Speakers
Matt Groh
MIT Media Lab
Matt is a computational social scientist and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab in the Affective Computing group. His research examines human-AI collaborative decision-making with a focus on three real-world problems: misinformation, algorithmic bias, and hidden influences of affect on decision-making.
Matthew Nock, PhD
Chairman, Department of Psychology
Harvard University
Professor Nock received his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University (2003) and completed his clinical internship at Bellevue Hospital and the New York University Child Study Center (2003). Nock’s research is aimed at advancing the understanding of why people behave in ways that are harmful to themselves, with an emphasis on suicide and other forms of self-harm.
Barbara Van Dahlen, PHD
Founder, WeBelife
Former Executive Director, PREVENTS Presidential Task Force
Dr. Barbara Van Dahlen is the Co-Chair, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of WeBelife, Inc. A licensed clinical psychologist, she received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Maryland in 1991.
Dr. Van Dahlen is an expert on the psychological impact of war and a thought leader in mobilizing constituencies to create large system change in the mental health sector. She is widely recognized for her work in changing the culture associated with mental health in order to remove barriers and increase access to care.
Vikram J. Singh
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia
Vikram J. Singh is Senior Vice President at West Exec Advisors. Vikram has led innovation in public policy and global affairs at the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of State, major non-profits and the private sector for 20 years. He served five Secretaries of Defense. Vikram uses his deep understanding of trends in defense, aerospace, technology and geopolitics, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, to help leaders from Fortune 50 board rooms to early-stage startups make the best possible decisions in a fast-changing world.
Vikram has been awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Civilian Service and twice awarded the Department of State Superior Honor Award. Vikram lives with his family on a small farm in Middleburg, Virginia, where they raise chickens and bees, board horses, and test new sensors and unmanned systems from time to time.
Kyle Staller, MD, MPH
Massachusetts General Hospital
Kyle Staller, MD, MPH is a gastroenterologist and the director of the Gastrointestinal Motility Laboratory at Mass General. He is also an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a member of the Clinical and Translational Epidemiology Unit. Dr. Staller specializes in disorders of gastrointestinal motility and disorders of brain-gut interaction.
Alice Cheng, PhD
NC State University
Yang “Alice” Cheng (Ph.D., MBA) is a tenured associate professor in the department of communication and an adjunct professor in the Poole College of Management at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC.
She has demonstrated a long-term commitment to research involving global public relations management, social media and artificial intelligence, and crisis communication.
Funded research includes:
“The Impact of AI-Powered Chatbots to Combat COVID-19 Misinformation: An Exploratory Study,” Faculty Research and Professional Development (FRPD), North Carolina State University, 2022-2023.
“Visualizing and Evaluating Digital Mental Health Campaign: An Interactive 3D Video of Suicide Prevention for Low-income College Student”, Public Science Faculty Support, North Carolina State University, 2020.
“AI Chatbot services and mental health communication”, Open incubator research award, North Carolina State University, 2020.
“Third-Person Effects of Corporate Fake News Spread on Social Media: A Path Model for Predicting Restrictive Versus Corrective Actions”, Junior Faculty Development Award Program, North Carolina State University. 2018-2019
Nigel Toon
Graphcore
Nigel Toon is co-founder, Chairman and CEO at Graphcore.
Graphcore is a silicon and systems company based in Bristol- UK, that has developed a new type of processor, the Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), to accelerate machine learning and AI applications. At the company’s most recent funding round in December 2020, Graphcore was valued at $2.8Bn.
Nigel has a background as a technology business leader, entrepreneur and engineer having been CEO at two successful VC-backed processor companies XMOS and Picochip (sold to Nasdaq:MSPD, now Intel), a founder of Icera (sold to Nasdaq: NVDA) and VP/GM at Altera (Nasdaq: ALTR, sold to Intel for $17Bn).
Alex Creswell
Graphcore
Alex is the VP for Government Affairs and Public Policy at Graphcore. He is a professor in AI and Digital Innovation at Manchester University and one of the co-chairs of the Turing Innovation Hub, a newly-established AI accelerator in Manchester. Alex Creswell retired from the British diplomatic service at the end of 2020 having served in a number of National Security roles often including a technology angle. He led a division of GCHQ and was the Director of the 70-strong team of analysts (JIO) which provides the British Prime Minister’s daily intelligence briefing and writes strategic assessment papers for the National Security Council.
Kalev Leetaru, PhD
GDELT Project
One of the leading innovators of the internet era, for more than 20 years Dr. Kalev Hannes Leetaru has been at the forefront of reimagining how we understand our world through some of largest datasets and computing platforms on the planet. His landmark studies have profoundly reshaped the way we use data in the study of human society and even redefined what "big data" is, leading Der Speigel to call him "one of the superstars of the new discipline".
Alice Baird
Hume
Alice is an audio researcher with interdisciplinary expertise in machine learning, computational paralinguistics, stress, and emotional well-being.
She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Augsburg, where she was supervised by Dr. Björn Schuller. Her work on emotion understanding from auditory, physiological, and multimodal data has been published extensively in the leading journals and conferences in her field, including Interspeech, ICASSP, IEEE Intelligent Systems, and the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.
Brian Bergstein
The Boston Globe
Brian Bergstein is editor of the Ideas section and a member of the Globe's editorial board. He previously was executive editor of MIT Technology Review, founding editor of the biotech publication Neo.Life, and a reporter and editor for The Associated Press in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Silicon Valley. He was a Knight Fellow in Science Journalism at MIT in 2004-05.
Alistair Smith
Sky
Alistair is Head of Insight in the Customer Service Strategy and Transformation team at Sky UK and is focused on developing an understanding of why customers contact Sky and how they feel about the experience. He has worked for Sky for 24 years, after 7 years as a statistician at the National Health Service. At Sky, he is involved in ensuring they have the right data and insight to support the transformation from a TV company, to a telcom, to a streamer, to an award-winning content creator, to a brand that puts people at the heart of all it does. Smith re-joined the customer service group in 2019, taking responsibility for speech analytics and data exploitation. Coinciding with Sky moving to a cloud-based data warehouse which provided an opportunity to understand more about customer interactions using speech transcripts.
James Mitchell
Sky
James is Interactions Manger in the Customer Strategy & Transformation Directorate at Sky where he leads a team of analysts and has operational responsibility to better understand reasons for customers contact, the actions taken, and how this impacts Sky and the customer experience.
Inheriting responsbility for Pienso in 2020 he has overseen the transition from trial implementation to a deployment that now runs at scale supported by processes that enable users with no NLP background to undertake topic modelling and journey evaluation to help inform both CX and change initiaitves and support the company ambition of providing the best service in the country.
Alexandra Crook
Program Manager, Department of Defense
Event Host
Karthik Dinakar
Pienso
Karthik Dinakar is a computer scientist specializing in machine learning, natural language processing, and human-computer interaction. He is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Pienso Inc, an interactive deep learning company.
Prior to founding Pienso, Karthik held positions at Microsoft and Deutsche Bank. A Reid Hoffman Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the recipient of the 2015 Dewey Winburne Award, Karthik holds a doctoral degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among other awards and publication, his research garnered two invitations to present at the White House, on the computational detection of cyberbullying and the use of probabilistic graphical Bayesian models for crisis counseling.
Karthik is a passionate advocate for empathetic design; believing that as AI reveals our biases, it unlocks opportunity to intentionally address them, at scale.
Event Host
Birago Jones
Pienso
Birago is a UI/UX expert with a breadth of knowledge spanning hardware, IoT, VR and AR. Birago earned his Masters of Science from MIT where he focused on artificial intelligence, HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and User Experience. He’s leveraged this unique skill-set working with companies like Google, Motorla and Cisco, to name a few. Birago is the founder and president of the MIT Media Lab Alumni Association, a mentor at Google’s 30 Weeks accelerator, and speaks regularly at conferences around the world.