Franz G. Fuchs is a research scientist at SINTEF, one of Europe's largest independent research organizations, and the centre leader of the Gemini center on quantum computing in Norway. After his master's degree in mathematics at the Technical University of Munich he received a PhD from the Centre of Mathematics for Applications which existed as a Norwegian Centre of Excellence at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on quantum computing algorithms and their application to solve real-world problems.

Dr. Beshan Kulapala is the Director and co-founder of Vega Innovations, based in Colombo Sri Lanka. Since 2013, Beshan has been leading a team of young multidisciplinary engineers developing high performance electric supercars, and new automobile technologies in the electric vehicle market. In addition Beshan is also the director of chargetNET and AIGrow startups, pushing technological boundaries in EV charging and advanced agriculture fields. He is also a Research Scientist with CodeGen International since 2013, the parent company of Vega, chargeNET and AIGrow.
With over 15 years of experience in the industry, previously Beshan was an Engineering Manager at Intel Corporation, USA, during which he led a team of engineers to develop integrated debug and survivability capabilities for all CPU products across the company. He was also the co-founder of the Validation Core Unit (VCU) - Center of Expertise at Intel Corporation. In addition Beshan is also the Chairman of the Sarva Medical Clinic in Boralesgamuwa, and volunteers his time as a Scout Master for his local Boy Scout troop.
Beshan obtained his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kentucky, a master's and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MBA from Arizona State University, USA.

A seasoned telco professional with over 16 years of experience in the industry, Namal was tapped by Axiata to for their newly formed subsidiary, Axiata Digital Labs. In his role as Vice President of Engineering & Emerging Technology, Namal is responsible for the research and development of ADL’s product and services portfolio including Charging, Telco, and Digital developments, Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, API management, IOT developments, and related emerging technologies. In his previous role as Head of Digital Transformation at Dialog Axiata, Namal was instrumental in building Dialog’s digitization roadmap, rolling out internal and external API ecosystems and building numerous charging solutions.

Jennie-Marie Larsen is an environmental and technology conceptual strategist on a quest to apply Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Automation and IoT to solve our world’s most pressing sustainability problems. Most recently as the CEO & Co-Founder of Alchemy.AI she co-pioneered technology solutions to address river health in The Ganges, automating land depollution using autonomous vehicles, and a smart city innovation to uncover the sustainable balance between human consumption and natural resources. She is the Executive Director for The Foundation for Planetary Intelligence which will use Artificial Intelligence and IoT systems to create strategies to scale climate solutions on a global basis. MBA, PhD Candidate, Sustainable Development & Diplomacy.

Arvind Neelakantan, Evangelist (India/ASEAN) for Epic Games specializes in games and in empowering film/animation studios in using real-time tech. Prior to Epic, he was the Head of technology (Indian Subcontinent) for Unity Technologies where he drove innovation strategy and provided technology leadership. He served as Disney India's lead software architect and was responsible for driving innovation through R&D activities and oversaw games/interactive content development. Before Disney, he was a full stack game engineer at Nickelodeon in Los Angeles for six years. At Nickelodeon, he developed MMORPGs and played a key role in the company’s technology business during the major transitions to cloud based computing.

Dr. Kalana Withanage obtained his PhD in Computer vision/Human-robot interaction (HRI) at the University of South Australia, Australia and BSc (Hons) in Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka. His research involved aspects of human pose estimation, activity recognition and prediction, motion capture technologies and robotic vision. He has been in the industry in researching, architecting and developments of Embedded systems for nearly 12 years in various start-ups (Imagineering Design, SYRP, Daytech), SME (Cohda Wireless), Consulting, Large multi-nationals (Motorola and Lockheed Martin) in different verticals such as Industrial, Consumer, Enterprise, Agricultural, Mining, Automotive, V2X, Intelligent transport systems, and Rail. Currently, he is working at Lockheed Martin, Australia as a Senior Software Engineer. Having worked with a broad variety of organizations and people, he has insights into niche innovations, early engagement with clients, business bootstrapping, scaling and global maturation. He is interested to share his blended experience in research and industry.

Mike is a 23 year ICT veteran with a focus on digital transformation, technology leadership, industry trends, and customer insight. He has been with Huawei for 10 years and currently operates as Huawei’s Chief Digital Officer and Executive Consultant for Asia Pacific.

Mike has previously held several CXO roles including CEO of a global SaaS and IoT startup, Chief Solution Officer at a leading Cisco/Nortel Solutions Integrator, and Chief Technical Officer at Nortel Asia. He has lived in Asia for 17years and has in-depth local and regional knowledge on consumer and operator behavior.

Suren Pinto is the CEO and Founder of Global Wavenet (www.globalwavenet.com) with 16+ years industry experience working with Mobile and Telecommunication operators around the world.
Suren leads R&D and spearheads the strategic direction of the company, and has delivered multiple innovative software, systems, and infrastructure solutions portfolios that serve wired and wireline carriers across the world. With specialization as a telco software development vendor and under Suren’s leadership, the company today has expanded operations in four continents and in over 20+ countries. He is responsible for managing a multinational team of 130+ staff located in Wavenet offices across Africa, Latin America, Sri Lanka, and Australia.
A born entrepreneur starting his first company at age 19, Suren has grown this business today into a 10+ million dollar company. His ‘innovation first’ approach has resulted in the company winning multiple awards in Asia Pacific such as the mBillionth Award, The National Business Quality Service Award by the British Computer Society and Merit Award by the Asia Pacific ICT Alliance.
Suren is passionate about driving the business towards consistently delivering on customer value through innovative digital transformation solutions and state-of-the-art technology.
Suren also consults telecom organisations and regularly speaks at international events. He was a keynote speaker at MWC Shanghai in 2019 and will be speaking again at the same event this year in 2020. Suren was also selected as a panelist at the Digital Transformation Conference Asia event organized by the TM Forum in Malaysia in 2019 and have spoken at many other events previously.

Vivek heads the South and Central Asia business for R3, an Enterprise Software company building Corda, the blockchain for business. In this role he is responsible of driving the business for R3 and promoting Corda and blockchain adoption in the region.

Vivek is an active member in the global fintech community focused on bringing the latest innovations to India. Prior to R3, Vivek served in multiple roles within the private and public sector, working with organizations like Tata Administrative Services (TAS), National Skill Development Council (NSDC) and Andhra Pradesh Economic Development Board.

He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering.

Amitha Dissanayake is a Technical Lead at Yaala Labs - a company which specializes in building cloud-native market infrastructure technologies and FinTech software platforms. He has years of experience in building cloud-native, mission-critical, low-latency and high-throughput market infrastructure software systems and FinTech software platforms for the banking industry. He’s an alumnus of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering of University of Moratuwa and Royal College Colombo. He is an AWS Certified Professional Solutions Architect and also a Corda Certified Blockchain Developer. He has multiple research publications in Machine Learning & AI and is keen on applications of Distributed Ledger Technologies in financial technologies.

Koumudi Ganepola is a Senior Software Engineer at Yaala Labs - a company which specializes in building cloud-native market infrastructure technologies and FinTech software platforms. She has years of experience in building cloud-native, mission-critical, low-latency and high-throughput market infrastructure software systems. She’s an alumnus of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering of University of Moratuwa and Devi Balika Vidyalaya Colombo. She’s a Corda Certified Blockchain Developer. She has multiple research publications in Machine Learning & AI and keen on emerging applications of AI & Natural Language Processing in financial technologies.

Sanjay has been in the technology sector for over 20 years and has consulted to global clients in digital transformation. With the advent of blockchain and crypto, he has now embarked on a journey evangelizing the benefits of Cryptocurrency and blockchain in Asia.

Having joined Wavenet in 2014 as a Management Trainee, Sumaiya has grown to become an integral part of Wavenet's product team. She is currently managing the uVAS and BSS verticals at Wavenet, where she has a keen interest in adopting suitable emerging tech to address burning customer issues

Thilina Premasiri, Director/Head of Game Development for Arimac Digital and Unreal Authorized Instructor Partner for Epic Games. He specializes in games and interactive media industry by upbringing and empowering local talent. Prior to Arimac, he was a visiting lecturer at SLIIT, AMDT and University of Kelaniya. He has worked on "Kanchayudha" gaming project which is Sri Lanka's biggest story based role playing game. He is one of the creators for the Adaptive gesture recognition framework for mobile applications where he studied how does the finger gestures on touch input systems change with varying conditions and developing an adaptive gesture recognition framework.

Raveen is the founder & CEO of Gamer.LK, and the founder President of the Sri Lanka Esports Association. He moved from an 8-year career in Software & Digital to focus on the Esports ecosystem in Sri Lanka and South Asia. Raveen has a vision for Esports in Sri Lanka and has been instrumental in growing the Esports industry as it exists today - including government and Olympic Committee partnerships as well as driving investment into the local Esports industry through fundraising.

Ken has been in the game industry for 5 years, as assets designer and game art lecturer in Indonesia. She's currently a program manager at Asosiasi Game Indonesia (AGI). She's been a gamer since 10 years old and was part of the Indonesian game community as well.

Zahra is currently the Community Manager at Gapstars, where her mission is to form meaningful connections with the tech community at large, through facilitating the flow of knowledge-sharing and thought leadership. With people at the heart of her role, she has a passion for forming and nurturing relationships and delving deeper into what drives communities forward. Outside of work, she actively participates in SLASSCOM and Spike Colombo by helping to spark great conversations in the tech and start-up spheres.

Isi Casas del Valle is a Chilean astropreneur. She holds a bachelor’s in laws (suma cum laude) from Universidad de los Andes (Chile), where she specialized in comparative law and legal English, and minored in basic sciences. With a keen interest in air and space, she worked as an air attorney for a boutique law firm in Chile whilst undergoing a postgraduate degree in Air and Space Law in UDIMA & the Instituto Iberoamericano de Derecho Aeronáutico y del Espacio y de la Aviación Comercial in Spain. She was awarded the Secure World Foundation’s Ray Williamson Future Fund Scholarship to attend the Southern Hemisphere Space Studies Program of the International Space University hosted in Adelaide, Australia; and presented the paper resulting from the program at the International Aeronautical Congress in Bremen, supported by Secure World Foundation’s IAC Young Professionals Scholarship. Moreover, she later participated as CAPCOM for one of the Southern Hemisphere Space Studies Programs at the International Space University. Isi joined the Space Generation Advisory Council as Chile’s National Point of Contact, was Event Manager of the 6th South America Space Generation Workshop, and now holds the title of Regional Coordinator for South America. She is now a space consultant for various space start-ups including Space Hero, a truly global casting-show seeking to democratize space, while completing her Master in Entrepreneurial Management at the ESE Business School. She is a member of the International Institute of Space Law and guest lecturer of Air and Space Law in various universities in Chile and the world.

"Supreet Kaur is a space systems engineer, a STEM writer, and an aerospace ambassador. Supreet is pioneering the field of systems engineering and project management by facilitating innovative research and technological development in aerospace.


Her education and experience spans North America and Europe: she has a B.S. in Industrial & Systems Engineering from San Jose State University, USA, and a M.Sc. in Space Studies from the International Space University, France.


She has published her research and made contributions to the discipline of systems and concurrent engineering in both North America (NASA) and Europe (ESA). Supreet has worked with several space agencies, bridging the gap between government and the commercial sector in this ""new space"" era.


Her work specializes in rapid design and prototype development, integration and management of complex systems, workflow digitization and optimization, innovations in systems testing, and acquisition of commercial partnerships.


In her spare time Supreet serves as a mentor, advising the future generation of aerospace leaders, and volunteers through the Rocket Women and Brooke Owens Fellowship to foster space education and communication. "

Kavindi De Silva’s aspiration from early childhood has been to be the first Sri Lankan Astronaut to help terraform Mars. Dedicated to achieving this dream, she has recently graduated from the International Space University (ISU) in Strasbourg, France, completing her thesis project under Human Performance in Space concentrating on electrophysiological cell-biology experimentation on the ISS. Kavindi has prioritized giving back to the community by mentoring and building foundations for children and young adults to pursue space education in developing countries, such as Sri Lanka. Kavindi also serves as the project manager and the Co-organizer for TEDxISU. She has worked for many space studies programs as the External Relations lead, IT & Operations team member, and as a Teaching Associate for ISU. Through these and a wide range of other work experiences, she has successfully collaborated with diverse groups of people in fields including high-end Astrophysics research with data analysis, Project & Event management, External Relations, Digital Media & Communications, IT Support, Student Administration, Education & Outreach, Engineering, Mentoring, and Teaching. Currently she is the lead for Global Events at Space Hero, a Global Media & Space Company!

Abhilasha is the Founder and CEO of Blue Sky Analytics, a Climate-Tech start-up using satellite data and AI to build environmental monitoring and climate-risk assessment products. She is a Fulbright scholar, Yale and IIT alum with over 8 years of work experience in private equity, big data analytics, product development and environmental policy.
She began her career as a Research Associate at J-PAL, working on air pollution regulation with the Ministry of Environment, India. After her Masters in Environmental Management from Yale, she went on to work on building flexible solar cells in Dublin, kickstarting a solar products and asset financing startup at PEG Africa and clean energy investing as an Associate at GoldenSet Capital.
Upon her return to India, Abhilasha founded Blue Sky Analytics in 2018 as she believes that “data has the capacity to change an entire ecosystem". She deems Blue Sky as a focal point of enabling global climate action with high quality, accessible environmental data.