Mr. Bart de Witte
Berlin, Germany
Founder and CEO of the Hippo AI Foundation based in Berlin. He is an advisor to several companies and startups specializing in digital health and regularly lectures at various business universities in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and China. Bart de Witte is a Fellow at the Institute for Exponential Technologies and Desirable Futures, futur.io., the Founder Hippo AI Foundation (2019-…), Director of Digital Health at IBM Germany based in Berlin (2016-2018), Public and Healthcare Leader for Central & Eastern Europe at IBM (Global) based in Vienna (2010-2016), Business Development Executive Healthcare at SAP, based in Zurich (2000-2010), and Physiotherapist Zurzach Care, Lecturer at Swiss Federal Institute of Sport Magglingen SFISM (1996-2000).
Bart de Witte holds degrees from various universities in Belgium (Physiotherapy and Dental Medicine) and has pursued several other post-university paths at national and international business schools, including Harvard Business School. His main focus has been on digital transformation and sustainability.
During the last 10 years Bart de Witte has been deeply involved in the development and application of artificial intelligence in healthcare. With his non-profit organization Hippo AI, he aims to make artificial intelligence in medicine a common good, creating a foundation for a sustainable and equitable society. In 2020, Bart de Witte and his Hippo AI Foundation were selected as a finalist for the prestigious Falling Walls conference as Breakthrough of the Year in the Engineering and Technology category, and in 2021 he won Axel Springer's German AI Prize in the Startups category. His first project at HIPPO AI was selected by the International Research Center for Artificial Intelligence under the auspices of UNESCO as one of 100 global projects solving problems related to the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals through the use of AI.
Before focusing 100% of his passion for information technology, he worked in sports rehabilitation in Switzerland with a focus on lower-back rehabilitation and sports injuries. He loves outdoor sports and always challenges himself to explore them. He has an unusual sense of curiosity that has led him to participate in many sports: mountaineering, snowboarding, canyoning, paragliding, base jumping, but in the end, he fell for kitesurfing. Mr de Witte wanted to combine his hunger for sports and movement with his profession, but then quickly discovered that information technology in the field of medicine was uncharted territory, which is why he switched to focus 100% of my time to digitising medicine. Only later did he discover that his innate need to know, discover and learn was also the driving force behind his career in big tech and now in digital healthcare. He never stopped exploring and innovating and he is looking forward to work with Aspetar and combine both worlds again.
Mr. De Witte states
“Over the years, I have set myself very high ethical standards when it comes to developing digital solutions in the field of medicine. I strongly believe that data-driven medicine, combined with state-of-the-art machine learning, can help to significantly accelerate scientific knowledge discovery and improve clinical practice. By combining open access principles and open source developments, digital medicine has the potential to scale medical expertise to build a more equitable society that benefits us all.”