Tuesday, December 9, 10:00 – 10:15am

Del Ross’s short biography

Del Ross is the Managing Director of Noctober Value Partners, LLC, a strategic advisory firm specializing in revenue generation for consumer-facing businesses. He has 20 years of digital and traditional marketing and sales experience and has spent most of the past 13 years in the hospitality industry, most recently serving as the head of sales and marketing for InterContinental Hotels Group, the world’s largest hotel company. Del is an e-commerce pioneer and holds multiple patents in the field of marketing technology. He has been responsible for delivering more than $12 billion in annual revenues and led the development of the multi-billion dollar Internet business for IHG. He is an expert in digital disruption and created a revolutionary offline marketing methodology based on his experience leading one of the largest online marketing programs in the world. Prior to IHG, he was the founder and CEO of Nexchange Corporation, a venture-backed startup serving national retailers and mainstream publishers. He also has direct experience in the consumer banking and consumer electronics industries.

Del is an MBA graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and holds an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University. He is a frequent guest lecturer at several universities and consults with investment advisory firms, hedge funds, and other institutional investors on a regular basis.

Rogier van der Heide, former Chief Design Officer, Philips Lighting and Ambassador, United Nations 2021 International Year of Light, will discuss how we need to humanize the Internet of Things and understand how connectivity will change the way that people view and use the world, and how they will interact

differently. Rogier will also address how the value of the Internet of Things is not about the infrastructure, the data or the hardware; it is about the wisdom we build on top of that.

Wednesday, December 10, 12:15pm – 12:30pm

Rogier van der Heide’s short biography

Rogier van der Heide is a well known designer in the public and commercial realm. Until August 2014 Rogier was Vice President and Chief Design Officer of Philips Lighting.As of 1 December 2014 he will be Chief Design & Marketing Officer of Zumtobel Group in Austria.

Rogier focuses on innovation-led design as an enabler of bridging technology and the creation of meaningful, life-enhancing solutions. He has 20 years of experience in engaging, inspiring, three-dimensional design that fuses light, image projection, architecture and product design to create memorable, authentic experiences around the world.

Until 2010, Rogier van der Heide was Director with Arup and the Global Leader of Arup Lighting. In that role, Rogier has been responsible for innovative, creative and well-executed projects all over the world.

Rogier has received over 20 individual design awards, and his design team at Philips got accoladed over 35 times with iF Awards and Reddot Awards, the leading global industry prizes for innovative design. Rogier’s work is widely recognised as leading in the field of creative and independent design.

Many architects work together with Rogier, who has completed projects in collaboration with Renzo Piano, Ben van Berkel, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Michael Graves, Cesar Pelli, Rob Krier and many others.

Rogier delivers many lectures, presentations and seminars about design, light, business, and strategic design at many international conferences. His talk inspiring talk on TED.com about the beauty of darkness has attracted over 500,000 viewers. Rogier was also Professor at the Technical University of Graz, Austria.

Professor Harvey Rubin from the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Rubin will be discussing how mobile base stations can be used for powering refrigeration systems and what this means for the providing better access to healthcare.

Harvey Rubin’s short biography

Dr. Rubin received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and his M.D. from Columbia University in 1976. He was a House Officer in Medicine at The Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and did his fellowship in infectious diseases at Harvard and the Brigham. Dr. Rubin joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 and became Professor of Medicine in 1998. He holds secondary appointments as Professor in the Department of Microbiology, the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics in the School of Medicine and as Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Dr. Rubin’s laboratory is in the Department of Infectious Diseases, School of Medicine, where his research is on the genetic and biochemical mechanisms involved in the pathophysiology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and other human bacterial pathogens. His research has been funded by the NIH, NSF, the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, DARPA and his startup antibiotic biotech company RMH Sciences. In addition to his work on the basic biology of the disease, he has extended the investigations to mathematical modeling of complex biological systems.

Dr. Rubin is the Director of the Institute for Strategic Threat Analysis and Response ISTAR, (www.istarpenn.org) which he founded in 2002. The mission of ISTAR is global–addressing strategies and responses to intentional as well as unintentional threats. ISTAR holds Special Consultative Status at the United Nations through its affiliate Friends of ISTAR. He is the founder of Energize the Chain (www.energizethechain.org), a non-profit organization that extends the vaccine cold chain to remote parts of the globe by powering vaccine refrigeration systems using energy available at mobile cell towers in these remote regions.