David Isbitski is Amazon's Chief Evangelist for Alexa and Echo, introducing the world to the power of Voice. He has helped launch numerous platforms and products at both Microsoft and Amazon and made a career out of helping people be successful with technology. Towards that end, he has delivered keynotes at major conferences around the world. A Jersey Shore native, David loves being near the ocean. He returns to his roots at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he graduated Cum Laude from the Honors Program with a B.A. in Information Systems.

Lauren is an AI Content + UX designer. She currently leads the AI Content Design team at Capital One, designing conversations for the Capital One skill on Alexa and for Eno, the first natural language SMS chatbot created by a U.S. bank. If you want to get her talking, ask her what she’s reading, or where she’s hoping to travel to next. Also, she loves meeting new designers and technologists! You can find her on Twitter as @laurenlookayz, and can connect with her here on LinkedIn.

As Head of The LEGO Group’s Emerging Platforms & Partnerships team as part of the Digital Consumer Engagement division, James Poulter is pursuing new technologies, platforms and partners to build digital consumer engagement with LEGO customers, shoppers and consumers on a global basis. James previously was the Social Lead for LEGO’s social network for Kids, LEGO Life – which launched globally in 2017 and has since grown to over 1m active users regularly posting their content to the world’s first global and safe social network for kids. As well as devising and developing social features such as LEGO Life’s emoji keyboard, custom characters and moderation systems, James oversaw the launch of LEGO’s global partnership with GIPHY leading the LEGO channel to accrue over 1 Billion GIF views in it’s first year.

Dr. Chiori Hori has worked on spoken language processing technologies since 1998. In 2002, she worked on spoken interactive Q&A using a real-time Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) based on Weighted Finite-State Transducer (WFST) with over-a-million word vocabulary, at NTT. She joined CMU to work on speech translation/summarization technologies in 2004 and then moved to ATR/NIC in 2007. She led the NICT ASR research group and their system to first place in the English TED talk recognition at IWSLT for three consecutive years from 2012. She invented a WFST-based cross-lingual dialog technology which was implemented on a humanoid robot ASIMO and recipe on-the-fly dialog systems at NICT. She has been working on neural network based technologies for Human-Robot communication at MERL since 2015. She is a member of the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and an editorial board of Computer Speech and Language.

Howard Lerman founded Yext in 2006 with a single goal: to build an impactful, great company with super talented people. Along the way, Yext has re-invented three industries: pay-per-call advertising, business listings synchronization, and today, digital knowledge management. With hundreds of amazingly talented employees serving many of the world’s leading businesses, Yext is on its way to realizing Howard’s original vision. Yext is Howard’s fourth software company. Howard is also Co-Founder and Chairman of Confide, a leading off-the-record messaging service.

Howard is a proud graduate of TJHSST and barely graduated from Duke University.

Cami works as a Senior Evangelist on Alexa for Amazon based in Seattle focused on Alexa Games. Since starting at Amazon in September 2017, Cami has spoken on behalf of Alexa at various conferences and workshops, including the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing, reInvent, Consumer Electronics Show, and Game Developers Conference. Cami is proud to be an advocate for diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. As a representative from the community she has spoken at over 40 different hackathons and events, most notably the GHC, the White House Tech Inclusion Summit, SXSWedu, ATECH Conference, and Google Women Engineers Conference. During her free time, Cami loves to play board games with friends, build mechanical keyboards, and quote the Office.

As Chief Digital Officer for the state of Georgia, Nikhil Deshpande leads the Office of Digital Services Georgia under the Georgia Technology Authority (GTA). Nikhil envisioned and led state government’s transition to an enterprise web-publishing platform based on Drupal, an open source content management system hosted in the cloud. The platform currently supports over 80 state agency websites. Under his direction, Georgia became the first state in the nation to use Drupal across it's enterprise and meet special needs of constituents with a range of disabilities affecting vision, hearing, motion and cognition making the platform Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 AA compliant. Nikhil strongly advocated the use of social media for Georgia.gov when using social media for government was not common, and established a presence for the state on Facebook and Twitter to quickly address citizens’ questions and concerns. Nikhil also served as adjunct faculty at the Atlanta campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design for ten years, where he taught graduate classes in Interaction Design and Game Development.