Alistair is President at MetaMetrics Inc, and Research Professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He drives innovation in educational AI and assessments, guarantees the validity of test scores for 35 million students every year, and helps over 100 organizations make sense of educational metrics. Previously, he was President of the division in Pearson that provided AI scoring services for dozens of assessments and speaking and writing programs. He also oversaw development and delivery of standardized assessments for tens of millions of learners. Alistair has worked as a teacher, examiner, director of studies, university lecturer, and EdTech executive, in the US, UK, Japan, and Thailand. He has an MA in English Language Teaching and MBA from Warwick Business School. His PhD from Lancaster University won the Jacqueline Ross TOEFL award for best dissertation in language testing. He is frequently an invited speaker at conferences and has authored over 20 research publications with a focus on educational technology and language assessments.

Torben Schmidt has been Professor of Teaching English as a Foreign Language at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany, since 2011. His research interests focus on project-based learning, task-based language learning, and foreign language learning with digital media (e.g., digital games, intelligent tutoring systems, AI-supported learning and teaching). From 2018-2024 he was the founder and director of the Future Center of Teacher Education at Leuphana University and coordinator of the Lüneburg project of the Initiative for Excellence for Teacher Education funded by the Germany Ministry of Research and Education. He is the editor and author of a middle-level textbook series and the developer of various learning apps. Professor Schmidt is a two-time winner of the Hans-Eberhard Piepho Prize and was awarded the “Germany—Land of Ideas” prize in 2015 for his blended learning project, “Going Green—An Educational Project for Sustainability.” Over 8000 students from 408 German EFL classrooms participated in his 2024 U.S. Embassy School Election Project.