K1st World | Stanford, CA

Gen. Stephen J. Hager

USCYBERCOM (Ret.)

Recently retired from active duty, Gen. Hager’s most recent posts included USCYBERCOM and the US Cyber National Mission Force, reporting to Gen. Nakasone, NSA Director. First commissioned in 1987, he was one of the few military officers with advanced engineering degrees from Silicon Valley. He has served in CENTCOM, DODIN, with deployments to Africa and Southwest Asia.

Rodney Brooks, PhD

Robust.ai & MIT

CTO & co-founder of Robust.ai, working on harmonizing human-robot interaction. Dr. Brooks also co-founded Rethink Robotics & iRobot. He directed MIT’s CSAIL for a decade. He is a Fellow of AAAI, AAAS, ACM, IEEE, ATSE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT, and earned his PhD from Stanford.

Jeannette Wing, PhD

Columbia University

Professor & Avanessians Director, Data Science Inst. at Columbia. Dr. Wing was CVP/Head of Microsoft Research, President’s Professor of CS at CMU, and an Asst Dir at the NSF. Her research interests are trustworthy AI, security & privacy, specification and verification, and distributed systems. Dr. Wing is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE. She earned her SB, SM, and PhD all from MIT.

Christopher Nguyen, PhD

Aitomatic

CEO of Aitomatic, a Knowledge-First ML company. He works with leading industrial companies like Panasonic and Tesla to help get fish from ocean to table, make efficient batteries for EVs, and keep cars safe. Dr. Nguyen was president of Arimo-Panasonic, eng. director at Google, and prof. of ECE at HKUST. He earned his BS from UC Berkeley, and MS & PhD from Stanford.

Hiroshi Kutsumi

Panasonic

Director at Panasonic, leading its Global Digital & AI Technology Center. His organization provides the bridge between leading-edge technologies and customer solutions through the business divisions. A veteran exec at Panasonic, Kutsumi-san is a senior leader in the CTO organization, bringing to market innovative products from autonomous robots to AI-based predictive maintenance.

Rhonda Germany Ballintyn

Honeywell

Corporate VP, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer (ret.) at Honeywell International. Prior to that, she served as VP, partner, and board member at Booz Allen Hamilton. Ms. Germany Ballintyn now serves as Chair and President of the Germany Ballintyn Education Foundation and serves on the board of Univar, Aegion, Hypertherm, Zapata Computing, and UMGC Ventures.

R. Sambasivam, PhD

Petronas Group

Chief Data Scientist at Petronas. He leads advanced Oil & Gas analytics initiatives at Petronas to transform & deliver value across the group. Earlier, at Tata Steel, Dr. Sambasivam led the development of the Analytics CoE, shaping large digital transformation programs. Dr. Sambasivam holds an MS in Mechanical Engineering, IIT and a PhD in Fluid Mechanics, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Merwan Mereby

WESCO (née Westinghouse)

VP of Digital Platforms at WESCO (formerly Westinghouse). Mr. Mereby has led global incubation & expansion of connected products & cloud-based industrial applications. He has led acquisitions of AI companies, managed sales/distribution strategies & policies. He has identified and forged strategic partnerships and managed relationships with other Fortune 500 companies.

Steve Jiang, PhD

UTSW Medical

Crittenden Chair Professor in Cancer Research, and Chief of Medical Physics & Engineering, Radiation Oncology, at UTSW Medical Center. Dr. Jiang leads the Medical AI & Automation (MAIA) Lab, incorporating human knowledge into deep learning for radiation therapy. He is Fellow at both the Am. Inst. for Medical & Biological Engineering, and the Am. Assoc. of Physicists in Medicine.

Urbashi Mitra, PhD

USC Viterbi

Director of the USC Information, Inference & Intelligence Group. Dr. Mitra is the USC Viterbi Gordon S. Marshall Chair in Engineering and Professor of ECE & CS. Her work includes underwater acoustic comm, wireless body-area networks for health, and sensor networks, under programs sponsored by Office of Naval Research and the NSF (Mobile Underwater Networks).

Jude Shavlik, PhD

UWISC (Emer.)

Professor (Emeritus) of Computer Science and of Biostatistics & Medical Informatics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Shavlik is a recognized expert in the application of human knowledge to ML, pioneering such architectures as Knowledge-Based Artificial Neural Networks (KBANN). He specializes in “Learning algorithms that take advice” and ML applied to biomedical tasks.

Chetan Gupta, PhD

Hitachi

Head, Industrial AI at Hitachi, co-leads the Hitachi Global AI CoE & is Deputy GM for Hitachi AI Research Center. Dr. Gupta leads the strongest team of DS, architects & devs to build fundamental horizontal Industrial AI technologies & vertical solutions for mobility, manufacturing, mining, energy management systems, and industrial analytics. He has a Ph.D. in Maths, M.S. in Mathematical CS & Chemical Engineering from UIC.

James Cham

Bloomberg Beta VC

Co-founding General Partner, Bloomberg Beta, a highly successful early-stage venture capital firm with a soul, based in Silicon Valley. Bloomberg Beta invests funds from a single LP: the billionaire Mayor Bloomberg. Mr. Cham is a thought leader in the future of AI and its business models. He earned his BS CS from Harvard and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Gopal Gupta, PhD

UT Dallas

Erik Jonsson Chair Professor of Computer Science at UT Dallas. Co-Director of the Center for Applied AI/ML. Dr. Gupta’s research interests include Knowledge Representation, Common Sense Reasoning, Explainable Machine Learning, as well as HCI Tools for Visually Impaired & Intelligent Interfaces. He earned his BS from IIT Kanpur, and MS & PhD from UNC at Chapel Hill.

Chao Hu, PhD

University of Connecticut

Assoc. Professor, Dept of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Hu’s research expertise is engineering design under uncertainty, post-design failure prognostics, with applications to Li-ion batteries, rotating machinery, and structural systems. His work on Intuitive Predictive Maintenance of Industrial and Agricultural Equipment is funded by the NSF.

Rayid Ghani, PhD

Carnegie Mellon University

Distinguished Career Professor of ML & CS at the Heinz College at CMU. He was the Chief Data Scientist for the Obama presidential campaign. He was also the Director of the Center for Data Science and Public Policy & Senior Fellow at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Dr. Ghani also led the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowship.

David Danks, PhD

UC San Diego

Professor of Data Science & Philosophy, UCSD. Dr Danks' research interests are at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, and machine learning. He has explored ethical, psychological, and policy issues around AI & robotics and accomplished significant research in computational cognitive science. Dr. Danks is on the advisory boards of NAIAC, SCSP, PART, CASMI and more.

Gerard Yeh, PhD

NVIDIA Autonomous Vehicle

Executive leader, Technology at NVIDIA Autonomous Vehicle, driving  trust & safety in AVs using human knowledge. Dr. Yeh has led established global teams of 200+ engineers, shipping over 90M units. He has held leadership roles for various technical functions, including algorithms, systems, software, test, VLSI, and operations. Dr. Yeh earned his MS & PhD in EE from Stanford.

Jeremy Coupe, PhD

NASA

Lead for NASA's Sustainable Aviation CDDR Demonstration, oversees the NASA/FAA Digital Mesh Technology and Applications AI/ML working group. Dr. Coupe led the development of NASA's ML Airport Surface Model and received the 2020 NASA Award for outstanding promotion and proliferation of AI/ML for aviation. He received his PhD in Computer Engineering from UC Santa Cruz.

Shashi Dande

WESCO

Technology Director at Wesco, where he leads teams of data scientists and ML engineers working on industrial, physical-world AI/ML, Robotics, Platform and InnovationAI. Prior to this, Mr. Dande was a Principal Architect at Haliburton, specializing in Robotics, Automation, AI, ML, RL. He earned his BS from the University of Madras, and an MSEE from Clarkson University.

Dharmin Parikh

Uber AI

Head of Product for Uber AI where he leads the team responsible for Uber’s ML platform, Michelangelo. Mr. Parikh was also Lead PM where he launched Uber's Safety Incident prevention & data products. Prior to Uber, he led product & engineering teams at Arimo and Intel corporation. He holds an MBA from Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley and MS in EE & Computer Networks, USC.

Sungyong Seo, PhD

Google Cloud AI

Dr. Seo’s research focuses on principled techniques for extracting knowledge from complex structures using it to build predictive models—merging insights both from data mining & machine learning. His work includes physics-informed machine learning, spatio-temporal learning, graph-based neural networks, time-series forecasting. He earned his MS from UMich and PhD from USC.

Jürgen Müller

BASF

Head of Knowledge Architecture, Global Digital Services at BASF. He leads an interdisciplinary group of experts &architects that drive knowledge architectures to build solutions combining NLP, ontologies, and knowledge graphs on large scale for improved productivity and insights. Mr. Muller holds a Mathematics diploma from the University of Bayreuth.

Hung Bui, PhD

Vin AI & DeepMind

CEO of VinAI, on a mission to make machines better understand humans. He was at Google DeepMind, Adobe Research, Nuance NLU Lab after ten years at the AI Center, SRI International. Dr. Bui led a multi-institution research team that developed the probabilistic inference technology for the CALO project. He was assoc prof at Curtin University, Australia, & earned a PhD in CS.

Seiya Miyazaki, PhD

Panasonic

Product Manager for AI engineering at Cold Chain Solutions Company, Panasonic. Dr. Miyazaki has been leading a wide range of development of industrial AI solutions including predictive maintenance, demand forecasting, control optimization, and product life estimation. He earned his MS degree in information technology from CMU and PhD from the University of Tokyo.

Matthias Ihme, PhD

Stanford University

Professor of ME and Photon Sciences. Dr. Ihme’s work includes modeling of reacting flows, numerical methods,  advanced energy conversion concepts and molecular processes. Award recipient of NSF CAREER, ONR Young Investigator, AFOSR Young Investigator, NASA Early Career Faculty, Hiroshi Tsuji Early Career Research, and Bessel Award of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Patrick Hall

BNH.ai & H2O.ai

Patrick Hall is principal scientist and partner at the AI-focused law firm BNH.AI. He also serves as visiting faculty in the Decision Sciences Department at The George Washington School of Business. Before co-founding BNH.AI, Patrick led responsible AI efforts at the ML software firm H2O.ai and developed general-purpose ML tools at SAS Institute.

Ovidiu Daescu, PhD

UT Dallas

Professor & Head, Department of Computer Science of the University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Daescu’s ongoing research interests include computational geometry, algorithm engineering, spatial bio-medical computing, smart cities, and applied machine learning. He earned his MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Notre Dame.

Paco Nathan

Derwen AI

Managing Partner at Derwen AI. Mr. Nathan works with leading industrial companies like BASF and Siemens on European AI initiatives. He is a recognized expert in natural language processing & understanding, data science, cloud computing, with 40+ years tech academic & industry experience, ranging from Berkeley, Stanford, Bell Labs to early-stage start-ups.

David Talby, PhD

John Snow Labs

CTO at John Snow Labs, helping healthcare & life science companies put AI to good use. He is the creator of Spark NLP, world’s most used NLP library in the enterprise. He has built and run web-scale software platforms and teams in startups, Microsoft’s Bing in the US & Europe, and scaled Amazon’s global financial systems. He holds a PhD and a master's degree in CS and Business Administration

Olaf Witkowski, PhD

Cross Labs

Director of Research, Cross Labs, where he leads fundamental research in Artificial Life & Trustworthy AI & CEO, Cross Compass. Dr. Witkowski's research focuses on expanding human capacities through empathic and trustworthy AI. He co-founded YHouse, a NY-based non-profit transdisciplinary research institute, focusing on awareness, AI & complex systems.

Francis Bilson Darku, PhD

University of Notre Dame

Research Asst Professor of IT, Analytics & Operations at the Mendoza College of Business. His research interests include sequential analysis, nonparametric statistics, econometrics, statistical disclosure control & data utility with application in psychology, economics and business. Dr. Darku serves as reviewer for Psychological Methods and the Journal of Applied Statistics.

Jerry Deng

Panasonic USA

General Manager, Business Intelligence & Operations. An experienced leader in Business and Product Management, Mr. Deng leads the BI, advanced-analytics, pricing, ERP, and master-data teams. He covers customer intelligence, competitor and market research, predictive analytics, price and portfolio optimization. He holds a Stern MBA and a BSEE from NJII.

Thuc Vu, PhD

OhmniLabs

CEO & Co-Founder, OhmniLabs, a 3D-Printed AI Robotics company. Dr. Vu previously founded Katango which was acquired by Google. An Assistant Professor at John Von Neumann Institute of Vietnam National University, he has deep expertise in game theory, machine learning, tournament design and multi-agent systems. He earned his BS in CS from CMU, and a PhD from Stanford.

Pete Warden, PhD

Useful Sensors

CEO of Useful Sensors. Former Founder & CTO of Jetpac, acquired by Google. At Google, Dr. Warden led the TensorFlow Mobile team responsible for deep learning on mobile and embedded devices, creating TinyML, a framework and runtime that enable powerful models that fit in small edge devices. He earned a PhD in CS from Stanford and a BS CS from the University of Manchester.

Vinh Luong

Aitomatic

Head of Solution-Product Engineering. Prior, he was among the first data scientists at the industrial data company Uptake. Today Mr. Luong specializes in applying Knowledge-First AI for Industrial IoT problems, eg. Predictive Maintenance to monitor over 100,000 industrial and consumer devices daily. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and an Economics degree from Cambridge.

Pardhu Gunnam

Metaphor Data

Co-founder and CEO of Metaphor Data, a metadata platform for the modern data stack. As data-engineering leader at Linkedin, Mr. Gunnam co-created DataHub, the leading open source metadata platform. He holds a Masters degree in CS from the University of Florida, and a BT in Electronics & Communications from the National Institute of Technology Warangal.

Takashi Kawamura

Panasonic

AI Solution Group Manager, Panasonic Digital & AI Development Center. He was MD of Panasonic R&D Company of America. He was awarded the Takagi Award from the Image Sensing Technology Research Society for his work on Panasonic’s DFD technology, and the Technical Award from the Photographic Society of Japan. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in EE from the University of Tokyo.

Timothy Rozario, PhD

Aitomatic

Head of AI Solutions Engineering at Aitomatic. He currently leads the AI engineering team in a relentless pursuit of building a better world through cutting-edge AI solutions that incorporate domain expertise. These tools have consumers with healthier food choices, better quality-of-life at home, and a safer way to travel. Dr. Rozario earned his PhD in CS and Information Sciences from UT Dallas.

Roshan Nanu, PhD

Aitomatic

Head of Product-Engineering, leading the development of cutting-edge AI products that enable the incorporation of domain expertise. Gounded in physics, neuroscience, and robotics, Dr. Nanu brings a strong grounding in AI and the use of human knowledge in ML systems to industrial AI. He holds a PhD in Neuroscience from Brandeis University and a BS in Physics from Caltech.

Doan Ha, PhD

Koidra

Co-founder of Koidra, an AI startup  transforming agriculture to achieve more yield with less waste by centralizing the knowledge base, automating, improving, and scaling it. Before that, Dr. Ha spent many years improving efficiency and performance in healthcare. She holds a DPH in Behavioral Sciences from UT Health Houston and MPH from Emory University.

R. Chiewvanichakorn

Panasonic

Data scientist at Cold-Chain Solutions, Panasonic, working on data analytics & AI solutions for industries. She leads the development of anomaly detection systems for cold-chain equipment. Ms. Chiewvanichakorn received her MS degree in Informatics from Kyoto University, Japan, where her research focused on neural networks and mixed-integer linear programming for chemo-informatics.

Wai Tong Chung

Stanford University

At Stanford University, Mr. Chung is working towards improving our scientific understanding of novel energy systems and rocket propulsion with state-of-the-art Machine Learning, High-Performance Computing, and Predictive Modeling techniques. He is a Graduate Fellow at the Stanford HAI Center, with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London.