The Speakers

Izhak Shafran is a researcher at Google working on various topics in deep learning including speech recognition and natural language understanding. Before joining Google, he was a faculty at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) and the Johns Hopkins Univeristy (JHU). He received his Ph.D. at the University of Washington Seattle. During his academic career, he was a recipient of NIH Career Development Award, Google Faculty Award, IBM Faculty Award, Intel Faculty Award and several NIH and NSF research grants. He has served as an invited participant on NSF review committees and on NIH advisory panels.

A. Baki Kocaballi is a human-computer interaction design researcher, lecturer, and artist. He has a PhD degree in Interaction Design (University of Sydney), Masters degree in Information Systems (METU), and Bachelor degree in City and Regional Planning (METU). Currently, he works as Lecturer in Interaction Design at the School of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering & IT, University of Technology Sydney. He is also Honorary Research Fellow at Macquarie University. Prior to joining UTS, he worked as a research fellow at the Centre for Health Informatics of Macquarie University, where he performed research on human-AI interaction and user experience of artificially intelligent conversational interfaces.