Keynote Speakers

Ioana Baldini

Research Staff Member in the IBM Research AI Organization

Ioana Baldini is a Research Staff Member in the IBM Research AI organization. Ioana is currently working on data science projects with a potential for social impact, focusing on biomimicry, crowdsourcing for dataset generation and collaborative platforms for data science. Before joining IBM Research AI, Ioana was one of the core researchers who developed OpenWhisk, an open source serverless platform, which is now offered as IBM Cloud Functions. Ioana holds a Masters degree from University of Toronto with a research thesis in distributed systems and a PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a research thesis focused on computer architecture and runtime systems, also from University of Toronto. Ioana received the NSERC (NSF-equivalent in Canada) Canada Graduate Scholarship, the IBM PhD Fellowship, the Canada Google Anita Borg Scholarship and the IBM Research Division Award for contributions to OpenWhisk. Ioana has several publications and eight filed patents in domains spanning computer architecture, heterogeneous and distributed systems, cloud infrastructure and applications, and collaborative platforms for data science.

Dyan Finkhousen

President, FUSE

Dyan leads GE’s GENIUSLINKTM group, building crowd-powered business plans and models to accelerate innovation and redefine what’s possible. She collaborates closely with the GE Global Operations, Global Research Center, business verticals, customers and entrepreneurs to establish the company’s vision for and execution of collaborative business models. The team was awarded the prestigious 2015 Berkeley-Haas Open Innovation Award for Business Model Transformation, and the 2016 Nine Sigma Innovation Leadership Summit - Innovation Champion Award. Prior to this role, Dyan served as GE’s Asset Optimization Software Marketing Leader – coaching business teams on the development and commercialization of GE PredictivityTM Industrial Internet services. She also led the development and launch of the GE Predictivity brand. A 20-year GE veteran, Dyan has also held significant senior marketing and product management roles in GE Capital businesses, delivering global strategy, marketing, sales, operational execution, and breakthrough business results. Before joining GE, Dyan led the Corporate Marketing Group for Transamerica Distribution Finance until its acquisition by GE in 2004. Dyan is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with an M.B.A. Degree in Marketing and Finance. She also holds a B.F.A. degree from Ohio University.

Yasmin Green

Director of Research and Development for Jigsaw

Yasmin Green is the Director of Research and Development for Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Alphabet Inc. focused on solving global security challenges through technology. Yasmin was previously Head of Strategy and Operations for Google Ideas, now Jigsaw. Yasmin has experience leading projects in some of the world’s toughest environments, including Iran, Syria, UAE and Nigeria. Based on her own interviews with ISIS defectors and jailed recruits, last year Yasmin launched the Redirect Method, a new deployment of targeted advertising and video to confront online radicalization.

Yasmin is a Senior Advisor on Innovation to Oxford Analytica and until 2015 co­chaired the European Commission's’ Working Group on Online Radicalization. She also serves on the Board of the Tory Burch Foundation. In 2016, Yasmin was named one of Fast Company's “Most Creative People in Business.” Yasmin received her B.Sc. in Economics from University College London and her M.Sc. in Management from the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Cole Ingraham

Music Systems Architect at Amper Music

Originally from the San Francisco bay area in California, American composer and multimedia artist Cole D. Ingraham holds a B.M. in Music Composition from the University of the Pacific, an M.F.A. in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College, and a D.M.A. in Music Composition from the University of Colorado at Boulder. After finishing his doctorate, he lived in Shanghai, China teaching music composition, theory, technology, and flute at FaceArt Institute of Music. Cole currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and works as the Music Systems Architect at Amper Music. He is an active performer, improviser, creative programmer, both as a soloist and a collaborator. His aesthetic involves experimentalism, noise, drone, programming as performance, and all things abstract.


Natalia Levina

Toyota Motor Corporation Term Professor of Information Systems, NYU Stern

Professor Levina has been with NYU Stern for over than ten years. Prof. Levina's main research interest is in understanding how people span organizational, professional, cultural and other boundaries in the process of building and using new technology. She uses qualitative and quantitative methods and a range of social and organizational theories in her work. She currently studies boundary spanning in the context of open innovation, crowdsourcing, and offshoring of professional services. Her research has been published in ISR, MIS Quarterly, Organization Science, Journal of Management Information Systems, Academy of Management Journal, Decision Sciences Journal, and other outlets. She received two dissertation awards from ICIS and the Academy of Management conferences and best paper of the track award at ICIS (2006). In 2011, she received a National Science Foundation VOSS Collaborative Grant and New York University Challenge Grant to study open innovation and crowdsourcing intermediaries. In 2007, she received the IBM SUR faculty award to study global sourcing. In 2005, she was awarded the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Industry Studies Fellowship to investigate boundary spanning in the global IT services industry. Before joining NYU Stern, Professor Levina worked as a senior information architect at Bremer Associates, Inc. and as an applications systems analyst at PSI International.

Hila Lifshitz-Assaf

Assistant Professor of Information, Operations and Management Sciences, NYU Stern

Professor Lifshitz-Assaf’s research focuses on developing an in-depth empirical and theoretical understanding of the micro-foundations of scientific and technological innovation and knowledge creation processes in the digital age. She explores how the ability to innovate is being transformed, as well as the challenges and opportunities the transformation means for R&D organizations, professionals and their work. She conducted an in-depth 3-year longitudinal field study of NASA’s experimentation with open innovation online platforms and communities, resulting in a scientific breakthrough. Her dissertation received the best dissertation Grigor McClelland Award at the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) 2015.

She investigates new forms of organizing for the production of scientific and technological innovation such as crowdsourcing, open source, open online innovation communities, Wikipedia, hackathons, makeathons, etc. Her work received the prestigious INSPIRE grant from the National Science Foundation and has been presented and taught at a variety of institutions including MIT, Harvard, Stanford, INSEAD, Wharton, London Business School, Bocconi, IESE, UCL, UT Austin, Columbia and Carnegie Mellon. Most recently, she received the Industry Studies Association Frank Giarrantani Rising Star award (2017).

Adam Marcus

Co-Founder and CTO of B12

Adam Marcus is a cofounder and CTO of B12, a NYC-based startup with a focus on building a better future of creative and analytical work. Previously, Adam was Director of Data at Locu, a startup that was acquired by GoDaddy. He has written on crowdsourcing and data science, including coauthoring a book, Crowdsourced Data Management: Industry and Academic Perspectives. He is a recipient of the NSF and NDSEG fellowships and has worked at ITA, Google, IBM, and FactSet. Adam holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT, where he researched database systems and human computation. In his free time, he builds course content to get people excited about data and programming.

Henry Timms

President & CEO, 92nd Street Y; Co-Author, New Power

Henry Timms is President and CEO of 92nd Street Y, a cultural and community center that creates programs and movements that foster learning and civic engagement. Under his leadership, the 144-year-old institution was named to Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies” list. He is the co-founder of #GivingTuesday, a global philanthropic movement that engages people in close to 100 countries that has generated hundreds of millions of dollars for good causes. Henry is a Hauser Visiting Leader, Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School and Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. With Jeremy Heimans, Henry co-authored the book New Power: How Power Works In Our Hyperconnected World - and How to Make it Work for You, described by David Brooks in the New York Times as “the best window I’ve seen into this new world”.

Eric von Hippel

T. Wilson (1953) Professor in Management, MIT Sloan School of Management

Eric's research discovers and explores patterns in the sources of innovation and develops new processes to improve the “fuzzy front end” of the innovation process—the end where ideas for breakthrough new products and services are developed. In his most recent book, Democratizing Innovation (MIT Press, April 2005), von Hippel shows how communities of users are actually becoming such powerful innovation engines that they are increasingly driving manufacturers out of product development altogether—a pattern he documents in fields ranging from open source software to sporting equipment. This discovery has been used for a better understanding of the innovation process and for the development of new innovation processes for industry. He is currently leading a major research project to discover how these user innovation communities work, and how and whether the same principles might extend to many areas of product and service development. In addition, von Hippel is working with governmental and academic colleagues in the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom to develop new and modified governmental policies appropriate to the newly emerging innovation paradigm of user-centered innovation.

Vladimir Vukicevic

CEO and Co-Founder of Meural

Vladimir Vukicevic is an entrepreneur and a lifelong believer in the power of art to foster human connection and improve our world. Driven by a vision of tech as a conduit for cultural access, Vladimir began his entrepreneurial career as co-founder and CTO of RocketHub—an early crowdfunding platform that helped artists and entrepreneurs raise money to support their creative visions. In 2013, Vladimir joined forces with longtime friend and fellow NYU Stern alumnus Jerry Hu to found Meural—an art tech company on a mission to democratize art, and provide working artists with a platform to share their work on a global scale. Meural's flagship product, the Meural Canvas, now lives on thousands of walls internationally.

Nathan Matias

Founder of CivilServant

Dr. J. Nathan Matias (@natematias) organizes citizen behavioral science for a safer, farer, more understanding internet. A Guatemalan-American, Nathan is a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton University in psychology, the Center for Information Technology Policy, and sociology. Nathan is founder of CivilServant, a nonprofit that organizes citizen behavioral science and behavioral consumer protection research for the internet. CivilServant has worked with communities of tens of millions of people on reddit and Twitter to test ideas for preventing harassment, broadening gender diversity on social media, responding to human/algorithmic misinformation, managing political conflict, and auditing social technologies. Together with Susan Benesch, Nathan is pioneering industry-independent evaluations on the impact of tech platform policies in society. In 2017, Nathan completed his Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab with Ethan Zuckerman on the governance of human and machine behavior in an experimenting society. Before MIT, Nathan worked in tech startups that have reached over a billion phones, helped start a series of education and journalistic charities, and studied postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge and Elizabethtown College. His writings have appeared in The Atlantic, PBS, the Guardian, and other international media.