockchain: Hype or Real Promise of Inclusion
Blockchain technology is now billed as the magic potion that can cure all current societal and financial ailments. Whether it’s set to curb global warming, eradicate hunger and poverty or bring financial inclusion to all those left behind, no problem is so insoluble that it can’t be overcome by the blockchain. This panel will try to separate the wheat from the chaff and review experiences that demonstrate the validity of such assertions.
✔︎ Blockchain & Fintech: The Realistic and the Delusional; What Technology Can and Cannot Do.
✔︎ A Review of Blockchain-for-Financial-Inclusion-Related Strategies from the Major Global Banking Institutions
✔︎ Cryptocurrency to Leverage Trade: What Benefits for Developing Countries?
✔︎ Blockchain and Social Responsibility: Examples of Corporate Reactions to Blockchain and Fintech
Sustainable Lifestyles: Exclusive & Social Conscious, an Oxymoron?
How to make luxury, cosmetic, fashion and leisure rhyme with sustainability and inclusion? While the social and environmental issues have been weighing heavy on the traditional definition of luxury as the producer of inessential and preposterously expensive items, the lifestyle industry has been trying to adapt and go beyond greenwashing plans to adopt genuine ecologic strategies and promote a concept of Fashion & Lifestyle for Good.
✔︎ Redefining Luxury to Embody social Inclusion and Environmental Concern.
✔︎ Buying Responsibly: Consumerism and Durability.
✔︎ Innovative Style and Design for Social and Environmental impact.
✔︎ Luxury and Philanthropy: From Greenwashing to Real Concern and Commitment.
✔︎ Travel the World or Seek Cultural Immersion: Sustainable Tourism and Traveler Responsibility
Technology and Life Extension: Longer Life for a Better World?
The instinct to survive and beat natural selection is probably the strongest of all human instincts. Long secluded in the realm of fantasy, utopia, and even quackery, new technological developments and scientific approaches to ageing seem to be the promise of an era of a dream come true. Hence, the question now is not IF science and technology can beat time but WHEN will they be able to. The real question remains to know whether longer lives for some make for a better world for all.
✔︎ Immortality or Just Better Life, Robotics and Chips to Overcome Debilitating Diseases
✔︎ Eternal Life for the Affluent or Better Life for All
✔︎ Medtech: From Cure to Care
SDGs: Opening New Roads for Sustainability
Do all roads lead to sustainability? Sooner or later, humanity will have to admit the necessity to think and design its future in terms of measurable sustainability, as well as to end the confusion between the means (economic growth) and ends (human development), or risk turning sustainability into an empty word. As the meaning of “development” is changing, new standardized social and environmental indicators of wealth and progress need to be adopted, taking into account the costs and benefits of a potentially improved quality of life for all.
✔︎ Social Dimension of Sustainability: Common Agenda and Adapted Priorities
✔︎ Infrastructure or Mindframes: Which Comes First, the Egg or the Chicken?
✔︎ Financing Transition in the Developing Countries
✔︎ How to Best Communicate on Progress Made
Renewable and Future Energy
While the reality of finite sources of energy is now definitely beyond doubt, the question remains to see if the seemingly infinite human ingenuity is capable of keeping all technology options open to produce and implement new clean, stable, scalable and cost-effective sources of energy.
✔︎ Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) to Monitor Carbon Emissions and to Ensure Provision of Cost-Effective Clean Energy to Developing Countries
✔︎ Wind and Solar: Genuine Solutions or Wrong Horses?
✔︎ Carbon Capture and Storage: Viable Transition or Workable Alternative?
✔︎ Improved Economics for a Faster and More Secure Transition in the Developing Countries
Sport4Good: Sharing After Cheering
Sport4Good: Sharing After Cheering About 3 billion people globally watch sport games and competitions on any given weekend, and close to 4 billion during special events such as the Olympics! That puts sport far ahead of any other human activity, including politics or the arts. Social development through sport makes sense; education through sport even more so: Plato was an eminent athlete; Socrates and Aristotle provided their teachings in gymnasia. Ancient Greece put Olympian values on an equal footing as philosophy, politics or mathematics. Nowadays however, in most cases, attention is basically restricted to so-called “underprivileged urban areas”. In view of their history and the financial investment they imply, the Olympics can be and should be a very strong promoter of and vehicle for social change. Promoting sustainability and inclusion, as well as furthering the United Nations SDGs through the concept of Sport for Good should be expanded to encompass all society’s echelons and attitudes, implicating and involving all stakeholders from non-profits to sponsors, through civil servants to business communities, to educators and parent associations.
✔︎ Turning Sport Arenas into Fields of Empowerment and Inclusion for All
✔︎ Making the Flame of Olympic Values Outlast the Games
✔︎ Corporate Social Responsibility Fueling Athlete Social Responsibility
✔︎ Sharing After Cheering
Smart Technology, Mobility and Smart Cities
A mindset for efficiency, mobility, inclusivity and liveability within an ecofriendly mindframe is the challenge so-called smart cities have to face and overcome. Getting there implies to leverage non-partisan political strategies, along with businesses and citizens at large will, to join creative forces and pave new paths towards reinvinting city life and citizenship.
✔︎ Smart Cities Reinvented: a Question of Methodology, Standards and Scalability
✔︎ Citizens as Stakeholders
✔︎ Technology as an Enabler of Transformation
✔︎ Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS): Monitoring Smart Mobility to Improve Quality of Life
✔︎ Data, Blockchain and Smart Mobility
✔︎ Redefining Destinations and the Ways to Get There
