Yoshua Bengio is Full Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), CIFAR Program co-director of the CIFAR program on Learning in Machines and Brains, Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms. His main research ambition is to understand principles of learning that yield intelligence. He supervises a large group of graduate students and post-docs. His research is widely cited (over 135,000 citations found by Google Scholar in September 2017, with an H-index of 125).

Yoshua Bengio is currently action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research, associate editor for the Neural Computation journal, editor for Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning, and has been associate editor for the Machine Learning Journal and the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks.

Gary Marcus, scientist, bestselling author, and entrepreneur, was CEO and Founder of the machine-learning startup Geometric Intelligence, recently acquired by Uber, and is known for his provocative and bold claims in artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Trained by Steven Pinker, he received his PhD at MIT at age 23. His professional research, published in leading journals such as Science, Nature, Cognition, and Artificial Intelligence, has focused on the foundations of cognition in humans, animals and machines, spanning fields from developmental psychology to neuroscience to genetics to artificial intelligence. A special interest has been on the challenge of endowing machines with common sense.

He is also well-known for his writing for the general public, including frequent essays and op-eds for The New Yorker and The New York Times. His books include The Algebraic Mind, The Birth of the Mind, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, The New York Times Bestseller, Guitar Zero and The Future of the Brain: Essays By The World’s Leading Neuroscientists.

In a 2012 essay for The New Yorker, he was perhaps the first person to publicly criticize deep learning, drawing on arguments he developed in his 2001 technical book The Algebraic Mind. More recently, in a 2018 arXiv article, Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal, he asked whether deep learning might be “approaching a wall.” The challenges he laid out there were covered everywhere from The New York Times to Wired to The Financial Times and Wall Street Journal.

In another provocative 2012 essay, Moral Machines, Marcus was the first to adapt “trolley problems” to driverless cars, anticipating much recent research on the ethics of AI. His next book, REBOOT: Getting to AI We Can Trust, to be published by Pantheon in Fall 2019, co-authored with Ernie Davis, calls for a fundamental rethinking of current approaches to artificial intelligence.

Daphne Koller  is the CEO and Founder of insitro, a startup company that aims to rethink drug development using machine learning. She is also the Co-Chair of the Board and Co-Founder of Coursera, the largest platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Daphne was the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where she served on the faculty for 18 years. She has also been the Chief Computing Officer of Calico, an Alphabet company in the healthcare space.

She is the author of over 200-refereed publications appearing in venues such as Science, Cell, and Nature Genetics. Daphne was recognized as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2012 and Newsweek’s 10 most important people in 2010.

She has been honored with multiple awards and fellowships during her career including the Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship in 1996, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1998, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 1999, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 2001, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004, and the ACM Prize in Computing in 2008.

Daphne was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 and elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014 and of the International Society of Computational Biology in 2017.

Her teaching was recognized via the Stanford Medal for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research, and as a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.

Hassan Sawaf has worked in the automatic speech recognition, computer vision, natural language understanding, and machine translation fields for 20+ years. In 1999, he cofounded AIXPLAIN AG, a company offering speech recognition and machine translation services to enterprises, before “cloud” was yet a mainstream concept. His startup was acquired by AppTek in 2004, where he served as COO and Chief Scientist till SAIC acquired AppTek’s assets in 2010. Hassan was then Chief Scientist and Technical Fellow in SAIC with focus on Human Language Technology and Artificial Intelligence. In 2013 he joined eBay as senior director and head of AI, growing the Artificial Intelligence capability that is now enabling a large parts of the business. Since September of 2016 he joined Amazon to lead the Applied Science for Amazon AI, building up the science foundations for various AWS AI services.

Kathryn Hume oversees the application of research for RBC’s artificial intelligence institute, helps guide company strategy, and assists in supporting Borealis AI’s brand profile among its audience.

She was previously VP of product and strategy at AI-powered software platform integrate.ai, which has raised $50 million to date, including a $39 million Series A round in September 2018. She was also previously the director of sales and marketing at machine-intelligence research company, Cloudera Fast Forward Labs. Hume frequently speaks and writes about AI and teaches courses on enterprise adoption of AI, law and ethics at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and the University of Calgary.

Vanja Josifovski is the Chief Technology Officer of Pinterest, where he works on establishing the company’s broader technical strategy while leading the efforts around machine learning. Prior to his current role, Vanja led the Discovery team – a group that oversees content selection for the Pinterest home feed, search, and visual discovery. He also spent time leading Pinterest’s Growth team, the group responsible for driving both user and engagement growth. Before joining Pinterest, Vanja worked on large scale machine learning and information extraction at Google Research. His career began with roles at Yahoo Research and IBM Research. Vanja holds a PhD in large scale database systems.

Jose Murillo established and leads the Analytics Business Unit at Banorte –the second largest financial group in Mexico. His group has been recognized as a success story within the data and analytics industry. The value created with analytics on 2018, the third year of operations of his group, exceeded 700 million USD–during his tenure the value created has exceeded 1.7 billion dollars. This case was published at Harvard Business Review as an example of a company which made its analytics investments pay-off (2018). Also, his team obtained the Lafferty Global Award on Credit Card Excellence for the impact of analytics on customer equity (2016). Jose was named among the top analytics and data professionals in North America by Corinium in its first and second edition. He has been published in several industry and refereed journals, he is a frequent speaker at analytics forums and he is a member of Queen’s University Advisory Board for the Masters in Management Analytics.

Prior to Banorte, Jose was a top-ranking official at Mexico’s Central Bank and participated for more than a decade at the Monetary Policy Committee holding the staff’s view on inflation –a key variable for policy decision. Also, he was an advisor to the International Monetary Fund on statistics and led missions to Ecuador and Chile. At the academia he taught economics at Rice University, ITAM and El Colegio de Mexico. He holds a PhD in economics from Rice University and graduated from ITAM (Cum Laude and received national prizes from the Chamber of Commerce and Tlacalel Prize).

Deepak Agarwal is a vice president of engineering at LinkedIn where he is responsible for all AI efforts across the company. He is well known for his work on recommender systems and has published a book on the topic. He has published extensively in top-tier computer science conferences and has coauthored several patents. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and has served on the Executive Committee of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). Deepak regularly serves on program committees of various conferences in the field of AI and computer science. He is also an associate editor of two flagship statistics journals.

Marc G Bellemare is a research scientist at Google Brain in Montreal, Canada; CIFAR Learning in Machines & Brain Fellow; adjunct professor at McGill University; and was recently awarded a Canada CIFAR AI chair, held at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta where he studied the concept of domain-independent agents and developed the highly-successful Arcade Learning Environment, the platform for AI research on Atari 2600 games. From 2013 to 2017 he was a research scientist at DeepMind where he made major contributions to the field of deep reinforcement learning. He is known for his work on reinforcement learning, including approximate exploration, representation learning, and the distributional method.

Mason Victors earned his MS in Mathematics from BYU, where he focused on developing new approaches to identifying individuals at-risk for chronic kidney disease. After an internship with the NSA, being unable to decide between becoming a spook or pursuing a PhD he chose the obvious route: join a start-up instead. As part of a small team of data scientists at Red Brain Labs and later Savvysherpa, he developed algorithms to mine unstructured medical records, analyze human behavior through cell phone logs, and simulate complex call centers. Apart from work, he loves spending time with his wife and two daughters.

Ravin Jesuthasan is a recognized global thought leader and author on the future of work and human capital. He has led numerous research efforts on the global workforce, the emerging digital economy, the rise of artificial intelligence and the transformation of work. Ravin has lead numerous research projects for the World Economic Forum including its ground breaking study; Shaping the Future Implications of Digital Media for Society and the recently launched Creating a Shared Vision for Talent in the 4th Industrial Revolution. He is a regular participant and presenter at the World Economic Forum’s annual meetings in Davos and Dalian/Tianjin and is a member of the forum’s Steering Committee on Work and Employment.

Ravin has been a featured speaker on the aforementioned topics at conferences in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Latin America. He has also been featured and quoted extensively by leading business media including CNN, BBC, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, CNBC, Fortune, FT, The Nikkei (Japan), Les Echoes (France), Valor Economico (Brazil), Business Times (Malaysia), Globe and Mail (Canada), South China Morning Post, Dubai One TV and The Australian among others.

He has been recognized as one of the top 25 most influential consultants in the world by Consulting Magazine. He is the author of Transformative HR and Lead The Work: Navigating a World Beyond Employment. He is also the lead author of the upcoming book Reinventing Jobs, which will be published by Harvard Business Review Press. Ravin has authored over 50 articles including 7 for HBR and his article in the HR People and Strategy Journal entitled Performance Management as a Business Discipline received the 2014 Walker Award for the most original and valuable contribution to the HR profession.

Geoff Benton joined 23andMe in 2010 and leads a team focused on developing the next generation of data-driven health products for 23andMe customers. This team works to keep 23andMe at the forefront of science and technology, driving the development of interventional studies and predictive models for human health that utilize genetics, lifestyle, and environment. Previously, he was a venture capital intern at Burrill and Company. Geoff earned his PhD in Cell Biology from the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Steve Chien is Technical Group Supervisor of the Artificial Intelligence Group and Senior Research Scientist in the Mission Planning and Execution Section at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology where he leads efforts in automated planning and scheduling for space exploration. Dr. Chien is also Adjunct Faculty with the Department of Computer Science of the University of Southern California and previously was a Visiting Scholar with the Department of Computer Science of the University of California at Los Angeles. He holds a B.S. with Highest Honors in Computer Science, with minors in Mathematics and Economics, M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, all from the University of Illinois.

Dr. Chien was a recipient of the 1995 Lew Allen Award for Excellence, JPLs highest award recognizing outstanding technical achievements by JPL personnel in the early years of their careers. In 1997, he received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal for his work in research and development of planning and scheduling systems for NASA. He is the Team Lead for the ASPEN Planning System , which received Honorable Mention in the 1999 Software of the Year Competition and was a contributor to the Remote Agent System which was a co-winner in the same 1999
competition. In 2000, he received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal for service and leadership in research and deployment of planning and scheduling systems for NASA. He is the Principal Investigator for the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment which is a co-winner of the 2005 NASA Software of the Year Award. In 2007, he received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal for outstanding technical accomplishments in the development of the Autonomous Sciencecraft deployed on the Earth Observing One Mission and the development of the Earth Observing Sensorweb. In 2011 He was awarded the innaugural AIAA Intelligent Systems Award, for his contributions to Spacecraft Autonomy. In 2011, he was the team co-lead for the Sensorweb Toolbox team, which was awarded Honorable mention in the 2011 NASA Software of the Year Competition. In 2015 He was awarded a JPL Magellan Award as well as the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal for his contributions to automated science scheduling for ESAs Rosetta mission.

As Chief Decision Scientist at Google Cloud, Cassie Kozyrkov advises leadership teams on decision process, AI strategy, and building data-driven organizations. She works to democratize statistical thinking and machine learning so that everyone – Google, its customers, the world! – can harness the beauty and power of data. She is the force behind bringing the practice of Decision Intelligence to Google and she has personally trained over 15,000 Googlers in machine learning, statistics, and data-driven decision-making. Before her current role, she served in Googles Office of the CTO as Chief Data Scientist. Prior to joining Google, Cassie worked as a data scientist and consultant. She holds degrees in mathematical statistics, economics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. When she’s not working, you’re most likely to find Cassie at the theater, in an art museum, exploring the world, or curled up with a good novel.

Itamar (一塔) Friedman is the founder and head of Alibaba Israel Machine Vision Lab, leading teams to create innovations for Alibaba’s diverse ecosystems.

Itamar was the CTO of Visualead, a startup developing cutting-edge machine vision O2O technologies acquired by Alibaba.

In the 90s, during high school, Itamar founded his first company, at that time pioneering the Internet scene in Israel by developing web applications to assist businesses having an online presence. Later on Itamar worked as an engineer at Mellaxon and Kaminario, and then was the co-founder and CTO of Dreambots, a startup in the robotic field.

Itamar holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering (Summa Cum Laude) and a MSc in Computer Vision and Machine Learning from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology).

Manuela M. Veloso is the Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research, which pursues fundamental research in areas of core relevance to financial services, including data mining and cryptography, machine learning, explainability, and human-AI interaction. J.P. Morgan AI Research partners with applied data analytics teams across the firm as well as with leading academic institutions globally.

Professor Veloso is on leave from Carnegie Mellon University as the Herbert A. Simon University Professor in the School of Computer Science, and the past Head of the Machine Learning Department. With her students, she had led research in AI, with a focus on robotics and machine learning, having concretely researched and developed a variety of autonomous robots, including teams of soccer robots, and mobile service robots. Her robot soccer teams have been RoboCup world champions several times, and the CoBot mobile robots have autonomously navigated for more than 1,000km in university buildings.

Professor Veloso is the Past President of AAAI, (the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), and the co-founder, Trustee, and Past President of RoboCup. Professor Veloso has been recognized with a multiple honors, including being a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, AAAS, and AAAI. She is the recipient of several best paper awards, the Einstein Chair of the Chinese Academy of Science, the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award, an NSF Career Award, and the Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research. See www.cs.cmu.edu/~mmv/Veloso.html for her scientific publications.

Dr. Joseph Sirosh is the CTO for Microsoft AI. Prior to this role, he has served as a Corporate Vice President of the AI and Data Platform at Microsoft responsible for Databases, Big Data, Machine Learning Cognitive Services, Bot Services and Information Management, and as the Vice President of the Global Inventory Platform at Amazon where he also spent nearly 9 years in various roles including building internal Machine Learning platforms. Prior to Amazon he was the VP of R&D at Fair Isaac Corporation. He holds a PhD in Neural Networks from the University of Texas at Austin and a BTech from Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai.

Francesca Rossi is AI Ethics Global Leader, Distinguished Research Staff Member at IBM Research AI and professor of computer science at the University of Padova, Italy, currently on leave.

Her research interests focus on artificial intelligence, specifically they include constraint reasoning, preferences, multi-agent systems, computational social choice, and collective decision making. She is also interested in ethical issues in the development and behaviour of AI systems, in particular for decision support systems for group decision making. She has published over 170 scientific articles in journals and conference proceedings, and as book chapters. She has co-authored a book. She has edited 17 volumes, between conference proceedings, collections of contributions, special issues of journals, as well as the Handbook of Constraint Programming. She has more than 100 co-authors.

She is a AAAI and a EurAI fellow, and a Radcliffe fellow 2015. She has been president of IJCAI and an executive councillor of AAAI.
She is Editor in Chief of JAIR and a member of the editorial board of Constraints, Artificial Intelligence, AMAI, and KAIS.

She co-chairs the AAAI committee on AI and ethics and she is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Future of Life Institute and of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. She is in the executive committee of the IEEE global initiative on ethical considerations on the development of autonomous and intelligent systems and she belongs to the World Economic Forum Council on AI and robotics.

She is a member of the board of directors of the Partnership on AI, where she represents IBM as one of the founding partners.

Mikhail Parakhin has been leading teams in AI innovation for some of the world’s top tech companies for over a decade. After several years at Microsoft leading the Bing Multimedia team, Mikhail brought his machine learning expertise to Yandex, one of Europe’s largest tech companies that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning. As CTO of Yandex, Mikhail leads all technical teams globally for the company.

Under his leadership, Yandex introduced the Machine Intelligence and Research (MIR) Division, which functions as a centralized, cross-functional unit to accelerate innovation and unify Yandex’s core machine learning technologies: MatrixNet (proprietary ML platform) and its development, CatBoost (best in class GBDT implementation), DaNet (DNN framework), computer vision, speech, and translation. Yandex has also recently launched it’s intelligent assistant, Alice, and tested its driverless vehicle on the snowy roads of Moscow among other innovation milestones set to shape the future.

Mikhail brings his unique background in machine learning and coding plus specializations in Search, Image processing and Handwriting/Speech recognition algorithms to not only advance Yandex’s technologies and products but the global tech ecosystem. Mikhail holds a Master’s in Physics from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute.

Jay Bellissimo is the Global Managing Partner of IBM Services Cognitive Process Transformation Growth Platform, leading the service lines of Cognitive Process Re-engineering, Cognitive Process Services, and Cognitive Business Decision Support. The Practices he oversees include Watson AI & Data Platform, Advance Analytics, Blockchain, Watson Internet of Things, Watson Health, Talent & Engagement, Process Automation, among others. His primary mission is to fuel growth by deploying competitive market offerings and building a diverse and differentiated talent pool and to continue to amaze and delight our customers.

Dr. Danny Lange is Vice President of AI and Machine Learning at Unity Technologies where he leads multiple initiatives around applied artificial intelligence. Previously, Danny was Head of Machine Learning at Uber, where he led the efforts to build a highly scalable machine learning platform to support all parts of Uber’s business.

Before joining Uber, Danny was General Manager of Amazon Machine Learning providing internal teams with access to machine intelligence. He also launched an AWS product that offers machine learning as a cloud service to the public. Prior to Amazon, he was Principal Development Manager at Microsoft where he led a product team focused on large-scale machine learning for big data. Danny spent eight years on speech recognition systems, first as CTO of General Magic, Inc., and then as founder of his own company, Vocomo Software. During this time he was working on General Motor’s OnStar Virtual Advisor, one of the largest deployments of an intelligent personal assistant until Siri. Danny started his career as a Computer Scientist at IBM Research.

He holds MS and PhD degrees in computer science from the Technical University of Denmark. He is a member of ACM and IEEE Computer Society and has numerous patents to his credit.