Co-Founder

Corinne Vigreux is co-founder of TomTom, a location technology specialist on a mission to create the most innovative technologies to help shape tomorrow’s mobility and create a safe, connected, autonomous world free of congestion and emissions.

Voted one of the top 50 most inspirational women in European tech, Corinne champions women in the workforce and advocates passionately for improved social mobility through education. In 2018, she launched CODAM, a tuition-free, nonprofit coding college in Amsterdam, because she believes coding is the engine for innovation that is driving the world forward faster than ever before. CODAM’s learning system is designed to unleash talent and open doors to new opportunities, and its mission is to help a new generation shape the future. Corinne is passionate about education, maximizing young people’s potential and social mobility.

Additionally, Corinne is a member of the supervisory board of takeaway.com NV and Groupe ILIAD, a member of the supervisory board of the Dutch National Opera & Ballet and an advisor to the Amsterdam Economic Board. She was made Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur in 2012 and Officer in the Royal Order of Orange-Nassau in 2016.

Dr. Werner Vogels is Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s customer-centric technology vision.

As one of the forces behind Amazon’s approach to cloud computing, he is passionate about helping young businesses reach global scale, and transforming enterprises into fast-moving digital organizations.

Vogels joined Amazon in 2004 from Cornell University where he was a distributed systems researcher. He has held technology leadership positions in companies that handle the transition of academic technology into industry. Vogels holds a PhD from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.

Hui Xiong is a Professor at Rutgers University, and is currently on leave and serving as head of Business Intelligence Lab and Talent Intelligence Center at Baidu Inc. His research interests include data mining, mobile computing, and their applications in business. He has authored over 200 research articles, and co-edited or coauthored 4 books including the widely used Encyclopedia of GIS, which has been recognized as the Top 10 Most Popular Computer Science Book authored by Chinese scholars at Springer. Dr. Xiong has served as chair/co-chair for many international conferences in data mining, including a Program Co-Chair (2013) and a General Co-Chair (2015) for the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), and a Program Co-Chair of the Research Track (2018) and the Industry Track (2012) for the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). Dr. Xiong’s research has generated substantive impact beyond academia. He is an ACM distinguished scientist and has been honored by the 2018 Ram Charan Management Practice Award as the Grand Prix winner from the Harvard Business Review, the 2017 IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Award, and the ICDM-2011 Best Research Paper Award.

Stuart Russell is a pioneer in the understanding and uses of artificial intelligence (AI), its long-term future, and its relation to humanity. He also is a leading authority on robotics and bioinformatics.

Stuart Russell is the author or coauthor of three books on knowledge, reasoning, and machine learning, including the standard textbook on artificial intelligence. Stuart Russell is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC-Berkeley and Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at UC-San Francisco.

Artificial intelligence. AI is a machine’s ability to perceive its environment and use that information to maximise its chance at succeeding at some goal. All of the technologies behind artificial intelligence are evolving at exponential rates and are just now beginning to rocket up the curve. Soon artificially intelligent machines will be doing things we can barely conceive, in virtually every area of human business, life, and culture. Few people understand this future better than Stuart Russell, who wrote the standard textbook on AI (with coauthor Peter Norvig), now in its third edition.

Robotics. Stuart Russell is also a leading researcher in the practical applications of machine intelligence. If AI is the brain of the machine of the future, the robot is its body. Robots are taking over more and more functions that once required a human actor, with far-reaching consequences — and opportunities — for people, businesses, and society as a whole. He has focused recently on the threat of autonomous weaponry.

Biological information. As an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery, Stuart has been researching computational physiology, with a current focus on Intensive Care Unit monitoring systems. He is a leader in the development of technologies that make sense of biological data and that apply this information in ways that advance human health.

Credentials. In addition to the positions already mentioned, Stuart Russell holds the SmithZadeh Chair in Engineering at UC-Berkeley and is Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Council on AI and Robotics. He is the recipient of many awards and held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris from 2012 to 2014. He is a researcher at a number of research centers, including the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR), the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), and the Synthetic Biology Institute (SBI). He is the founder and Vice-President of Bayesian Logic, Inc., a data analysis start-up under contract with the UN to build a new Nuclear Test Ban Treaty global monitoring system.

Chief Scientist

Fernanda is an engineering executive with 20 years of industry experience. She is currently a consultant and an advisor on issues related to scalability of infrastructure and organizations. Her most recent job was as a Director at Facebook where she spent 7 years leading teams of up to 200 people leading the Production Engineering engagements with the Facebook family of apps, Advertising, Growth and Machine Learning. Fernanda is originally from Brazil, and prior to Facebook, Fernanda worked at Google Zurich for 6 years, IBM Brazil and other smaller companies. Fernanda has also been a Free Software advocate for over 15 years, and is one of the members of Free Software Foundation Europe.

President and CEO

Dr. Larry Heck is the CEO of Viv Labs and SVP and Head of Bixby North America at Samsung. From 2014-2017, he was a Research Director at Google, leading an advanced Dialogue R&D effort behind the Google Assistant. From 2009-­2014, he was the Chief Scientist of the Microsoft Speech products team and later a Distinguished Engineer in Microsoft Research. In 2009, he co­-founded the initiative that led to Microsoft’s Cortana personal assistant. From 2005-2009, he was Vice President at Yahoo! responsible for Search and Advertising quality. From 1998-2005, he was with Nuance Communications and served as Vice President of R&D. He began his career as a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute (1992-1998) initially in acoustics and later in speech research with the Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory. Funded by the US government’s NSA and DARPA, his SRI Speaker Recognition team achieved the first significant success with deep neural networks in speech processing in the 1998 National Institute of Standards and Technology Speaker Recognition evaluation.

Dr. Heck received the PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1991. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, published 150+ scientific papers and holds 50+ United States patents. He was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni at Georgia Tech and received the Distinguished Engineer Award from the Texas Tech University Whitacre College of Engineering.

Specialties: machine learning (ML), deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), dialogue systems, speech recognition, speaker recognition/voice authentication, web search, online advertising, signal processing, acoustics.

Chief Digital Officer

Former Vice President

Neelie Kroes has served as a Director since May 2016. Ms. Kroes is the former Vice President of the European Commission, European Commissioner for Competition and European Commission for Digital Agenda. Ms. Kroes served as Commissioner for Competition from 2004 to 2010 and as Vice President and Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society from 2010 to 2014. Prior to joining the European Commission, Ms. Kroes served in the Dutch House of Representatives and as State Secretary and Cabinet Minister.

She is currently a member of the Global Policy Advisory Board of Uber Technologies, Inc. She is also a member of the Advisory Board of Bank of America Merrill Lynch and a member of the Finance Committee of Rijksmuseum Fonds (Amsterdam). Ms. Kroes previously served on the boards of Lucent Netherlands, AB Volvo and McDonald’s Netherlands and was the chairperson of Nyenrode University. Ms. Kroes received her M.S. in Economics from Erasmus University.

JoAnn C. Stonier serves as chief data officer for Mastercard, charged with delivering on both the promise and protections of data. She oversees the curation, maintenance and management of the company’s strong data assets as Mastercard increasingly looks to deepen the value it can provide its merchant, banking and government customers and cardholders through its analytics capabilities.
Reinforcing the critical imperative of putting consumers and their privacy at the center of the data strategy at Mastercard, JoAnn previously served as the company’s chief information governance & chief privacy officer. In that role she was responsible for worldwide privacy and information governance as well as leading regulatory engagement in this area.

Prior to joining Mastercard in 2008, JoAnn was the chief privacy officer for American Express. She also held various roles with the company, including chief operating officer, American Express Tax & Business Services; vice president, acquisition integration; and vice president & assistant to the chairman. JoAnn has worked at Waldenbooks, Inc., PepsiCo and started her career as an auditor for PriceWaterhouse Coopers.
JoAnn often speaks on the need for balancing data innovation and privacy, and has been recognized as an innovative leader in data and privacy by the Aspen Institute, the United Nations and the Information Governance Initiative. JoAnn was instrumental in the creation of Trūata, a trust co-founded by Mastercard and IBM that offers a new approach to handling data anonymization in order to meet the data protection standard established by the EU-General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). JoAnn currently serves on the Trūata board.

In addition to her work at Mastercard, JoAnn is an adjunct professor at Pratt Institute, where she teaches business strategy and international business in the Design Management Master’s program; she has served on the boards of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, the Center for Information Policy Leadership and the Information Accountability Foundation.

JoAnn received her Juris Doctorate from St. John’s University and her Bachelor of Science degree from St. Francis College. She holds memberships in the Bar of the State of New York and the Bar of the State of New Jersey. She is based in Purchase, N.Y.

COO

Anne Marie Neatham is chief operating officer (COO) at Ocado Technology, the division that powers Ocado, the world’s largest online only grocery retailer. As COO of Ocado Technology, Anne Marie leads the creation and organisational development of Ocado Technology’s centres in UK, Poland, Barcelona and Sofia.
An Irish Ex-Pat, She completed a BSc in Computer Science at University College Cork before starting work as a software engineer and has worked in various technical roles in Ireland, the US, Germany and the UK. Anne Marie joined Ocado in 2001, to lead the development of early in-house support applications and has since lead the development of various applications in Ocado as well as opening Ocado’s first off shore development centre in Poland.

Anne Marie also leads the Code for Life initiative, at the heart of which is Rapid Router, a free and comprehensive teaching resource for coding in primary schools. Rapid Router is the first in a series of educational resources being created by Ocado Technology based on real life challenges within its business to teach young people to code and to inspire them to take up a career in a technical field. We are very proud of having recently topped 100K users of this application.

Gary Marcus, scientist, bestselling author, and entrepreneur, was CEO and Founder of the machine-learning startup Geometric Intelligence, recently acquired by Uber, and is known for his provocative and bold claims in artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Trained by Steven Pinker, he received his PhD at MIT at age 23. His professional research, published in leading journals such as Science, Nature, Cognition, and Artificial Intelligence, has focused on the foundations of cognition in humans, animals and machines, spanning fields from developmental psychology to neuroscience to genetics to artificial intelligence. A special interest has been on the challenge of endowing machines with common sense.

He is also well-known for his writing for the general public, including frequent essays and op-eds for The New Yorker and The New York Times. His books include The Algebraic Mind, The Birth of the Mind, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, The New York Times Bestseller, Guitar Zero and The Future of the Brain: Essays By The World’s Leading Neuroscientists.

In a 2012 essay for The New Yorker, he was perhaps the first person to publicly criticize deep learning, drawing on arguments he developed in his 2001 technical book The Algebraic Mind. More recently, in a 2018 arXiv article, Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal, he asked whether deep learning might be “approaching a wall.” The challenges he laid out there were covered everywhere from The
New York Times to Wired to The Financial Times and Wall Street Journal.

In another provocative 2012 essay, Moral Machines, Marcus was the first to adapt “trolley problems” to driverless cars, anticipating much recent research on the ethics of AI. His next book, REBOOT: Getting to AI We Can Trust, to be published by Pantheon in Fall 2019, co-authored with Ernie Davis, calls for a fundamental rethinking of current approaches to artificial intelligence.

VP Analytics & AI

Astrid Undheim is VP of Analytics & AI in Telenor Research, with responsibility for the AI research agenda in Telenor Group. She has a telecommunication background and has been in Telenor since finishing her PhD at NTNU in 2009. Astrid and her team has been part of establishing the Norwegian Open AI-lab at NTNU, and her team is working with NTNU researchers and students to advance AI methods and make it applicable to industry.