Invited Speakers

As a Research Scientist and Team Lead at Google DeepMind, Lora Aroyo is at the forefront of data-centric AI, focusing on engineering high-quality data to fuel AI systems evaluation. Her team developed novel metrics and methodologies to rigorously assess both human and machine-generated data. This work is foundational to ensuring the safety, reliability, and fairness of AI evaluations across a wide spectrum of capabilities. Lora and her team are recognized for developing the CrowdTruth and GRASP frameworks, which leverage diverse human perspectives and disagreement for providing pluralistic alignment for machine learning models - challenging the traditional paradigm of a single "ground truth". Before joining Google, Lora was a professor of computer science at VU University Amsterdam, where she led the User-Centric Data Science research group. There, her team published data-centric advancements in various application fields from digital humanities to medicine. This influential work was pivotal in adapting the IBM Watson system for medical applications and earned four IBM Faculty Awards. Her experience also includes serving as Chief Scientist for the New York-based startup Tagasauris and holding leadership roles and serving on organizing committees for major conferences series, including Human Computation (HCOMP), User Modelling (UMAP), Semantic Web, TheWebConf (WWW), CHI, AAAI, ACL, and NeurIPS.

 David Rothschild is an economist at Microsoft Research in New York City and has a Ph.D. in applied economics from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written extensively, in both the academic and popular press. His work pushes the boundaries on varying data and methods: polling, prediction markets, social media and online data, and large behavioral and administrative data. His work focuses on solving practical and interesting questions including: mapping and updating public opinion, the market for news, effect of advertising, finance, and an economist take on public policy. David is also a Co-PI for PennMap at University of Pennsylvania.