Topic: Machine Learning

Aishwarya Srinivasan

Aishwarya worked as a Data Scientist in the Google Cloud AI Services team to build machine learning solutions for customer use cases, leveraging core Google products including TensorFlow, DataFlow, and AI Platform. Prior to this, Aishwarya was working as an AI & ML Innovation Leader at IBM Data & AI, where she was working cross-functionally with the product team, data science team and sales to research AI use-cases for clients by conducting discovery workshops and building assets to showcase the business value of the technology.

She is the founder of Illuminate AI, first of its kind non-profit organization for providing resources and mentorship for people who want to build their career in the field of AI. She is an advocate for open-source technologies, presently an open source Developer Advocate for Deepchecks; previously a developer advocate for PyTorch Lightning and a contributor to Scikit Learn.

Aishwarya has been awarded Trailblazer of the Year by Women in AI in 2022 and Women of Influence by Business Journal in 2022. She holds a post-graduate in Data Science from Columbia University.

She has worked with clients all across the globe and has traveled internationally to London, Dubai, Istanbul, and India to lead and work with them. She is very focused on expanding her horizons in the machine learning research community including her recent Patent Award won in 2018 for developing a Reinforcement Learning model for Machine Trading.

She is an ambassador for the Women in Data Science community, originating from Stanford University. She has been spotlighted as a LinkedIn Top Voice 2020 for Data Science and AI, which features Top 10 Machine Learning influencers across the world.

She is an ardent reader and has contributed to the scholastic community.

Besides being a data junkie, she is a fitness fanatic who is into martial arts (Krav Maga) and yoga.

Toby Lewis

Toby Lewis is a Cyber Security Expert with a career that began within the British Intelligence Services. He was a founding member of the National Cyber Security Centre and now leads an international team of Cyber Security Analysts for British AI & Cyber Security firm, Darktrace. His career has been punctuated by major Cyber Security events, initially working on the threat from Nation State espionage until WannaCry transformed the Cyber Crime landscape into one dominated by Ransomware.

Toby has delivered keynote speeches at flagship conferences on Cyber Security, sharing his experiences working at the sharp end, combating major Cyber Security incidents and providing insights into the cyber threat landscape. He has provided expert commentary for mainstream broadcast news and print media, on topics ranging from the benefits and risks associated with Artificial Intelligence, to joining BBC Radio 5 Live on the morning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine to discuss the potential use of Cyber Weapons by the two countries.

Since joining Darktrace at the start of 2021, Toby has been at the forefront of the real-world application of AI and Machine Learning within Cybersecurity, drawing on his Artificial Intelligence expertise and a deep understanding of the value in the right type of AI for the right application and the human factors around building confidence within organisations as they begin their journey with AI. With the AI explosion associated with ChatGPT, this also means engaging in a much more informed debate, balancing out the hype and catastrophisers with a pragmatic view of this new technology.

War stories gathered over nearly 20 years in Cyber Security allow Toby to provide an accessible introduction to the intersections of technology, geopolitics and cybersecurity, as well as deeper expertise on topics such as the application of Artificial Intelligence in cyber security, and what really happens when hackers get access to your network.

Rayid Ghani

Did you vote in 2012? If so, Rayid Ghani may have lent a hand. He was the chief scientist at Obama for America in 2012 and played a groundbreaking role in the campaign. Focusing on analytics, technology, and data, he used online tools like email and social networking to motivate people’s offline actions, from fundraising and volunteering to voting.

Ghani is one of a small number of tech wizards in an increasingly data-driven world. If the 2008 campaign was about charisma and hope, the 2012 campaign was about science and data. Gone is the art of the political campaign. Successful campaigns are no longer run by people who play by gut instinct but instead by people like Ghani. With work that focuses on developing and using machine learning and data mining algorithms to solve challenges in business, government, and politics, he helps organizations make the most out of their institutional knowledge. In today’s data-centric, competitive world, businesses need to utilize increasingly targeted approaches to attract consumers. One of the leading experts in this field, Rayid Ghani addresses how data, analytics, and communications advances can be used to influence and change consumer behavior. He tells stories from his time in the Obama camp and shares successes about using the latest tools and applying big data to organizations.

At Obama for America, Ghani aimed to convert the vast amount of data collected through large commercial databases, boutique lists, voter files, social media sites, and an unprecedented quantity of voter interviews into a source of valuable data. With the use of sophisticated analytics, algorithms, and machine learning, the insights from the data were used to galvanize the campaign and predict voters’ views on particular issues like abortion and the economy. Armed with this information, the campaign was more focused in its message, and the result was vastly increased efficiency in fund-raising and volunteer and voter mobilization.

Before Obama for America, Ghani worked at Accenture Technology Labs for 10 years as a research scientist and the director of analytics research. His work closed the gap between academia and business and spanned a variety of industries, including healthcare, retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG), manufacturing, intelligence, and financial services. Ghani mined mountains of private corporate data to find statistical patterns that could forecast consumer behavior. He then helped organizations find and use patterns in consumer behavior to develop targeted strategies for individual preferences. For example, he deployed algorithms that replaced health insurers’ random audits, to anticipate which of 50,000 daily claims were most likely to require individual attention.

Ghani’s work has been published in more than 50 academic publications with more than 2,000 citations. He has received myriad media mentions on TV and in publications like TIME, The New York Times, Slate, Businessweek, Financial Times, Chicago Tribune, and U.S. News & World Report. He has also been featured in books, such as The Numerati and SuperCrunchers. Ghani’s interests span a whole gamut from general machine learning and data mining to privacy preserving data mining, text mining, semi-supervised learning, active learning, information retrieval, NLP, and knowledge management. He has filed for 15 patents and seven have been awarded so far.

Risto Siilasmaa

Risto Siilasmaa is the former Chairman of the Board of Directors of Nokia Corporation.  He joined the Nokia Board in 2008 and became Chairman of the Board in May 2012. As Chairman he led Nokia through its transformation from an ailing devices company to a successful network infrastructure player through the divestiture of the Nokia device business to Microsoft and the acquisition of Nokia Siemens Networks and the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent.

Mr Siilasmaa is the founder of F-Secure Corporation, a Finnish cybersecurity company and served as the President and CEO of the company between 1988-2006. Since then he has held the position of Chairman of the Board of Directors. Mr Siilasmaa is a member of the Board of Directors of Futurice Corporation,  the Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Confederation of Finnish Industries, Chairman of the Technology Industries of Finland and a member of the European Round Table ERT. He is also a member of Tsinghua SEM Advisory Board, International Business Leaders Advisory Council for the Mayor of Beijing and High-level Advisory Council of the World Internet Conference (Wuzhen Summit). In addition Mr Siilasmaa is the Finnish Chairman of the recently established China-Finland Committee for Innovative Business Cooperation.

 Mr. Siilasmaa has received several awards including Nordic Chairman of the year 2009, the Most Influential IT Leader 2007, The Leader of the Decade 2003 and Innovation Luminary Award 2015 granted by EU Open Innovation Strategy and Policy Group.

Mr. Siilasmaa holds a Master of Science degree from the Helsinki University of Technology and he was awarded Honorary Doctorate in Technology by Aalto University schools of technology in 2018.

Pieter Abbeel

AI speaker Pieter Abbeel is an AI & Robotics Professor, as well as the Robot Learning Lab’s Director at UC Berkeley. In 2014, Pieter co-founded Gradescope.com, while in 2017, he co-founded Covariant.ai. He is also an Advisor for many companies in the Robotics and AI field, including OpenAI. Moreover, Pieter created the Venture Fund AI@TheHouse and often gives lectures on artificial intelligence.

Pieter started the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab following his appointment at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor. Furthermore, in 2014, he helped develop Gradescope, which was sold to TurnItIn in 2018. Pieter created Gradescope with Sergey Karayev, Arjun Singh, Ibrahim Awwal, and several other UC Berkeley engineers.

Speaker Pieter Abbeel began working for OpenAI in 2016. Since then, he has written plenty of articles on robot learning, reinforcement learning, and unsupervised learning. 2016 saw him also take on the role of co-director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab. The BAIR involves undergraduate and postdoctoral students that are passionate about robotics and machine learning.

His other venture is Berkeley Open Arms, which has licensed the intellectual property (IP) from Berkeley related to the Blue Robot project. In 2017, he was appointed as a tenured, full-time professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Pieter Abbeel, Rocky Duan, Peter Chen, and Tianhao Zhang launched AI-based company covariant.ai in 2017. The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Wired, and IEEE Spectrum all wrote articles regarding the company’s launch.

Covariant.ai leverages recent developments in deep reinforcement learning and deep imitation learning to produce artificial intelligence software that simplifies the process of teaching robots new, advanced skills. Abbeel is actively performing researches as well as teaching upper-division and graduate courses in robotics, artificial intelligence, and deep unsupervised learning.

He has won numerous awards, including best paper awards at ICML, NIPS and ICRA, early career awards from NSF, Darpa, ONR, AFOSR, Sloan, TR35, IEEE, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Pieter's work is frequently featured in the popular press, including New York Times, BBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Wired, Forbes, Tech Review, NPR.

Current main research thrusts: robotics and machine learning with particular focus on deep reinforcement learning, deep imitation learning, deep unsupervised learning, meta-learning, learning-to-learn, and AI safety.

On OpenAI: OpenAI was co-founded by Pieter Abbeel's PhD student John Schulman (who is also the lead architecture behind ChatGPT) in December 2015. Abbeel himself was recruited to OpenAI in early 2016, where he helped lead many of the OpenAI research projects, including projects on reinforcement learning, generative AI, meta-learning, robot learning. In Fall 2017 Abbeel left his full-time role at OpenAI to found Covariant, which is leading the way in AI powered robotic automation, and transitioned into an Advisory position at OpenAI.

Marco Gercke

Prof. Dr. Marco Gercke is an entrepreneur, scientist and consultant. His first focus area is Cybersecurity. With more than 100 speeches in over 100 countries and over 100 scientific publications, Prof. Gercke is one of the world's leading experts in the field of cybersecurity and cybercrime. He is the founder and director of the Cybercrime Research Institute, an independent research institute and think tank based in Cologne. He advises governments, organizations and large enterprises around the world on strategic, political and legal issues in the field of cybersecurity. The main focus of his work is the development of innovative approaches to tackling a problem that has developed into one of the most challenging issues for governments and businesses in recent years – Cybercrime.  Over the past 15 years, he has worked in over 100 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Pacific and Latin America.

As a respected and experienced speaker, Prof. Gercke offers excellent and useful insider knowledge on the subject of cybersecurity due to his many years of activity and internal view. His lectures are clearly structured, very informative and include practical examples. As an eloquent and experienced speaker Marco usually gives free speeches without slides – an approach that allows him to adjust the response from the audience at all time.

In addition to speeches, Prof. Gercke is conducting "Cyber ​​Incident Simulations" with governments and board members of large enterprises. These are not technical simulations, but a “war gaming” / “serious gaming” approach, which allows the participants to check their capabilities in dealing with sophisticated attacks. The basis can be a real or a fictitious company (with different branches of industry available). Depending on the decision of the participants the plot of the simulation develops dynamically. It is also highly interactive and allows an interaction with the audience.

In the last years Prof. Gercke has carried out such simulations worldwide with numerous governments and board members of large enterprises. The simulation was also run for World Bank, the European Central Bank and the United Nations, and has been part of the Munich Security Conference program for the last three years. Global Speakers Bureau clients can book such simulation giving the audience an exclusive insight into how ministers and directors of large companies are preparing for cyber attacks.

The second focus of his lecture and advising activities are the digitization and its effects - especially with regard to "Machine Learning" and Artificial Intelligence. In the 90th he founded a company that utilized "Machine Learning" to develop software solutions for medical diagnostics. He was responsible for the development of the underlying technology. The next company he founded, a media agency, used "machine learning" and artificial intelligence for user interaction. Today, he focuses on advising international organizations and executive boards of major companies on issues related to the opportunities and risks of digitalization and the use of artificial intelligence. As an entrepreneur, scientist and consultant, his speeches are visionary and provide an insight into the significant development in this area.

Marco believes in customization of speeches. He does not give the same speech twice and is always open to discussing with organizers of events how to best tailor the speech to the event and audience.