Building Future Cities

Jon Kastelan is a Machine Learning Specialist, advising governments and city agencies on analytics and machine learning across North America and Asia Pacific. Previously, Jon has worked with PwC's Analytics and Urbanisation practice to support the development of the Smart City blueprint for Hong Kong. He has also taught data science and analytics at New York University and worked with urban-focused startups. City governments are increasingly using Machine Learning (ML) methods to help serve their citizens better. Jon led a workshop for World Bank staff to further understanding of the nuts-and-bolts of ML in a smart city context. From key ML concepts such as training and test data, identifying important features for prediction, to model evaluation metrics. Jon’s ability to simplify the complex and make ML more accessible to smart city practitioners is quite rare, we can’t wait to learn more.

Cristian Santibanez [https://www.linkedin.com/in/csantibanez/] is an urban innovation & mobility expert currently the  Marketing Operations and Urban Mobility Lead at HyperloopTT [https://www.hyperlooptt.com]- an innovative transportation and technology company focused on realizing the Hyperloop, a system that moves people and goods at unprecedented speeds safely, efficiently, and sustainably. Son of a pianist and a political activist, Cristian was born in Prague, spent his childhood in Santiago de Chile, and grew up in Paris as an Italian national. Cristian is also building Explicity, an urban experimentation agency building technology to identify opportunities for urban public service improvement and a methodology to implement replicable and scalable experiments that validate collaborative business models and foster public-private partnerships. Cristian is also a lecturer at Sciences Po, at ENSCI and at ISEG, and Startup Sesame’s Mobility Lead.

Veronika Bylicki is an engagement innovator, community builder and sustainability strategist. A lifelong Vancouverite, Veronika is passionate about creating more sustainable, liveable cities and amplifying the meaningful engagement of citizens, particularly youth, in addressing urban challenges. As Executive Director and Co-Founder at CityHive [https://cityhive.ca/], Veronika leads a social enterprise on a mission to transform the way young people shape their cities and the civic processes that engage them. Veronika completed her BSc in Global Resource Systems at The University of British Columbia, with a specialization in Urban Sustainability, Policy and Planning. Her experience includes working in Sustainability Education Facilitation with Metro Vancouver [http://www.metrovancouver.org/], and in Environmental Assessment with Environment and Climate Change Canada, and as a Director at Co-Design Engage [http://codesignengage.com/], which leads participatory design processes in city planning. She was awarded as a Top 25 Under 25 Environmentalist in Canada in 2015, has delivered a TEDxYouth talk [https://youtu.be/jBeU0K0B2yc] on Urban Sustainability and was a Social Innovation Fellow at RADIUS SFU [https://radiussfu.com/]. Veronika is currently a Commissioner on the Vancouver City Planning Commission [https://vancouver.ca/your-government/vancouver-city-planning-commission.aspx] and Board Member for CityStudio Vancouver [https://citystudiovancouver.com/]. Veronika is an outdoor enthusiast and can often be found zipping around the city on her bike.

Dr. Bruno Zamborlin is a pioneer in the field of AI for Human-Technology interaction. As the CEO and Chief Scientist of the a London-based technology company Hypersurface [https://www.hypersurfaces.com]– Bruno’s team are using vibration sensors and edge-AI to convert any object of any material and shape into an intelligent Hypersurface, seamlessly merging the physical and data worlds without the need for keyboards, buttons or touch screens. Bruno Zamborlin, gained his PhD in Arts and Computer Science at Goldsmiths University in London and the IRCAM-Pompidou centre in Paris, where he researched new interfaces for musical expression. Hyperspaces wants us to imagine a world where consumer electronics, IoT, retail, transportation, augmented reality, and smart facilities can potentially be changed forever.

The Tyre Collective [https://www.thetyrecollective.com] is a startup on a mission to mitgate tyre wear emissions in our environment. Tyre wear is the stealthiest and second-largest source of micro-plastics pollution in our air and water. Co-founders, Hanson Cheng, Siobhan Anderson, Hugo Richardson and Deepak Mallya began the project as part of their MA/MSc in Innovation Design Engineering at Imperial College London [https://www.imperial.ac.uk/study/pg/design-engineering/innovation-design-engineering/] and the Royal College of Art [https://www.rca.ac.uk/]. They are a multicultural team of engineers and designers with a wide range of professional experience. With the goal to make our cities healthier, The Tyre Collective aims to bring people across disciplines and industries together, by creating a global network of partnerships and collaborations. They are currently working with some of the largest tyre and vehicle manufacturers in the world to develop their technology further. The Tyre Collective  recently won UK National James Dyson Award [https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/2020/project/the-tyre-collective/] & The Mayor of London, Entrepreneur Competition's Environment Award [https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/business-and-economy/mayors-entrepreneur-competition/mayors-entrepreneur-programme].