Davos

From 1999 to 2011, Cornelius was Managing Partner at the law firm CMS Hasche Sigle, with 8 locations in Germany and more than 600 lawyers. As Managing Partner, he initiated and negotiated various mergers, consolidating individual firms into a cross-regional law firm. He integrated CMS Hasche Sigle into the international CMS organisation, which was established in 1999 and now has 74 offices worldwide. Cornelius has been a member of the Executive Committee of CMS since 1999 and was Chairman thereof from 2008 to 2011. Since 2011, he is Executive Chairman of CMS and Senior Partner at CMS Hasche Sigle. Cornelius attended school in Essen/Ruhr District (Germany) and Neuchâtel (Switzerland). He studied law at the universities of Bonn (Germany) and Santander (Spain) and took his first state law exam in 1980. He completed his traineeship in Hamburg, including a position abroad in Chicago, USA. In 1983, he took his second state law exam and started working as a lawyer. In 1986, he became a Partner at the Hamburg law firm Hasche Albrecht Fischer (now: CMS Hasche Sigle). His specialities are corporate and maritime law.

Dr. Rainer Esser studied law in Munich, Geneva and London. He continued his studies in the United States with a Master of Law at the University of Georgia before receiving his final degree in 1986. After graduating from the German School of Journalism (Deutsche Journalistenschule) in Munich, he worked as a lawyer for various law firms. Since 1989 he also holds a PhD in International Law of the University of Regensburg. From 1989 -92 he served as Editor in Chief at Bertelsmann International in Munich and eventually joined Munich-based Spotlight Publishing House (Spotlight, écoute, ECOS and ADESSO) as Managing Director. After serving as Managing Director of Main-Post Publishing House in Würzburg in the late nineties he started his current position as CEO of DIE ZEIT in 1999. In 2011, he also took on the role as Managing Director of DvH Medien GmbH.

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Dr. Uwe Jean Heuser is Head of the Economics department of the German weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT. He studied Economics in Bonn and Berkeley (USA), did his Ph.D. in Köln, and achieved an MBA at Harvard. He is one of Germany’s most renowned business journalists and non-fiction authors. His book Humanomics, in which he describes the revolution of economic thinking, was named “Business Book of the Year 2008”. In addition to his work with the editorial staff at
DIE ZEIT, Dr. Heuser has extensively lectured at the University of St. Gallen, and now teaches at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. In 2004, he received the Herbert Quandt Media Award for his collection of articles Creator and Destroyer. In 2011, Dr. Heuser was awarded the Dietrich-Oppenberg-Media Prize by the Lesen Foundation.

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David Kenny is senior vice president, IBM Watson and IBM Cloud, spearheading the Watson technology platform development, as well as optimizing IBM’s public cloud for data and cognitive workloads.

David was most recently General Manager, IBM Watson, responsible for the Watson platform, its global ecosystem of business partners and developers, and emerging solutions. Prior to joining IBM, he was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Weather Company (Weather), where he oversaw the company’s portfolio of consumer and business-to-business weather brands and businesses including The Weather Channel, weather.com, wunderground.com and WSI. David was previously president of Akamai, the leading cloud platform designed to help enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences to mobile and fixed Internet users.

Previously, he served as managing partner of VivaKi, the combined worldwide media and digital arm of Publicis Groupe, and he was co-founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Digitas Inc., a top global integrated brand agency.

David currently serves on the Board of Directors of Best Buy. He is also a director of Teach for America, a nonprofit that enlists recent graduates to teach and to effect change in under-resourced and low-income communities. David received an MBA from the Harvard School of Business, and a bachelor’s degree from the GM Institute (now Kettering University).

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Bill McDermott is chief executive officer of SAP, the world’s business software market leader. He leads the company’s more than 83,000 employees and 2+ million-person ecosystem in executing SAP’s vision to help the world run better and improve peoples’ lives.

Since becoming CEO in 2010, Bill’s innovation-led strategy for SAP has resulted in expansive increases in customers, total revenue, market value and profitable growth. One of the most popular leaders in business, Bill’s approval rating from employees on website Glassdoor hovers around 99%. As the only American in history to lead Europe’s most valuable technology company, Bill advises world leaders and policymakers on issues including youth unemployment, digital government and international trade policy. He is a member of the European Roundtable of Industrialists and the U.S. Business Council.

Bill also serves on the boards of directors for performance apparel maker Under Armour and engineering software maker ANSYS, Inc. He has received numerous awards for his civic leadership, including GENYOUth’s Vanguard Award, City Year’s Idealist of the Year, the We Are Family Foundation’s Visionary Award and the Children’s Aid Society’s Promise Award. He is a proud supporter of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Jefferson Health.

His life stories and leadership lessons are shared in Bill’s worldwide best-selling autobiography, Winners Dream: A Journey from Corner Store to Corner Office. The book is now in its 12th printing and was awarded the gold medal for business memoir of the year in 2014. It has been published in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and China.

Bill resides in Germany, the United States and, most frequently, at 39,000 feet.

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Florian Leibert is Co-Founder and CEO at Mesosphere where his team is building the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DCOS), based on the Apache Mesos open source distributed systems kernel. Leibert was an early engineering lead at Twitter where he helped build critical infrastructure for doing analytics and search. He was primarily responsible for Twitter’s user search product. After a few years at Twitter, Florian Leibert joined Airbnb and built out the data infrastructure team. He has published a number of patents and papers in the area of information retrieval and large-scale distributed systems. Leibert was also the main author of Chronos, a fault tolerant job dependency scheduler and job orchestration framework built on top of Apache Mesos.

Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber has greatly influenced modern Artificial Intelligence. His lab’s deep learning methods (developed since the early 1990s) have revolutionized machine learning and AI, and are now available to billions of users through Google (e.g., greatly improved Google Voice & Google Translate), Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Baidu, Amazon, and many other companies. His research group also established the field of mathematically rigorous universal AI and optimal universal problem solvers. His formal theory of creativity & curiosity & fun explains art, science, music, and humor. He is recipient of numerous awards including the 2016 IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award “for pioneering contributions to deep learning and neural networks,” and president of the company NNAISENSE, which aims at building the first practical general purpose AI.

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Jochen is Editor-in-chief of ZEIT ONLINE, Germany’s most popular premium news site, and editorial board member of DIE ZEIT, Germany’s most widely read weekly newspaper.

He is the recipient of several awards, including Germany’s most prestigious honor, the Grimme Online Award. He has also been named the German Editor-in-Chief of the Year and Digital Leader in Gold in addition to receiving the Scoop Award for excellence in digital journalism.

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