Speakers

Věra Jourová is a Czech politician and lawyer who has been the Vice President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency since December 1, 2019. She previously served as the European Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality from 2014 to 2019. She has also served as the Czech Minister for Regional Development and Member of the Chamber of Deputies (MP) between 2013 and 2014.

B. Bix Aliu returned to U.S. Embassy Warsaw to serve as the Deputy Chief of Mission in June 2019. Fifteen years ago, Bix was a Vice-Consul and Deputy Cultural Attaché at the Embassy. Most recently, Bix served as the U.S. Consul General in Krakow. Prior to returning to Poland, Bix was the Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy in Montenegro, where he often served as Charge d’Affaires, a.i. During his diplomatic career, Bix was detailed to Congress as a Pearson Congressional Fellow and served as a Special Advisor to the Representative of Virginia’s Second Congressional District. He also served at the Department of State’s National Foreign Affairs Training Center, where he helped shape the future generation of the U.S. Foreign Service. Bix has represented U.S. interests abroad in Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, and the UAE. A native of Chicagoland, Bix holds a Medical Degree from the University of Kosovo School of Medicine and a Master of Strategic Studies Degree from the U.S. Army War College. He speaks fluent Albanian, Montenegrin, Macedonian, Serbian, and Polish, among others.

Lech Wałęsa is a Polish elder statesman and former union organizer who served as the first democratically elected President of Poland from 1990 to 1995. He used to be the leader of Solidarity (NSZZ Solidarność), one of the first oppositional and freedom-oriented social movements in the communist bloc, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. Photo: Lars Møller

In 2010, Valdo Lehari Jr. became Vice-President of the European Newspaper Publishers Association (ENPA), Brussels – after serving as its President for four years, the maximum term allowed under the organization’s statute. Since 2001, he has been Chairman of the Executive Board and President of the Association of Newspaper Publishers of Southwest Germany, based in Stuttgart.

Stephen Brown is Editor in Chief at POLITICO. He is in charge of all of our journalistic content in Europe, helping to design our strategy and running the newsrooms as well as editing, commissioning and writing stories from Brussels and our European bureaux. He began his career in journalism at the Financial Times in London before joining Reuters as a graduate trainee. He had postings in Madrid and Lisbon before moving to Argentina from 1994 to 2002, eventually as bureau chief for southern Latin America. Stephen was then bureau chief in the Nordic & Baltic region, based in Stockholm, Italian chief correspondent based in Rome and chief correspondent for Germany, based in Berlin. He joined POLITICO in June 2015.

Emma Lacey-Bordeaux is a journalist working for CNN based in Washington DC. At a moment of unparalleled political turmoil in the United States, she works to ensure the integrity of CNN’s political coverage as a Senior Director for Standards and Practices. Throughout her decade at the company, Emma has occupied many roles. She’s reported and produced, provided research and editing. During that time she has gained the trust and respect of news leaders from Beijing to Los Angeles reporting or helping guide the network on some of the biggest stories of our time. She’s broken news on numerous stories concerning America’s justice system, gun laws and immigration system. She has covered Presidential elections, one attempted insurrection, many major protests and always seeks out the unexplored, human angles to the giant stories capturing the world’s attention. Compassion and curiosity drive Emma’s journalist interests and passions. She’s lived in various cities in the United States and around the globe and loves few things more than a leisurely dinner with new friends. She holds a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies from Georgia State University and a Master of Fine Arts in Narrative Non-Fiction from the University of Georgia and recently released a groundbreaking documentary exploring how restrictive notions of masculinity play out in America’s prisons. She’s also a passionate advocate of cross-cultural exchanges and dialogues, especially in this unique and tumultuous global moment of challenge and interconnectedness. Emma has delivered talks on journalism and communication at home in the United States and in countries including Estonia, Ukraine and Serbia. She’s hosted journalists from South Africa, Uganda, Ukraine and Georgia. She’s actively engaged in discussions around the globe about advancing the mission of the free flow of quality reporting especially amid significant challenges. Emma lives in DC with her husband and their dog, Scout, and two cats. She loves cooking, eating, biking and following her boundless curiosity to new delights.

The Chair at Forum on Information and Democracy. Christophe Deloire is a French journalist who has been secretary-general and executive director of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) since 2012. He ran one of the leading French journalism schools, the CFJ, from 2008 to 2012, and was an investigative reporter for the politics and society sections of the French news magazine Le Point from 1998 to 2007. He has also worked for the TV channels ARTE and TF1, made documentary films, edited several authors and written several bestsellers including Les islamistes sont déjà là (2004), Sexus Politicus (2006) and Circus Politicus (2012)

Maarit Jaakkola, PhD, Associate Professor, is the Co-Director of Nordicom, a Centre for Nordic Media Research at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Her research interests focus on digital media literacy, user-generated cultural content, cultural journalism and cultural citizenship. She is the responsible editor of NordMedia Network, as well as the founder and coordinator of Academic Forum of MIL Research in Sweden.

Vice-Rector responsible for International Relations and ESR at the Kozminski University, habilitated in Management in New Technologies at Kozminski University and received her doctorate in the field of philosophy of artificial intelligence at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw. Apart from the Vice-Rector's position, she is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Management in Digital and Networked Societies at the Kozminski University and the Leader of AI in Management Program. Until recently, she conducted research at the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. She graduated from The New School for Social Research in New York. In autumn 2020, she started a Senior Researcher Fellowship at the American Institute for Economic Research on the automation of work, and in 2021 she will join the Labor & Worklife Program at Harvard University. She is interested in the development of new technologies, natural language processing, humanoid artificial intelligence, social robots and wearable technologies. She is the author of Collaborative Society (The MIT Press) http://www.collaborativesociety.net/, published together with Dariusz Jemielniak.

Klaus Bachmann is former foreign correspondent in Central and Eastern Europe and the Benelux countries. Since 2004 he works as a political scientist, first at the University of Wroclaw, then at SWPS University in Warsaw. He also used to work at Johns Hopkins University, USA, Renmin University (China) and the universities of Bordeaux, Vienna and Stellenbosch (South Africa). In Poland he writes for Tygodnik Powszechny, Polityka and Gazeta Wyborcza.

Mark Dekan is responsible for the CEE Joint Venture of Axel Springer and Ringier. In addition he holds the position of CEO Ringier Axel Springer Polska. Mark has extensive experience in media business, including the traditional and digital media, as well as in management of large and diverse organizations.

Iveta Radičová is a sociologist by profession and holds the title of Professor. She served as the first woman Prime Minister of Slovakia from 2010 to 2012, she also briefly held the posts of Minister of Defence and Minister of Labour. She is an expert on the social policy in European projects aimed at the coordination of social security systems. She currently serves as Dean of the Faculty of Media at the Pan-European University in Bratislava.

Peter Bárdy has been Editor-in-Chief of Aktuality.sk, as well as a columnist for the website, for more than 10 years. Aktuality.sk is one of most popular and respected news portals in Slovakia. Peter has been involved in the media business for more than 20 years; he started working as a journalist for the Žilinský večerník paper, than he worked for the Nový Čas daily. First he specialized in crime and the Slovak Mafia, later focusing on politics.

Hannah is a DPhil student in Social Data Science at the Oxford Internet Institute and a researcher at the Computational Propaganda Project. Her research focuses on China’s use of state-sponsored digital disinformation. In particular, she focusses on the effect of China’s digital disinformation campaigns on international audiences by assessing how they interact with this disinformation. She employs both quantitative text analysis and social network analysis to explore, for example, China’s use of bots and the ways that external audiences engage with these bots. She holds a BSc in Politics and Philosophy from the London School of Economics, as well as two MScs, in Contemporary Chinese Studies, and in the Social Science of the Internet, both from Oxford University. She has also studied Mandarin at Fudan University (Shanghai). Her DPhil is generously funded by the Oxford Internet Institute’s Shirley Scholarship.