Toyin Aguda, Senior AI Research Scientist, J.P. Morgan AI Research
Toyin is a Senior AI Research Scientist at J.P. Morgan AI Research with focus on using AI to benefit the finance industry and beyond through Synthetic data generation and NLP-related projects. She also co-led ICAIF’21 workshop. Prior to joining J.P. Morgan, Toyin worked as a Data Scientist III with Caterpillar, a subject matter expert on its clients’ data platform for aftermarket solutions, and also with Nielsen TV Rating as a Data scientist. Toyin holds a master’s degree in Applied Economics from the University of Illinois at Chicago and another in Applied Probability and Statistics from Northern Illinois University.
Mahmoud Mahfouz, AI Research Lead, J.P. Morgan AI Research
Mahmoud is an AI Research Lead at J.P. Morgan AI Research and a part-time PhD student at Imperial College London. Mahmoud's research focuses on the application of imitation and reinforcement learning methods to financial algorithmic trading problems. Mahmoud graduated from the University of Manchester in 2014 and has been working at J.P. Morgan since then in different roles including software development, applied data science, and artificial intelligence research.
Girmaw Abebe Tadesse, Research Scientist, IBM Research Africa
Girmaw is a Challenge Lead and Research Scientist at IBM Research Africa working in AI Science and Healthcare teams, mostly on designing machine learning techniques to utilize multiple data sources to understand global healthcare challenges (e.g., child mortality), and to discover anomalous groups related to interventions. Prior to that, Girmaw worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford, where he primarily developed deep learning techniques to assist diagnosis of infectious diseases. He worked in multiple projects with international collaborations including clinicians and researchers in China and Vietnam. Girmaw completed his PhD at Queen Mary University of London under the Erasmus Mundus Double Doctorate Program in Interactive and Cognitive Environments with UPC-BarcelonaTech. His PhD research focused on computer vision and machine learning algorithms for human activity recognition using wearable sensors. He has worked in various research groups across Europe, including the Technical Research Center for Dependency Care and Autonomous Living (Barcelona, Spain), KU Leuven in Belgium, and INESC-ID in Portugal). Girmaw currently serves as a reviewer for multiple IEEE Journals (e.g., Internet of Things, Multimedia, Biomedical and Health Informatics) as well as on program committees (e.g., AAAI) and/or as co-organizer of several workshops (e.g., AISG, ML4H at ICLR, ICML and NeurIPS).
Allan Anzagira, Senior AI Research Scientist, J.P. Morgan AI Research
Allan is a Senior AI Research Scientist at J.P. Morgan AI Research where he is currently working on research in explainable AI. Prior to joining JPMorgan, he obtained a PhD in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina A&T State University in August 2020.
Babatunde Sawyerr, Lecturer, University of Lagos
Babatunde is a certified AI and a senior lecturer at the University of Lagos. He is a fellow of the Nigerian computer society (FNCS), a member to several learned and professional organizations and a visiting scholar to over 5 universities around the world. His research/expertise focus induces the design and development of Nature-Inspired search and optimization algorithms for both continuous and combinatorial optimization problems, AI, Machine Learning, Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He has authored, co-authored several AI related papers. To mention a few, he is a founding member and research lead for Machine Intelligence Research Group (MIRG) and the Department of Computer Science and Mathematical Analysis and Optimization Research Group (MANORG) at the University of Lagos.
Charese Smiley, AI Research Lead, J.P. Morgan AI Research
Charese is an AI Research Lead at J.P. Morgan AI Research. Her research interests center around natural language processing and computational linguistics. Prior to joining J.P. Morgan, Charese worked on the Vision and Language Technology team at Capital One and at Thomson Reuters, with the Research & Development group. Charese holds two patents for her research and is a winner of Turing tests for creative arts, claiming 1st prize in Dartmouth’s 2017 PoetiX competition for machine-generated sonnet most indistinguishable from human poetry. She also won the 2018 LimeriX competition for machine-generated limericks. Charese has a B.S. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University and a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Indiana University.
Samuel Assefa, Head of AI and Machine Learning, U.S. Bank
Samuel is Head of AI and Applied R&D Innovation at U.S. Bank leading Innovation on the use of AI to transform financial services. He was previously an Executive Director of AI Research at J.P. Morgan. Prior to joining J.P. Morgan, Samuel worked as a Vice President of AI/ML & Data Science at Barclays, a Research Fellow in population genomics/bioinformatics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and as a computational biologist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Samuel is an honorary professor of Artificial Intelligence at Jimma University and an associate staff member of CDT-Africa at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. He has an MSc in Information Systems from De Montfort University and an M.Phil and PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Cambridge in the UK.