Organizers

Erik T. Mueller is a computer scientist and author of the books Commonsense Reasoning (Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann) and Daydreaming in Humans and Machines (Ablex). He is a Senior Director and Senior Distinguished Engineer at Capital One. Previously, he was a member of the IBM team that developed the Watson question answering system that won on the Jeopardy! game show. He received the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Feigenbaum Prize with the team. Before that, he worked at Morgan Stanley in the Analytical Proprietary Trading, Fixed Income Research, and Market Risk departments. He holds 30 patents and has published five books, two book chapters, and 40 papers, including two articles in the journal Artificial Intelligence. He was co-chair and co-organizer of three IJCAI Workshops on Cognitive Knowledge Acquisition and Applications (Cognitum). He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science from UCLA and an S.B. in computer science and engineering from MIT.

Joan Bruna is an Associate Professor at Courant Institute, New York University (NYU), in the Department of Computer Science, Department of Mathematics (affiliated) and the Center for Data Science. He belongs to the CILVR group and to the Math and Data groups. From 2015 to 2016, he was Assistant Professor of Statistics at UC Berkeley and part of BAIR (Berkeley AI Research). Before that, he worked at FAIR (Facebook AI Research) in New York. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Courant Institute, NYU. He completed his PhD in 2013 at Ecole Polytechnique, France. Before his PhD he was a Research Engineer at a semiconductor company, developing real-time video processing algorithms. Even before that, he did a MsC at Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan in Applied Mathematics (MVA) and a BA and MS at UPC (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona) in both Mathematics and Telecommunication Engineering. For his research contributions, he has been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship (2018), a NSF CAREER Award (2019), a best paper award at ICMLA (2018) and the IAA Outstanding Paper Award.

Tom Goldstein is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research lies at the intersection of machine learning and optimization, and targets applications in computer vision and signal processing. He works at the boundary between theory and practice, leveraging mathematical foundations, complex models, and efficient hardware to build practical, high-performance systems. He designs optimization methods for a wide range of platforms ranging from powerful cluster/cloud computing environments to resource limited integrated circuits and FPGAs. Before joining the faculty at Maryland, Tom completed his PhD in Mathematics at UCLA, and was a research scientist at Rice University and Stanford University. He has been the recipient of several awards, including SIAM’s DiPrima Prize, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, and a Sloan Fellowship.

Jianpeng Xu is a Staff Data Scientist at Personalization team in WalmartLabs, focusing on improving user shopping experiences by developing personalization and recommendation systems using learning-to-rank techniques. Previously, he worked at eBay on price optimization, NLP, and large-scale anomaly detection. Jianpeng received his Ph.D from Michigan State University in 2017. His research focused on Multi-task Learning and its application on Spatio-temporal data mining, online learning, and learning-to-rank techniques. Jianpeng has published his work on prestige journals and conferences such as TKDE, KDD, IJCAI, ICDM, SDM, IEEE Bigdata, and received the Best Poster Award from Doctoral Forum on SDM, 2016 and Best Paper Award from IEEE BigData, 2016. He is actively serving as Program Committees for conferences such as KDD, AAAI, IEEE BigData, IJCAI and reviewers for TKDE, Pattern Recognition, TNNLS, Neurocomputing, BMC Bioinformatics, etc..

Senthil Kumar (primary organizer) is the Chief ML Scientist at the Center for Machine Learning at Capital One where he applies Machine Learning and AI to various business problems. Prior to joining Capital One, he was at Bell Laboratories where he developed new technologies and managed several successful products that have been licensed around the world. He has published over 30 papers and holds 6 patents. Most recently, he co-organized the 2020 KDD Workshop on Machine Learning in Finance, and the 2020 NeurIPS Workshop on Fair AI in Finance..

C. Bayan Bruss is the director of Applied Machine Learning research at Capital One’s Center For Machine Learning. His team is currently focused on Graph Machine Learning, Decision Theory, Machine Learning for Data and Privacy and Explainable AI. Prior to Capital One Bayan has over a decade of experience in academia, startups and consulting. He has participated in the organizing committees and program committees of several conferences and workshops at KDD, ICAIF, and NeurIPs. He holds an Adjunct Position at Georgetown University.

Oleg Rokhlenko is a Science Manager at Amazon Alexa Shopping, leading a science team specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Conversational AI for voice-activated shopping assistant agents. Before joining Amazon, Oleg was a Senior Research Scientist in Yahoo Labs, focusing on ML, NLP and Community Question Answering. Prior to that, Oleg was a Research Staff Member in IBM Research. Oleg holds a PhD from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and has numerous publications in top-tier conferences in the relevant fields. Oleg also serves on the program committee of the leading ML, NLP, and IR conferences such as NIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, SIGIR, WSDM, The Web Conference, and more.

Sameena Shah is a Managing Director in the AI Research organization at J.P. Morgan. She is a highly accomplished technology leader with over 20 years of educational and industry experience in engineering, AI, and leading development teams that created award winning and high business value AI technologies for financial, risk, news, and legal verticals. Previously, Sameena was Managing Director, Head of Data Science at S&P Global Ratings where she led the firm’s strategy and development for Augmented Intelligence. Prior to that, Sameena worked at Thomson Reuters for seven years in roles of increasing responsibility that involved building state of the art AI systems that resulted in business growth and operational efficiencies. Sameena is also the Founder and CEO of Aylan Analytics LLC, and has worked at Yahoo! Research, a NYC based hedge fund, an International hedge fund, and a global startup. Sameena has a PhD in Distributed Machine Learning and a Masters in Computer Science from IIT Delhi. She is the winner of the top PhD in the country award, Cloudera top AI/ML application award, several best paper awards and numerous innovation based recognitions. She has contributed 50+ Publications, and 20+ Patents.

Oluwatobi Olabiyi is currently a Senior Engineering Manager for Multi-modal Conversational AI at Nvidia. His research interests are in the areas of sequential decision making under uncertainty, and include spoken dialogue, NLP, machine translation, dialogue management, NLG, neural generative dialogue, adversarial networks, and reinforcement learning. Before joining Nvidia, he was a senior ML research manager for conversation AI at Capital One and a senior research scientist at Toyota Research Institute. His background is in Signal Processing for Cognitive Communication Systems and earned his MS and PhD from Prairie View (Texas) A&M University. He has co-authored several peer-reviewed articles published in international conferences and highly referred journals.

Svitlana Vyetrenko is an AI Research Director at JP Morgan Chase. She holds a PhD in Applied and Computational Mathematics from California Institute of Technology. She was previously a Vice President in Macro Linear Quantitative Research at JP Morgan Chase; and an Associate in Equity Strategies at Goldman Sachs. Her research interests broadly span applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning methods to trading; with current focus on using multi-agent simulations to model realistic markets for trading strategy and policy research. She has previously co-organized Neurips 2020 Workshop on Fair AI in Finance.

Hongxia Yang is working as the Senior Staff Data Scientist and Director in Alibaba Group. Her interests span the areas of Bayesian statistics, time series analysis, spatial-temporal modeling, survival analysis, machine learning, data mining and their applications to problems in business analytics and big data. She used to work as the Principal Data Scientist at Yahoo! Inc and Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center respectively and got her PhD degree in Statistics from Duke University in 2010. She has published more than 70 top conference and journal papers, held 9 filed US patents and is serving as the associate editor for Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry. She has been elected as Elected Members of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) in 2017 and the Chinese Institute of Electronics Young Scientist Club in 2019 respectively.

Saurabh Nagrecha is an Applied Researcher at eBay Search Science. Before joining eBay, he was Senior Machine Learning Researcher and Tech Lead at Capital One. He received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame in 2017 specializing in machine learning. His research interests span across data science and machine learning with a focus on highly imbalanced cost-sensitive systems problems. He has 6 years of experience leading projects combating fraud and money laundering in retail trading platforms, financial institutions, auto insurance and travel & expense sectors. He also has a background in teaching as an adjunct faculty member at Capital One Tech College where he led the development of courses in the area of Network Science.

Charese Smiley is an AI Research Lead on the AI Research team at J.P. Morgan. Her research interests center around natural language processing and computational linguistics. Prior to joining J.P. Morgan, Charese worked on the Vision & Language Technology team at Capital One and at Thomson Reuters, with the Research & Development group. Charese holds two patents for her research and is a winner of Turing tests for creative arts, claiming 1st prize in Dartmouth’s 2017 PoetiX competition for machine-generated sonnet most indistinguishable from human poetry. She also won the 2018 LimeriX competition for machine-generated limericks. Charese has a B.S. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University and a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Indiana University.