Organizers
Tara Chklovski (Technovation)
Tara Chklovski is Founder and CEO of a global technology entrepreneurship nonprofit, Technovation that engages underrepresented groups, especially girls and women, in an annual competition through which they identify problems in their communities and use mobile and AI technologies to develop solutions. Technovation has been in operation for 14 years, reaching more than 160,000 participants through its competitions. Tara brings extensive experience implementing complex, global, technical, virtual events that foster a sense of community between diverse individuals. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Physics from St. Stephen’s College and a Masters in Aerospace Engineering from Boston University.
Amir Banifatemi (XPrize)
Amir Banifatemi is the Chief Innovation and Growth Officer at XPRIZE. He is also a co-founder of AI Commons, and co-founder and curator of the AI for Good Global Summit with the ITU and UN Agencies. He has managed two venture capital funds and continues to support and advise companies and initiatives with a focus on exponential technologies and transformation of humanity and society. He advocates democratic access to innovation for all. Mr. Banifatemi holds a Master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Technology of Compiègne, a Doctorate in System Design and Cognitive Sciences from the University Paris Descartes, as well as an MBA from HEC Paris, and is a regular guest lecturer and an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley, Chapman University, Claremont McKenna College, UC Irvine, and HEC Paris.
Gustavo Stolovitzky (IBM)
Dr. Gustavo Stolovitzky is the Chair of the Exploratory Life Sciences Program at IBM Research and an adjunct Professor at Columbia University. As the Founder of the DREAM Challenges, Dr. Stolovitzky has pioneered the use of crowdsourcing as a tool for scientific research and of the Wisdom of Crowds as a robust methodology for predictive modeling. His current main interests are in the fields of crowdsourcing, ensemble learning and translational research. Dr. Stolovitzky holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Yale University, and has been distinguished with several awards including the HENAAC’s Pioneer Award for Great Minds in STEM, and the “Premio Raíces” awarded by the Argentinian Government. Dr. Stolovitzky has been elected Fellow of the NY Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the World Technology Network, Fellow of the American Physical Society and Fellow of the AAAS, and IBM Fellow, the highest honor IBM bestows to its technical leaders.
Adriënne Mendrik (Netherlands eScience Center, Eyra)
Adriënne Mendrik is manager and researcher at the Netherlands eScience Center (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and recently founded the company Eyra, which is aimed at providing digital solutions to empower researchers and work more towards collective science and collaboration. She has extensive experience with designing benchmarks and challenges for measuring algorithm performance in biomedical image analysis, and has organized various workshops and tutorials on this topic at international conferences (IEEE ISBI, IEEE eScience, MICCAI) as well as the CiML workshop at NeurIPS in 2019. She wrote a paper that describes a theoretical framework for challenge design. At the eScience center she led the development of a platform to set-up benchmarks to test algorithm performance for challenges in a wide range of scientific disciplines (from astronomy to humanities and social sciences). Her research focuses on machine learning in medical image analysis and benchmark and challenge design.