Education Futures

Henry Scott studies at the London Interdisciplinary School ( lis.ac.uk ), pursuing a Bachelor of Arts and Science in Interdisciplinary Problems and Methods, and will be part of the school's third graduating class. Dyslexic since childhood, he turned early to AI dictation tools to help articulate his thinking — a habit he credits with sharpening his own unassisted writing over time. At LIS he took...

Oksana Matiiash is the CEO of WINWIN EdTech Center of Excellence, Ukraine's national hub for technology and innovation in education. Launched in December 2025 under Ukraine's Global Innovation Strategy, the Center generates evidence through research and foresight and pilots education technologies, including AI, while Ukraine navigates a full-scale war. It also brings together government, educators...

MacKenzie Price is the co-founder of Alpha School and the AI-driven 2 Hour Learning model that powers it, a Stanford-trained psychologist who left the traditional path the day her daughter came home from second grade and said, simply, "school is boring." In 2014, working alongside the colleague she still calls "the OG, the Original Guide," Price opened the first Alpha campus in Austin, Texas, bett...

Jenny Anderson is an award-winning journalist and author with 25 years in the field, including a decade covering finance at The New York Times — where she won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2008 for her coverage of Merrill Lynch ahead of the 2008 financial crisis. She later pioneered coverage of the "science of learning" at Quartz, and now contributes to The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washingto...

Bethany Koby-Hirschmann is a designer, social entrepreneur, and co-founder and Chief Vision Officer of Fam Studio , a research and design practice based in Somerset, England. She holds a BA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice from the University of Bath, and is completing a PhD on youth co-creation and the uses of enchantment. In 2012, after fi...

This special episode is a recording of a live panel discussion from the AI & Education Meetup series, hosted by Education Futures at the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS). Svenia is joined by four guests at the intersection of AI and learning: Ash Brockwell, LIS associate professor and lead of the new Education Futures master's; Niccolò Pescetelli, LIS associate professor leading the AI &a...

Justin Reich is an Associate Professor at MIT and Director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab , author of Failure to Disrupt (Harvard University Press), host of the TeachLab podcast, and the force behind The Homework Machine — a landmark 7-part podcast series investigating what's really happening with AI in classrooms across the US. We asked him, one of the most respected education technology researc...

What does it actually take to know if an AI tutor is helping kids learn? Bibi Groot , Chief Impact Officer at Eedi Labs , has spent her career answering exactly that question — first at the Behavioral Insights Team (aka the Nudge Unit, co-founded with Nobel laureate Richard Thaler), then in classrooms across the UK and Latin America. In this episode, Bibi walks us through how Eedi's diagnostic eng...

Anne-Sophie is the co-founder and Executive Director of everyone.ai , a Silicon Valley nonprofit bridging artificial intelligence and developmental neuroscience. She is also the Chief Program Officer of iRAISE (International Research-driven Alliance for AI Serving Every child), the global coalition she launched at the Paris AI Action Summit alongside 11 governments, UNESCO, UNICEF, and companies i...

Kashyap "Kash" Rajesh is 20 years old, a Junior at Cornell University studying Information Science and Government with a minor in AI, and he's been working in AI policy since he was 14. He supported the founding of Encode, a non-profit originally founded by young people, focused on how AI is impacting the public and particularly the next generation, which grew to 40 states and every inhabited cont...

What if AI education wasn't just for engineers and computer scientists, but for every student, regardless of their field? That's exactly the bet Camille Salinesi is making at one of the world's most iconic universities. Camille is a full professor of computer science at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne , where he has been based since 1999. A specialist in requirements engineering and ap...

In this episode, Svenia Busson sits down with Dr. Alex Carter , Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, and Director of Creativity Research at the Centre for AI Interaction. Alex holds a PhD in philosophy from Essex — with roots in Wittgenstein and the philosophy of language — and has become one of the UK's most provocative thinkers at the intersection of...

Dr. Asyia Kazmi, OBE spent 12 years teaching mathematics in some of London's toughest schools, and she loved every minute of it. She went on to advise the UK government, work at PwC, lead Global Education Policy at the Gates Foundation, and is now CEO of WISE (World Innovation Summit for Education, https://www.wise-qatar.org/ ), a Qatar Foundation initiative that convenes the world's leading minds...

Linda Liukas spent her early career surrounded by engineers in Silicon Valley, working at Codecademy and dreaming of a different kind of computer science education — one that felt tangible, joyful, and human. In 2014, she launched a Kickstarter for Hello Ruby , a children's storybook teaching the big ideas of computer science through characters and storytelling. She asked for $10,000. She got near...

What skills will remain irreplaceable as AI takes over more and more of the work we do? That's the question that led Rahim Hirji to write SuperSkills — a book about the human capabilities that will define who thrives in the age of AI. Rahim has spent over two decades at the intersection of technology and education. He ran Maths Doctor, one of the UK's first online tutoring businesses. He co-founde...

What separates an AI companion from an AI agent? And when does a "sticky" learning app actually make you smarter? In this episode, Svenia Busson sits down with Rhys Spence , Head of Research & Platform at Brighteye Ventures — one of Europe's leading EdTech and future-of-work VC funds, with over €220 million under management. Rhys shares the key insights from Brighteye's report Me, Myself and M...

What if education wasn't about delivering content, but about preparing young people for human flourishing in the age of AI? In this episode of Education Futures, Svenia Busson sits down with one of the earliest visionaries on AI in K-12: Babak Mostaghimi. Back in 2019, long before ChatGPT, he convinced one of the largest school districts in the US that AI would be a Netflix-style disruption for ed...

What does education need to become when AI can replicate most of our cognitive abilities, and what human skills must we protect, develop, and teach now, before it's too late? In this episode, Svenia Busson sits down with Delphine Le Serre, engineer turned behavioral scientist, founder of EdHu 2050 and creator of the MOON Pedagogy. After starting her career in microelectronics, Delphine gave her fi...

What can Socrates teach us about artificial intelligence? In this episode, Svenia Busson sits down with Alexander Montag, a scholar of ancient Greek philosophy finishing his doctorate at Tulane University, and soon to teach at St. John's University in New York as well as to conduct research at the New School for Social Research. Together they explore the concept of Socratic dialogue. We unpack wha...

What if teachers stopped being passive consumers of AI, and started shaping how it's built? In this episode, Svenia Busson sits down with Stephen Jull a true EdTech veteran who started his career teaching in the remote woodlands of Northern Canada, went on to co-found GeoGebra GmbH — the free dynamic mathematics software that reached over 500 million users worldwide — and now leads EdTech and AI s...

What does it actually look like when a higher education institution takes AI seriously, as something to integrate into the very design of how students learn, are assessed, and grow? In this episode, Svenia Busson sits down with the founder of Forward College, Boris Walbaum, who walks us through one of the most concrete and thoughtful AI-in-education frameworks we've encountered. From an in-house A...

In this episode of Education Futures, Svenia Busson sits down with Pilyoung Kim, Professor of Psychology at the University of Denver and Director of the Center for Brain, AI, and Child (BAIC). Pilyoung's research bridges developmental science and AI design to understand how generative AI is shaping the social, emotional, and neural development of children. We dive into: Why general-purpose chatbot...

In this episode of Education Futures, Svenia Busson sits down with the founder of the Safe AI for Children Alliance, Tara Steele, a former intelligence officer who spent a decade assessing long-term risks before turning her attention to one of the most urgent and least-discussed issues of our time: the impact of AI on children. From conversational AI optimized for intimacy (not just attention) to...

What happens when millions of children start talking to LLMs every day and no one knows whether it's safe? In this episode, Laurent Jolie sits down with Stéphie Herlin, co-founder and Research & Product Lead at KORA, the first independent, non-profit, open-source benchmark measuring how safe LLMs are for children. Before KORA, Stéphie spent 8+ years as a government economist, then moved into e...

In this episode, Svenia Busson sits down with Wess Trabelsi , a Tech Integration Specialist at Ulster BOCES in New York, where he supports eight rural school districts. Wess is neither a cheerleader nor a doomsayer when it comes to AI in education, he's something rarer: an evidence-driven practitioner who actually read the research. Wess shares his deep dive into the science (or lack thereof) behi...