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Laura Rosenbaun

Conversation Design Lead, General Motors

Laura Rosenbaun is currently the Conversation Design Lead at General Motors, leading a team of Conversation Designers covering GM’s current and upcoming conversational experiences. She has extensive research and design experience, for both in and out of vehicle interactions that are multimodal, voice-forward, and voice-only. Laura holds a PhD on Linguistics and Computer-Mediated Communication from the University of Haifa, Israel.

Jeff Blankenburg

Principal Technical Evangelist, Amazon

Today, he works on the Amazon Alexa team helping developers make Alexa even smarter. Jeff has also spoken at conferences all over the world, including London, Munich, India, Tokyo, Sydney, and New York, covering topics ranging from software development technologies to soft skill techniques. He also serves as an organizer for the Stir Trek conference.

Joel Crabb

Vice President, Architecture and Chief Architect, Target

Joel Crabb serves as Vice President, Architecture, and Chief Architect of the Target Corporation. He is a digital retail transformation specialist that has led the agile, product and technical architecture vision within two iconic retailers, Target and Best Buy. At Target, he created the Target Retail Platform, which transformed Target from complete outsourced technology to a technology leader in retail. In his years at Best Buy, he led the rebuilding of BestBuy.com into a cloud centric ecommerce platform, enabling 200% growth over four years. He is a graduate (B.S. in Electrical Engineering) of Washington University in St. Louis, (M.S., Nuclear Engineering) the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and (M.B.A.) the University of Minnesota.

Dominique Essig

VP and General Manager of Conversational Commerce, Walmart

Dominique (who also goes by Dom) is a creative and passionate product and operations leader with more than 18 years of online experience both in North American and Global product management, customer experience and operations, and software development. She has led and managed the product management, UX design, engineering, data science, IT, analytics and insights, and customer service functions with revenue and cost directed responsibilities.  Currently, Dom oversees the Conversational Commerce team for Walmart. In this role she is responsible for all parts of Walmarts conversational experiences including Voice and Text Commerce. Responsible for changing how people interact and shop with Walmart. 

Dom was previously the Chief Product Officer of Jetblack, a members-only shopping service that was the first portfolio company within Store Nº8, the incubation arm of Walmart. She joined Walmart through their acquisition of Bonobos where she was the Chief Experience Officer. Prior to that she was VP of product and user experience at Gilt Group, and spent 12 years leading product teams at Travelocity. Dominique graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Duke University where she also served as captain of their NCAA Women's Varsity Volleyball team. She currently lives in Larchmont, NY with her husband and two sons.

Anil Lewis

Executive Director, Federation of the Blind

Anil Lewis is currently employed as the executive director for Blindness Initiatives for the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), located in Baltimore, Maryland, he coordinates outreach, marketing, and fund raising activities for a national nonprofit organization. He leads a dynamic team of individuals responsible for the creation, development, implementation, and replication of innovative projects and programs throughout a nationwide network of affiliates that work to positively affect the education, employment, and quality of life of all blind people.  

As the director of Advocacy and Policy for the NFB, Lewis was responsible for a variety of public policy and strategic programs. Most notably, he was the legislative lead of the NFB’s efforts to repeal Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, an obsolete provision that allows employers to pay workers with disabilities less than the federal minimum wage. As the director of Strategic Communications for the NFB, Lewis coordinated the public relations campaign for the NFB’s Blind Driver Challenge™, an innovative research project to develop nonvisual access technology that made it possible for a blind person to safely and independently operate an automobile.

Ryan Steelberg

President & Co-Founder, Veritone

Ryan Steelberg is a seasoned technology executive and pioneer of digital and data-driven businesses.  He is currently the co-founder and President of Veritone, Inc., a public company on NASDAQ. He also serves on its Board of Directors. Previously, he served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Brand Affinity Technologies, Inc.  Prior to that, Mr. Steelberg served as the Head of Broadcast at Google Inc.  From 2002 to 2007, he was the co-founder and President of dMarc Broadcasting, an advertising company that was acquired by Google Inc. in 2006.  From 1998 to 2000, he served as President and CEO of 2CAN Media, a company that was acquired by CMGi.   From 1995 to 1998 he served as President of AdForce, a company that was also acquired by CMGi in September of 1999, after its IPO earlier that year.

Noelle Silver Russell

Global Partner, AI and Analytics, IBM

Noelle Silver Russell is a multi-award-winning technologist and entrepreneur who specializes in advising companies on emerging technology, cloud, AI and Web 3.0. She has led teams at NPR, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon Alexa, and is a consistent champion for public understanding of the ethical use of AI and tech based on her work building some of the largest AI Models in the world. She is the founder of AI Leadership Institute and serves as an executive at IBM. She was recently awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award for Artificial Intelligence as well as VentureBeat’s Women in AI Responsibility and Ethics award.

Carter Calle

Messaging & AI Strategy, IHG Hotels & Resorts

Carter has over 20 years of experience as a customer service professional in organizations of various sizes. Most recently, he spent 8 years managing chat strategy and operations first for Time Warner Cable and then at Comcast. He deployed and integrated new chat platforms and chat bots at both companies. At Comcast, he led the effort to expand into messaging in the form of SMS chat. He also led the pilot and eventual deployment of Apple Business Chat. Carter lives in Alexandria, VA with his wife Beth and their two labs. He enjoys travel, cooking, concerts and boating.

Yin-Juei Chang

Lead Experience Researcher, Best Buy

Yin-Juei (pronounced “Ing Ray”) is a research scientist, a leader, a strategic thinker, and an advocate of ethical research. Starting as a neuroscientist and developmental psychologist, her interests in understanding human behaviors have taken her from academia through nonprofit to tech. Her work with adolescents and young adults impacted by cancer has ignited her passion for research around health and wellbeing. She has worked across diverse-age populations - from babies, adolescents, and adults to seniors. Her work at Best Buy as a Lead Researcher has been focusing on health tech for seniors and consumer health. She holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology and a MSc in Neuroscience.

Jordan-Mirrer

Director, Interactive Games, Sony Entertainment

A writer by training, designer by practice, and developer by necessity, Jordan is a leader in the interactive voice space. He initially stumbled into voice design with a little demo project for Jeopardy! that turned into one of the most popular games for Alexa. Jordan went on to build and lead a team at Sony Pictures to produce more voice games for brands including Wheel of Fortune, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Ghostbusters, Barbie, and more. Jordan now leads interactive licensing for Sony's Game Show division with a special interest in emerging platforms.

Evan Macmillan

CEO, Gridspace

Evan has been an entrepreneur most of his life. Previously, he co-founded Zappedy, a payments technology company that was backed by Eric Schmidt's venture fund and acquired by Groupon. His other technology projects have been covered by the WSJ and PBS. Evan's patents include an HCI invention and a bank infrastructure capability. He has an engineering bachelor's from Stanford in Product Design.

Shyamala Prayaga

Senior Software Product Manager, NVIDIA

Shyamala is a seasoned conversational AI expert. Having led initiatives across connected homes, automotive, and wearables - just to name a few, she's put her work on research into usability, accessibility, speech recognition, and multimodal voice user interfaces, and has even been published internationally across publications like Forbes. Outside of her research, she's spent the last 18 years designing mobile, web, desktop, and smart TV interfaces and has most recently joined NVIDIA to own their roadmap for Speech AI tools.

Olga Howard

Information Architect & Innovation Manager, PBS

Olga Howard is a designer focused on innovation and strategy. In her current role she manages the Metadata for Content Discovery program at PBS where she’s moving the needle towards voice discoverability.

Davar Ardalan

Executive Producer of Audio, National Geographic

Davar Ardalan is National Geographic's executive producer of audio, where she oversees the award winning podcast series, "Overheard”, the narrative limited series "Into the Depths" as well as new forays into spatial audio via Nat Geo's Soundbank. Prior to this, Ardalan was deputy director of the Presidential Innovation Fellowship Program in Washington D.C. and before that a veteran journalist at NPR News for two decades. In May 2014, Davar was the recipient of an Ellis Island Medal of Honor, for individual achievement and for promoting cultural unity. In Fall 2021, through her work at IVOW, (Intelligent Voices of Wisdom) Ardalan launched a conversational AI scholar on Google Assistant to preserve the wisdom and work of her late mother, Islamic scholar, Dr. Laleh Bakhtiar into 21-century voice technology. In March 2022, Ardalan's team at National Geographic’s Overheard were honored at the Ambies for Best Knowledge, Science and Tech Podcast. The team also won three Anthem Awards in February 2022 and in May 2022, Overheard received a Webby, in the category of Diversity and Inclusion in Podcast.

Roger Kibbe

Senior Developer Evanglist, Samsung

Roger is a senior developer evangelist for Samsung's conversational AI products. He is also a co-founder of Niftorian which is enabling artists to thrive in the world of Metaverse and NFTs.

Greg Bennett

Director of Conversation Design, Salesforce

Greg Bennett is Director of Conversation Design at Salesforce, where he founded and leads the company’s first dedicated Conversation Design practice since its inception. As a sociolinguist, he shepherds a product and design vision at Salesforce that helps teams across the entire product portfolio create inclusive experiences that feel natural, helpful, and meaningful, and manages an international team of Conversation Designers who work with Salesforce’s Product leaders to define the future of conversational AI.