Johnny Ryan – Keynote Speaker

Dr Johnny Ryan FRHistS is Head of Ecosystem for PageFair where he works with global stakeholders to sustain the open Web beyond blocking.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a member of the World Economic Forum’s expert network on media, entertainment and information.

His previous roles include being Chief Innovation Officer of The Irish Times. His second book “A History of the Internet and the Digital Future” is on the reading list at Harvard and Stanford.

His writing has appeared in NATO Review, Fortune, Business Week, Business Insider, Contagious, and Ars Technica.

His first book, based on his work as Senior Researcher at the Institute of International & European Affairs, was the most cited source in the European Commission’s impact assessment that decided against pursuing Web censorship across the 28 member states of the European Union.

As a PhD scholar at the University of Cambridge he studied the spread of terrorist memes on the Web. He was supervised by MI5’s official historian, and his advisor was the former Director of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

He started his career as a designer, and returned to design thinking later as Executive Director of The Innovation Academy at University College Dublin.

He was an associate on the emerging digital environment at the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge, and Executive Director of The Innovation Academy at University College Dublin. He occasionally lectures at the Business School of University College Dublin.