Confirmed Speakers

Prof. Sarvapali (Gopal) Ramchurn - Professor of Artificial Intelligence - University of Southampton

Professor Sarvapali Ramchurn is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Turing Fellow, and Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. He is the CEO of Reponsible AI UK, Director of the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems hub. He is also a Co-CEO of Empati Ltd, an AI startup working on decentralised green hydrogen technologies. His research is about the design of Responsible Artificial Intelligence for socio-technical applications including energy systems and disaster management. His research involves applying techniques from Machine Learning, HCI, and Game Theory. He has won multiple best paper awards for his research and is a winner of the AXA Research Fund Award (2018) for his work on Responsible Artificial Intelligence. He has pioneered the development of AI-based disaster response systems using multi-UAV systems, AI-driven large-scale battery management for smart grids, and an AI bot that outperformed more than 5M human players (top 0.7%) in the English Premier League Fantasy Football Tournament. His papers have been cited more than 8500 times (according to Google scholar). He is originally from Mauritius and is passionate about AI for Social Good and Environmental Sustainability.

Dr. Lora Aroyo - Research Scientist - Google

Dr. Lora Aroyo is a research scientist at Google Research NYC where she works on Data Excellence for AI. Her team DEER (Data Excellence for Evaluating Responsibly) is part of the Responsible AI (RAI) organization. Their work is focused on developing metrics and methodologies to measure the quality of human-labeled or machine-generated data. Lora received an MSc in Computer Science from Sofia University, Bulgaria, and PhD from Twente University, The Netherlands. She is currently serving as a co-chair of the steering committee for the AAAI HCOMP conference series and is a member of the DataPerf working group at MLCommons for benchmarking data-centric AI. Prior to joining Google, she was a computer science professor heading the User-Centric Data Science research group at the VU University Amsterdam. This team invented the CrowdTruth crowdsourcing method jointly with the Watson team at IBM. This method has been applied in various domains such as digital humanities, medical and online multimedia. She also guided the human-in-the-loop strategies as a Chief Scientist at a NY-based startup Tagasauris. Some of her prior community contributions include president of the User Modeling Society, program co-chair of The Web Conference 2023, member of the ACM SIGCHI conferences board.

Prof. Elena Simperl - Director of Research - King's College London & Open Data Institute (ODI)

Professor Elena Simperl is the ODI’s Director of Research and a Professor of Computer Science at King’s College London. She is also a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a senior member of the Society for the Study of AI and Simulation of Behaviour, and a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow. Elena’s research is in human-centric AI, exploring socio-technical questions around the management, use, and governance of data in AI applications. According to AMiner, she is in the top 100 most influential scholars in knowledge engineering of the last decade. She also features in the Women in AI 2000 ranking. In her 15-year career, she has led 14 national and international research projects, contributing to another 26. She leads the ODI’s programme of research on data-centric AI, which studies and designs the socio-technical data infrastructure of AI models and applications. Elena chaired several conferences in artificial intelligence, social computing, and data innovation. She is the president of the Semantic Web Science Association. Elena is passionate about ensuring that AI technologies and applications allow everyone to take advantage of their opportunities, whether that is by making AI more participatory by design, investing in novel AI literacy interventions, or paying more attention to the stewardship and governance of data in AI.

Prof. Hana Chockler - Professor - King's College London

Professor Hana Chockler's research interests lie in the area of causal reasoning and explainability. She is interested both in the theoretical concepts and in applications of these concepts to software engineering and machine learning systems (neural networks). Her current large-scale applied research project is the explainability platform for black-box AI: Causal Responsibility-based Explanations (ReX). She is looking for students and postdoctoral researchers for a variety of projects related to ReX and extending ReX to other domains. Historically, Hana's interest in causality arose from investigating the reasons and causes for the results of verification of hardware and software systems. She brought the concepts of causality from AI to formal verification and demonstrated their usefulness to the causal analysis and explanations of verification procedures. In other directions, Professor Chockler has an ongoing research activity in the areas of formal verification, hardware synthesis, and learning for software analysis and exploration. Her work is supported by the UKRI TAS Node in Governance and Regulation “Better Governance by Design”, UKRI TAS Hub, Royal Society International Exchanges Grant, and Google Faculty Award.

Dr. Angelo Dalli - Chief Scientist & Co-Founder - UMNAI

Dr. Angelo Dalli is UMNAI’s Chief Scientist and Co-Founder. As an Artificial Intelligence expert and serial tech entrepreneur, he combines deep technical ability with commercial acumen. Angelo has applied AI solutions since 2006 in the technology, transportation, bioinformatics, entertainment and fintech industries while using AI creatively for visual applications. He has founded nine startups, was involved in four IPOs/M&As and invested in over 40 successful companies. Angelo has created a foundational neuro-symbolic AI technology, called Hybrid Intelligence, that gives AI human-like reasoning, better understanding, transparency and goal-planning capabilities. He has authored over 20 peer-reviewed publications, published 52 granted/pending AI patents, and is on the board of CSAI and various ISO/IEC committees on global AI standards. Angelo is a professional member of IEEE, AAAI, ACM, and a member of EBAN, YPO, and WBAF and is an IOI Olympic Bronze medallist. Guided by the philosophy of creating scalable and innovative technology businesses with a significant social impact, Angelo's contributions have not only advanced the field of AI but have also fostered positive change.

Natan Vidra - Founder & CEO - Anote

Natan Vidra is the Founder / CEO of Anote. Natan has experience working as a Data Scientist / Software Engineer within Deloitte's Applied Artificial Intelligence division. At Deloitte, Natan collaborated on many AI projects in the domains of Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision and Big Data Analytics. Natan graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelors of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a Masters of Engineering in Computer Science.

Rajat Ghosh - Staff Data Scientist - Nutanix

Rajat Ghosh is a Staff Data Scientist at Nutanix, where he leads the development of Generative AI-driven solutions to enhance employee productivity. His work centers on advancing software engineering efficiency through the deployment of AI-powered agents. Previously, he designed and implemented a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) productivity agent from inception to successful deployment. In addition to his role at Nutanix, Rajat actively contributes to the MLCommons AI Safety group, focusing on model evaluation. His research interests include large language model (LLM) alignment and evaluation. Rajat holds a Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, India.

Srija Chakraborty - Scientist - Universities Space Research Association (USRA)

Srija Chakraborty is a Scientist at USRA and specializes in applied machine learning for scientific datasets, currently focusing on satellite observations for Earth and Space Sciences. Her research interests are centered around machine learning for scientific applications, with an emphasis on unsupervised learning, anomaly detection, time-series analysis, foundation models, and machine learning-enabled dataset generation for downstream applications. She serves on NASA Black Marble Science Team leading machine learning-based near-real time disaster mitigation efforts and long-term monitoring of global environmental change, on NASA’s FireSense Implementation Team assisting stakeholders for wildfire management using machine learning, and other multi-agency scientific programs. She is also interested in responsible AI, AI Policy and Governance and is currently a Science Policy Fellow with the American Geophysical Union’s Voices for Science program, and serves as a working group member and secretary for IEEE Standards Working Group on Environmental Impact of AI. Prior to joining USRA, she was a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at Goddard Space Flight Center with the Black Marble Science Team and developed machine learning approaches for nighttime remote sensing and received a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Arizona State University in 2019.

Ankit Jain - Senior Engineering Manager - Meta GenAI

Ankit Jain is senior engineering manager at Meta GenAI where he leads AI Safety Efforts for Multimodal models as part of MetaAI. He leads a 40+ member cross-functional team of researchers, engineers and data scientists. Prior to this role he has worked as senior research scientist at Uber AI Labs, the machine learning research arm of Uber. Previously, he worked in variety of machine learning roles at Bank Of America and other startups. He co-authored a book on machine learning titled TensorFlow Machine Learning Projects. Additionally, he’s been a featured speaker in many of the top AI conferences and universities and has been awarded 40under40 Data scientists from Analytics India Magazine. He earned his MS from UC Berkeley and BS from IIT Bombay (India).

Ken Fricklas - CEO - Turaco Strategy

Kenneth Fricklas is CEO of Turaco Strategy, an organization that has been guiding enterprises of all sizes in AI, Ethics and Governance work including assessments, building a center of excellence, and developing safe AI deployment strategies.  He is the Innovation Chair of Colorado CleanTech, an adjunct professor and creator of the AI Ethics, Governance and Regulation curriculum at the University of Denver, and is the Chair of Multimodal AI Benchmarking for MLCommons AILuminate(tm) benchmark.  He has worked in AI across multiple industries including healthcare, smart cities, and weather.   Formerly, Kenneth was an innovation lead at CableLabs and head of measurement program management for Google Search.

Dr. Sean McGregor - Founding Director - Founding Director with the Digital Safety Research Institute

Sean McGregor is a machine learning safety researcher and a founding director with the Digital Safety Research Institute at the UL Research Institutes. Prior to joining Underwriters Laboratories, Dr. McGregor launched IncidentDatabase.ai modelled after similar approaches in aviation and medicine for safety research, development, and policy. With an applications-centered research program spanning reinforcement learning for wildfire suppression and deep learning for heliophysics, Sean has covered a wide range of safety critical domains. His open source development work has earned media attention in the Atlantic, Der Spiegel, Wired, Venture Beat, Vice, and O'Reilly while his technical publications have appeared in a variety of machine learning, HCI, ethics, and application-centered proceedings. Sean serves as an advisor or co-chair for a variety of efforts, including those at IAAI, OECD, ML Commons, and the United Nations, among others.

Prof. Virginia Dignum - Professor of Responsible Artificial Intelligence - Umeå University

Virginia Dignum is Professor of Responsible Artificial Intelligence at Umeå University, Sweden, where she leads the AI Policy Lab. She is also senior advisor on AI policy to the Wallenberg Foundations and chair of the ACM’s Technology Policy Council. She has a PHD in Artificial Intelligence from Utrecht University (2004), was appointed Wallenberg Scholar in 2024, is member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA), and a Fellow of the European Artificial Intelligence Association (EURAI), and of ELLIS (European Laboratory of Learning and Intelligent Systems). She is also co-chair of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems 2.0, member of the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), of the UNESCO’s expert group on the implementation of AI recommendations, the OECD’s Expert group on AI, and founder of ALLAI, the Dutch AI Alliance. She has been a member of the United Nations Advisory Body on AI, the EU’s High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, co-chair of the WEF’s Global Future Council on AI, and leader of UNICEF's guidance for AI and children. Her new book “The AI Paradox” is planned for publication in 2025.

Marko Grobelnik - Josef Stefan Institute Artificial Intelligence Lab - Co-Lead

Marko Grobelnik is a researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Focused areas of expertise are Machine Learning, Data/Text/Web Mining, Network Analysis, Semantic Technologies, Deep Text Understanding, and Data Visualization. Marko co-leads Artificial Intelligence Lab at Jozef Stefan Institute, cofounded UNESCO International Research Center on AI (IRCAI), and is the CEO of Quintelligence.com specialized in solving complex AI tasks for the commercial world. He collaborates with major European academic institutions and major industries such as Bloomberg, British Telecom, European Commission, Microsoft Research, New York Times, OECD. Marko is co-author of several books, co-founder of several start-ups and is/was involved into over 100 EU funded research projects in various fields of Artificial Intelligence. Significant organisational activities include Marko being general chair of LREC2016 and TheWebConf2021 conferences. Marko represents Slovenia in OECD AI Committee (AIGO/ONEAI), in Council of Europe Committee on AI (CAHAI/CAI), NATO (DARB), and Global Partnership on AI (GPAI). In 2016 Marko became Digital Champion of Slovenia at European Commission.