Organizers

Andrea Stefanucci

Andrea Stefanucci is Head of Product Management, AI Research at J.P. Morgan in the New York office. Andrea has 15 years of experience in strategy, innovation, AI and product management in the financial services industry.

Previously, Andrea was a Senior Engagement Manager at McKinsey and Company, providing strategic consulting to some of the world’s largest financial institutions. Prior to that, Andrea worked at Samsung, Bain and Accenture in internal strategy, innovation and management consulting roles.

Andrea holds an MS in Computer Engineering from University of Pisa and an MBA from INSEAD.

Sherin Mathews

Sherin Mathews is a Principal AI Research Scientist within the Chief Digital Innovation Team at U.S. Bank. In this role, she is responsible for driving innovative solutions on the intersection of AI and financial services. Mathews is a repeated and requested industry speaker on her research papers in areas of machine learning, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. Prior to her role at U.S. Bank, Mathews held research positions at McAfee, Canon Inc., and Intel Corporation. Mathews has a BSEE degree, with honors, from the University of Mumbai and an MS in electrical and computer engineering focused in signal processing from the State University of New York, College at Buffalo. Additionally, Mathews has an MSEE and a Ph.D. in machine learning from the University of Delaware.

Bjorn Austraat

Bjorn Austraat brings more than two decades of diverse experience in taking complex business problems and finding pragmatic, profitable solutions to them through machine learning, AI and other technologies.

Currently, he serves as SVP and Head of AI Acceleration at Truist where he is building out the new AI & Analytics Accelerator (A3) to enable innovation and accelerate scalable solution deployment for AI and analytics across the enterprise. The Accelerator will provide a complete incubation environment including open source and commercial software, AI-optimized hardware, design thinking and Agile methodologies as well as synthetic data to support and empower teammates across Truist to grow ideas from early stage to MVP to fully deployed solutions.

Formerly, Bjorn was SVP for Agile AI at Wells Fargo, Global Cognitive Finance Leader with IBM for a top-3 International Bank and the Global Leader for Cognitive Visioning and Strategy for IBM Watson, where he provided strategic direction for marquee engagements including H&R Block and Vodafone.

Prior to joining IBM, Bjorn held a number of senior leadership roles in companies ranging from Silicon Valley startups to large, multinational consulting enterprises working with companies such as Apple, AT&T, Microsoft and Ford.

Samuel Assefa

Samuel Assefa is Head of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at U.S. Bank. Prior to joining U.S. Bank, Sammy was an Executive Director in the J.P. Morgan AI Research team and a VP of AI/ML Data Science at Barclays. Sammy completed his PhD research in Computational Biology and analysis of large scale genomic data at the University of Cambridge. He also has a MSc in Information Systems and data mining. Prior to his corporate career, he was a post doctoral research fellow in Population Genomics at the University of London, where he holds a research post as a visiting lecturer in Bioinformatics.