Remote Participation
The Guiding Transitions International Conference can also be joined remotely. We offer two options for online participation:
1. Join via Zoom (recommended for interaction)
If you would like to ask questions or share comments through the chat, we recommend joining the conference on Zoom. This option requires a free registration.
Please register here and select “I will participate online.” You will receive the zoom link via email on the morning of the conference.
2. Watch the Live YouTube Broadcast
If you prefer to simply follow the sessions without interacting, you can watch the live broadcast on our YouTube channel:
www.youtube.com/univiu/live
The stream will also be visible directly on this webpage during the conference.
We look forward to welcoming you online!
Ece Kamar is Distinguished Scientist, Corporate Vice President and the Managing Director of the AI Frontiers Lab at Microsoft Research. She leads research and development towards pushing the frontiers of AI capabilities. Releases from her lab includes Phi family of models and libraries to empower agentic work, including AutoGen, MagenticOne and MagenticUI. Ece has a decade of experience studying the impact of AI on society and developing AI systems that are reliable, unbiased and trustworthy. She has been instrumental in building the Responsible AI efforts inside Microsoft. She serves as Technical Advisor for Microsoft’s Internal Committee on AI, Engineering and Ethics. Ece received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Sabanci University in Istanbul. She completed her PhD at Harvard University, where she has worked with Prof. Barbara Grosz on human-AI collaboration. Ece is an Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington and is an Adjunct Faculty at Sabanci University. She was a member of the first study panel of Stanford’s AI100. She is currently serving on the National Academies' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB). She has been on the organizing committees of top AI and HCI conferences and received multiple best paper awards for her work.
Luc Steels is a pioneer of artificial intelligence research in Europe. After studies and research, first in languages and literature at the university of Antwerp and then at the MIT AI Lab in the late seventies (advisor Marvin Minsky), he returned to Europe in 1983 as professor of computer science at the Free University of Brussels (VUB). He founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1983 and became its acting director until 2011. In 1996 he became founding director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. From 2011 he joined the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA) as research professor, associated with the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (IBE, UPF-CSIC) in Barcelona. From 2018 he started activities in Venice, first at Ca’Foscari University in the Department of Management and the European Center for Living Technologies, then at the Venice International University in Venice (Italy) until 2025. During all this time he was not only active as an AI researcher, but also as a prolific writer (Google scholar lists more than 400 papers more than 24,000 citations and an h-index of 74 and an i-index of 221). He also published a dozen edited volumes and monographs about knowledge-based AI, behavior-based robotics, artificial life, AI in education, evolutionary linguistics and computational music. In 2022, Steels received the EURAI Distinguished Service Award, highest distinction for AI in Europe.
Marina Calloni is Full Professor and Chair of Political and Social Philosophy at the University of Milan-Bicocca. She is a member of the Board of Directors and Director of the research center ADV – Against Domestic Violence. She holds a PhD in Philosophy and a PhD in Social and Political Sciences. In 2020, she was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic by the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella. She is President of the Italian Society of Critical Theory. She worked on the archives of the Frankfurt School and was a post-doctoral researcher with Habermas in Frankfurt, as well as one of his Italian translators. She has been a guest professor at the New School for Social Research in New York and a fellow at the Italian Academy – Columbia University. She has taught at the Universities of Notre Dame, Łódź, Frankfurt a.M., Bremen, Vienna, Lugano, Hanover, and Kurume. She was a senior researcher at the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science, directing the International Network for Research on Gender.
C. Shawn McGuffey, Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology and past Director of African & African Diaspora Studies at Boston College. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Dr. McGuffey’s professional work primarily highlights how race, gender, sexuality and social class both constrain and create the choices survivors pursue in the aftermath of trauma in the U.S. and throughout the African Diaspora. Two of his current projects focus on sexual trauma. One examines how gender, sexuality, and race shape parental responses to child sexual abuse; and the other investigates the social psychology of sexual assault survivors in the U.S., Ghana, South Africa, and Rwanda. His most recent project examines Black and feminist geographies. 
Manfred Nowak is Secretary General of the Global Campus of Human Rights in Venice and Director of the Vienna Master of Arts in Applied Human Rights at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He previously served in various expert functions, such as UN Expert on enforced disappearances (1993-2006), UN Special Rapporteur on Torture (2004-2010), judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina (1996-2003) and Vice Chairperson of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (2013-2018). In 2016 he was appointed Independent Expert leading the UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty. He was Director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights at Utrecht University (SIM, 1987-1989) and of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights at Vienna University (BIM, 1992-2019) as well as Visiting Professor at the University of Lund (2002-2003), the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva (2008-2009), and at Stanford University in Palo Alto (2014). He is author of more than 600 publications in the fields of public international law and human rights.
Simone Borghesi is Director of the Florence School of Regulation – Climate at the European University Institute (EUI), President of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE) and Vice Rector for International Relations at the University of Siena. He has been President of the Italian Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (2018-19) and Secretary General of the Policy Outreach Committee of EAERE (2018-23). He received a M.Sc. at University College London (1996) and a Ph.D. at the European University Institute (2001). He worked at the International Monetary Fund (1998) and FEEM Milan (1999). He was visiting scholar at INRA (2013), University of Cambridge (2015), ETH Zurich (2016). He has directed several LIFE projects on Emissions Trading (SIDE, DICET, COASE) and the EUI unit in past and present Horizon projects (e.g. Innopath, Capable, Spes). 
Rika Preiser is Professor at the Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST) at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and UNESCO Co-Chair in Complexity and Transformative African Futures. Her research weaves together philosophical inquiry, complexity science, and environmental ethics to address urgent social-ecological challenges. She focuses on relational and embodied approaches to human–nature interactions, and investigates how creative, experimental methods can support regenerative change. Her work highlights the role of critical reflection and systemic imagination in fostering meaningful sustainability transformations.
Dean, School of Environment, Tsinghua University.
Nicola Tollin is Professor with special responsibilities in Urban Resilience, Chairholder and coordinator of the UNESCO Chair on Urban Resilience at University of Southern Denmark, within the section of Civil and Architectural Engineering.