Public-Interest
AI Accelerator Program

Patricia Mangeol is the Director of Research and Digital Learning Initiatives at Sandbox Inc., a Canadian agency focused on helping public and nonprofit organizations achieve their education and outreach objectives. She leads the work of Sandbox Labs, the company’s R&D arm, forging partnerships in North America and Europe to leverage research methodologies and technological innovations to advance education and learning. Previously, Patricia led higher education research and policy projects at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and was a policymaker in the Ontario government (Canada). She advised governments in Canada, France, Hungary, Portugal, Slovakia, and the United States on policies spanning higher education, the labour market, immigration and digital education. Alongside her work at Sandbox, Patricia is conducting doctoral research within the Open University of Catalonia’s Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences on how higher education institutions and leaders respond to AI-driven labour market changes. 

Albert Cañigueral is an explorer, consultant, author and speaker around the impacts of technology in society. He currently works at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) as the AI Factory one-stop shop manager. Before his current position, he was the Artificial Intelligence and Language Technologies (AI/LT) coordination and development manager. Always bridging research, innovation and society. Before joining BSC, Albert focused on the impacts of technology and the future of work. Author of “El trabajo ya no es lo que era: nuevas formas de trabajar, otras maneras de vivir” (Conecta, 2020) and co-producer and co-director of “Ciudad en Beta: el trabajo de hoy, la ciudad del mañana” (Createl, 2022). Between 2021 and 2022, Albert served as director general de Dades Obertes, Transparència i Col·laboració at the Open Government Secretary at Generalitat de Catalunya. Before that he led the development of the Ouishare network in Spain and Latin America from 2012-2021.

Felix Sieker is a Project Manager at the Bertelsmann Stiftung. He specializes in AI and compute policy and regularly publishes research papers and policy briefs that analyze proposed regulations and policy frameworks, advising the German federal government, ministries, and the European Commission. Over the past year, his work has placed particular emphasis on Public AI.

Previously, he worked at think tanks, universities and in an advisory role for Germany’s central advisory body for its high-tech agenda and as a freelancer for foundations and the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. In 2021, he completed his PhD at the Hertie School with a dissertation on the role of platform companies in the digital transformation of work. He studied “Sociology, Politics and Economics” at Zeppelin University and “Comparative Social Policy” at the University of Oxford.

Alek is the Director of Strategy at Open Future. He has 20 years of experience with public interest advocacy, movement building and research into the intersection of society, culture and digital technologies. He is a sociologist by training and holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the Polish Academy of Science. He is currently also a member of the Board of Wikimedia Europe.

In 2010 he established Centrum Cyfrowe, one of the leading Polish organizations promoting openness and internet users’ rights. He led Centrum Cyfrowe for ten years as the Director and President of the Board. Before founding Centrum Cyfrowe, he was a strategic advisor to the Prime Minister of Poland.

In 2005, he co-founded Creative Commons Poland and had since then been an active member of the Creative Commons network. He co-chaired, with Ryan Merkeley, the Creative Commons Network Strategy process. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Creative Commons organization in 2021-2024.

Alek has been involved in a range of initiatives aimed at charting new directions and strategies for a range of organizations and the open movement itself. He led (with Nicole Allen), the 10th Anniversary review of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. He co-chaired (with Ryan Merkeley) CC’s network strategic review process, which led to the creation of the new CC network model in 2017. He is one of the authors of the Open Policy Index, an effort to map open policies worldwide. In Poland, he has been involved in developing epodreczniki.pl, the open public textbooks initiative. Finally, he co-authored A Vision for Shared Digital Europe, an alternative digital policy vision for Europe.

He is a member of the advisory board of the Inspiring Girls Polska foundation. He is also one of the co-founders of COMMUNIA, the European Association for the Public Domain. Together with other COMMUNIA members, he’s been involved since 2015 in European copyright reform advocacy, related to the European Copyright Directive legislative process. As a member of the Board of Strategic Advisors to the Prime Minister of Poland (2008-2011), he co-authored the strategic report “Poland 2030” (2009) and the Polish official long-term strategy for growth.

He is an alumnus of the Leadership Academy for Poland (class of 2017) and former Junior Fellow at McLuhan Program on Culture and Technology, University of Toronto.

He published, with Mirek Filiciak, a collection of essays titled “Two zero. Alphabet of the new culture and other essays”. Since 2006 he has been blogging for “Polityka,” a prominent Polish weekly.

Alek lives in Warsaw with his partner and two daughters. In his free time, he cooks, runs and bakes bread.

Simona Levi is a technopolitical strategist, researcher and activist focused on digital rights and democratic governance in the digital age. She is a founder, in 2008, of Xnet, Institute for Democratic Digitalisation. In 2017, Rolling Stone selected her as one of the 25 people shaping the future. Since 2018, she has designed and directed the Postgraduate Course in Technopolitics and Rights in the Digital Era (first at UPF, later at the University of Barcelona). Levi builds devises for civic action and advises institutions and civic organisations across Europe on digital sovereignty, public digital infrastructure, freedom of expression, systemic disinformation, and whistleblower protection. At the request of the President of the European Parliament, she published the report “Proposal for a sovereign and democratic digitalization of Europe” (Publications Office of the EU). She is also the author of books including Democratic Digitalisation: Digital Sovereignty for the People and Fake You: An Activist’s Guide to Defeating Disinformation.

Javier Creus is a strategist, entrepreneur, and founder of Ideas for Change, with over two decades of experience in systems innovation, collaborative economies, and open, peer-to-peer business models. He is widely recognized as a thought leader in citizen innovation and techno-social transformation across Europe and Latin America. As the creator of the Pentagrowth methodology, he has supported global companies and startups in designing disruptive, impact-driven business models by aligning internal capabilities with external opportunities. His work spans consulting, entrepreneurship, and academia, including roles as a strategic planner, professor of disruption management at ESADE, and advisor to organizations such as Ouishare and the Open Knowledge Foundation. He is also co-author of We Are Not Ants, exploring the social dynamics of collaboration and technological change, consistently bridging strategy, innovation, and societal impact.

B Cavello is a technology and facilitation expert who is passionate about creating social change by empowering everyone to participate in technological and social governance. They serve as director of emerging technologies for Aspen Digital, a program of the Aspen Institute. B also serves as assistant program chair for the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Conference and as a board member to Metagov, an interdisciplinary research nonprofit promoting digital self-governance. Previously they worked as a tech policy advisor in the US Congress, program lead at Partnership on AI, senior engagement lead at IBM, and director of product and community Exploding Kittens.

Tatiana Fernández is an economist with a PhD in European Integration and International Relations, with over 25 years of experience in public administration. She has spent much of her career within the Generalitat de Catalunya, where she led regional economic strategy and transformative innovation, contributing to a shift toward place-based, cross-sector coordination. Since 2015, her work has focused on advancing systemic change through applied research, policy design, and the facilitation of collective processes across institutions and stakeholders. She is Co-Founder of SharedAgendas.org and Global Institutional Lead at Naked Innovations, where she supports governments, companies, and research organizations in aligning strategy, coordination, and learning to address complex socio-economic challenges. Her work has been central to the development of the Shared Agendas approach for socio-technical transitions, bridging governance, innovation, and practice, with a focus on system design and behavioral change.

Dr Maja Bogataj Jančič is the founder and head of the Open Data and Intellectual Property Institute ODIPI. Maja is a copyright expert; her recent work focuses on open science, open data, data governance and artificial intelligence, as well as open science issues and the legal framework of copyright and data for research and science. Maja is the National and Regional Coordinator for Knowledge Rights 21 project, she is a member of the board of the Slovenian Open Science Community and the head of the Expert Body for Legal Issues Related to Copyright and Data Governance. Maja is a president of the supervisory board of the National and University Library (NUK) and member of IFLA Committee on Copyright and Legal Matters. She is a vice president of COMMUNIA. She is Creative Commons Slovenia since 2004. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Knowledge Governance. Maja graduated from the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana (1996), obtained her LL.M. from the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana (1999, Economics), Harvard Law School (2000, Law) and Facoltà di Giurisprudenza di Torino (2005, Intellectual Property), and her Ph.D. from the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana (2006, Copyright).

Migle is focusing on legal changes and challenges that the Artificial Intelligence, robotics and other disruptive technologies are presenting the contemporary societies with. In particular, Migle is interested in the impact of these technologies on human rights, development and evolution of rights, ethics of technology, philosophy of law and our understanding of agency, personhood, autonomy and risks. At the UPF, Migle is teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on law and technological disruptions. She is a member of the Research Commission and is also coordinating the PhD program in Law since 2022.  Currently Migle is on her second mandate (2025-2028) as a member of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE -  advisory board to the European Commission), a member of the Directive Board of "Gregorio Peces-Barba" Institute of Human Rights, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) (Madrid, Spain) and, since 2025, member of editorial board  of "Derechos y Libertades: Revista de Filosofía del Derecho y Derechos Humanos."

Joshua Tan is co-founder and research director at Metagov, a laboratory for engineering institutions. His work explores the intersection between artificial and collective intelligence. He completed his PhD and postdoc at Oxford, previously held fellowships at Stanford (at the Digital Civil Society Lab), Princeton (in the CS department), and MIT (in the math department), and taught at Harvard (in the law school) and Carnegie Mellon (in the policy school). His work has been funded by the NSF, Ford Foundation, EPSRC, EU Next Generation Internet, Henry Luce Foundation, One Project, NIST, Ethereum Foundation, Optimism Foundation, and others.

Maximilian Gahntz works as AI Policy Lead at Mozilla. In this capacity, he's leading Mozilla's global work around issues such as open-source AI, transparency and accountability, and competition in the AI industry. Before he joined Mozilla, he was a fellow of the Mercator Fellowship on International Affairs, working on the EU's AI Act at the European Commission.

Rodrigo Cetina Presuel is the Associate Dean for Education and Academic Affairs and a Senior Lecturer in Law and Public Policy at the UPF Barcelona School of Management (UPF-BSM). He holds a PhD in Communication Law and Policy from the Complutense University of Madrid and specializes in the legal and regulatory challenges of digital technologies, including internet platforms and artificial intelligence. He explores how private entities shape the digital public sphere through algorithmic decision-making, content moderation, and platform governance. His work also critically examines the evolving legal frameworks that govern AI-driven technologies and their impact on fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, data privacy, and democratic accountability and the complexities of these technologies when implemented by public administration.

Before joining UPF-BSM, he has been a research associate at Harvard University’s Institute for Global Law and Policy, contributing to global dialogues on digital platform regulation and to the ethical implications of AI and its regulation. His research bridges law, technology, and policy, offering insights into the balance between innovation and the protection of human rights in the digital age.

Dr. Cetina Presuel co-leads the Master’s in Public and Social Policies program and the Master’s in International Business at UPF-BSM. He also served as the Executive Director of the RCC at Harvard University and has held several international faculty, research, and teaching positions, among others at Harvard University, New York University (NYU), Emerson College, Lasell University, and at the City University of New York (CUNY).