Sophie Hackford
Futurist, Technologist & Researcher
Sophie Hackford is a futurist whose research entails meeting weirdos and troublemakers in off-the-beaten-track labs, makerspaces, and garages around the globe. As part of her research, she consults for exec teams and boards of large companies on understanding the explosive new technologies defining the new economy.
"Technological progress is not just about digitizing today's processes. It is about entirely new possibilities"
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Sophie co-founded and chairs 1715 Labs: a spinout from Oxford University's Astrophysics Department, labelling data to train algorithms. Sophie previously worked at WIRED magazine, for Singularity University at the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley, and prior to California, the interdisciplinary Oxford Martin School at Oxford University, where Sophie raised more than $120m of research investment. She is the CIO at Not Just a Label, working on the future of retail and cities, and is a contributor to World Economic Forum, Google, and Victoria & Albert Museum publications.
Sophie Hackford provides a fast-paced overview of the explosive technologies that are shaping the future. From encoding movies in DNA to pixelating the planet, from virtual universes to prosthetic intelligence, Sophie will explore how our relationship with the "machines" is becoming weirder and more complex.