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Robleh Ali is a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative. His main focus is on how national currencies can be issued digitally outside the existing banking system and the role of central banks in such a system. The overall aim of the work is fundamentally reforming the financial system by changing the way money is issued. He previously led the research into central bank issued digital currency at the Bank of England.

Ben Fung is Research Advisor and Assistant Director in the Currency Department of the Bank of Canada. His main role is to provide leadership in the department’s economic research program and to provide advice to the department on issues related to developments in retail payments and their implications for the demand for cash. As Assistant Director, Ben is responsible for managing the Economic Research and Analysis team. He also has extensive experience in monetary policy research and analysis. From 2000 to 2003, Ben worked as senior economist at the Bank for International Settlements’ Hong Kong Office. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Western Ontario.

Dr. Wei-Tek Tsai received his S.B. in Computer Science and Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at Cambridge, MA in 1979, M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley in 1982 and 1985.
He worked for University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN from 1985-2000, and served as Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and he held MEIS Professorship at University of Minnesota.
He left University of Minnesota and joined Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona in 2000 as a full professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering. He became an Emeritus Professor in Dec. 2014.  Since Dec. 2014, he has been 1000-Talents Program Professor at Beihang University, Beijing, China. At Beihang University, he initiated Digital Society and Blockchain Laboratory within School of Computer Science and Engineering, and the laboratory is the first and only academic laboratory dedicated to blockchain research and education in China as Feb. 2016.  He has authored more than 400 papers in software engineering, service-oriented computing, and cloud computing. He travels widely and has held various professorships in Asia and Europe including Yantze River Professorship (2009-2012) at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

A trained physicist, she took her degree and PhD from the University of Salerno in Italy before assuming research roles at universities in Australia and Britain. She works in the Department of Mathematics at King’s College London in Econophysics, complex networks and Data science. She is the first Professor of Econophysics in the world and Honorary Professor of UCL in the Department of Computer Science. She has authored over 80 papers and gave invited and keynote talks at major international conferences in the US, across Europe and Asia, making her one of the world’s leaders in this field.

Alexander Lipton is Connection Science fellow at MIT Media Lab, adjunct professor of mathematics at NYU Courant Institute, an advisory board member at the Oxford-Man Institute, and a Scientific Committee member at UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies. He departed from Bank of America Merrill Lynch where he served for ten years as a managing director. During this time, Alex worked in various senior managerial roles including quantitative solutions executive and co-head of the Global Quantitative Group. Earlier, he was a managing director and head of Capital Structure Quantitative Research at Citadel Investment Group in Chicago; he has also worked for Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and Bankers Trust. While working full time as a banker, Alex held several prestigious academic appointments, including visiting professor of quantitative finance at Oxford-Man Institute, visiting professor of mathematics at Imperial College London, and visiting professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois. Before switching to finance, Alex was a full professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois and a consultant at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in pure mathematics from Moscow State University. His current professional interests include digital banking, FinTech, including distributed ledger and other applications of cryptography in banking and payment systems. His scientific interests are centered on quantitative development of modern monetary circuit theory, mechanisms of money creation, interlinked banking networks, balance sheet optimization, and related topics. In 2000 Alex was awarded the first Quant of the Year Award by Risk Magazine. Alex is the author of two books (Magnetohydrodynamics and Spectral Theory and Mathematical Methods for Foreign Exchange) and the editor of five more, including, most recently, Quant of the Year 2000-2014, All Award Winning Papers. He has published more than a hundred papers on hydrodynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, astrophysics, chemical physics, and financial engineering. Alex is a founding patron of The 14-10 Club at the Royal Institution (jointly with David Harding). Alex is an avid collector of military optics and is currently working on a book on the history of military binoculars.

Primavera De Filippi is a permanent researcher at the CNRS in Paris and faculty associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, where she is investigating the concept of governance-by-design as it relates to blockchain technologies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. Primavera holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence. She is a member of the Global Future Council on Blockchain Technologies at the World Economic Forum, as well as the founder of the Internet Governance Forum’s dynamic coalitions on Blockchain Technology (COALA). In addition to her academic research, Primavera acts as a legal expert for Creative Commons in France and sits on the stakeholder board of the P2P Foundation.

Ben Craig is a senior economic advisor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. He specializes in the economics of banking and international finance. Before joining the Bank in 1994, Dr. Craig was an assistant professor of economics at Indiana University. He has also taught at Washington State University, Stanford University, and the University of Konstanz, Germany. He was a visiting scholar at the Bundesbank in Germany in 2001 and from 2012-2014. Dr. Craig earned a bachelor’s degree with honors from Harvard University in 1976 and received a PhD in economics from Stanford in 1986. He is married and the father of three children.