Review – Speakers 2019

David Austin has worked at Intel for 19 years in silicon manufacturing and the Internet of Things Domain.  Currently he’s a Senior Principal Engineer focused on AI solution development in Intel’s Internet of Things Group.  David develops deep learning and traditional computer vision based solutions in the Industrial market segment working closely with partners around the globe.

Co-founder and deep learning researcher. With consultancy background at BCG and McKinsey, Mr Berglund combines years of industrial and business process analysis experience with a cutting-edge understanding of modern deep learning. He holds a MSc.Econ from LSE, UK and a PhD in deep learning from Aalto University, Finland.

Sebastian Blank is Head of Natural Language Processing at inovex. The recent developments in Generative AI fascinate him and make him wonder how LLMs will impact our life’s and our way of working. He is interested in the integration of such models into actual applications and how to make them more reliable, i.e. robust to hallucination.

Alex is the Founder of Sebenz.ai, a platform that creates jobs for people in Africa who earn money on their phones while labeling training data for machine learning models. He is also the founder of NumberBoost, a startup based in Cape Town that builds custom A.I. solutions focused on real-time computer vision using deep learning, edge computing and privacy-preserving federated machine learning. NumberBoost has won startup competitions with MultiChoice, Mercedes-Benz, Lloyd's Register in London and NTT Data Japan. He organizes the Cape Town Machine Learning and Deep Learning Meetup groups and chaired the organizing committee for the 2018 Deep Learning IndabaX conference in Cape Town.

Sven is a researcher, entrepreneur, author and keynote speaker in forecasting with AI/ML. As an Assistant Professor at Lancaster University, UK, his 80+ papers on forecast algorithms ranks him in the top 10 globally (Google Scholar). He is also founder of iqast.de, a university spin-off based in Hamburg pioneering intelligent forecasting software solutions e.g. beer demand at ABInBev, container shipments at Hapag-Lloyd, FMCG products at Beiersdorf, or medical products at Johnson & Johnson.

Sébastien is the CDO of the HRS Group, the leading global Business Travel company. A former Professor in Astrophysics and a Data Scientist, he has headed several Data departments, focusing on creating a measurable business impact leveraging data related technology and machine learning. Deeply convinced that data is a strategic business asset, he aims at democratising data across the company by advocating a profound cultural change, with data becoming part of everyone's responsibility. Sébastien is a member of the board of SBSF Agritech.

Grzegorz (Greg) Gawron, is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at LiveRamp. He is focused on applications of privacy-enhancing technologies. During his recent engagement at the IQSS OpenDP Fellows program at Harvard, he explored the privacy implications of split learning. He obtained his Master's degrees in computer science and economics from Warsaw University and is currently working toward a computer science PhD at AGH in Krakow.

Jonathan is an experienced Machine Learning Engineer with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry and a passion for deep learning. 

Philipp is the founder and managing director of dida, a Berlin-based software company specializing in the field of machine vision and natural language processing. He holds a master in statistics from TU Berlin and has more than 10 years of experience in data science projects.

Tilak Kasturi is an engineer, innovator, and entrepreneur with more than 20 years of executive experience in enterprise software, big data, and applied artificial intelligence. He has driven scalable product platform startups across various verticles, including healthcare, media, entertainment, and now industrial repair and maintenance with Predii Inc. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Institute of Technology, (India), an M.S. in Computer Science from the Florida Institute of Technology, and an M.B.A. from the University of Central Florida.

Dr. Johannes Kröckel is Head of Data Science & AI at Schaeffler. He holds a PhD in Information Systems from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. After finishing his doctorate on applied computer vision for customer behavior analysis at the point of sale in 2013 Dr. Kröckel worked as a Technology Consultant and Data Scientist at Lufthansa Industry Solutions before he joined the automotive supplier in 2016.

Dr Natasha Latysheva is a machine learning engineer in the NLP engineering group at Welocalize, a leading language services provider. Her work focuses on natural language processing and machine translation. She previously worked as a data scientist in the video gaming industry, and before that on a PhD in computational biology at Cambridge.

Karry Lu is a senior data scientist at WeWork with degrees in economics and statistics, and interests in recommendation systems, NLP, and Bayesian inference. In previous lives, he has led machine learning at a (successfully exited!) foodtech startup, and fought crime for the feds with the power of linear regression.  Even more previous lives include relapsed statistician, community organizer and failed novelist. 

Gloria Macia is a data scientist at F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, where she passionately strives to bring AI-powered solutions to one of the most highly regulated industries worldwide. Prior to Roche, she was part of the quality and clinical affairs management team at Sonova Holding AG. Her interests include technological innovation, translational science, medical device development, and healthcare regulation. Gloria came to Switzerland in 2015 for a robotics research stay at EPFL and later decided to pursue a MSc in biomedical engineering-bioelectronics at ETH Zurich. Her computer science skills have been awarded several prizes and scholarships from renowned companies such as Intel, Toptal, and Palantir.  

Development Manager at Berggren Oy, responsible for business process automation and system integrations. Jukka worked 10+ years at Nokia and as Berggren's Head of IT he led the company into the vanguard of digital IPR houses. Jukka loves to develop and learn and currently studies for a Master's degree in Strategic Leadership. He lives up north, in Oulu, Finland.

Dr. Kaustubh Pathak is an Advanced Data Analyst at Schaeffler since 2017 and specializes in the fields of Robotics, Computer Vision, and Predictive Maintenance. He obtained his PhD in 2006 from the Univ. of Delaware, USA, and worked as a tenured Assistant Professor at Jacobs University Bremen before joining Schaeffler.

SK is the Chief Product officer AI in Hexagon (www.hexagon.com). He is also an AI expert and a successful twice startup entrepreneur. He is a frequent speaker in conferences and an AI blogger.

Experienced engineer with 4+ years of experience as analyst in FMCG industry, including SC Adidas Ukraine, Danone, P&G, Henkel, SMART business. Certified within R, Python, Data Science and Data Management.

Dr. Christian Spindler is co-founder and CEO of the Green FinTech Sustainaccount.

Sustainaccount closes the extensive gap of available and required sustainability data from small and medium size enterprises. Sustainaccount enables SMEs to manage their ESG data in a granular and adaptive manner, and to adequately report towards their banks and their customers. Simultaneously, Sustainaccount enables banks with untapped ESG data to create urgently needed decarbonization finance products.

Christian served as Senior Manager for IoT & Machine Learning at PricewaterhouseCoopers and gained extensive experience in industrial IoT and processes as Senior Researcher at the global electro-technology company ABB. Christian graduated in physics (PhD) and earned an MBA from the University of St. Gallen.

Martin Szugat is founder and managing director of Datentreiber, a data strategy consultancy supporting companies to digitally transform to a data-driven business. He invented the Data Strategy Design method and provides a free Data Strategy Designkit. Prior to Datentreiber, Martin Szugat was managing director of SnipClip, an agency for social media marketing & analytics. With a degree in bioinformatics, he has conducted research in machine learning and worked as a freelance software developer, consultant & author. Since 2014, he is responsible for the Predictive Analytics World & Deep Learning World conferences in Europe as program director.

Marcel Tilly is Professor of Cloud Computing at the Rosenheim University of Applied Sciences. After almost 13 years at Microsoft, he continues to work on topics related to IoT, Big Data, Deep Learning and AI; in detail, he deals with speech and image recognition and their application in real-world scenarios. At the university he can now deepen his experience in research and teaching and get to the bottom of it. If there is still time left, he speaks at conferences, writes articles or programs something.

Ward is the leading machine learning engineer at IxorThink, the AI practice of the Belgian software company Ixor. Fascinated by the mystery and power of the human mind, he is inventive in explaining how AI models work and how to interpret their results. At IxorThink, Ward demonstrated a lot of added value with operational AI driven solutions in the content marketing industry and healthcare sector.