2022 Program

Invited speakers

Shiv Vitaladevuni, Amazon, Director of Alexa AI Research in Perceptual Technologies.

Shiv Vitaladevuni is a Director in Applied Sciences at Amazon Alexa, leading one of the speech and ML organizations. His organization’s mission is to make Alexa more perceptive and contextually aware so that Alexa is better able to determine when and how to help customers. They develop technologies such as wakeword, acoustic event detection, speaker understanding and paralinguistics, used by millions of customers across the globe. Consisting of 150+ scientists and engineers, the team brings together expertise in speech and ML science and engineering, embedded and cloud services, deep learning, signal processing, large scale data analytics. The team emphasizes close collaboration between science and engineering, executing on high risk R&D efforts to deliver state-of-the-art ML products to our customers, and technical excellence to build high availability ML systems and services.

Ashok N. Srivastava, Intuit, Senior Vice President and Chief Data Officer.

Ashok N. Srivastava, Ph.D. is the Senior Vice President and Chief Data Officer at Intuit. He is responsible for setting the vision and direction for AI and Data across Intuit to power prosperity across the world. He is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford and a member of the Board of Directors of the University of Colorado Foundation. He serves on a committee for the National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine on a Congressionally mandated study on Emerging Trends in Aviation Safety. Ashok is a Fellow of the IEEE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

Previously, he was the VP of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Systems and the Chief Data Scientist at Verizon. His global team focused on building new revenue-generating products and services powered by big data and artificial intelligence. He is the founder and former Editor-in-Chief of the AIAA Journal of Aerospace Information Systems.

At NASA, he led advanced technology programs in Aerospace, Space Systems, and Earth and Space Sciences including the System-wide Safety and Assurance Technology and the Integrated Vehicle Health Management programs. He served as a Venture Advisor focusing on big-data analytics at Trident Capital, and was on the advisory board of several startups.

Ashok is the author of over 100 research articles in data mining, machine learning, and text mining, and has edited four books in these subjects: Text Mining: Classification, Clustering, and Applications, Advances in Machine Learning and Data Mining for Astronomy, Machine Learning for Engineering Systems Health Management, and Large-Scale Machine Learning in the Earth Sciences.

He has over 30 patents awarded and several under file. He has won numerous awards including the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award for “pioneering contributions to intelligent information systems,” the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal for contributions to state-of-the-art data mining and analysis, the NASA Honor Award for Outstanding Leadership, the NASA Distinguished Performance Award, several NASA Group Achievement Awards, the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from UC Boulder, the IBM Golden Circle Award, and the Department of Education Merit Fellowship.

Round-table discussions

• How to successfully introduce ML to new orgs. Presenters: Mingwei Shen, Ofri Mann and Aner Hamama
• Building new ML teams. Presenters: Lory Nunez
• Industry vs research. Presenters: Sarah Campbell
• Scrum in ML. Presenters: Ashish Bansal, Mark Ally and Vijay Morampudi
• ML main pitfals/challenges. Presenters: Muna Abdelrahim, Tor Kwembe and Polina Reshetova
• ML for business optimization. Presenters: Gerben Oostra, Hanan Shteingart