From Innovation to Scale (I2S)

Discuss and learn how to successfully build, commercialize, and scale AI innovations in challenging market conditions

Previous Workshops: I2S 2023

From Innovation to Scale (I2S)

In recent years, the AI community has witnessed an exciting acceleration in innovation across foundation models, deep learning, and new AI applications across numerous verticals. AI innovations driven by both academic and industry research labs have rapidly been adopted by big tech companies and startups to deliver value-differentiated products and services.

For many machine learning researchers looking to commercialize their work, a frequently wondered question is, “How do I kickstart a startup that can commercialize my research innovations?”. ML practitioners in the KDD community are curious about how big tech and startups scale AI research and innovations to be used by millions of users. With rapid advances in generative AI algorithms, the landscape is evolving around the opportunities and challenges of building robust and scalable generative solutions.

The second edition of this interactive workshop aims to build on this discourse focusing on two aspects: First, bringing together invited AI thought leaders from academia, big tech, and startups to share their perspective on realizing the opportunities of GenAI in various business verticals via use-case themes, challenges, and risks. Second, inviting startup founders (from academia and industry) focused on verticalized GenAI offerings to share their journey in product commercialization and the challenges of the GenAI productization landscape.

Topics of interest in this workshop include but are not limited to:

Commercializing AI research innovations
Scaling AI startups
Acquiring customers in challenging market conditions
Building successful teams
Pitching for initial funding
Developing and executing go-to-market strategies
Best practices for AI innovation

If you have valuable insights and experiences to share in any of these areas, we encourage you to submit a proposal to speak at the I2S workshop. We welcome submissions from AI thought leaders, startup founders, and other professionals with relevant expertise.

Spotlight Speakers

Sofus Macskassy

Founder, Zaimler AI

Speaker Bio:
Sofus Macskassy is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of a startup focused on leveraging AI to simplify getting your data AI ready. Prior to his current role, Sofus was a Director of Engineering and AI at LinkedIn where he innovated on automating taxonomy and knowledge graph creation. He was the VP of Data and AI at two startups and was one of the founders of the Applied ML team at Facebook. He has a PhD in AI and has been an active researcher in AI for over two decades, focusing on graphs, text mining, information extraction and rigorous evaluation of ML models.

Benjamin Cistecky

Managing Partner, Certitude Holdings

Speaker Bio:
Ben is an investor in Resaro, a company established by Temasek, and together with the Resaro team shapes the future of AI safety and assurance. He spent 11 years with Temasek where he spearheaded successful investments in Fintech and played a key role in establishing the AI team in 2019. Ben holds a degree in business from INSEAD.
Ben is a governing committee member of the AI Verify Foundation, which promotes open-source methods and tools to enable responsible adoption of AI. He also serves on the Singapore Computer Society's AI Ethics and Professional certification program committee.

Carla Zaldua Aguirre

CEO, acceXible

Speaker Bio:
Carla is a serial entrepreneur with experience in bringing R+D projects to market. She is currently the CEO of accexible, a startup focused on detecting diseases through speech analysis. She is also part of the founding team of code4jobs, startup focused on digital skills training for unemployed people.
Carla Zaldua graduated (MSc) in Information and Communication Systems at the London School of Economics and in Political Sociology at the University of Deusto. Recently, she has been appointed as one of the most influential women innovative entrepreneurs by the Spanish government.

Arnaud Barthelemy

Partner&COO, Alpha Intelligence Capital

Speaker Bio:
Arnaud Barthelemy has a dual background as a diplomat and as an investor. He started his career in the foreign service and served his country (France) for 15 years, most notably as a representative to the United Nations Security Council and as its top representative in Hong Kong. He has also 9+ years of experience in international financial services, having worked for the Franco- German financial services group ODDO BHF and for France’s strategic investment fund (Fonds Stratégique dInvestissement, now Banque Publique d’Investissement), the main investor in startups in France.
Arnaud has been a partner and COO of Alpha Intelligence Capital since the creation of the fund. As such he runs operations globally and manages investors relations worldwide. He also primes AIC’s dealflow in Europe.

Michael Zeller

Head, AI Strategy & Solutions, Temasek

Speaker Bio:
Dr. Michael Zeller is the Head of Artificial Intelligence & Solutions at Temasek and is responsible for the investment company’s AI venture building and accelerating the deployment of AI technologies to create scalable AI products and solutions.
Dr. Michael Zeller joined Temasek in July 2020 and is a founding team and board member of Aicadium, a global tech company founded by Temasek in 2021 to provide Artificial Intelligence solutions to companies in its ecosystem and beyond. Temasek’s AI Centre of Excellence. Aicadium comprises a team of global, best-in-class AI talent seeking to empower companies to achieve better outcomes through the adoption and delivery of AI technologies and solutions. He also represents Temasek on the Board of Aicadium.
Prior to joining Temasek, Dr. Zeller was the CEO of Dynam.AI, an AI consultancy and solutions firm. He has over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur, executive and advisor of technology-centric organisations.
Dr. Zeller led the Strategy & Innovation function at Software AG, an enterprise platform integration and IOT solutions provider. He was previously CEO and co-founder of Zementis, a leading software solutions provider for predictive analytics, which was acquired by Software AG. Before founding Zementis, Dr. Zeller was CEO at OTW Software, a company providing software engineering processes and design services, and worked in various engineering and IT roles with major aerospace corporations.
From 2013 to 2021, Dr. Zeller served as Secretary/Treasurer on the Executive Committee of ACM SIGKDD, the premier international organization for data science. With a special emphasis on applied machine learning and big data solutions, his mission as SIGKDD Executive Committee Member was to foster a strong partnership between research institutions & industry organisations as the key for the continued success of the global SIGKDD community.

Ankur Teredesai

CEO, CueZen Inc, Prof., Univ of Wash

Speaker Bio:
Ankur Teredesai, is the founder and CEO of CueZen and a tenured professor at the University of Washington. His research of over 2 decades in Healthcare AI has resulted in over 100+ publications advancing fair and equitable use of AI and Machine Learning across the continuum of care with several algorithms deployed today across global health systems from dynamic risk prediction in neo-natal care to his work on using AI to reduce hospitalizations and improving quality of life with transitions to palliative care.
In 2015, Ankur Teredesai spun-out his first healthcare AI venture, KenSci which was acquired by Providence Health Systems in 2021. He subsequently founded CueZen with a mission to drive AI driven personalized care at nation scale. Today, CueZen’s personalized recommendation engine powers numerous behavior change solutions from wellness to sleep, to personalized chronic condition management, and is embedded inside well recognized nation scale health platforms including NHS, Ministry of Health Singapore, Tata in India and within digital therapy solutions in the US.
Prof. Teredesai’s vision is that the day is not far when AI will enable personalize the standard of care for every individual on this planet. His aim is to ensure that when this happens, it is fair, equitable, and scalable to large populations.

Workshop Program

Date: Aug 26, 2024

Time: 2:00pm-6:00pm

Room: 115

2:00pm - Opening Remarks: Mohak Shah

Session 1: Building and scaling AI ventures

Four experienced founders from Europe, Singapore and the US will share their journey and experience in starting a venture. Learn what it takes to build and grow a successful company, from finding the right idea to attracting top talent and developing a go-to-market strategy.

2:10pm - Founder Spotlight 1: Sofus Macskassy, Founder, Zaimler AI
2:20pm - Founder Spotlight 2: Ankur Teredesai, CEO, CueZen Inc, Prof., Univ of Wash
2:30pm - Founder Spotlight 3: Benjamin Cistecky, Managing Partner, Certitude Holdings
2:40pm - Founder Spotlight 4: Carla Zaldua Aguirre, CEO, acceXible

Panel 1: Gen AI - implications for ventures, product development, and go-to-market

Generative AI has changed the world and how the general public perceives the promise of Artificial Intelligence. However, it also has far reaching implications for early-stage AI ventures themselves. As compared to “traditional” AI algorithms, Gen AI has changed the way we train models, the amount of capital it takes to procure compute resources, and how to establish a safe and responsible way of using LLMs. Responsible AI and impending regulation across different jurisdictions are on everyone’s mind. Our panel of AI founders will explore the impact that Gen AI has on their companies, products and services.

2:50pm - Panel discussion moderated by Michael Zeller, Temasek
Panelist: Sofus Macskassy, Ankur Teredesai, Benjamin Cistecky, Carla Zaldua Aguirre

Networking Break (40 mins )

3:50pm - Mingle with start-up founders and investors to explore ideas, connect with like-minded entrepreneurs and make new friends. Bring your questions, share your experience!

Session 2: Investing in AI

Investors with a global market perspective will discuss their journeys, investments theses in early-stage ventures and share thoughts on investing in AI-driven startups in a rapidly evolving landscape.

4:30pm – VC fund spotlight 1: Arnaud Barthelemy, Alpha Intelligence Capital
4:40pm – VC fund spotlight 2: Michael Zeller, Temasek

Panel 2: Thoughts from early stage investors: Raising capital for your venture in the GenAI era

Generative AI has brought a renewed focus on the promise of AI across a variety of enterprises and has accelerated the expectations on the paradigmatic shift. The world has seen rapid development in Gen AI models – both general-purpose, and domain-specific. However, building Gen AI ventures is significantly different from classical AI offerings owing to the difficulty in establishing business models, differences in the product economics, evolving safety and regulatory concerns, difficulty in evaluating and validating the products, concerns around reliability, and so on. Consequently, realizing ROI from GenAI is proving to be non-trivial. This panel will focus on the perspectives of investors on the evolving Gen AI space, realizable business opportunities, and takeaways for existing and aspiring early-stage ventures and founders for building successful products and offerings.