Keynote Speakers

CVP, Microsoft GenAI

Misha Bilenko is a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Azure AI. His work focuses on developing small language and vision models, model adaptation algorithms and tools, technical collaborations with OpenAI, and AI model adoption by Microsoft products. Prior to his current position, Misha was a Senior Vice President of AI and Research at Yandex where he was responsible for range of AI products and services, including smart speakers, assistants, speech, vision, machine translation and machine learning tools and platforms. Before Yandex, he worked at Microsoft’s Cloud+Enterprise division and Microsoft Research. He hold a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin.

Academia Keynote: Ahmed Abbasi

Joe and Jane Giovanini Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations

Ahmed Abbasi is the Joe and Jane Giovanini Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations. He serves as Director of the Analytics Ph.D. program and Co-Director of the Human-centered Analytics Lab. Ahmed completed his Ph.D. work in Information Systems at the University of Arizona’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab. He attained an M.B.A. and B.S. in Information Technology from Virginia Tech. His research interests relate to text and predictive analytics. Ahmed has published nearly one hundred articles in journals and conferences, including several in top-tier outlets such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research (ISR), Journal of MIS, ACM TOIS, IEEE TKDE, and IEEE Intelligent Systems. His work has been funded by over a dozen grants from the National Science Foundation and industry partners such as Microsoft, eBay, Deloitte, and Oracle. Ahmed serves as Senior Editor for ISR and Associate Editor for ACM TMIS and IEEE Intelligent Systems. He is a recipient of the IEEE Technical Achievement Award, INFORMS Design Science Award, and IBM Faculty Award. Ahmed’s work has been featured in various media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, the Associated Press, WIRED, CBS, and Fox.