AI value creation - a view across aisles

Vijay Narayanan

Fellow and Partner, Fellows Fund

AI has the potential to fundamentally rewire value chains in every sphere of human activity. In this talk, I will share some perspectives of how AI can create value, from my experience both as an operational leader in small and large enterprises and investing in AI startups"

Speaker Bio:
Vijay K Narayanan is currently a Fellow and partner at Fellows Fund, an early-stage VC composed of a network of senior technical executives in data, ML/AI, life sciences, security etc. He was earlier the Chief AI officer at ServiceNow, leading research, science and engineering at Pinterest, the Head of Algorithms and AI Solutions at Microsoft, Director at Yahoo Labs, Analytic Science manager at FICO and a post-doc fellow at Princeton Univerrsity. He holds a Ph.D in Astronomy and has worked in data and ML platforms, products and solutions for over 2 decades in both consumer and enterprise companies.

Froomle's Journey from Research to Recommendations

Bart Goethals

Professor at University of Antwerp, Co-founder and CTO Froomle

Speaker Bio:
Bart Goethals is professor at the department of computer science of the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He leads the Adrem Data Lab research group, which performs fundamental research on the structures, the basic properties and the power of languages, algorithms and methodologies for processing and analysing large quantities of data. His primary research interests are the study of recommender systems and data mining techniques to efficiently find interesting patterns and properties in large databases. He received several awards for his publications. He was organizer and program chair of ECML PKDD 2008, program chair of SIAM DM 2010, and general chair of IEEE ICDM 2012. He has served as general chair of the ECML PKDD Steering Committee, and is action editor of the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal, Specialty Chief Editor of the Recommender Systems section in Frontiers in Big Data, and associate editor of ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems, and ACM transactions on Information Systems, and he was Editor-in-Chief of the ACM SIGKDD Explorations newsletter. In 2016, he founded the spin-off company Froomle which provides a SAAS recommender systems platform to its customers.

Hema Raghavan

Co-founder and Head of Engineering @Kumo.AI

Speaker Bio:
Hema is a co-founder and Head of Engineering at Kumo AI, where the team is building a product that makes Querying the Future (predictions) as easy as querying the past (SQL). At its heart Kumo uses Graph Neural Networks and the team at Kumo believes that GNNs will transform how AI is done on data warehouses in a similar way that the LLM revolution has impacted areas of text, NLP and vision. Hema received her PhD from Umass Amherst in 2007 in Search and Information Retrieval. She started her career in Applied Research labs in Yahoo! and IBM. She also spent nearly a decade in LinkedIn building innovative systems to power Linkedin's notifications ecosystems and People You May Know. She is not only well known for building industry scale AI systems, but also for building teams and companies that are inclusive and diverse and where innovation is at the forefront.

Lu Zhang

Founder & Managing Partner

Speaker Bio:
Lu Zhang, Founder and Managing Partner of Fusion Fund, is a renowned Silicon Valley based investor, a serial entrepreneur, and a Stanford Engineering alumna. Lu is a World Economic Forum (Davos) Young Global Leader and was recently selected as a Best 25 Female Investor by Business Insider. She has also garnered other accolades including the Featured Honoree in VC of Forbes 30 Under 30, Silicon Valley Women of Influence, and Town & Country 50 Modern Swans – Entrepreneurship Influencer. Lu is also on the Jury Board of Cartier Young Leader Award. Prior to starting Fusion Fund, she was the Founder and CEO of a medical device company focused on non-invasive technology for the early diagnosis of Type II diabetes (acq. 2013). Lu is a frequent speaker at tech events and conferences such as Davos Economic Forum, Future Investment Initiative (FII), Forbes, Web Summit, SuperReturn, etc. and also serves as a mentor and advisor to several tech innovation programs in Silicon Valley. Lu is the board member of the Youth Council of Future Forum and Future Science Award. She received her M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University.