Here at the Open Data Science Conference we gather the attendees, presenters, and companies that are shaping the present and future of AI and data science. ODSC hosts one of the largest gatherings of professional data scientists, with major conferences in the USA, Europe, and Asia.
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ODSC has an active online community. We host online knowledge sharing on data science and other topics using our Ai+ Training Platform.
Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. He is a recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award and held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris. In 2021 he received the OBE from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and gave the Reith Lectures. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His book “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach” (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence, with a current emphasis on the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity. He has developed a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty and is currently working to ban lethal autonomous weapons.
As Chief Decision Scientist at Google Cloud, Cassie Kozyrkov advises leadership teams on decision process, AI strategy, and building data-driven organizations. She is the innovator behind bringing the practice of Decision Intelligence to Google, personally training over 15,000 Googlers. Prior to joining Google, Cassie worked as a data scientist and consultant. She holds degrees in mathematical statistics, economics, psychology, and neuroscience.
Making Data Useful(Track Keynote)
Carlos Guestrin is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. His previous positions include the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the Computer Science & Engineering Department of the University of Washington, the Finmeccanica Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Senior Director of Machine Learning and AI at Apple, after the acquisition of Turi, Inc. (formerly GraphLab and Dato) — Carlos co-founded Turi, which developed a platform for developers and data scientist to build and deploy intelligent applications. He is a technical advisor for OctoML.ai. His team also released a number of popular open-source projects, including XGBoost, LIME, Apache TVM, MXNet, Turi Create, GraphLab/PowerGraph, SFrame, and GraphChi. Carlos received the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He is also a recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award, NSF Career Award, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and IBM Faculty Fellowship, and was named one of the 2008 ‘Brilliant 10’ by Popular Science Magazine. Carlos’ work received awards at a number of conferences and journals, including ACL, AISTATS, ICML, IPSN, JAIR, JWRPM, KDD, NeurIPS, UAI, and VLDB. He is a former member of the Information Sciences and Technology (ISAT) advisory group for DARPA.
DJ Patil is perhaps the most influential data scientist in the world. Having been appointed by President Obama as the very first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, he was tasked with making the largest organization in history—the U.S. Federal Government—a data driven enterprise.
Working directly with the highest ranking officials in government, DJ’s efforts led to the establishment of nearly 40 Chief Data Officer roles across a vast array of departments and programs. Patil’s experience in national security initiatives is extensive, and for his efforts was awarded by Secretary Carter the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service which the highest honor the department bestows on a civilian.
Manuela Veloso is Head of J.P. Morgan Chase AI Research and Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emerita at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was previously Faculty in the Computer Science Department and Head of the Machine Learning Department. She is past president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. In her career she has received numerous awards and honors, including: National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research, Radcliffe Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard University), Einstein Chair Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award for “contributions to the field of artificial intelligence, in particular in planning, learning, multi-agent systems, and robotics.” Veloso is a Fellow of AAAI, AAAS, ACM, and IEEE. She was elected in 2022 to the National Academy of Engineering.
Neil Lawrence is the inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning. He has been working on machine learning models for over 20 years. He recently returned to academia after three years as Director of Machine Learning at Amazon. His main interest is the interaction of machine learning with the physical world. This interest was triggered by deploying machine learning in the African context, where ‘end-to-end’ solutions are normally required. This has inspired new research directions at the interface of machine learning and systems research, this work is funded by a Senior AI Fellowship from the Alan Turing Institute. Neil is also visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield and the co-host of Talking Machines.
Hilary Mason is the co-founder and CEO of Hidden Door. Prior to Hidden Door she was General Manager of the Machine Learning business unit at Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR). She previously founded Fast Forward Labs, an applied machine learning research and consulting startup which Cloudera acquired in 2017. Additionally, she was Data Scientist in Residence at Accel Partners, co-founded HackNY, and was Chief Scientist at bitly. Hilary has received numerous awards, is a regular keynote speaker, and has advised startups, corporations, and governments.
Making Story Computable: The Future of Co-creative Entertainment(Keynote)
Dr. Stonebraker has been a pioneer of database research and technology for more than forty years. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, and the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES. These prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science for twenty five years. More recently at M.I.T., he was a co-architect of the Aurora/Borealis stream processing engine, the C-Store column-oriented DBMS, the H-Store transaction processing engine, the SciDB array DBMS, and the Data Tamer data curation system.
Presently he serves as Chief Technology Officer of Paradigm4 and Tamr, Inc.
Data Mastering at Scale(Track Keynote)
Professor Schmidhuber earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich (TUM). He is a Co-Founder and the Chief Scientist of the company NNAISENSE and was most recently Scientific Director at the Swiss AI Lab, IDSIA, and Professor of AI at the University of Lugano. He is also the recipient of numerous awards, author of over 350 peer-reviewed papers, a frequent keynote speaker and an adviser to various governments on AI strategies.
His lab’s deep learning neural networks have revolutionized machine learning and AI. By the mid-2010s, they were implemented on over 3 billion devices and used billions of times per day by customers of the world’s most valuable public companies’ products, e.g., for greatly improved speech recognition on all Android phones, greatly improved machine translation through Google Translate and Facebook (over 4 billion translations per day), Apple’s Siri and Quicktype on all iPhones, the answers of Amazon’s Alexa, and numerous other applications. In 2011, his team was the first to win official computer vision contests through deep neural nets with superhuman performance. In 2012, they had the first deep neural network to win a medical imaging contest (on cancer detection), attracting enormous interest from the industry. His research group also established the fields of artificial curiosity through generative adversarial neural networks, linear transformers and networks that learn to program other networks (since 1991), mathematically rigorous universal AI and recursive self-improvement in meta-learning machines that learn to learn (since 1987).
Margaret is a Senior Research Scientist in Google’s Research & Machine Intelligence group, working on artificial intelligence.
Her research generally involves vision-language and grounded language generation, focusing on how to evolve artificial intelligence towards positive goals. This includes research on helping computers to communicate based on what they can process, as well as projects to create assistive and clinical technology from the state of the art in AI.
Her work combines computer vision, natural language processing, social media, many statistical methods, and insights from cognitive science.
Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Masters in Mathematics from Arizona State University, and earned his PhD in Cognitive Science in 1985 from the University of California, San Diego. He was a professor at MIT from 1988 to 1998. His research interests bridge the computational, statistical, cognitive, biological and social sciences. Prof. Jordan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a Plenary Lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018. He received the Ulf Grenander Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 2021, the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2020, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award in 2016, the David E. Rumelhart Prize in 2015, and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2009. He gave the Inaugural IMS Grace Wahba Lecture in 2022, the IMS Neyman Lecture in 2011, and an IMS Medallion Lecture in 2004. He is a Fellow of the AAAI, ACM, ASA, CSS, IEEE, IMS, ISBA and SIAM.
In 2016, Prof. Jordan was named the “most influential computer scientist” worldwide in an article in Science, based on rankings from the Semantic Scholar search engine.
On Learning-Aware Mechanism Design(Keynote)
An AI expert and health AI pioneer, Suchi Saria’s research has led to myriad new inventions to improve patient care. Her work first demonstrated the use of machine learning to make early detection possible in sepsis, a life-threatening condition (Science Trans. Med. 2015). In Parkinson’s, her work showed a first demonstration of using readily-available sensors to easily track and measure symptom severity at home, to optimize treatment management (JAMA Neurology 2018). On the technical front, her work at the intersection of machine learning and causal inference has led to new ideas for building and evaluating reliable ML (ACM FAT 2019). Suchi currently holds a John C. Malone endowed chair at Johns Hopkins University, with appointments across engineering, public health, and medicine. She is also the Founder of Bayesian Health, aiming to revolutionize the delivery of healthcare by empowering providers and health systems with real-time access to essential clinical inferences. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including being named a Sloan Research Fellow, a National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine, MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35, and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.
Mihaela van der Schaar is the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Medicine at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute in London, and a Chancellor’s Professor at UCLA.
Mihaela was elected IEEE Fellow in 2009. She has received numerous awards, including the Oon Prize on Preventative Medicine from the University of Cambridge (2018), a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2004), 3 IBM Faculty Awards, the IBM Exploratory Stream Analytics Innovation Award, the Philips Make a Difference Award and several best paper awards, including the IEEE Darlington Award.
Mihaela’s work has also led to 35 USA patents (many widely cited and adopted in standards) and 45+ contributions to international standards for which she received 3 International ISO (International Organization for Standardization) Awards.
In 2019, she was identified by National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts as the most-cited female AI researcher in the UK. She was also elected as a 2019 “Star in Computer Networking and Communications” by N²Women. Her research expertise spans signal and image processing, communication networks, network science, multimedia, game theory, distributed systems, machine learning and AI.
Mihaela’s research focus is on machine learning, AI and operations research for healthcare and medicine.
In addition to leading the van der Schaar Lab, Mihaela is founder and director of the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine (CCAIM).
Why Medicine is Creating Exciting New Frontiers for Machine Learning(Keynote)
Zoubin Ghahramani is Chief Scientist of Uber and a world leader in the field of machine learning, significantly advancing the state-of-the-art in algorithms that can learn from data. He is known in particular for fundamental contributions to probabilistic modeling and Bayesian approaches to machine learning systems and AI. Zoubin also maintains his roles as Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge and Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. He was one of the founding directors of the Alan Turing Institute (the UK’s national institute for Data Science and AI), and is a Fellow of St John’s College Cambridge and of the Royal Society.
Gaël Varoquaux is a research director working on data science and health at Inria (French Computer Science National research). His research focuses on using data and machine learning for scientific inference, with applications to health and social science, as well as developing tools that make it easier for non-specialists to use machine learning. He has long applied it to brain-imaging data to understand cognition. Years before the NSA, he was hoping to make bleeding-edge data processing available across new fields, and he has been working on a mastermind plan building easy-to-use open-source software in Python. He is a core developer of scikit-learn, joblib, Mayavi and nilearn, a nominated member of the PSF, and often teaches scientific computing with Python using the scipy lecture notes.
Prediction with Missing Values(Tutorial)
Raluca Ada Popa is an assistant professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. She is interested in security, systems, and applied cryptography. Raluca developed practical systems that protect data confidentiality by computing over encrypted data, as well as designed new encryption schemes that underlie these systems. Some of her systems have been adopted into or inspired systems such as SEEED of SAP AG, Microsoft SQL Server’s Always Encrypted Service, and others. Raluca received her PhD in computer science as well as her two BS degrees, in computer science and in mathematics, from MIT. She is the recipient of an Intel Early Career Faculty Honor award, George M. Sprowls Award for best MIT CS doctoral thesis, a Google PhD Fellowship, a Johnson award for best CS Masters of Engineering thesis from MIT, and a CRA Outstanding undergraduate award from the ACM.
Kurt received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Indiana University in 1984 and then joined the research division of AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 1991 he joined Synopsys, Inc. where he ultimately became Chief Technical Officer and Senior Vice-President of Research. In 1998 Kurt became Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley. Kurt’s research now focuses on systems issues associated with the application of Deep Learning to computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and finance.
Kurt has published six books, over 250 refereed articles, and is among the most highly cited authors in Hardware and Design Automation. Kurt was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1996. At the 50th Design Automation Conference Kurt received a number of awards reflecting achievements over the 50 year history of the conference. These included “Top Ten Cited Author” and “Top Ten Cited Paper.” He was also recognized as among one of only three people to have received four Best Paper Awards in the history of the conference. Kurt’s research on Deep Learning has also received Best Paper Awards at the Embedded Vision Workshop and at the International Conference on Parallel Processing.
As an entrepreneur Kurt has served as an angel investor and advisor to over twenty-five start-up companies including C-Cube Microsystems, Coverity, Simplex, and Tensilica. Kurt co-founded DeepScale with his PhD student Forrest Iandola. DeepScale was acquired by Tesla in 2019.
Making Deep Learning Efficient(Track Keynote)
Jeannette M. Wing is the Executive Vice President for Research at Columbia University and Professor of Computer Science. In her EVPR role, she has overall responsibility for the University’s research enterprise at all New York locations and internationally. The New York locations include the Morningside and Manhattanville campuses, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and Nevis Laboratories. She joined Columbia in 2017 as the inaugural Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute.
Prior to Columbia, Dr. Wing was Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research, served on the faculty and as department head in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and served as Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Wing’s research contributions have been in the areas of trustworthy AI, security and privacy, specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. Her 2006 seminal essay, titled “Computational Thinking,’’ is credited with helping to establish the centrality of computer science to problem-solving in fields where previously it had not been embraced, and thereby influencing K-12 and university curricula worldwide.
She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. She received distinguished service awards from the ACM and the Computing Research Association and an honorary doctorate degree from Linköping University, Sweden. She earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in computer science, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Trustworthy AI(Talk)
Oriol Vinyals is a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind, and a team lead of the Deep Learning group. His work focuses on Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Prior to joining DeepMind, Oriol was part of the Google Brain team. He holds a Ph.D. in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley and is a recipient of the 2016 MIT TR35 innovator award. His research has been featured multiple times at the New York Times, Financial Times, WIRED, BBC, etc., and his articles have been cited over 85000 times. Some of his contributions such as seq2seq, knowledge distillation, or TensorFlow are used in Google Translate, Text-To-Speech, and Speech recognition, serving billions of queries every day, and he was the lead researcher of the AlphaStar project, creating an agent that defeated a top professional at the game of StarCraft, achieving Grandmaster level, also featured as the cover of Nature. At DeepMind he continues working on his areas of interest, which include artificial intelligence, with particular emphasis on machine learning, deep learning and reinforcement learning.
AlphaStar: Grandmaster Level in StarCraft II Using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning(Track Keynote)
Sarah Aerni is a Senior Manager of Data Science at Salesforce Einstein, where she leads teams building AI-powered applications across the Salesforce platform. Prior to Salesforce she led the healthcare & life science and Federal teams at Pivotal. Sarah obtained her PhD from Stanford University in Biomedical Informatics, performing research at the interface of biomedicine and machine learning. She also co-founded a company offering expert services in informatics to both academia and industry.
Supporting Your Machine Learning Teams: Testing, Modularity and Monitoring(Talk)
Dr. Oren Etzioni has served as the Chief Executive Officer of the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) since its inception in 2014. He has been a Professor at the University of Washington’s Computer Science department since 1991, and a Venture Partner at the Madrona Venture Group since 2000. He has garnered several awards including Seattle’s Geek of the Year (2013), the Robert Engelmore Memorial Award (2007), the IJCAI Distinguished Paper Award (2005), AAAI Fellow (2003), and a National Young Investigator Award (1993). He has been the founder or co-founder of several companies, including Farecast (sold to Microsoft in 2008) and Decide (sold to eBay in 2013). He has written commentary on AI for The New York Times, Nature, Wired, and the MIT Technology Review. He helped to pioneer meta-search (1994), online comparison shopping (1996), machine reading (2006), and Open Information Extraction (2007). He has authored over 100 technical papers that have garnered over 2,000 highly influential citations on Semantic Scholar. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in 1991 and his B.A. from Harvard in 1986.
Semantic Scholar, NLP, and the Fight Against COVID-19(Track Keynote)
Michael Kearns is a professor in the Computer and Information Science department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the National Center Chair and has joint appointments in the Wharton School.He is founder of Penn’s Networked and Social Systems Engineering (NETS) program, and director of Penn’s Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences. Michael is also the co-author of the book The Ethical Algorithm that talks about the science of designing algorithms that embed social values like privacy and fairness. His research interests include topics in machine learning, algorithmic game theory, social networks, and computational finance. He has worked and consulted extensively in the technology and finance industries. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Michael has worked extensively in quantitative and algorithmic trading on Wall Street (including at Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, and SAC Capital; see further details below). He often serve as an advisor to technology companies and venture capital firms. He is also involved in the seed-stage fund Founder Collective and occasionally invest in early-stage technology startups. Michael is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Alan Turing Institute, and of the Market Surveillance Advisory Group of FINRA.
Rachel Thomas is director of the USF Center for Applied Data Ethics and co-founder of fast.ai, which has been featured in The Economist, MIT Tech Review, and Forbes. She was selected by Forbes as one of 20 Incredible Women in AI, earned her math PhD at Duke, and was an early engineer at Uber. Rachel is a popular writer and keynote speaker.
As part of the global data science community we value inclusivity, diversity, and fairness in the pursuit of knowledge and learning. We seek to deliver a conference agenda, speaker program, and attendee participation that moves the global data science community forward with these shared goals. Learn more on our code of conduct, speaker submissions, or speaker committee pages.
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