RAAIS 2018 speakers
London, 29th of June 2018
Blake Richards - Principal Investigator at the University of Toronto
Blake is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Biological Sciences with a cross-appointment to the Department of Cell and Systems Biology. He’s also a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in the Learning in Machines and Brains Program, and a Lab Scientist with the Creative Destruction Lab.
Previously, Blake worked as a programmer and research analyst in magnetic resonance imaging at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. He earned his PhD from the University of Oxford in Pharmacology where he explored synaptic plasticity in early life.
Friederike Schüür - Research Engineer at Cloudera Fast Forward Labs
Friederike is a Research Engineer at Fast Forward Labs (FFL). Diving into emerging machine learning capabilities, FFL builds fully functioning prototypes exploring state-of-the-art technology as well as advising companies how to get ready for the future of machine learning and AI.
Prior to Fast Forward Labs, Friederike worked at small to medium startups on the US East Coast, earned a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from University College London, and during a postdoc at New York University researched how we make gambling decisions to maximize financial gain.
Shakir Mohamed - Research Scientist at DeepMind
Shakir is a Research Scientist at DeepMind working on statistical machine learning and artificial intelligence. Much of his current focus is on the interface between probabilistic reasoning, deep learning and reinforcement learning, and how the computational solutions that emerge in this space can be used for systems and agent-based decision-making.
Prior to joining DeepMind, he held a Junior Research Fellowship from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) as part of the programme on Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception. He holds a PhD in Statistics Machine Learning from the University of Cambridge.
François Chollet - Software Engineer at Google Brain
François Chollet is a software engineer at Google in Mountain View, CA. He is the creator of the Keras deep-learning library, which has over 200k users, as well as a contributor to the TensorFlow machine-learning framework.
François is author of the book “Deep learning with Python” (Manning Publications). He does deep-learning research with a focus on computer vision and the application of machine learning to formal reasoning.
Justin Gilmer - Research Scientist at Google Brain
Justin Gilmer was a member of the first Google Brain Residency Program and is now a Research Scientist at Google Brain.
He is interested in building data efficient neural networks for problems in chemistry and biology, studying theoretical properties of deep learning, and machine learning security.
Recently he has been working with Ian Goodfellow on adversarial examples.
In 2015 he received his PhD in Theoretical Mathematics from Rutgers University with a focus in Combinatorics.
Kenn Cukier - Snr. Editor at The Economist
Kenneth is a Senior Editor at The Economist, and host of its weekly podcast on technology. He is the coauthor of "Big Data," a NYT Bestseller translated in over 20 languages. He is an associate fellow at Said Business School at Oxford, working on a book on artificial intelligence.
Previously Kenn was a foreign correspondent in Europe, Asia and America. In 2002-04 he was a research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Kenn is a board director of International Bridges to Justice and The Open String Foundation. He is a trustee of Chatham House, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Guy Galonska - CTO and Co-Founder of INFARM
As CTO, Guy is responsible for INFARM’s Product R&D, Engineering, Manufacturing and Software development leading various teams of mechanical engineers, software engineers and designers at INFARM.
He is a self-educated farmer, entrepreneur and inventor that led the development of INFARM’S unique patented technology alongside his brother, Erez Galonska.
Guy honed his leadership skills through half a decade in the culinary industry where he explored and matured his interest in holistic ways of eating and producing food.
Chris Ré - Associate Professor at Stanford University
Chris is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University in the InfoLab who is affiliated with the Statistical Machine Learning Group, Pervasive Parallelism Lab, and Stanford AI Lab. His work's goal is to enable users and developers to build applications that more deeply understand and exploit data.
Chris also cofounded a company, based on his research, that was acquired by Apple in 2017. He received a Moore Data Driven Investigator Award in 2014, the VLDB early Career Award in 2015, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2015, and an Okawa Research Grant in 2016.
Ian Hogarth - Angel Investor
Ian is an angel investor focused on applied machine learning as well as large markets relatively unaffected by the internet so far. He has invested in 30 startups, including Chorus.ai, Avidbots, Kheiron Medical, Nested, and Tide Banking.
Previously Ian co-founded Songkick, which is used by 17 million music fans every month to discover concerts. He served as CEO for 8 years, scaling the business to $100m in ticket sales and 120 employees. Songkick was backed by Y Combinator, Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Access Industries. In 2015, Songkick sued TicketMaster for antitrust violations and anti-competitive behaviour under the Sherman Act. The case was settled out of court in January 2018 for $130M. Songkick was acquired by Warner Music Group. Ian holds a Master’s degree in Engineering from the University of Cambridge.
Phil Keslin - CTO and Co-Founder at Niantic
Phil Keslin is the CTO and Founder of Niantic, Inc., creators of Pokémon GO. Started in early 2011 and Incubated within Google, Phil led the engineering team in exploring the convergence of mobile, geo and social within a range of applications leading up to the launch of Ingress and FieldTrip.
Prior to Niantic, Co-Founded Keyhole with John Hanke. As its CTO, Phil led the development of the Earthviewer application that later become Google Earth upon the company's acquisition by Google. Phil was a contributor to StreetView, GMail and Lively products while at Google.
Luc Vincent - VP Autonomous Technology at Lyft
Luc is VP of Autonomous Technology at Lyft. In this role, he bootstrapped and currently leads the "Level 5 Engineering Center", Lyft's ambitious effort to build a Self Driving System. He also oversees Lyft's Open Platform initiative - which enables third party Autonomous Vehicles to operate as part of the Lyft service - as well as Mapping Technology.
Prior to Lyft, Luc spent 12 years at Google, most recently as Sr Director of Engineering. Luc led all imagery-related activities of Google's Geo group and was responsible for launching Street View. He earned his B.S. from Ecole Polytechnique, M.S. in Computer Science from University of Paris XI, and PhD in Mathematical Morphology from Ecole des Mines de Paris.