Program

Mr Adhiraj Saxena is with the AI Safety & Trust Technologies unit at Singapore IMDA. He has been in responsible AI & data protection domain for 11 years. He has worked for national programs like the national digital identity ‘MyInfo’, the national AI program ‘AISG’ and more recently the ‘AI Safety Institute’. He has a Masters in Engineering from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Regional Urban Data & AI Specialist (Asia Pacific) at UNDP. Board Member at Global Skills Development Council & Karsa City Lab. Digital, policy & business strategy executive with comprehensive 15++ years of exposure in business, government and technology. Successfully orchestrated & delivered digital transformation in private & public sector.

Actively volunteer in numerous domains to drive concrete impacts in city, society, nation and region. Passionate in talent building, teaching, academic research (including journal editorial board) and philosophical discussion.

Dr. Ming Tan’s interests include technology governance, multi-stakeholder approaches to digital development, public-private-philanthropic partnerships and institution-building in the public and social sectors. She is Senior Advisor at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group and teaches at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Concurrently, she is Senior Fellow and was Founding Executive Director of the Tech for Good Institute, Southeast Asia’s first technology policy think tank, and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Governance and Sustainability at NUS Business School.

Clarisse is Head of the OECD’s Data Governance and Privacy (DGP) Unit, which supports the Organisation’s work in data governance, data flows and privacy.

Before taking up her OECD role in August 2022, Clarisse was based in Singapore, where she held a first position as Senior Fellow at the Asian Business Law Institute (ABLI), a pan-Asian legal think tank anchored at the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL). At ABLI, she launched and led a flagship project on the convergence of data privacy laws and data flow regulations in 14 Asian jurisdictions. In August 2021, she created the position of Managing Director of the APAC office of the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF), the world-leading US privacy think tank. She was also an adviser to the head of the TMT practice at Rajah & Tann Asia LLC, Singapore’s leading law firm.

From 2001 to 2015, she held various positions at the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL), including head of the Department of European and International Affairs and senior advisor to the President and Secretary General in the years leading up to the adoption of the GDPR. She was a Jersey Data Protection Authority (JDPA) member from October 2018 to June 2022.

Clarisse holds a Masters in Private Law and a postgraduate degree in Intellectual Property from the University of Paris Panthéon Assas, a Magister Juris (MJur) from the University of Oxford and a Doctorate (cum laude) in Comparative Law from the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) in the Netherlands.

Evan Jones is the founder and CEO of Standard Economics, Corp. The company’s mission is economic super-intelligence: a financial system that fully automates every layer of the economic stack in order to distribute money to everyone on earth.

Previously, Evan led revenue product at X, where he built payments, earnings, and business tools serving hundreds of millions of consumers and creators. He later joined xAI, where he stood up the consumer team ahead of Grok 3 and developed data pipelines for labor automation, reporting directly to Elon Musk.

Standard Economics develops Uno, an autonomous bank. A system that underwrites credit, lends, collects, issues debit cards, enables peer-to-peer transfers and bill pay, offers interest-bearing accounts, and creates earning opportunities through data labeling. Uno learns from real-world financial behavior and converts everyday activity into a live economic identity, expanding access to money for populations historically excluded from traditional financial systems.

The company’s long-term objective is a global socioeconomic system that improves with scale: one that increases economic participation, grows the middle class, and creates more efficient pathways for capital to reach people everywhere.

Growing up in Ireland, Evan knows firsthand how important this mission is to the continued growth and advancement of humanity.

Cazadira F. Tamzil is a public policy strategist and philanthropy practitioner with over a decade of experience across consulting, non-profits, and academia. She currently serves as Executive Director of Pijar Foundation, a youth-led institution accelerating education, innovation, and public policy action across Asia.

At Pijar Foundation, Cazadira works across sectors to help promising innovations move beyond pilots and toward wider adoption and scale. She leads the organization’s programmes, strategic partnerships, and engagement with governments, philanthropic organizations, multilateral institutions, innovators, and other ecosystem actors—connecting emerging solutions with the institutions, expertise, and resources needed to translate them into meaningful impact.

Under her leadership, Pijar Foundation has expanded its role as a regional platform for systems change, reaching over 80,000 beneficiaries. She has led multi-stakeholder efforts to align national priorities with regional innovators, including technical assistance to eight government agencies and an innovation sandbox connecting ten Asian startups with three city governments in Indonesia. Its flagship Global Future Fellows initiative has cultivated a network of 100+ leaders across eight ASEAN countries, advancing policy-relevant solutions in climate, food, and health.

Graduating summa cum laude, she was named Best Graduate of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences in 2015. In the same year, she was selected as one of McKinsey’s Young Leaders for Indonesia. She earned a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), graduating with Distinction and receiving the Best Dissertation Award, and graduated summa cum laude from Universitas Indonesia.

A recognized expert, she has spoken at over ten global forums and has published four books as well as more than ten op-eds in reputable media outlets across East and Southeast Asia.

Jonathan Yap is a Digital Development Specialist (Data Infrastructure) at the Asian Development Bank’s Digital Sector Office. He brings over 15 years of experience in telecommunications and ICT across the Asia-Pacific region, with expertise in digital connectivity and infrastructure, public policy, regulation, project management, as well as business development.

Prior to joining ADB, Jon served as Senior Technical Program Manager in Amazon Leo, where he managed cross-functional licensing schedules and regulatory dependencies to support service deployment across Asia-Pacific markets. Earlier, he held senior positions at Telenor Asia in Singapore and Axiata Group in Malaysia, where he advanced telecommunications and digital economy investments across South and Southeast Asia through policy advocacy and industry reforms in areas including telecom infrastructure, spectrum management, taxation, data privacy, and broadband development.

During his time with Axiata Group, Jon was based in Cambodia, where he led Smart Axiata’s regulatory strategy and public affairs agenda, overseeing stakeholder engagement, corporate communications, sustainability initiatives, and nation-building programs. A telecommunications engineer by training, he also held technical and commercial roles, including Head of Business Development, Rollout Manager, and RF Engineer with major telecommunications service providers in Malaysia.

Jon holds an MBA from the University of Strathclyde, U.K., and a B.Eng. in Telecommunications from Multimedia University, Malaysia.

Maria Mercedes T. Rodrigo is a professor at the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science. She is the head of the Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences and co-head of the Ateneo Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality Laboratory. Her research work focuses on artificial intelligence in education, learning analytics, computer science education, and educational games. In recent years, she has focused on the contextualization of these technologies in under-resourced educational environments. Her current projects include virtual reality games for informal education and the use of LLMs for medical education.

She is on the Executive Committee of the Artificial Intelligence Education Society. In 2021, Dr. Rodrigo received the Distinguished Researcher Award from the Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (APSCE). She is the former president of APSCE.

Professor at the University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Engineering, Department of Technology Management for Innovation. Graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1997 and earned a Ph.D. in Engineering in 2002. He has held research positions at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and served as a visiting researcher at Stanford University. Since 2007, he has been an associate professor, and since 2019, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Engineering. His research specializes in artificial intelligence, deep learning, and generative AI.

He has served as the chairman of the Japan Deep Learning Association since 2017, a technical advisor to Matsuo Institute Inc. since 2020, an outside director of SoftBank Group Corporation since 2019, an expert member of the Council for Achieving New Capitalism and the chair of the AI Strategy Conference since 2023, the chair of the AI Institutional Study Group since 2024, and a board director of the AI Robot Association since 2024, Chairperson, Tokyo AI Strategy Council, Tokyo Metropolis since 2024, an outside director of Panasonic Holdings Corporation since 2025, and an expert member of Council for Japan’s Growth Strategy since 2025, a member of Independent International Scientific Panel on AI under United Nations since 2026, Member, Expert Panel to Consider National Security from the Perspective of Comprehensive National Power, Cabinet Secretariat, since 2026.

Mr. Mohamed Shahudh is a Development Economist with extensive experience across Asia Pacific, including Small Island Developing States, Least Developed Countries, and Fragile Contexts. He currently serves as Senior Economist at UNDP Philippines, where he leads policy advisory on inclusive growth, economic transformation, and resilience.

A central focus of his work sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and economic development — examining how AI is reshaping labor markets and productivity dynamics, and exploring governance approaches that balance progress with protection. Under his leadership, UNDP has launched its flagship Human Development Reports titled “A Matter of Choice: People and Possibilities in the Age of AI” and “The Next Great Divergence: Why AI may widen inequality between countries”, and led critical industry discussions on the implications for the Philippines and the ASEAN region.

Prior to his current role, Mr. Shahudh held Senior Economist positions across UNDP offices in Lao PDR, Malaysia, and the Maldives, where he supported governments on inclusive growth, economic resilience, and the structural reforms that underpin productive and future-ready economies.

Leandro Angelo Y. Aguirre serves as the Undersecretary for Strategic Initiatives and Industry and Competency Development at the Department of Information and Communications Technology. Prior to this, he served as Deputy Privacy Commissioner of the National Privacy Commission.

He received his Juris Doctor from the University of the Philippines and his LL.M from Harvard Law School. He is a member of the academe and the Philippine and New York State Bar.

He co-authored the book “Privacy and Data Protection Law in the Philippines” with Celine A. Dee. The book examines the right to informational privacy in the Philippine privacy regulatory framework.