James Hodson is CEO and founder of the AI for Good Foundation, a UN-backed platform that promotes the beneficial use of AI in business and society. and co-founder of the Economists for Ukraine initiative. James Hodson is one of the world’s leading researchers and entrepreneurs in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

He is also Sr researcher at the Jozef Stefan Institute Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Slovenia and advises/invests in promising early-stage companies with a strong AI component. James serves as Senior Researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Department of the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, and as the CEO of the AI for Good Foundation. Prior to joining Cognism as Chief Science Officer, James built and directed the AI Research group at Bloomberg in New York, leading a team of more than 20 in a rich cross-disciplinary research agenda. James was also a researcher at the German National Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and holds several patents across Machine Translation and Network Inference. He created several high-profile events for the AI, data science, non-profit, and policy communities such as the KDD Data Mining for Social Good Conference in August of 2014.

He has provided broad-ranging economic and policy advisory services to the Ukrainian government since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February of 2022. Hodson has authored tech-enabled economic transformation strategies for several national governments and was banned from traveling to Russia due to his work designing new sanctions regimes against the Russian Federation in the energy, financial, technology, and individual sanctions areas. The AI for Good Foundations’ work in Ukraine employs more than 50 full-time staff across the country, and partners directly with the Ukrainian government’s Presidential administration, Ministry for Digital Transformation, Ministry of Culture, and every single one of Ukraine’s regional governments to provide direct humanitarian support, infrastructure resiliency, and protection of Ukraine’s cultural patrimony.