Ross J. Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at University of Cambridge and University of Edinburgh. He is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on security. He is one of the pioneers of the economics of information security, peer-to-peer systems, hardware tamper-resistance and API security. Furthermore, he was one of the designers of the international standards for prepayment electricity metering and power line communications, and was one of the inventors of the AES finalist encryption algorithm Serpent. In 2015, he won the Lovelace Medal, Britain’s top award in computing. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Prof. Ross J. Anderson leads the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre, which collects and analyzes large datasets about online criminal activity. He is known to all security professionals as the author of the textbook “Security Engineering – A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems”.

Max Smeets is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich and Director of the European Cyber Conflict Research Initiative. He is the author of ‘No Shortcuts: Why States Struggle to Develop a Military Cyber-​Force’ (Oxford University Press & Hurst Publishers, 2022) and co-​editor of ‘Deter, Disrupt or Deceive? Assessing Cyber Conflict as an Intelligence Contest’ (Georgetown University Press, 2023) and ‘Cyberspace and Instability’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

Max is an affiliate at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and an associate fellow at Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). He also lectures on cyber warfare and defense as part of the Senior Officer course at the NATO Defense College in Rome. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Stanford University CISAC and a College Lecturer at Keble College, University of Oxford.

He has also held research and fellowship positions at New America, Columbia University SIPA, Sciences Po CERI, and NATO CCD COE. Before his academic career, Max worked in finance in London and Amsterdam. Max received a BA in Economics, Politics and Statistics summa cum laude from University College Roosevelt, Utrecht University and an M.Phil (Brasenose College) and DPhil (St. John’s College) in International Relations from the University of Oxford.