Jürg Zumtobel, Chief of the Supervisory Board Zumtobel AG and son of the company founder, held the opening address for the Year of Light Event.

Since 1 October 2013, Ulrich Schumacher has been Chief Executive Officer of Zumtobel Group AG. He is responsible for managing and optimising the Group as a whole. According to Mr. Schumacher, the key to success is leadership in innovation combined with excellent design and consistent customer orientation. “We dispose of enormous potentials to use our existing knowledge and strengths to create added value and competitive advantages for the entire Group, so that as a whole, we will be more than the sum of our individual parts.”

Olafur Eliasson founded the Studio Olafur Eliasson in 1995 in Berlin, where he creates and develops works of art including extensive installations and photographs of a distinctive experimental nature. Eliasson is involved in a serious of public space projects, including Green River, which he realised in various cities between 1998 and 2001. In collaboration with the Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen, Eliasson also designed the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007, a temporary pavilion in Kensington Gardens, London.

Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner are the founders of the Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) architecture studio in Caracas, Venezuela. Since 2007, they have been teaching as visiting professors for the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning at Columbia University, where they have also set up the S.L.U.M. Lab (Sustainable Living Urban Model Laboratory). Brillembourg and Klumpner were appointed as Chair of Architecture and Urban Development at the Department of Architecture of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ) in Zurich in August 2010, with a focus on the urban South.

Karl Jónsson recently joined Tridonic as an IoT Architect. For the last six years, he led the development of the first IP-based lighting solution for consumers at Greenwave Systems. Before he joined Greenwave, he reported to the CTO Office of Cisco Systems consumer group, where he developed and redesigned consumer electronics linked to the Internet.