Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov is widely regarded as the greatest chessplayer in history, becoming the youngest world champion ever at 22 in 1985 and spending twenty years as the world’s top-rated player. His legendary matches against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue made him a central figure in artificial intelligence and the evolution of the human-machine relationship. He retired from chess in 2005 to become a leader of the Russian pro-democracy movement against the rising dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. He is the chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation and has become a powerful voice for individual freedom worldwide. As a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, Kasparov specialized in interdisciplinary collaboration and, as he puts it, “how our technology can make us more human.” Kasparov speaks and writes frequently on innovation, decision-making, and risk. His book Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins will be published in May 2017. His earlier books include How Life Imitates Chess (2007), Winter Is Coming: Why Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped (2015) and two acclaimed series of chess books, My Great Predecessors and Modern Chess. The Kasparov Chess Foundation promotes chess in education around the world with five centers on four continents.