Dorian Cougias

Founder / CEO at Unified Compliance

Dorian Cougias is not your typical compliance expert. As a pioneer researcher, award-winning author, and charismatic speaker, Dorian brings a blend of deep knowledge, innovative thinking, and a dash of humor to the often complex world of compliance. With a career decorated with ground breaking achievements – from designing the world's largest compliance database to authoring over twenty patents – Dorian is a luminary in the field, captivating audiences with insights that are as enlightening as they are engaging.

Giuseppe Futia

Independent AI Expert: KG, LLM, & GNN

Giuseppe Futia (PhD) is a Senior Data Scientist, AI Educator, and Author in the field of Knowledge Graphs, Large Language Models, and Graph Neural Networks. Giuseppe has multidisciplinary experience in industry and academia focused on research, development, and communication. He loves to explore new technologies to incorporate human knowledge into intelligent systems. He is a fellow at the Nexa Center for Internet and Society, Politecnico di Torino, Italy.

Cedric Berger

Head of Knowledge Extraction & Integration at Roche

Cedric holds a PhD in biophysics and a MBA in Technology and Innovation Management. Cedric worked 8 years in biomedical fundamental research and 7 years in drug development both in private and public organisations. Since 2016, Cedric has been involved in the management of data, information and knowledge in healthcare. Currently as the Head of Knowledge Extraction and Integration for pharmaceutical technical operations, Cedric is setting up a platform to prototype generative AI solutions.

Shaista Hussain

Co-Founder & CEO at SAIF Check

Dr. Shaista Hussain is a Clinical Pathologist, Machine Learning Engineer and Medical Researcher. She has a deep passion for developing cutting-edge algorithms and machine learning models, with years of experience in explainable, responsible & ethical AI. Dr. Shaista also has extensive experience in Data Analysis; Blockchain & Cryptocurrency, CRISPR Cas9 Genomics, as well as in application development.  Dr. Hussain is an influential thought leader and accomplished researcher having published numerous scientific papers and has spoken at prestigious conferences worldwide.

Stratos Kontopoulos

Knowledge Graph Engineer at Foodpairing AI

An enthusiastic and committed knowledge scientist, with a broad interdisciplinary research focus. A versatile expert in Semantic Web technologies and Knowledge Representation methodologies, and in their practical application in diverse domains. Published research papers in international journals and conference proceedings. Experienced in project and team management and strategic planning, as well as research project proposal preparation. An agile development enthusiast and an ardent collaborator.

Rupert Steffner

Founder & CEO at Wunder

Rupert Steffner is the founder of WUNDER, a marketing AI startup that is helping brands boost marketing performance with a new AI trained to understand emotions. Rupert has over 25 years of experience in designing and implementing highly sophisticated technical and business solutions, with a focus on customer-centric marketing. Previously, Rupert was chief platform architect of Otto Group’s new business intelligence platform BRAIN and head of BI at Groupon EMEA and APAC. He also served as business intelligence leader for several European and US companies in the ecommerce, retail, finance, and telco industries. He holds an MBA from WU Vienna and was head of the Marketing Department at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg.

Beatrice Gamba

Head of Innovation at WordLift

Beatrice Gamba is Head of Innovation at WordLift. Born and raised in Rome, Beatrice joined WordLift's team in Rome in 2016. With over 10 years of experience in tech & digital companies, Beatrice oversees a team of more than 10 SEO experts, data analysts and digital marketers that look after a portfolio of world-class companies from the most diverse industries and sizes. Her role as Head of Digital Innovation is not just about helping clients embrace new technologies but also about fostering a culture of innovation. Beatrice's approach is deeply rooted in data science, leveraging insights to drive decisions and strategies that propel WordLift and its clients, including Fortune 500 companies, towards achieving their digital goals. Beatrice is most fascinated by knowledge graphs and their potential for SEO. Her daily job is in fact to generate value with innovative, AI-driven digital strategies, making sure to accomplish the best results with detail-oriented management and the most effective resources.

Nicolas Averseng

Founder & CEO at YOOI

Nicolas is the founder and CEO of YOOI, the value-driven Data & AI portfolio: manage all your Data & AI use cases and products from one central cockpit, to demonstrate value, govern risks and optimize costs end-to-end. With YOOI, organizations they animate and accelerate their transformation and engage business teams to demonstrate the value of their D&A investments, while keeping costs under control, and managing the ethical and responsible compliance along the full lifecycle. With 20+ years of experience in enterprise software, data & analytics, Nicolas has built & brought to market several innovative software & data platforms across several industries. With always the same focus in mind: making sure the technology serves a business purpose and brings value.

Rebecca Grier

Sr. Product Researcher at Lokalise

Rebecca's been diving into UX research for two decades, touching base with various business sectors along the way. She's played a role in shaping some pretty neat technology, including streaming video, augmented reality, machine learning, and self-driving cars.  Her impressive career highlights include contributing to the first re-write in 10 years of the U.S. Department of Defense's UX design standard, establishing user testing best practices for the U.S. DoD's Director of Operational Test & Evaluation, elected to the Human Factors Ergonomics Society (HFES) Executive Council, and chairing an SAE task force that authored an information report on design considerations for people with disabilities and autonomous vehicles.

Anandhi Vivek Dhukaram

Chief Responsible AI & Data Officer at Esdha

Transformation leader skilled in human-centred AI, strategic planning, and empowering organisations through complex socio-technical challenges for Responsible AI adoption, cognitive systems engineering, and AI & Data governance for accelerating AI adoption and sustainable enterprise transformation.  With over 20 years' of experience, I’ve enhanced millions of customer experiences, led large mission-critical products, and optimised efficiency with high business value data insights, AI and ML solutions across various sectors. Proficient in team building, talent cultivation, and inspiring stakeholders by aligning them to a shared vision.  Leveraging my strong academic, business, and technical acumen, along with multidisciplinary problem-solving skills and an entrepreneurial spirit, I enable businesses to seize opportunities, maximise ROI, and strengthen trust.

Joseph Mercieca

Researcher, Designer & Accessibility Consultant at Anotherconcept

A pragmatic tech-savvy research and design specialist with solid acumen in business, culture and diversity. Guided multi-national companies and scale-ups leveraging UX, CX, cultural aspects, and compliance to deliver unparalleled service via cutting-edge B2B & B2C solutions encompassing web, apps, software, data-rich enterprise SaaS, and novel utilities powered by machine learning (ML).  → Core areas of interest include: Technical UX, IA, Cognition, A11Y, IoT & Artificial Intelligence specifically Chatbots, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and Generative AI alongside Ethics and Legal Compliance. In the past 10 years, I partnered with numerous stakeholders including machine learning (ML) engineers, data scientists, and product/service designers in multi-national fast-paced Agile / DevOps setups to tackle complex challenges. Subsequently, I worked with talented CRO experts on projects requiring critical-thinking skills to deliver personalized online experiences for B2B-B2C market players yielding a 9-35% conversion increase (i.e. lead generation, purchases).  Moreover, due to extenuating circumstances, I made tough decisions leading to relocation. These moves fortified my expertise after assimilating cultural norms and compliances, and how these implicate the design and delivery of products and services. Nowadays, I apply these learnings in HCI, research, design, and development.  Looking back, I feel lucky that I got engaged in domains like - cybersecurity, retail e-commerce, hospitality, ed-tech, music tech, fintech, health, digital marketing, and product development. These diverse experiences solidified my aptitude for envisioning realistic use case scenarios leading to early troubleshooting and pain point rectification resulting from complex architecture, multi-faceted flows, and demanding user interaction thus consolidating the product and service value proposition.  Lastly, my interests involve the exploration of diverse cultural perceptions towards design, the geopolitical influence on the digital ecosystem, and ethical concerns surrounding artificial intelligence (AI). In my spare time, I travel, read articles, volunteer, and perform music.

Ruchika Israni

AI Leader at Deloitte

As a distinguished leader within the Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence (AI CoE) at Deloitte Canada, I specialize in spearheading and implementing groundbreaking AI solutions that significantly benefit our clients. My expertise in trustworthy AI, data science, and product management is underpinned by a robust portfolio of certifications and accolades, attesting to my profound skills and accomplishments in the field. I am the recipient of a Master of Science degree in Information Management from Syracuse University and bring over a decade of experience—13 years to be precise—in both the United States and Canada. My professional journey has seen me collaborate with leading entities in the software and consulting domains, including CA Technologies and Deloitte, where I have led a myriad of complex projects, products, and teams. My efforts have consistently resulted in elevated customer satisfaction and loyalty, culminating in the prestigious honor of a custom TREK bicycle in recognition of my embodiment of CA's DNA and exceptional performance. My core mission is to harness my extensive knowledge and experience towards the creation of AI solutions that are not only innovative but also ethically sound, transparent, and dependable, thereby mirroring the values and aims of our clientele and stakeholders. Beyond my technical and leadership roles, I am a fervent advocate for enhancing diversity within the tech landscape. I actively contribute to and support the Women Defining AI (WDAI) and Women in AI (WAI) communities, reflecting my commitment to fostering an inclusive and equitable environment in the technology sector.

Micaela Dixon

Founder/ Researcher at UX Design for AI

As a People-Centred AI Designer and Researcher, Micaela Dixon bridges the gap between UX and AI by leading a collaborative community called UX Design For AI. Leveraging her diverse experience, Micaela works with companies to improve their approach to AI products and services at every stage of a project. Her focus is on ensuring that users remain the central concern throughout all phases of AI development.

Ashleigh Faith

Founder & Youtuber at IsA DataThing

Having worked for over 15 years in the semantics and ML/AI field, and host to the educational YouTube channel IsA DataThing.

Margaret Warren

Founder at Metadata Authoring Systems

Margaret Warren started her career by serving in the United States Coast Guard as a Cryptographic Electronics Technician. After leaving the Coast Guard, she held successive positions at several companies working in multimedia, technology, software programming, and network system administration. In 1993, she formed her own company to provide networking, hardware, and software services across the Gulf Coast, and successfully managed it for over 15 years. She studied computer science at Florida State University and later earned a BS in Information Technology from the University of West Florida.  Warren has always been deeply interested in how people describe what they experience visually and how to capture and formalize this knowledge into machine readable structures. As an artist and researcher, she works at the intersection of embedded metadata, knowledge graphs, and data-centric AI from a distinctly human-centered perspective. She currently serves as CEO and CTO of Metadata Authoring Systems LLC, a technology consultancy that helps businesses and organizations increase the value and impact of their digital imagery and she is also a research associate with the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC).  She is the creator of ImageSnippets™, a metadata management and information publishing system. Originally created to support Warren’s image annotation research, it has grown into a fully operational web application that empowers users to annotate and publish images on the web with industry standard structured linked data. The platform also functions as an ontology engineering system with visual prompts for subject matter experts. Its pioneering approach uses a human-in-the-loop interface with AI-augmented image labeling to construct knowledge graphs and can be highly useful for training AI models in scene graph prediction. The system has been the subject of invited talks at Google, the Internet Archive, DBpedia Organization, CEPIC, International Press and Telecommunications Council (IPTC) Photo-Metadata conferences, Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) and IHMC.  She also serves as a Technical Advisor for the Foto App, a social media app for photographers and image makers, where she provides technical strategies and subject matter expertise to their team particularly in the area of metadata management. Warren is member of the IPTC photo-metadata working group, which is responsible for developing standards for image metadata in digital media resources. She is also a member of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and a newly formed charter for that organization called: ""Collections as Data"". She holds a patent in Computable Semantic Annotations, and contributed a chapter to The Personal Knowledge Graph book.

Heidi Araya

CEO & Chief Consultant at BrightLogic

As a global consultant, keynote speaker, patented inventor, and author with over two decades of experience, Heidi has dedicated her career to driving multimillion-dollar business improvements using a people-first approach. Her expertise lies in enhancing organizational effectiveness and fostering innovation, underpinned by a deep understanding of industry dynamics, decision culture, and organizational psychology. With a keen interest in AI's transformative potential, Heidi completed an applied data science program at MIT, built a product for AI chatbots, and tries to keep up with generative AI tools.  Heidi’s insights will help professionals navigate and thrive in an era characterized by exponential technological change and increasing uncertainty. When Heidi's not transforming businesses, she's raising butterflies, tackling home improvement projects, and staying active.

Pallavi Karanth

Research Software Engineer at TIB - Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology

To ideate, innovate and create solutions to problems in Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Graphs leading to positive impact in the real world. With rich experience in creating knowledge graph solutions for enterprise data, am passionate on analyzing enterprise data for actionable insights. Looking to leverage my knowledge and produce outstanding outcome for company, team and self. Have worked on various semantic web technologies such as RDF, OWL, Linked data, Knowledge Graphs along with analysing semantics rich data to help in better analytics, retrieval, visualisation. Eager to apply graph analytical and semantic technologies to create innovative solutions which can put any enterprise at competitive edge.

Ashley Gross

Founder at The Prompt Community

With a decade of marketing experience, Ashley has discovered the transformative impact of generative AI. After successfully implementing AI applications within an enterprise company and building a GPT for the sales team, Ashley founded a subscription-based community offering tools, founder insights, workshops, and events.

Yasmine Clarke

Founder / CEO at The Bee2Bee Network

Founder of Agile Apprenticeships.com & Agile Apprentice University

Rupa Chaturvedi

Founder at Design Leaders Edge

Rupa Chaturvedi is a seasoned product design professional with over 15 years of experience in the tech industry, having worked at companies such as Amazon (Alexa AI), Google and Uber. Her fingerprints are all over AR/AI/ML/Computer Vision consumer technologies we use today, including AR and Conversational AI enabled consumer experiences at Amazon and Uber.  She holds a MS Degree in Product Design from Stanford University and a PG Diploma in Creative Leadership from THNK, Amsterdam.  Recognized as a thought leader in human-centered design, her passion lies in helping startups and product teams achieve Product-User Fit by adopting a user-centered and responsible approach to AI product development. She has published over 16 patents in this space, teaches several professional courses on UX Design for AI Applications and consults with startups and product teams on AI and Design Leadership.  She is an active food tech enthusiast/investor and also runs MSRC, a non profit building California’s first sustainable race club.

Brian Garr

Chief Product Officer at Puretalk AI

I have been in the conversational AI space since 1999 starting at IBM and a series of AI startups with multiple successful exits. I have a "Heroes in Technology" award from the Smithsonian Institute, and I have spoken about AI on six continents.

Ayse Arslan

Researcher at Berkeley AI Initiative (SPAR)

Ayse participated in various projects in partnership with international organizations such as UN, NATO and the EU. While serving as an adjunct faculty member in her home country Turkiye she attended various international conferences as a speaker and published over 80 articles in both peer-reviewed journals and academic books. She is also the author of 3 books in the field of Tech Policy. She completed her masters and doctorate degrees at both University of Oxford (UK) and University of Cambridge (UK). Currently, she lives with her family in Silicon Valley. Ayse is a researcher at Berkeley AI Initiative and is also a working group member for generative AI by National Institute of Standards and Tech (NIST).

Michelle Currie

Founder at Savant Solutions 4 HIT

Michelle Currie, a widely respected healthcare authority with an impressive track record spanning over two decades in the realm of healthcare informatics, serves as the visionary Founder and CEO of SavantSolutions4HIT (SOS4HIT). Throughout her illustrious career, she has consistently demonstrated her exceptional ability to pioneer transformative initiatives and seamlessly integrate cutting-edge technology to propel the industry forward. Her adept utilization of clinical data and sophisticated analytics has been pivotal in effecting revolutionary changes within the healthcare sector. Under Michelle's astute and forward-thinking leadership, SOS4HIT has become a premier consultancy renowned for its technical prowess and expertise in applied informatics within the healthcare landscape. Her unwavering focus on strategic planning and her unique ability to effectively translate between diverse business, clinical, and technology stakeholders have earned the unwavering trust of many esteemed healthcare entities. Notably, her work with the Center for Disease Control, the National Quality Forum, and Yale CORE has been instrumental in initiating the transition and successful application of the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, now acknowledged as the gold standard for data modeling and information exchange in the United States healthcare domain. Drawing upon her meticulously cultivated experience, Michelle is currently directing her efforts toward comprehensively understanding the integration and application of clinical data in digital Clinical Decision Support, digital Clinical Practice Guidelines, and the seamless incorporation of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence within the healthcare sphere. This strategic pivot underscores her unwavering commitment to remain at the forefront of technological advancements, ensuring that SOS4HIT remains at the vanguard of spearheading innovation within the healthcare industry.

Savneet Singh

Independent Tech Ethicists

I am a Tech Ethicist by passion, advocating for the future of responsible emerging technologies that are ethical, unbiased, transparent, explainable, and trustworthy. I recently earned a certification from the London School of Economics in Ethics of AI, furthering my commitment to this field. Over the past year, I have been exploring, learning and writing on AI ethics, sharing insights and fostering discussions on how we can create a more equitable technological future.

Thalia Barry

Advisory UX Researcher, AI at IBM

As a creative misfit, I'm an artist, designer and researcher. In the AI tech industry, I specialize as an Advisory UX Researcher that is co-creating Trustworthy AI experiences that help run our global economy.

Yan Vishnepolsky

Podcast Host at the Human-Centered AI Podcast

13 years as a UX pro. Launched a UX agency abroad. 5 years as a contractor at large brands.

Elina Halonen

Founder & Behavioural Insights Strategist at Square Peg Insights

With 15 years in behavioral science, I've partnered with global clients to solve complex challenges through innovative solutions. My background in psychology and linguistics enriches my unique approach to AI and human interaction, allowing me to harness the full potential of LLM chatbots. As an amateur dog trainer, I draw practical parallels between human and animal behavior, which clarify my work and enhance my intuitive interactions with AI. This diverse expertise drives my passion for creating more intuitive and human-centric AI systems.