Luminaries and enterprise veterans to speak at Future of Data-centric AI

The Future of Data-centric AI virtual conference will bring together a star-studded lineup of expert speakers from across the machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science field. This impressive group of experts is united in their passion for pushing the boundaries of technology and democratizing access to the power of AI.

From generative modeling to automated product tagging, cloud computing, predictive analytics, and deep learning, the speakers present a diverse range of expertise. Our speakers lead their fields and embody the desire to create revolutionary ML experiences by leveraging the power of data-centric AI to drive innovation and progress.

AI luminaries from across the industry

A host of AI and machine learning luminaries will anchor our program, delivering talks and participating in fireside chats and panels with their unique perspectives.

DJ Patil, general partner at GreatPoint Ventures, will have a fireside chat with Snorkel AI CEO Alex Ratner. Patil served as the first U.S. chief data scientist, a role he held under President Barack Obama from 2015 to 2017. He also worked in the Defense Department under President George W. Bush, and has co-authored several books on data science.

Yoav Shoham is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of AI21 Labs, a company that aims to create natural language understanding and natural language generation systems. He is also a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University, where he taught and researched since 1987.

Emad Mostaque is the founder and CEO of Stability AI, a company that aims to maximize the accessibility of modern AI to inspire global creativity and innovation. He is also one of the co-creators of Stable Diffusion and founded Symmitree, a startup that aimed to reduce the cost of technology for individuals living in poverty.

Gideon Mann is the head of the ML Product and Research team in the Office of the CTO at Bloomberg LP. He leads corporate strategy for machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, and alternative data. He has over 30 publications and more than 20 patents in machine learning and NLP. He is also a founding member of the Data for Good Exchange (D4GX).

Matei Zaharia is co-founder and Chief Technologist at Databricks as well as an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He is also the creator of Apache Spark. He received the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for his research on large-scale computing.

Heavy hitters from some of the world’s biggest companies

The Future of Data-centric AI roster includes speakers from some of the world’s biggest and most influential companies, such as Wayfair, JPMorgan Chase, and Google.

Dr. Ali Arsanjani, director of cloud partner engineering at Google Cloud, will join the conference for a panel about the power and responsibility of adopting AI. Dr. Arsanjani has over 20 years of experience in AI/ML, analytics, cloud computing, and software engineering. He was previously a senior leader at AWS, and the CTO of Analytics & ML at IBM. He has published more than 100 papers and books on AI/ML, SOA, BPM, RPA, and other topics.

Archana Sapkota is a machine learning manager at Wayfair. She leads the automation of catalog tagging to make sure the information about products in the catalog is rich and clean. At the conference, Sapkota will present about how Wayfair used a data-centric approach to improve the customer experience. She has also led projects to provide personalized experiences to customers by providing visual similarity-based recommendations. Within Wayfair, she is recognized as an expert in computer vision.

Daniel Wu is the Head of Commercial Banking AI and Machine Learning at JPMorgan Chase where he drives financial service transformation through AI innovation. He will join Dr. Arsanjani on the panel about responsibility in AI. Daniel holds a computer science degree from Stanford University.

Academic leaders from storied institutions

Our roster also includes speakers from some of the most reputable institutions of higher learning on the planet, such as Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown.

Vijay Janapa Reddi is an Associate Professor at Harvard and Vice President of MLCommons, a non-profit organization aimed at accelerating machine learning innovation. He co-led the development of MLPerf Inference benchmark and won accolades, including the Gilbreth Lecturer Honor from the National Academy of Engineering.

Alejandro Zarate Santovena is a lecturer at Columbia University’s Scool of Professional studies. He also currently serves as the Managing Director at Marsh-USA, where he spearheads Data Strategy. He will speak to our audience about opportunities for data-centric AI in insurance. Santovena holds a Professional Certificate in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.S. in Management of Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.B.A. from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.

James Dunham is an NLP Engineer at Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology, where he collaborates with subject matter experts to solve inference problems, specializing in applying machine learning to scientific text. James previously worked on open civic data at MIT’s Election Lab; developed survey methods at the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab; and taught at NYU.

Snorkel AI’s internal stars

Inspired by feedback from last year, the cast at this year’s The Future of Data-centric AI also includes members of the team that builds and maintains Snorkel Flow at Snorkel AI.

Aparna Lakshmi Ratan, vice president of product at Snorkel AI, will participate in a fireside chat during the conference. Aparna has extensive experience building and shipping large-scale ranking and recommendation systems powered by ML for Search and Ads at Microsoft and Meta.

Rebekah Westerlind, one of the founding engineers at Snorkel, currently serves as a tech lead/manager on the Snorkel ML engineering team. She will present at the conference, and her passion for learning has led her to work on a range of projects from AI to big data.

Angela Fox is a staff product designer at Snorkel AI who works on the core user experience of ML iterations to empower data scientists with more clarity, control, and focus. She is well-versed in error analysis, complex classification use cases, and computer vision UX. At the conference, she will tell the crowd how to use Snorkel Flow to tackle advanced classification problems.

Finally, Snorkel CEO Alex Ratner will handle the opening keynote on both days of the conference and will engage in a fireside chat. Alex, together with his co-founders, built Snorkel AI on their mutual academic work around the concept of data-centric AI. In addition to his daily duties at Snorkel, Alex is an Affiliate Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington.

Ask the presenters questions directly

This year’s The Future of Data-centric AI event includes a Slack Workspace that speakers will join after their presentations to take additional live Q&A from the audience. We encourage you to join the new Slack community today.  There, you will find hundreds of data scientists and data professionals discussing the upcoming sessions and poster submissions.

Join the Slack community here.

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