Invited Speakers and Panelists

Li Deng (Chief Al Officer at Vatic Investment; Former Chief Al Officer and Head of Machine Learning of Citadel; Former Chief Scientist of Al at Microsoft; Fellow of the lEEE and the Academy of Engineering of Canada; and close collaborator with Nobel Prize Laureate Geoffrey Hinton): Li Deng is the Chief AI Officer and Head of Machine Learning at Vatic Investments. He was previously the Chief AI Officer at Citadel, and the Chief Scientist of AI and Founder of the Deep Learning Technology Center at Microsoft. He has also been an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington. His technical expertise includes Artificial Intelligence, Quantitative Finance, Portfolio Construction/Optimization, High Frequency Trading, Advanced Statistics and Machine Learning, Mathematical/Statistical Modeling, Applied Computer Science, Speech Recognition, Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, Big Data Analytics, and AI for education and healthcare. He received the 2019 IEEE SPS Industrial Leader Award" for leadership in pioneering research and development on large-scale deep learning that disrupted worldwide speech recognition industry and for leadership in natural language processing and finance engineering" and the 2015 IEEE SPS Technical Achievement Award "for outstanding contributions to deep learning and to automatic speech recognition." He was named a Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE) Fellow in April 2019 in recognition for his research in deep learning and speech recognition. He authored/co-authored 6 technical books.

Steve Yang (Director of CRAFT, Associate Professor at the School of Business at Stevens Institute of Technology): Dr. Steve Yang is an Associate Professor of the School of Business at Stevens Institute of Technology. He holds a Ph.D. in Systems and Information Engineering from University of Virginia with concentration on Financial Engineering. His research has been focused on understanding markets’ irrationality and its impact on trading, portfolio, risk management, and systemic risk using decision science tools such as Markov decision processes, reinforcement learning, and other artificial intelligence (AI) methods. His research has been funded by a variety of NGOs, government agencies and industry firms such as, NSF, SWIFT, IRRC, IAAER, CFTC, DoD, Accenture, Northrop Grumman, KPMG, etc. He graduated at the top of his class with a B.S. degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Beihang University. Dr. Steve Yang is currently the Director of the Center for Research toward Advancing Financial Technologies (CRAFT—https://www.stevens.edu/school-business/craft-center/craft-center-leadership-and-affiliated-faculty) established by Stevens Institute of Technology and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). He has worked with several major federal financial regulators, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and Treasury in the capacity as either a research consultant or visiting scholar.

Randy Zhao (Founder and CEO of Onwish AI) Dr. Randy Zhao earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute in 2019, after completing a Master's degree at Yale University and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has gained diverse experience across multiple sectors. At Bain & Company, he was a founding member of Bain vector program, helping client conduct digital transformation. In the investment field, Dr. Zhao held roles at IDG Capital, focusing on private equity, and at 5Y Capital, specializing in venture capital investments. Currently, Dr. Zhao is the founder of Onwish.ai, a company dedicated to developing AI copilots for market research. His diverse experiences and expertise in AI and language technologies enable him to bridge the gap between technology development and strategic business applications. 

Jimin Huang (Founder of FinAI, Co-Founder of Chancefocus AMC): Jimin Huang is the founder of The Fin AI working group (https://thefin.ai/), an initiative dedicated to advancing open science, tooling, and model development for the financial services industry with a focus on responsible innovation. The Fin AI is now an associated member of FINOS and a collaborator with the NVIDIA AI Technology Center (NVAITC) through Hugging Face. Jimin is also an associated member of The National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM). His research spans natural language processing and computational finance, with a particular emphasis on financial large language models (LLMs) and open-source contributions. He is the organizer of the FinLLM Challenge at FinNLP-AgentScen @ IJCAI-2024 and serves as the general chair for The Joint Workshop of the 9th Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing (FinNLP), the 6th Financial Narrative Processing (FNP), and the 1st Workshop on Large Language Models for Finance and Legal (LLMFinLegal).

Matt White (Executive Director of PyTorch Foundation, GM of AI at Linux Foundation, Director of Generative AI Commons): Matt White is a distinguished expert in artificial intelligence and business, Renowned for successfully deploying large-scale AI platforms across the telecom, gaming, media, and entertainment industries. With over two decades of experience, Matt has consistently demonstrated his ability to stay ahead of the curve in technological innovation, spearheading advancements in AI applications in diverse domains. He is also the author of the soon to be released book titled "Generative AI For Business".

Christina Dan Wang (Researcher on FinGPT; Assistant Professor of Finance at NYU Shanghai; Global Network Assistant Professor at NYU): Christina Dan Wang is an Assistant Professor of Finance at NYU Shanghai and a Global Network Assistant Professor at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at NYU. Prior to joining NYU Shanghai, Wang was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at Columbia University and a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Operations Research and Financial Engineering department and at the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University.

Anwar Walid (Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering, Dept of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University): Walid, has been an adjunct professor at Columbia University since 2009. He is also an IEEE Fellow and the senior editor for the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

Walid joined Amazon in September 2021 and works in Amazon Ads where, among other things, his team builds machine learning models that predicts click-through rates for advertisement

Karl Moll (Technical Project Advocate at FINOS): Karl Moll has been a technical solutions consultant and open source advocate for 10 years. He specializes in digital modernization, API usage, technical integrations, and solutions design with a focus on developer experience & community. Currently, he is the Technical Project Advocate at FINOS (Fintech Open Source, the FSI focused org under the Linux Foundation) where he helped shepherd the launch of the AI Strategic Initiative, and was co-lead of the LLM Exploration Initiative (use case driven project focused on open source tools, benchmarks, data, etc) and active participant in the AI Readiness SIG, which recently published a draft of a open source Governance Framework focused on financial services deployment. He has been involved in digital transformation projects in government agencies, financial institutions, and tech companies of all sizes. He has recently been an active participant in several open source projects in sustainable consulting, decentralized identity, collaborative ownership of creative & technical assets, online governance, and digital wallets.