On Wednesday May 2nd and& lifts off in the historic city of Leuven, exploring the impact of health, tech and creativity on the future of the city. The 4-day happening, with 10 locations, 100+ speakers and artist is massive. We dove into the enormous program. It has eight main topics that challenges shaping the future city life. We selected 8 sessions and 3 performances that you simply can’t afford to miss. Most of the sessions, we discovered, are part of main topic “AI for better or worse”. Where the main question is: Will Artificial Intelligence, deep learning, robotics... change our lives? Should we worry or should we embrace the never-ending stream of AI novelties?

Thursday 3 May, 09:00 — 10:30
Venue: Pieter De Somer
Keynotes by:

• Carlo Ratti architect, engineer, inventor, educator & activist professor at MIT Senseable cities
• Carla Cammilla Hjort, SPACE10-founder & cultural entrepreneur *
• Sophie Vandebroek, COO of IBM Research

Related interview: Alternative futures explored at Made in Space interview with Carla Cammilla Hjort

Thursday 3 May, 14:00 — 15:30
Venue: Pieter De Somer
Keynotes by:

• Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro, Builds androids/human replicas, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory Osaka University *
• Prof. Bram Vanderborght, Professor in Robotics & active member of BruBotics
• Nelly Ben Hayoun, The ‘Willy Wonka of Design & Science’ *

Thursday 3 May, 16:00 — 18:00
Venue: Pieter De Somer

Keynotes by:

• Lucy McRae, Science fiction artist & body architect *
• Shigeru Ban, Revolutionary pioneer in humanitarian architecture
• Tiffany Pham, Founder of Mogul *

Thursday 3 May, 16:00 — 18:00
Venue: M-Museum

Forum with:

• Kenric McDowell, Head of the Artists & Machine Intelligence program at Google
• Emily Segal, One of the most creative people in business that knows everything about future trends. *
• Samir Bantal, and&'s art curator & director of AMO, the research & design studio of OMA
• Moderator Marco Bevelo

Samir Bantal curated the art interventions in public space. Interventions are by Studio L A & Harry Nuriev & AMO & Dries Depoorter.