James J. Petrucci is a Director in the Corporate Department of Gibbons in New York. His practice encompasses many aspects of corporate law, including mergers and acquisitions, private equity transactions, joint ventures, and securities law. His extensive experience in private equity includes mergers and acquisitions; fund investments; structuring of funds and fund transactions; negotiation, documentation, and closing of fund acquisitions and investments; and advice in such areas as corporate law, due diligence, investment management, real estate, employment, ERISA, and tax issues. He also advises leading state pension plans and institutional investors with respect to their investments in private equity funds, real estate funds, hedge funds, and other alternative investments.
To view Mr. Petrucci’s full biography, visit: www.gibbonslaw.com/professionals/james-j-petrucci
Currently, Adam Cheyer is co-Founder and VP Engineering of Viv Labs, a startup simplifying the world by providing an intelligent interface to everything. Viv Labs was acquired by Samsung in 2016. Previously, Adam Cheyer was co-Founder and VP Engineering at Siri, Inc., a company aimed at fundamentally redesigning the face of the consumer mobile experience. In 2010, Siri was acquired by Apple, where Mr. Cheyer became a Director of Engineering in the iPhone/iOS group. Mr. Cheyer is also a Founding Member and Advisor to Change.org, the premier social network for positive social change, and a co-Founder of Sentient Technologies.
Adam serves as the Managing Director of Dreamit HealthTech, a venture fund that accelerates digital health and medtech companies. His career has focused on building early stage venture-backed healthtech companies. Adam has held various senior management roles in sales, marketing, product development, clinical affairs, operations, and general management. He co-founded five health technology companies which have collectively raised over $60M in early stage capital.
Prior to Dreamit, Adam served as CEO PhotoSonix Medical (consumer acne device), Bioconnect Systems (vascular implant) and X-SITE Medical (vascular surgical device, acquired by Maquet Getinge Group).
Adam serves on the boards of Safkan Ear and ZSX Medical. He is an active angel investor and has served on the boards of several healthtech companies. He is the co-chair of the Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technology (PACT) medical technology advisory board and serves as a Mentor in Residence for the Penn Center for Innovation. Adam was awarded the PACT MedTech Leadership Award in 2014. He is a named inventor on seven U.S. patents. Adam holds a BSE from the Wharton School and an MBA from UCLA.
Adrien Schmidt is an internationally recognized engineer, innovator, and speaker. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Aristotle, an enterprise software company that delivers a personal voice analytics assistant that uses natural language processing to convert data analytics into meaningful conversation. Adrien is also a thought leader in the AI space whose work is featured in major publications such as Forbes, Inc, HuffPo, B2C and more. He is based in San Francisco, CA, USA.
Adva Levin is an Alexa champion and the founder of Pretzel Labs, an award winning voice-first studio that creates playful experiences for kids and families. Pretzel Labs' work includes Kids Court, an Alexa based judge that settles kids fights (Top 25 Alexa skill of 2018); Freeze Dancers, a dancing game for the most energized children; and Big Talk, a platform that encourages young English learners to enjoy conversational English.
Dr. Ahmed Bouzid is Founder and CEO of Witlingo, a Washington DC based startup that builds products and solutions for Voice First devices and platforms, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana. Prior to Witlingo, Dr. Bouzid was Head of Alexa's Smart Home Product at Amazon and VP of Product and Innovation at Angel.com. Dr. Bouzid is also co-founder and Director of the Ubiquitous Voice Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to the mission of evangelizing the emerging voice interface, and author of two books on Voice User Interface design. Dr. Bouzid holds 12 patents in the Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing field, and is a visiting lecturer at Weber State University. Dr. Bouzid was recognized as a “Speech Luminary” by Speech Technology Magazine.
Alex Kaplunovich is a well-established entrepreneur, a technology leader and a worldwide presenter. He is an expert in evolving technologies, AWS Certified solutions architect. His expertise lies in the areas of Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, Serverless Architectures, Data Analytics and Databases. As a CTO of Advanced Technology Experts, Alex manages development of multiple innovative products, improves overall quality and reliability of software systems, assuring the best practices and most efficient architectures are implemented using the best technologies available. He received his B.Sc. degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and his M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1994 and 1997 respectively. Presently, Mr. Kaplunovich is finishing his PhD. In Computer Science. Mr. Kaplunovich has published numerous papers in prestigious refereed journals and refereed conference proceedings and presented at the prestigious industry and academic conferences in the areas of Cloud Computing, Machine Learning and Serverless Architectures. Alex has wife and four children.
Alex loves to break the mold and push the limits. There is no "cannot be done," only "how will it be done?" Alex has been challenged several times throughout his career by remaining on the bleeding edge, not knowing what can be done, only knowing what needs to be done. Adam is the voice agent that was created by Alex, giving birth to a new initiative that grew into a team effort and taking our company into the next generation of call centers. Alex is a rock star at work and out of work. Believe it or not, this guy is also the lead singer of his band, Ready Freddy. Alex continues to innovate and solve business issues while team building, developing, and experimenting with new, cutting edge technologies.
A rare mix of scientist and businessman, Alex is a well-regarded innovator in the field of speech and natural language processing, interactive voice response systems and behavioral informatics. He has over 20 years of leadership experience both in the corporate and entrepreneurial sides of business. His background includes working at AT&T Labs-Research, Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies and is a co-founder of Alesman. His academic achievements have gone hand in hand with his extensive research work, receiving his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University and later his MBA from the Stern School of Business, NYU. Alex lives in Los Angeles where he enjoys kayaking and sailing.
Alina Morkin is the VP of Marketing at Voices.com, the largest global online marketplace for audio and voice over products and services. With a personal belief in the power of effective, thoughtful communication to build and strengthen relationships, Alina is a trusted authority on all things related to marketing, communications and voice over.
By day, Allen is a Senior Developer at Objective Consulting, where he helps clients understand how to apply new technologies to make their lives, and the lives of their customers, better. By night, Allen is a Google Developer Expert for the Google Assistant, helping developers do much the same thing - understand Voice Agents so they can create the next generation of software and let users do new and innovative things with voice. He first became involved in voice with Google Glass, and is the co-author of the book Designing and Developing for Google Glass published by O'Reilly.
Amir Hirsh is the co-founder and CEO of Audioburst, where he drives company vision, acceleration, building, and execution. Hirsh is well-known for having founded and spearheaded many successful startup exits. Prior to Audioburst, Hirsh founded and served as CEO of Sendoo, an innovative messaging mobile service; Collactive, the first social media marketing platform (acquired by Israel Aerospace Industries); Blue Security, the only anti-spam deterring service (backed by Benchmark Capital); and Riptech, the first commercial MSSP (acquired by Symantec for $145M). Hirsh also serves as Founder and Director of Cyber Security Group.
Hirsh received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from George Mason University with honors. He resides in Tel Aviv, Israel.
As Chief Marketing Officer, 1-800-Flowers.com, Amit is responsible for leading a multi-channel marketing strategy for the brand across online, digital and social channels. Additionally, he manages innovation partnerships and provides strategic direction for the growth and development of mobile and social commerce across the company’s entire portfolio of brands. Amit has a proven track record for leading digital and performance marketing, while rapidly scaling user acquisition and revenue streams. He joined 1-800-Flowers.com in September 2011 to manage online, mobile and social marketing initiatives. Over the next several years, he was promoted to roles of increasing responsibility and was named Chief Marketing Officer in March 2017. Prior to joining the company, Amit held strategy and business development roles at FTD, Visiting Nurse Service of New York and McKinsey & Company. Under Amit’s leadership, the company continues to be at the forefront of implementing new and emerging technologies. To nurture and grow the entrepreneurial spirit across the company’s portfolio of brands, Amit oversees the company’s Digital Leadership Program, an incubator for young talent and catalyst for driving innovation throughout the organization. Amit is a member of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee for the Mobile Marketing Association. He has a master’s degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences/Liberal Studies from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts from Bowdoin College.
Amy Stapleton is Founder of Tellables, a publisher of voice first conversational stories. Apart from designing voice apps, Stapleton is a writer and editor of content for the Tellables Amazon Alexa story experiences "Tricky Genie" and "My Box of Chocolates." Stapleton retired from a career at NASA to pursue her vision of transforming talking devices into a platform for engaging new story experiences.
Amy Summers launched Pitch Publicity in 2003, in the face of a rapidly changing climate for communication and media relations. She has 20 years experience in securing publicity and developing communication strategies for influential experts in medicine, science, tech, finance and international corporations and nonprofit organizations. Summers campaigns have resulted in billions of media impressions worldwide and she’s credited as the first to strategize live media interviews at both the deepest and highest points of the planet (scientific laboratory, 63 feet beneath the sea and Mount Everest summit, 21,000 feet above sea level). She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Public Relations from the University of Florida; serves on UF Alumni Association national board of directors, UF College of Journalism and Communications Public Relations Advisory Council and produces one of the most highly ranked communications Flash Briefing for Amazon’s Alexa Skills, “The Pitch with Amy Summers.”
Ananya Sharan is the Product Manager for Pandora’s Voice Mode, a new, native smart assistant that allows listeners to control Pandora’s mobile app and enjoy new music discovery using simple voice commands. Ananya has deep experience as a Search PM and is passionate about helping customers effortlessly discover and find products they love. She has an MBA from Duke University, the Fuqua School of Business, and an undergraduate degree in CS Engineering.
Anders Brown is a passionate business leader with a focus on growing new businesses at the intersection of software, hardware and media. He has a broad range of sales, marketing, engineering and operational experience across US, Asia and Europe, including a wide range of work with corporate financing such as acquisitions, joint ventures and IPOs.
Andrea is a Technical Evangelist for Amazon Alexa. In this role, Andrea travels the world sharing stories, learnings and best practices for building voice-enabled experiences, aka Skills, with Alexa. When not coding, he enjoys composing music and mountain biking. You can reach out to him on Twitter at @muttonia.
Andreea Danielescu, Founder of Antilipsi and Head of Engineering at CivitasAI, has spent the past decade working in voice assistants, chatbots, augmented reality and gestural interfaces. She holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from University of Arizona and a PhD from Arizona State University. Previously, she worked as a Partner Engineer for Facebook Messenger and on Intel Real Speech, overseeing the design and development of a conversational coaching product for running and cycling in partnership with Oakley.
Andrew Bellavia is the Dir. of Market Development for Knowles Corp, a leading acoustic solutions provider to the hearables, smart speaker, mobile, and IoT industries. He has been personally involved in supporting the development of many innovative hearable devices including Bragi, Doppler, Nuheara, and a number of others soon to be released. Andrew is also an advocate for the role technology can play in addressing hearing loss, and in the practical use cases for voice in the convergence between hearing aids and hearables. He earned a BSEE from the Illinois Institute of Technology and an MBA from the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management. When not in the office he can usually be found running the roads of N. Illinois and the world, often photographing as he goes. His last two speaking engagements on the topic of intelligent hearables were at the Acoustic Block conference in October 2018 and at the 52Audio conference in March, both in Shenzhen, China.
Andrew Dubrov is a Senior Conversation Experience Designer at Nuance Communications. He comes from Academia (Ph.D. French Literature and Linguistics, NYU, 2017) and has worked in automating second language acquisition. As a designer, he focuses on shifting the conventions governing how we speak with machines.
Angela Stengel is the Head of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Content Ideas Lab, a team responsible for exploring fresh ideas that connect with new audiences, whatever the format or platform.
Angela led a team to launch ABC's first audio briefings for voice assistants and has worked closely with the ABC R&D team on exploring new and experimental ways for journalists to tell stories on emerging voice platforms.
As Product Development Lead for ABC Radio, Angela bridged the gap between technical and editorial, bringing together designers, engineers and broadcasters.
Applying human-centred design techniques to content projects has been part of Angela's approach for some years, a highlight being using "Jobs To Be Done" to set up ABC's first digital only podcast commissioning, a project which created three top rating podcasts including Science Vs.
Anil is the Founder, CEO of xReach.io. , where he is responsible for management, product innovation and market fulfillment strategies. Anil has been instrumental in identifying niche digital marketing needs in the life sciences and B2B publishing industries. With the introduction of the voice channel, he was able to early on realize the potential of using this channel and the underlying technological innovations, in developing highly engaging brand extensions and customer engagement solutions.
Ann has focused her career on understanding how people use speech and natural language to communicate with each other and with technology. She's held voice UI and UX roles at large corporations as well as small start-ups. As Head of UX and Design at 22otters, she designed multi-modal conversational mobile interfaces for patient self-care. At Nuance, she worked on multiple client projects, established VUI best practices based on user data, and taught others the ins and outs of voice design. She's been a VUI designer at Amazon Lab 126, and done R&D in language ID and emotion detection, retries and discourse structure. Currently Voice UI/UX Design Leader at Sound United, Ann continues her goal of creating user-centered VUI designs. She's co-author of the upcoming book Voice-First Development. Ann holds a PhD in Cognitive Science and Linguistics from UC San Diego.
Anne Weiler is CEO and co-founder of Wellpepper, a clinically-validated and award-winning platform for interactive treatment plans. Wellpepper is the winner of the Alexa Diabetes Challenge, and an early adopter of voice interfaces in healthcare. Anne previously held global product management roles at Microsoft, in new product development and emerging markets. She spent 3 years at Microsoft Russia leading the $300M Information Worker Business. Anne joined Microsoft in 2001 with the acquisition of Canadian web content management company, Ncompass Labs.
Archana Vemulapalli, General Manager, Global IS Offering Strategy, Management, and Development has end-to-end responsibility for IS offering design and co-creation with clients, offering management and development of market-led digital. Previously at IBM, Archana lead IBM's Networks Services and Project & Implementation Services globally, securely delivering agile, resilient and intelligent networks for public and private sector clients across the globe in support of their cognitive and cloud transformation. Prior to joining IBM in January 2018, Archana led next-generation technology initiatives at a variety of organizations from start-ups to major consulting firms to government, including serving as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Washington, DC. Archana is the recipient of several honors, including the Washington Business JournalÕs C-Suite Award, The Washingtonian Tech Titan Award, StateScoopÕs Golden Executive of the Year Award & Top Women in Tech Award, as well as DCÕs Top 50 Women in Tech Award.
Arek has over 10 years of experience in IT and leadership. Working in various roles at leading European tech startups LiveChat and Estimote, Arek is on the forefront of modern technology and Artificial Intelligence. As CTO at Lekta, he leads their Research and Product team delivering the highest caliber solutions to global enterprise companies. Combining industry experience, academic research and their own technology solutions—Lekta helps customers visualize, plan and execute AI and other technology driven change that results in decreased Customer Care cost burdens, high Customer Satisfaction and growth in Sales opportunities.
Ari is a veteran of the IP-communications industry. He served as president and advisor for two VoIP companies that were acquired. Also as senior executive at VocalTec Communications, the VoIP industry pioneer, and a strategy manager for Lucent Technologies. Ari currently serves on the boards at the NJ Technology Council and USPL, a multinational pharmaceutical company. He holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University, and a law degree and BA in Economics, both from Tel Aviv University.
Arte Merritt is the co-founder and CEO of Dashbot – the leading chat bot analytics platform, which has processed over 30 billion messages. Previously, he founded the mobile analytics platform, Motally, which he led to a successful exit via sale to Nokia. Arte has 18 years experience in the mobile space and over 20 in the analytics space, working with companies like Yahoo Mobile, Turner Broadcasting, and a wide variety of startups. In addition, he helped launch two accelerator programs, Turner’s Media Camp and Mobile Monday’s Momentum, and is a mentor in Orange Fab. Arte is an MIT alum.
Audrey Arbeeny is the Founder, CEO and Executive Producer of Audiobrain, widely recognized as global leaders in sonic branding. Audiobrain’s iconic sonic branding initiatives includes Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Google, Holland America Line, IBM, KIA Motors Corp, Microsoft, Bayer Healthcare, Logitech, Whirlpool, Toshiba, and many others. Audrey is on the Board of Governors of the National Academy of Television Arts and Science New York Chapter, and has been Music Supervisor for nine Olympic Broadcasts with NBC, for which she has received 2 Emmy Awards. With over 20 years specializing in sonic branding, Audiobrain is at the forefront of emerging technologies, and their sonic imprints are heard every day throughout the world. Audrey teaches and lectures on sonic branding at Pratt Institute and is a visiting lecturer and mentor of the Masters In Branding Program at School of Visual Arts, has appeared in many publications and has authored must-read articles on the use of intentional music, sound and voice.
Azi is an Alexa Developer Evangelist at Amazon. Her role involves inspiring and helping developers to build voice experiences using Alexa. She has been a developer and software consultant for a variety of products during her career. She believes we can create more engaging experiences for users when we use voice technology and she is passionate to help solving problems using these capabilities.
Barry Graubart is Head of Product for Agolo. Barry has spent his career applying technology to content to drive innovative new products. An early adopter of natural language processing and machine learning, Barry has brought AI-based products to market at the Intercontinental Exchange, Alacra, Connotate and ClearForest.
Ben Parkison is a passionate believer in the future of voice and natural language interactions with enterprise systems. As Vice President, Sales at Valence, Mr. Parkison has the benefit of speaking with customers worldwide about their digital transformation needs and opportunities. As part of this experience, he has led the design and development of the voice and chatbot strategy at Valence and is excited to share his views in support of the industry’s enterprise voice movement.
Beth Ritter-Guth is the Associate Dean of Online Learning and Educational Technology at Northampton Community College. Her current work features the Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Artificial Intelligence programming in addition to ethical hacking, cyber law, gaming, gamification, and the digital humanities. She has earned multiple awards for the use of these technologies including the Teacher of the Future award by the National Association of Independent Schools, the Nobel Teacher of Distinction Award, the Campus Leadership Team Award by Campus Technology, and most recently, the Innovator of the Year by the League of Innovation and the Leadership & Innovation award from NJEdge. My work has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Magazine, USA Today and America Online.
Bill Rogers has a unique combination of deep, hands-on technology expertise and broad-based business strategy acumen that allows him to take a unique, holistic approach to creating and managing software companies. At Orbita, he’s created the healthcare industry’s leading conversational platform to design, build, manage, and optimize HIPAA-compliant chatbot- and voice-powered virtual assistants Entities like Amgen, Mayo Clinic, and Deloitte use Orbita’s solutions and services to support digital engagement strategies that increase operational efficiencies while also improving consumer, patient, and member experiences. Rogers previously founded Ektron, a provider of Web content and digital management platforms used to create and manage unique, personalized digital experiences. The company was acquired in 2014 and merged with Episerver which recent sold for $1.1B. Rogers also co-founded one of healthcare’s first telemedicine companies.
Bob has been recognized by Amazon as an Alexa Champion and is a leading subject matter expert in the voice industry. Bob has a deep enterprise IT background that spans 20 years. Prior to VoiceXP, Bob was a RedHat Certified Engineer and considered a subject matter expert on Cloud Computing, Cloud Migration, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. Bob’s last role was as an executive at CenturyLink where he managed the Cloud Ecosystem and Evangelism Programs, Cloud Marketplace, and a product owner for Managed Services. Recently, Bob bought a water lily farm in the Missouri Ozark Mountains and relocated his family to the country.
Bonnie Canziani is an Associate Professor in the Joseph M. Bryan School of Business and Economics at The University of North Carolina Greensboro. Dr. Canziani currently teaches in the areas of service management and global/cultural issues. She holds a bachelor's degree in Spanish and Linguistics and the Masters and Doctorate in Hotel Administration from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Dr. Canziani’s research focuses on the management of customer service relationships and business profitability in various sectors including hospitality, tourism, wine, and transportation. She has studied the nexus and co-influence of customer and company in myriad ways, including host/guest relationships; customers as co-producers of service quality; customer service enhancement in hotels and wineries; and more recently, the role of voice-assisted devices such as Amazon Alexa in service encounters. Her work in service management serendipitously yielded consulting opportunities in website usability, given that websites are an additional point of customer contact with the hospitality firm. She is a Coleman Fellow in Entrepreneurship and a fellow of the Direct Selling Educational Foundation.
Bradley Metrock is CEO of Nashville-based Score Publishing, which helps creators find voice. Metrock founded podcast network VoiceFirst.FM, hosts the popular show This Week In Voice, published the audiobook Perspectives on Gender in #VoiceFirst Technology, produces the company's series ofVoiceFirst Events, and co-founded the industry association VoiceFirst.Community.Quoted by organizations as diverse as The Mayo Clinic to Forbes to Harvard Business Review, Metrock has been cited as a leading thought leader on voice-first technology and AI, speaking regularly on its profound impact on our world.
Brandon is the Founder of SKILLED, an emerging technology creative agency, headquartered in NYC. Obsessed with technology throughout his life, Brandon founded SKILLED with the mission to bend emerging technologies creatively. SKILLED develops best in class VOICE experiences for Fortune 500 brands including PepsiCo and Starbucks. SKILLED treats conversational interfaces as a true omni-channel platform, ready to be leveraged by brands in order to drive engagement, conversion, and transactions.
I have lived and worked in several countries: originally from South Africa, then 10 years in the UK, and most recently 10 years of living in New Zealand. I have worked in both startups and corporates such as Vodafone and The Carphone Warehouse. Most of my time has been in tech and communications. I have started and grown several businesses across the different countries I have lived in and love working in new tech and taking it to market to make a difference in people's lives. I'm an experienced Executive and Advisory Board Member with a demonstrated history of working in the Tech industry globally. A strong professional skilled in SaaS, Tech, Start-up Environments, Marketing Management, Strategy, High Growth businesses, and Sales. A people leader and team builder. I'm fascinated by Fintech, AI and Blockchain
Bret Kinsella is CEO, Founder and Editor of Voicebot.ai, the leading research, news and analysis source for the voice and AI industries. His Voice Insider newsletter has a select audience of industry insiders and often breaks industry news weeks before it becomes public. Bret is a frequent speaker in the U.S. and Europe and also hosts the weekly Voicebot Podcast where he interviews the entrepreneurs, engineers and executives shaping the voice technology landscape. Bret is also a practitioner in voice app development where he has contributed to the strategy and design behind several popular voice apps on Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. A past executive at Sapient and Accenture and an officer in several startups, Bret earned degrees from UCLA and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and can be found most weekends running in the mountains.
Brian Bauman is a VUI Designer for Wolters Kluwer Health, where he creates outbound IVR calls to engage patients in managing their health. As a playwright, he's written over a dozen plays which have been performed in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boulder, Colorado. He's been awarded three MacDowell Colony fellowships in playwriting. His play BUCKSHOT was published in the Brooklyn Review.
My name is Brian Plaskon, I am a product owner at Realogy, and my product is a voice assistant for real estate agents.
Brian is the Vice President of Engineering at SpinDance, a software consultancy dedicated to helping organizations developing awesome IoT products. A software craftsman and technical speaker with over 20 years of experience, Brian has helped some of the largest companies in the world adopt and ship voice-enabled products. As a "full stack IoT" engineer and business leader, Brian contributes daily to the strategy, development and support of distributed, multimodal systems. When he's not creating the future, he enjoys cooking and exploring his home state of Michigan with his family.
Brielle Nickoloff is a Lead of Product Marketing at Witlingo, a Washington D.C., based startup that builds products and solutions for Voice First devices and platforms, including Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana. Brielle earned dual Bachelor’s degrees in Linguistics and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Much of Brielle’s research in the space began with a closer look at the ways one’s emotional reaction to a voice interface is notably more inflated than reactions to other types of user interfaces. She loves to design for maximally accessible and minimally intrusive technology by leveraging the beauty of natural human language.
Brooke Hawkins is a designer in the world of voice and conversational interfaces. Her experience in the industry is vast, having designed voice experiences for healthcare institutions, nonprofits, Fortune 500 companies, and startups. Brooke’s work sits at the intersection of designing useful and meaningful interactions, as well as creating scholarship around the ethics surrounding our future of living in a voice interface mediated world. Brooke has spoken at the IA Summit and the Voice Summit, as well as a variety of industry podcasts like Machine Yearning, VoiceFirstFM and more. Brooke also is committed to training and educating a new generation of talent, and co-authored the Career Foundry course Intro to VUI design.
Bruce Epstein is head of US operations for AEBIS, a Paris-based boutique automation services firm. Bruce spent the first half of his career delivering complex real-time embedded systems at companies including Allen-Bradley, Digital Equipment, Alcatel, and Mannesmann – first in the US and then in France. In 2004, he joined AEBIS in Paris, applying his acquired skills in complex technical and organizational projects. Notable clients include BNP-Paribas, CNP Assurances, Natixis, Reuters, Société Générale, and Travel Technology. Since 2016, Bruce has been based in NY. Bruce holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester and an MS in Computer Engineering from Case Western Reserve University.
Bruce is Co-founder and CEO of AgVoice. He was raised in western Missouri, where his family actively farms over 4,000 acres, and an orchard of 40,000 apple trees. He has over 20 years of experience in tech leadership positions at IBM, NCR & AGCO Corporation. He led solution management and marketing teams for multi-billion dollar product lines. For AgVoice, Bruce provides a vision which foresees increased use of hands-free enabled technology and powerful cloud data analytics within everyday farming and ranching operations for delivering expanded utility and continuous ease-of-use. Bruce has a Bachelor of Science degree in Agriculture Economics from the University of Missouri and an MBA from the University of North Carolina.
Callan Schebella is co-founder and CEO at Inference Solutions. Inference Solutions provides a SaaS platform that allows you to create Intelligent Virtual Agent experiences on the carrier network of your choice. The Inference platform is sold by more than 35 telecommunication carriers around the world. Callan has spent his entire career in the machine learning and spoken dialog space. Prior to Inference, he worked at Telstra Research Laboratories and developed software tools used to automate complex conversational environments. Callan is based in San Francisco but is originally from Melbourne, Australia.
Carissa is passionate about inclusive design and accessibility, working closely with UX and development to build empathy and create delightful, accessible solutions from inception to production. She believes in the democratization of information, that accessibility is a solveable design challenge and everything is (and should be) a work in progress.
Cathy Pearl is Head of Conversation Design Outreach at Google, and the author of the O'Reilly book, "Designing Voice User Interfaces".Ê She's been designing and creating Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) for nearly 20 years and is passionate about helping everyone make the best conversational experiences possible.Ê Previously, Cathy was VP of User Experience at Sensely, whose virtual nurse avatar helps people stay healthy.Ê She has worked on everything from programming NASA helicopter pilot simulators to designing a conversational iPad app in which Esquire magazine's style columnist tells users what they should wear on a first date.Ê She has an MS in Computer Science from Indiana University and and BS in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego.
Cev's experience has allowed her to become a leader who isn't afraid to ask tough questions of those around her. She is focused on supporting team members who are just as excited and passionate about each other's growth as their own. Her goal is to grow businesses from the inside out and foster work environments where every voice has the opportunity to be heard. Cev believes in changing traditional companies into connected companies.
And this will be accomplished with Salesforce Einstein, which allows customers to make decisions faster, make employees more productive, and make customers happier using AI-powered predictions and recommendations.
And, with Einstein Voice, customers can do more with the power of their voice and the intelligence of Einstein – now in pilot.
Charlie is engineering lead in the Potato San Francisco studio. He has successfully led and delivered many products with diverse technology stacks and has extensive experience with a variety of platforms. Charlie has helped deliver voice experiences for Activision and Bethesda, as well as winning a Cannes Lion for innovation.
Chris Geison is a Principal UX Researcher for emerging technologies at AnswerLab, where he leads research to help Fortune 500 clients create experiences that people love. Drawing from his background in digital strategy at Charles Schwab and behavioral counseling at a mental health facility, Chris' UX research practice is focused on distilling strategic insights from human interactions. He has presented his work on user research and voice user interfaces at multiple international conferences and to clients in a wide variety of industries. A graduate of Brown University, Chris lives in San Francisco with his wife, their daughter, and an imaginary panther named Winston.
Christina Mallon is a digital marketer, inclusive designer and disability advocateÊat the forefront of an important movement working to combine inclusivity within technology and advertising. Christina's arms slowly became paralyzed at the start of her career. The transition to ÕdisabledÕ was challenging, but has never slowed her down. As a young digital marketing professional with a physical ÒdisabilityÓ she felt under-represented as a consumer. Rather than being discouraged, she recognized the opportunity to grow awareness and make a meaningful impact which drew her to her current positions as board member of Open Style Lab and Accessibility lead of POSSIBLE NY. In addition to these two positions, she consults brands like Macy's, IKEA, and The Wing on how to be more inclusive. ChristinaÕs work around inclusive design has received nation-wide attention and has been featured in Fast Company, Yahoo Style, NBC News, Vouge, BBC, and The New York Times.
Clinton has been an investor, director, and CEO of several publicly-traded and private companies during the past fifteen years, including roles with restaurant and retail companies. In 2017 he co-founded Novo Labs to create artificial intelligence services that push the frontier for how intelligent systems can interact with live consumer environments. Today, Novo Labs develops and manages conversational commerce services for the restaurant industry, with a focus on high-volume voice channels such as phone or drive-thru orders.
Colleen Fahey is a creative executive with deep expertise in branding and marketing at multiple touch points. When she learned of Sixième Son, a Paris audio branding agency that had created over 350 audio brands, she approached them about expanding their borders to North America. Since then, her team has led Sixième Son’s audio branding initiatives for Atlanta, Michelin, Huggies, CAT Footwear, a research hospital, a college, a global vaccine launch, a medical technology, an AIDS treatment, a manufacturer, an addiction recovery behemoth, a news network…and counting. She has also co-authored the book, Audio Branding: Using Sound to Build Your Brand. Throughout her career, Colleen has worked for major marketing organizations and leading brands in the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia. She served as Executive Creative Director at Frankel (now Arc), where she also ran a thriving business unit and simultaneously carried executive responsibility for Human Resources and Employee Development, managing over 150 mostly right-brained people. Post the sale of Frankel to Publicis, Colleen moved onto a global Publicis Worldwide strategic team based in Paris, her role was to support the network of agencies with branding, path-to-purchase, activation and kids marketing initiatives around the world. Raised in Madrid, she speaks fluent Spanish as well as conversational French and pathetic Portuguese.
"40 under 40 Healthcare Innovator by the Boston Business Journal and Medtech Boston; Cris is a seasoned entrepreneur/intrapreneur who is driven to improve human health through technology and innovation.
De Luca is currently the Global Head of Digital Innovation for Johnson & Johnson Innovation, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He holds Chief Digital and Data responsibilities for translating Data Science/Hi-Tech external innovation opportunities throughout J&J’s Innovation Centers, JLABS incubators, and JJDC corp ventures across the Pharma, Consumer and Medical Device businesses.
With entrepreneurial DNA, Cris is most notably known for his role in the innovation economy since Co-Founding Ultra Light Startups, the oldest and largest startup-investor pitch accelerator in Boston and New York City with additional chapters in Silicon Valley and London. ULS accelerated 700+ bootstrapping startups with 26% having gone on to raise angel/venture funding, leading to several large-scale acquisitions by companies such as Apple, Trip Advisor and Singapore Telecom.
Cris is a Venture Fellow at FundRx and serves on the advisory boards of SXSW Health, AARP Health Innovation and VOICE Summit. He advises/mentors academic and research institutes, government agencies, corporations, entrepreneurs, and early stage companies."
Dagmar Schuller, CEO and co-founder, led audEERING, AI innovation leader, to a multi-million company. For more than a decade, she conducts research in the areas of AI, machine learning and big data with the aim to embed intelligent audio analysis into real-life concepts, thus utilizing the technology for everyone. Dagmar Schuller and her team are constantly developing applications for new areas ranging from health, automotive, marketing and communication to smart personal assistants.
Dan manages The Times's report on emerging platforms and explores how the newsroom can take advantage of new technologies like smart speakers and voice assistants, augmented reality and conversational AI. In January, he assembled a team to launch the first set of Times voice experiences, including a Flash Briefing, a custom skill for The Daily podcast and an interactive news quiz. He'll continue to lead strategy and operations in the voice space going forward.
Daniel Hill is obsessed with figuring what grabs people's attention and holds it. What makes someone tap the "like" button or double tap on a picture? What makes someone post the crying emoji or share a post with their private text message group? Daniel currently works at Columbia University Medical Center and runs DanielHillMedia, where he teaches small business owners how to use Instagram. He hosts an Instagram podcast, called "The Instagram Stories", and launched the first Instagram Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing Skill where he gives daily news updates and answers questions. You can find him on Instagram @danielhillmedia.
Daniel Solomon, MD, MPH, is a Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Section Clinical Sciences in the Division of Rheumatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). He holds the Matthew H. Liang Distinguished Chair in Arthritis and Population Health at BWH. Solomon has advanced the care and treatment of patients throughout his career, most notably with his investigative research achievements in the epidemiology of rheumatic diseases and the comparative effectiveness of treatments in this area.
Solomon earned his BA and MD degrees at Yale University, MPH at Harvard University and completed his training at BWH. His early work focused on the safety of NSAIDs and selective COX-2 inhibitors, and he continues to study analgesics. He has also examined osteoporosis prescribing in the US and conducted several large-scale trials to improve osteoporosis care. Solomon holds NIH, foundation, and pharma grants to investigate cardiovascular disease in rheumatoid arthritis, implementation of improved treatment paradigms in rheumatoid arthritis, and machine learning algorithms to improve care for rheumatic diseases.
He is currently leading several projects developing and testing mobile health technologies for arthritis. He has designed and help build a voice enabled smartphone app for rheumatoid arthritis that has been tested in a randomized controlled trial. He has taken a user-centered design approach with numerous patient and provider focus groups testing the app throughout its development lifecycle. His group has data on app adherence and patient's preferences for voice versus touch screen apps.
He has published over 380 original scientific articles, 60 editorials and book chapters, and currently is the Deputy Editor of the US major journal in Arthritis. As well, he is the Chair of the FDA Arthritis Advisory Committee.
Darlene Gillard Jones
Director Community, Founding Team, digitalundivided
Darlene Gillard Jones is part of the Founding team and Director, Community for digitalundivided, a social enterprise that fosters economic growth through the empowerment of Black and Latinx women entrepreneurs using innovation as a tool where she oversees all Community Partnerships, events and is part of the leadership team focused on expansion. The cornerstone of digitalundivided’s work is the BIG Incubator program (BIG) for tech enabled startups led by Black and Latinx women that provides a structured curriculum focused on developing sustainable businesses and direct access to funding.
Darlene has spent the past 20 years as the idea-to-execution force behind some of the most well-known brands and publications in business, media, and technology.
Prior to digitalundivided, Darlene held senior leadership positions at several national media outlets for women including W, Essence, and Elle Magazines and spearheaded projects for Time Inc, eBay, Disney, and the International Downtown Association. Darlene is often tapped for public speaking engagements including Georgia Tech, Grace Hopper, and SXSW.
Dave Kemp is the Marketing & Business Development at Oaktree Products. He graduated from the University of Kansas in 2012 with a BA in Journalism and sold Business Intelligence to fortune 100 companies prior to joining Oaktree. Dave travels around the US to Audiology & Voice conferences, giving talks on future applications for Bluetooth hearing aid and hearable technology.
David is an entrepreneur at heart. For the last decade, David, with the help of his team, has grown Voices.com from the ground up to become the leader in the voice industry. As Chief Executive Officer, David is responsible for setting the vision, executing the growth strategy, creating a vibrant culture, and managing the company on a day-to-day basis. He is frequently published in outlets such as The Globe & Mail, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal.
Dave is currently the Chief Evangelist for Alexa and Echo at Amazon. He has been a professional speaker, trainer, and evangelist for over a decade. He has taught full-day courses on many topics including voice design, natural language understanding, mobile, and the cloud. Dave has helped launch numerous technology platforms and devices while at both Microsoft and Amazon. He is an author for LinkedIn, hosts the AlexaDevChat podcast, alexadevchat.com, can be found online at thedavedev.com and Twitter as @thedavedev.
David Yakobovitch is a Principal Data Scientist at Galvanize, responsible for delivering global instruction, curriculum development and customer support. He also partners with Engagement Managers and Account Executives for the Corporate arm of the business, Galvanize Enterprise. David previously served as Lead Data Scientist for Enterprise with General Assembly in 2017 and 2018, for the Fortune 500 portfolio. General Assembly was acquired by Adecco for $413 million in 2018. Prior to General Assembly, David served as Chief of Staff for the BIG3 Basketball League from 2016 to 2017. Prior to BIG3, David served in a variety of roles in Banks and Insurance Providers from 2010 to 2015, including Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, ADP, and Aflac. David currently serves as an advisor of The Carpentries and Futureworks. David is the Host of HumAIn, an AI Podcast that shares consumer trends from Industry-Leading Executives at Fortune 500s and start-ups in the 4th Industrial Revolution. David grew up in the United States. He received an undergraduate degree in business administration and information systems from University of Florida and is pursuing a PhD in Advanced Research at Capitol Technology University.
Davis Park develops and directs all FPCIW’s technology initiatives and programs. The FPCIW is a center of excellence in Front Porch, one of Southern California’s largest not-for-profit providers of retirement living communities and affordable housing. Davis has two decades of program development experience in technology implementation in senior, low-income, and other underserved communities to explore and deploy innovations to help people live well. He has served as a presenter or facilitator in dozens of regional, national, and international conferences. Davis is the former director of Community Technology Programs at the Little Tokyo Service Center, where he managed several community-based initiatives designed to bridge the digital divide. Davis is also an inaugural member of the Zero Divide ZFellows, a program that promoted technology adoption and social justice to underserved communities. He has served on several boards and committees dedicated to promoting technology access, adoption, and policy, and is a current advisory board member for OASIS LA and PowerMyLearning. Davis holds a BA in anthropology from UC Berkeley and a MA from UCLA’s Urban Planning Program.
Deborah Dahl is Principal of Conversational Technologies, which advises its clients on speech, natural language and dialog technologies. Her focus is on implementations of practical and scalable conversational systems that push the boundary between theory and applications. Her clients range in size from startups to large enterprises and government organizations. She has written many technical papers as well as three books, including Multimodal Interaction with W3C Standards: Toward Natural Interfaces to Everything, published in 2016.
DeLonn is the Co-Founder / CEO of SayKid. Prior to SayKid, he held leadership roles intersecting consumer, technology, and education with Target, Deloitte Consulting, and Google. He also led two equity-backed ventures to successful outcomes. In 2014, he turned around a division that had invested $1B+ in education, where he gained appreciation for the structural challenges and disruptive potential in early education. Having grown up in a low-income household himself and nearly dropping out of a community college, the experience also gave him hope. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School, and BSB from the University of Minnesota, and AA from Normandale Community College.
Dennis is a Master Technical Architect at Salesforce with diverse experience in multiple areas of software development including programming, collaborative Llifecycle management, quality management, mobile, Internet of Things and cloud; all with the goal to bring emerging technologies to the forefront.
Derek Holt is President & Chief Operating Officer of K4Connect, a mission-centered technology company focused on creating solutions that serve and empower older adults and individuals living with disabilities through the integration of latest technologies including smart home, smart wellness, social and voice. Previously, Holt was a member of the founding executive team at Startup America Partnership, a public-private partnership with the White House focused on accelerating entrepreneurship nationwide. Holt began his career at IBM and served as the Worldwide Program Director for Business Partners and General Business in the Rational Software Division. Throughout his 10-year career at IBM Holt served in various technical and business leadership roles, he was awarded multiple patents and worked with partners and customers in over 25 countries.
Derek received his bachelors of arts from the University of Texas, Austin. Afterward, he attended Stanford University, where he received both his Ph.D and J.D. It was during law school that Derek became interested in the tech world. Post academia, he moved onto more technical roles leading development teams. Then in 2006, Derek started at Sitecore as the VP of Technical Services. He managed Sitecore’s CMS technical support, training, and pre-sales support for the North American market for 12 years. Along the way, Derek became intrigued with conversational AI and how it could revolutionize enterprise solutions, so he joined Cognigy as the VP of Technology where he’s tasked with helping his clients understand the power of cognitive psychology.
Diana Deibel is a speaker, writer and Lead Designer at the digital product design consultancy Grand Studio in Chicago, focused on leading their voice and future tech initiatives. She is also the founder of the Chicago brand of the Ubiquitous Voice Society. Her work mainly centers on omnichannel experiences using voice-first design.
In addition to writing and designing for bots, Diana is a produced playwright and screenwriter who has written and produced for a variety of networks including Animal Planet and Blue Man Group. She is the co-creator of the webseries The Underlings, and the in-development pilots Shytown, Automates and Frances, Choose.
Throughout all her work, Diana believes in creating stories and solutions representative of the diverse world we live in, and in questioning the outcomes of our creations.
Diana Mosa is the co-founder of Talking to Me, the first voice design-agency in the nordics as well as in the northern of Europe. She currently changing industries within Scandinavia by helping them go towards a more voice-first world by educating businesses and governments, setting their voice-strategies as well as designing and executing the voice-applications. She is also a diversity-activist and is trying to make sure diversity is the new normal in the tech-industry.
Dillan DiGiovanni is an integrative identity coach, writer and speaker who inspires self-awareness, cultural change and individual resilience through his writing, storytelling and keynotes. Dillan is a two-time TEDx speaker, has been featured on PBS and has spoken at companies like IDEO, Microsoft, General Assembly and he’s a Global Mentor for WeWork Labs. Dillan's expertise is the intersection of educational theory, diversity and identity development, behavioral change theory and integrative health. Dillan earned his B.S. in Education from The College of New Jersey and his MEd from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. He returned home to New Jersey after living in New England for 12 years. He runs on 80s music and coffee and needs to eat more greens. His favorite movie is The Karate Kid and he would definitely beat you in a lip-syncing contest.
Dima spent the last five years creating voice-first products as a chief product officer and conversational UX designer. Dima combines expertise in UX design and deep understanding of voice and natural language processing technology. In 2017 Dima co-founded MyBuddy.ai - the voice-based English tutor for kids to help his son to learn English as a second language.
Domhnaill Hernon is an award-winning technology, innovation and creativity executive. Domhnaill received an undergrad in Aeronautical Engineering and a PhD in Aerodynamics from the University of Limerick and an executive MBA from Dublin City University, Ireland. He previously led R&D organizations and developed and executed strategies to overcome the “innovation valley of death”. He is Head of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) which is a new initiative he founded to fuse art and engineering/science to develop solutions that humanize technology. Domhnaill’ s work has been featured in Wired Magazine, Times Square, SXSW, Nasdaq, MWC and Inspirefest to name just a few and he advises cultural programs globally.
Dominik is co-founder of 169 Labs in Munich and Cologne, one of the leading german voice assistant agencies. He brings 15 years of experience from consulting work and digital projects to the agency. He advises on strategy, business models, digital processes and innovative applications in the world of voice interfaces.
"Doug Schumacher is an advertising creative director, ad tech entrepreneur and founder of voice and audio content studio Arrovox. He synthesizes his background as an advertising writer, brand strategist, social media content analyst and comedy podcast writer to guide clients to creative solutions firmly grounded in brand strategy.
Brands Doug has worked with include Starbucks, Disney, Frito-Lay, Intel, Apple, Nestle, The NFL, Nissan, Chevron, Capital One, Aramark, Sony Pictures, Mattel and Warner Bros. Ad agencies he’s worked with include DDB, TBWA/Chiat/Day, BBDO, Ogilvy, Saatchi, Y&R, FCB and RPA."
Galina Madjaroff is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and a Clinical Associate Professor at the Erickson School for Aging Studies at University of Maryland Baltimore County. Her duties include administrative and leadership responsibility for the undergraduate and graduate degree-granting programs, supervision of teaching assistants, coordination with all full and part-time faculty, course scheduling, scholarship programs and serving on the key committees at the University that help the Erickson School fulfill their role as a member of the academic and service community at UMBC. Dr. Madjaroff holds a Doctorate in Information Systems with a concentration in Human-Centered Computing. Her research focuses on improving the lives of older persons through the use of accessible technology as well as alleviating privacy and security concerns online for older persons. Her most recent work focused on alleviating caregiver and care recipient burden after the onset of cognitive impairment through the use of the Amazon Echo ÒAlexaÓ intelligent agent. She continues to focus her research on how Voice Userface Interface technologies such as the Amazon Echo can support older adults. Dr. Madjaroff has presented her research at venues around the country and internationally, as well as consulted with technology companies on the design of new devices for older persons. She has published on various topics including Person-Centered Technology and Quality of Life, Narratives of Older Adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Their Caregivers and Supporting Caregivers and Care Recipients after the Onset of Cognitive Impairment with Home Based Technology, Amazon Alexa. Most recently Dr. Madjaroff was awarded a three-year, $500,000 National Science Foundation Grant to explore Negotiating Cyber Systems Access for Older Adults with Mild Neurocognitive Disorder.
Dr. Robin Kiera is most appreciated as an expert, speaker, influencer recognized in several ranking in both Insurtech and Fintech industries. With Digitalscouting as a platform for corporate innovators, thought leaders, events, and entrepreneurs - he became an in-demand member of the advisory committees of conferences and also serves as a sparring partner for corporate conferences and start-up mentor for digital strategy and execution. For your business consultation needs, go to https://bit.ly/2YL8gXE, need a speaker and media partnership go to https://bit.ly/2wfgJWO
Dr. Kondabolu is a practicing Orthopaedic Surgeon and the Co-Founder/CEO of Medicine ReMixed, a media company and creative agency focused on podcasting and voice technology in Healthcare. He served as a consultant for Anchor FM, a startup recently acquired by Spotify. Medicine ReMixed was named to The Best Podcasts list in 2018 by Anchor. Dr. Kondabolu is currently a Media consultant for Orthobullets, an online platform for Orthopaedic Surgery education. He created a Top 10 iTunes Education Podcast called “The Orthobullets Podcast.” His current projects include patient education applications for voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home. He has been interviewed by Wired magazine, featured in TechCrunch and other technology blogs for his work in podcasting.
Duane Forrester is the Vice President of Industry Insights for Yext, leading industry outreach, evangelism and authorship for the company. Between Microsoft and Yext, he was the VP, Operations with Bruce Clay, Inc, where he lead the operations for organic and paid search, social, content and design. Prior to moving to BCI, he was a Sr. Product Manager responsible for Bing’s Webmaster Program, focused on helping small, medium and enterprise businesses improve their digital marketing efforts. Previously, he was an inhouse SEM running the SEO program for MSN in the US & Americas. He's also the founding co-chair of SEMPO's In-House SEM Committee, was formerly on the Board of Directors for SEMPO and is the author of two books: How To Make Money With Your Blog & Turn Clicks Into Customers. Duane has written for publications ranging from SearchEngineLand and DuctTape Marketing, to Entrepreneur Magazine, the New York Times and Inc. He actively advises startups and large corporations, and even spent time advising the staff who maintain the White House's websites.
Dustin Coates is Voice Search Go-to-Market Lead at Algolia. He has written Voice Applications for Alexa and Google Assistant (Manning Publications), co-hosts VUX World, and writes about voice tech at Talking to Computers. He lives in Paris with his wife and smart home devices.
Dylan has led product from the start of Pulse Labs, and he’s overseen testing on every voice application upon which Pulse Labs has worked.
He was previously the Director of Data Science for Overstock.com, where he built and ran the data science team. He loves figuring out and understanding how customers behave, so he can help make their lives better. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Utah, and M.S. and B.S. degrees in statistics, physics, and mathematics from Stanford University, where he was a President’s Scholar. He enjoys running, reading, and playing the violin.
Ed is a principle product manager for Microsoft Research, Artificial Intelligence. He started out as a scientist, trained as a researcher, and ultimately fell in love with applying those skills to creating new products and businesses. Ed joined MSR from the Cortana team where he co-founded the product, lead product planning, and lead some targeted AI innovation and ecosystem projects. Prior to Microsoft, Ed lead insight strategy teams for Yahoo!, helping build new products and better businesses across search, browse, rich media, and ecommerce. And even before that, Ed lead market research, user research, business intelligence, and management consulting
Ed Sewell is the CEO and Founder of Velocity AI. He is a thought leader in smart cities, smart buildings and autonomous, connected vehicle infrastructure. Velocity AI is a member of the NVIDIA Inception program for Artificial Intelligence startups. Voice is a natural interface to interact not just with the world around us, but also with physical assets and things, such as connected devices - including lights and autonomous vehicles. Velocity AI helps accelerate growth and innovation in voice technology investments. In addition to Velocity AI, Ed was the founder and architect of Virtual DNA. A global cyber security firm specializing embedded voice biometrics and machine learning.
Eddie O’Leary is the Founder and President of COLAB, a digital strategy, design, and development agency located in Richmond, Virginia. He founded COLAB in 2008 to focus on great customer service and solving real-world business problems. For the past eleven years, Eddie has steadily grown COLAB both in size and reputation. In 2014, Eddie was selected to participate in Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses Program at Babson College, where he earned a Certificate in Entrepreneurship. COLAB was recognized as one of Richmond's top 25 fastest growing businesses in 2013 and 2014, and has received numerous design awards from AIGA and the Richmond Ad Club. In 2018, COLAB was named among INC Magazine’s 5,000 fastest growing private companies.
Prof. Ehud Reiter serves as the Chief Scientist at ARRIA NLG Limited. Prof. Reiter is responsible for overall direction of technology development as well as supervision of specific NLG projects. He is Professor of Computing Science in the University of Aberdeen School of Natural and Computing Sciences, founder of the University's NLG Research Group and a founder and director of Data2Text. Ehud is also Chair of SigGen, a special interest group of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). Reiter co-authored the de-facto textbook on NLG systems, "Building Natural Language Generation Systems", and is one of the main developers of the Simplenlg open-source NLG library.
Einat Is a voice user interface designer with a diverse background (Science, Art, Education, UX design). She created the Alexa skill, Kiwi Monsters, an interactive story that teaches kids about evolution. Her Alexa skills emphasizes sounds and human voices in order to produce an immersive experience for the users. Einat works on her Chatty Creations projects along with designing voice experiences for other companies.
Elaine is the Principal Product Designer for Twilio's conversational AI platform called Autopilot. Autopilot enables businesses to build and train smart conversational bots intuitively to deliver efficient customer experiences. Prior to Twilio, she lead design at eBay on their fully AI-powered shopping assistant that lived inside of Messenger and Google Assistant. And, lead design at a startup building an office assistant Slack bot with humans in the loop. Since then, she has spoken about designing for bots at conferences like SuperBot, Business of Bots, Talk UX, and multiple panel discussions. You can read more about her learnings and insight building AI bots on her Medium. Before her design career in conversational assistants and AI, she was an art director and product designer at agencies and startups in NYC.
Elijah B. Torn, Sr. Creative Director at MassiveMusic New York, is an electronic musician who lives and performs in the city of blinding lights. He’s been working with music and audio for brands for nearly fifteen years. His experience however is not just limited to audio branded content. Torn has also released three solo albums of electronic music. These albums have received air time on KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic”, WNYC’s “New Sounds” as well as (the late) Lou Reed's SiriusXM radio show "NY Shuffle”.
Emily Binder is an entrepreneur, voice marketing strategist, and founder of Beetle Moment Marketing, a voice first marketing agency. Past: quarterback for dozens of successful marketing initiatives from startups to global brands. Present: helping businesses stay relevant and grow with forward-looking strategies focused on voice assistants, smart speakers, branded audio content, and social media. Emily speaks and writes about marketing, technology, and career. She hosts two shows about marketing and likes rollerblading, ergonomics, and hacking credit card points. Fun facts: 1) Emily attended high school where The Breakfast Club originated, 1.5 miles from the Home Alone house. 2) In 2010, Emily launched social media for RMS Titanic Inc., the salvor-in-possession of the wreck of Titanic. Listen to the 5-star Beetle Moment Marketing Flash Briefing: search for "Beetle Moment" on Alexa or Google. Marketing blog, podcast, clients & case studies, and more: beetlemoment.com Everywhere: @emilybinder and @beetlemoment
Emily Sappington is the Product Design Manager for Voice & Conversational UI at Babylon Health. Previously she served as VP of Product at London-based AI startup, Context Scout. Emily has spent the bulk of her career in the United States designing Cortana for Microsoft across devices, particularly Natural Language & UI interactions with the assistant. Emily is a lecturer, US patent-holder, career coach for Ada School (the National College for Digital Skills in the UK), and is a recipient of an Exceptional Talent Visa from the UK Government and Tech Nation.
Eric is a Sr Solutions Architect with the Alexa Voice Service, which helps device makers like Bose, Sonos, and Lenovo integrate Alexa into their products. Prior to working with device manufacturers, Eric helped Alexa skill developers create engaging voice-first experiences for Alexa customers. Outside of work, you can likely find Eric swimming, biking, or running for training and competition in Ironman triathlons.
Eric Seay is Co-Founder & CMO of the next-generation audio branding agency, Audio UX, where he and his team are strategically designing what the future will sound like. As an early adopter of voice, Eric has been involved in thought leadership communities including #Voice18 and VOICE2, and has since appeared on both VUX World and Design for Voice discussing best practices for sonic branding in skills. Combining his studies in Music Business and Psychoacoustics at Berklee College of Music with his passion for the science of sound and technology, you can find him donning Hearables while he creates the audio user experiences of tomorrow.
Erin Abler is Principal Conversational Designer at Mobiquity, where she creates voice-first and multimodal experiences for widely-recognized consumer, travel, and healthcare brands. Before joining Mobiquity, Erin served the City of Philadelphia as Lead Content Designer, the first position of its kind in the U.S. She cut her teeth in experience architecture, design research, and content strategy with Razorfish and Allen & Gerritsen; her writing and editing experience goes back to the early aughts. Previous speaking venues include Content Strategy Philly, PhillyCHI, Gilbane's Digital Experience Conference, the Code for America Summit, and SXSW Interactive.
Erin brings her knowledge of language and understanding of customer needs to the team at MRS BPO. After spending five years immersed in a customer-facing role, she uses her background to help shape the automated and digital solutions used at MRS BPO. She is passionate about crafting the best possible customer experience in the industry.
Eros Marcello is a Forbes-featured Conversational AI designer, writer and linguist specializing in developing cognitive personification for human-interfacing Artificial Intelligence, and a former SpaceX Hyperloop competitor.
Filip is a software engineer who participated in an Alexa development workshop last summer hoping to simply get an interesting project on his resume, but instead has been implementing voice apps ever since. His lifelong passion for language and technology make him feel right at home in the fascinating world of virtual assistants. He joined Rocket Insights, the fastest growing product agency in the US, to redesign a skill for FX Networks using Alexa Presentation Language while it was still in private beta and ported it to Google Assistant as well.
Fiona Kate is a producer on the BBC Voice + AI team in London.
In previous roles Fiona has produced radio programmes, visual documentaries, social and digital content, podcasts and events - working as a journalist for the UK number 1 youth broadcast station, BBC Radio 1.
She's an active member of the Women in Voice London leadership team where she helps to organise offline events in the capital, which encourage a better-represented workforce in the industry.
Awarded the “She’s Mercedes” businesswoman award by Mercedes Benz among women such as Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook.
Flavilla Fongang is an award-winning businesswoman, international speaker, MD, and creative brand strategist. She was also a guest marketing and brand strategy lecturer at Goldsmiths University, she mentors at London Metropolitan University and was named the most influential businesswoman by LinkedIn. Her creative branding and marketing agency has already received multiple awards. Her agency works predominantly with tech, finance, luxury and FMCG companies.
On top of being a creative brand strategist, she is also a colourology expert and multi-entrepreneur. She was born & raised in Paris and moved to London in 2002 despite being unable to speak English. Within her first year in London, she obtained a BA in Economics & Law, a BA in Marketing & Communications and MA in International Business with distinction. Her determination extends to helping her clients achieve their goals and they appreciate her positive attitude and fun personality. As a result, her clients have achieved outstanding outcomes for their business. She believes and has seen businesses achieve more when they develop brands with authentic human purpose.
She has developed her creativity and experience working in different business environments: Africa, the Middle East, Asia, North/South America, and Europe. Traveling and working internationally helped her stay ahead of trends, and understand the cultural diversity of each client market and adapt to it. She has over 15 years of client management, marketing, branding, team management and leadership experience working with micro to large companies.
As CTO and co-founder of audEERING, Florian Eyben has been the driving force behind the development of innovative software solutions in the field of intelligent audio analysis since 2013.
The electrical engineer (summa cum laude) is an expert in digital signal processing, speech and music analysis, and machine learning. At the TU Munich, he developed the first version of openSMILE - the world's leading open source toolkit for automated real-time analysis of speech and music signals.
To date, Florian has authored and co-authored over 150 peer-reviewed publications, and his research on automated speech and music analysis has been cited over 7000 times. In addition to his role as CTO of audEERING, he is actively involved in research activities with cooperating universities.
Frank Cannone is the Chair of the Corporate Department and a member of the Executive Committee at Gibbons P.C. Mr. Cannone’s practice is focused on mergers and acquisitions, private equity, early-stage and emerging growth, and corporate and securities law. He has extensive experience representing clients in connection with public and private capital raising, private equity, venture capital, mergers and acquisitions (in middle market transactions), public-private-partnerships (P3)/government transactions, alternative energy finance, corporate healthcare, venture capital transactions, and cross border transactions.
Frank J. Radice is an Emmy winning Journalist, Producer/Director, Musician, Author, and Media/Marketing Executive.
He is the managing partner of the consulting firms, VIDA F.R. Co. in NYC, and BadCatCo in London, the Expert in Residence for Definition6 and Vixen Labs, and London bureau chief, Salon Media. He’s on the advisory boards of Digital Hollywood and Observatory Pictures.
Frank is the former President and CMO of NATAS (The Emmy Awards), EVP the NBC Agency, the former Chair of the Promax BDA UK Conference and Awards, and consultant to Univision Communications in house marketing and promotion agencies, and the El Rey Network.
As a marketing executive for more than 20 years, Frank received the TV Week Magazine "Campaign of Distinction" award, was inducted into the PROMAX/BDA Hall of Fame, and named Brand Builder of the Year by Multichannel News and Broadcasting & Cable.
An award winning composer, he co-created the long running “America’s First Family” theme, and is a two time Emmy nominee for original music composition for NBC’s Today show. He is an Emmy Nominee for Best Promotional Announcement on MSNBC, and is honoured by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for his contributions to NBC's "Saturday Night Live."
In addition to extensive experience in advertising, promotion, and music, Frank has a lengthy background in journalism. During his 17 years with ABC News, he was honoured with 2 DuPont Awards and 2 national Emmy Awards. He was a producer for “Nightline," "Good Morning America," “ABC World News Tonight,” and “The Last Word with Phil Donahue and Greg Jackson,” and senior producer, product development, ABC News Interactive, and Executive Producer Of Entertainment News for CNN.
Frank and wife, Vida, co-wrote "Sam Katz on the Loose." a pop-up children's book illustrated by Charles Fazzino published by Random House.
He can be seen regularly on the global speakers circuit and on TechCrunchTV's "Gillmor Gang," and his music can be heard daily on “SalonTV”
Frank Schneider is the CEO of artificial intelligence listening company, Speakeasy AI, whose mission and technology is based upon the premise of listening to understand, not merely respond. He was born and raised in Philadelphia, a city where listening is equal parts human empathy and survival, Frank spent the bulk of his 22 professional years in roles where active listening is of paramount importance. Frank has taught elementary, middle and high school and worked with adult ‘English as a second language’ students fleeing war-torn countries, and teens who were court adjudicated. He has coached basketball players and sales reps, counselled convicted felons, teachers and corporate teams in conflict resolution and peer mediation. Frank explains the history of listening software, in typed conversations between humans and chatbots. Now we’re speaking vocally to artificial intelligence, famously to assistants like Alexa and Google Home. However, your voice is still transcribed word for word and sent into very similar algorithms to those that powered chatbots. This is listening to transcribe, not listening for meaning or understanding. Advanced listening AI, that Frank works with, attempts to understand what we’re saying from the moment we say hello. Real listening examines the type of language that’s being used and also incorporates context. In this way, it should be accurate, helpful and effective at large scale. Frank also talks about why listening is pivotal to being a basketball coach. No matter how you coach, you’re not playing the game, so you need to listen to your team to get on-the-field knowledge about what’s happening. The players have something to say, so in order to give the best advice, guidance and direction, you need to have their input onboard.
As a Senior Solutions Architect for Amazon Alexa, Franklin is passionate about knowledge sharing and enabling others to succeed. He actively seeks out creative solutions to complex business and technical challenges. His experience ranges from startups to large enterprises, spanning multiple industries. In addition to eight AWS certifications, he holds an MBA, as well as chemical engineering and math degrees. Franklin was an early adopter of Amazon Alexa, and now is working to share his knowledge of Alexa with developers.
Freddie Feldman is the Voice Design Director for Wolters Kluwer Health in Chicago. He leads a team of amazing voice designers focused on creating patient-engagement IVR phone calls that have resulted in over 15 million phone interactions to date. These IVR calls are a part of a broader product portfolio providing personalized, dynamic communication to patients over time. Freddie also provides feedback, subject-matter expertise, and advocacy for emerging voice-based products across the WK portfolio. He has been developing a strategic vision for voice-based products and helping to create compelling demonstrations of voice technologies.
Garrick Gauch (Co-Founder/Partner at MadValley Labs) Boston Garrick is an accomplished digital technology executive with extensive experience with consumer brands on all aspects of mobile marketing and channel deployments, including; mobile-first strategy, UX design thinking, emerging tech innovation, ecosystem integration, and user analytics and retention. As co-founder and partner of MadValley Labs, Garrick seeks to combine elements of Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley - to support brands with the emerging tools of digital storytelling.
German is a fan of computers since he was in kindergarten. He started his professional career as a software developer and later transitioned into developer advocacy roles. Before that, he had the opportunity to be part of many projects in different industries for major companies (as developer, technical writer, team lead, tech advocate, community manager and consultant). He has a passion for technology and finding ways to make it approachable and interesting to others which led him to be involved in creating and growing developer communities. His main interests are ASR/NLU technologies and VUI/VUX because he believes these will be the main drivers of innovation in human-computer interaction for decades to come.
Giles is the CMO of a 100+ person tech startup trying to change the world for the better by addressing it all with just 3 words. Giles was the fifth employee at what was then a budding startup and created the vision, positioning, identity and go-to marketing strategy for the company. He built a team made up of creatives and strategists across accounts and production all while redesigning the service, app, site, identity of the company and working closely with customers to promote partnerships. By carefully blending tech for good and commercial messaging, he has taken what3words from a quirky idea to a globally recognized brand used by organizations (including Airbnb, Lonely Planet, Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Dominos, and more), individuals and governments in over 170 countries.
Greg has spent the last 19 years defining, designing and building interactive experiences for clients like Starbucks, Walmart, Amazon, Campbell's and Yahoo. For the last 9 years at RAIN, Greg's has been assisting brands with the definition and development of tailored voice strategies, the creation of voice experiences (Alexa Skills & Google Assistant Actions), and exploring actionable approaches to Conversational AI. Prior to RAIN, Greg was a designer for Context Studio and King Features, a division of the Hearst Corporation. He also spent several years as part of the faculty at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University as a professor of design.
Ha-Hoa Hamano is the Senior Product Manager of Emerging Platforms at NPR. In her role, Ha-Hoa evaluates new business opportunities for delivering NPR content on digital experiences via large screens, wearables, connected cars, voice assistants, and other emerging devices. She leads a cross-functional team to support a ubiquitous, personalized listening experience to meet NPR listeners wherever they are.
Halim is a high tech innovator who spearheaded world-class data science projects at game changing techs like eBay and Teradata. Formally educated in Machine Learning, his professional expertise span Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, and Big Data. Halim has a proven track record of applying state of the art data science techniques across industry verticals such as eCommerce, web & mobile services, airline, BioPharma, and the medical technology industry. He currently leads the AI department at Cognoa, a data driven behavioral healthcare startup in Palo Alto.
Harish is the product owner for audio advertising at Pandora. He oversees iterative creation of new audio ad formats, like dynamic audio. He is also interested in areas where music intersects advertising along with sonic attributes of audio advertising. You can learn more about him on his linkedin profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/harishgoli/
Dr. Sandhu is a leading expert in Voice Recognition and AI in healthcare. Harjinder was the former CTO of Nuance Health and a pioneer in speech recognition.
Heidi Culbertson is the Founder and CEO of Marvee, a Voice-First Strategy & Design studio specializing in voice experiences for our aging population. The mission is simple, to create context-aware voice experiences to make life better for older adults, families, and those who surround them throughout the aging journey.
Helen Todd is Co-founder and CEO of Sociality Squared, a social media agency established in 2010 in New York City who understands the magic of people coming together around what they value and love. Helen is an award-winning marketer, international speaker, and also an advisor and speaker for SXSW Interactive. She graduated from Xavier University and holds a Master’s degree in Integrated Marketing Communications from Emerson College.
While studying Industrial Design + Wearable Technology at OCAD University In Toronto, I realized that things weren't just going to be just things for much longer.
Now, I’m a Senior Designer and Researcher: creating compelling, contextual experiences for ambitious companies, and researching + establishing best practices within the emerging fields of voice design and augmented reality. I do my best work in the discovery and definition phases on the design process: researching, developing strategies, ideating, and designing and testing interactions. When I’m not designing with my team, I’m writing about research processes and my thoughts on the future, reviewing skincare products and training as an amateur powerlifter.
Holger Wiebe is head of the Entwicklungsredaktion (R&D Desk) at ZEIT ONLINE. With his team, he is responsible for the development of all editorially driven products. He is part of ZEIT ONLINE's strategic task force, responsible for exploration and development of voice and audio products. As Product Owner, he is also involved in projects such as the international platform for political dialogue "My Country Talks" or ZEIT ONLINE's own conference "Z2X". Since the late 1990s he has worked in various digital product development roles, both in advertising and media, successfully establishing several companies.
Ilker is the CEO & Co-founder of Botanalytics, conversational analytics company based in San Francisco. Having background of Computer Science & MBA. Ilker is a regular speaker about conversational analytics, artificial intelligence, and early-stage fundraising. He's also been selected to Forbes 30 Under 30, 2018 Enterprise Technology category.
James Barrood leads one of the largest technology trade associations in the US. He has been recognized by NJBiz as a Power 100 List leader and by ROI-NJ as a Top 100 Influencer. He sits on several boards including the NJ State Chamber of Commerce, R&D Council of New Jersey, Jumpstart Angel Network and Innovation NewJersey. Prior to heading the Council, James led the top ranked entrepreneurship center at Fairleigh Dickinson University for over 10 years. Since 1997, he has been active in the regional entrepreneurial and business communities.
James is the editor of the book, Entrepreneurship and Innovation: Global Insights from 24 Leaders and co-author of Lessons from the Great Recession. He has been a columnist for NJBIZ and written articles for ROI-NJ, Entrepreneur, BusinessInsider.com, the Star-Ledger, NorthJersey.com, and The Providence Journal and has been widely quoted regionally and nationally. He holds an MBA from Texas A&M and a BA in Economics from Rutgers University.
New Jersey Tech Council
Representing 500,000+ innovators, the mission of the Tech Council is to help people and their companies/organizations grow and succeed while empowering the region's diverse tech, innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems. Founded in 1996, the independent nonprofit organization has 1,000+ member companies and coordinates 125+ events and partner programs annually. The Council 1. Offers opportunities to learn, network and grow; 2. Provides access to funding via its JumpStart Angel Network and Tech Council Ventures Fund; 3. Nurtures the tech and STEM talent pipeline; 4. Recognizes and promotes industry leaders and innovators; and 5. Advocates for public policy which strengthens our ecosystem.
James is the CEO and Co-Founder of Vixen Labs, a Voice first consultancy and Founder of the UK’s leading Voice & AI community Voice2.
James is an innovation and Marketing consultant with over 10 years experience specialising in Voice, Conversational AI Technologies and emerging platforms such as Immersive AR/VR, 5G and Blockchain.
Previously 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 Head of Social Media for LEGO’s social network for Kids, LEGO Life – which launched globally in 2017 and has since grown to over 2m 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.
Prior to joining LEGO, James worked for a number of the world’s leading marketing, advertising and public relations firms including Edelman and Ogilvy leading digital marketing, mobile and social campaigns both in EMEA and globally as well as new business efforts for clients such as Diageo, Unilever, Bose, PayPal, HP and Adobe.
Outside of work James is an advisor to the Church of England’s digital board as well as well as a number of other charities, entrepreneurs and startups.
James is also the host of the show “Signal” for Christians In Media which explores on a monthly basis the intersection between faith, media and technology.
James is a father to Hazel and Willow and husband to Holly and lives in Greenwich in South-East London. He can be found on all good social media as @jamespoulter
James is Director of Product Management for Sonos' Software Platform. The team is responsible for the services and APIs that power millions of Sonos experiences around the world, including the company's open developer platform and integrations with strategic partners. Recently, the team worked with Alexa and Google to bring their voice UI and ecosystem to the Sonos Sound Platform and was the first smart speaker to offer multiple voice assistants.
James Vlahos is the author of TALK TO ME: How Voice Computing Will Change the Way that We Live, Work, and Think (Houghton Mifflin, March 26, 2019). Covering the business, technological, cultural ramifications of the voice revolution, the book has been described by readers such as Wired editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson as "brilliant and essential." Vlahos is also the creator the Dadbot, an conversation-making program that shares the personality and life story of his late father, and of an Alexa skill, The Voice Computing Book. Vlahos contributes to the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Popular Science, The Atlantic, and GQ.
Jason is the chief strategy officer for Voicify. Jason acts as a collaborator and leader with Voicify’s partners and customers, enabling them to leverage the power of the Voicify platform to engage with their customers and prospects. Jason is an evangelist, speaker, thought leader and strategist for the company. Jason is passionate about personalizing the relationships between brands and customers, for the betterment of both. He believes in finding the ‘Youtility’ of what brands can do to better the experiences of those they serve.
Dr. Jason Mars is the co-founder and CEO of Clinc, the company that created the world’s most sophisticated and comprehensive conversational A.I. platform for the enterprise. Recently recognized as one of the ten most innovative CEOs in banking by Bank Innovation, he is also a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan where he directs Clarity Lab, one of the best places in the world to be trained in A.I. and system design. He is an active part of the IBM Watson Conversational System Research Center and participates in ongoing collaborative research with Intel and the National Science Foundation. Jason has devoted his career to solving difficult real-world problems with A.I., computer vision, and natural language processing at scale. Prior to The University of Michigan, Jason was a professor at the University of California San Diego. He has also worked at Google, Intel and IBM. Jason’s work building the world’s first open-source platform for constructing large-scale A.I. and deep learning-based Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) has been recognized globally and continues to have a significant impact on industry and academia. Jason holds a PhD in computer science from University of Virginia.
As Noble Systems’ VP of Product Management, Jason Ouimette is responsible for leading the company’s solution development path, managing and maintaining the product roadmap and timelines for delivery with Development and QA teams, reviewing documentation for new products and versions to ensure that functionality is clearly defined, and assisting technical training, IDT, sales and support teams with the roll out of new products. Jason has 20 years of experience in the call center sector. Prior to joining Noble, he was employed at Tony Hoffman Productions as a Senior Systems Administrator, where he managed call center infrastructure, including PBX, dialer, sales application and database, customer service application and database, inventory management systems, marketing reporting systems, network infrastructure, PC/OS hardware support, and other technology elements.
Arria NLG, Chief Operating Officer, Prior to joining Arria, Jay held key senior executive positions in global companies including: EMC, Documentum, Unisys, and Lockheed Martin. Jay has successfully led companies from growth phase through to post-acquisition integration. “Arria’s key technology links applications to humans in ways never before possible. Arria is in a key leadership position with its core NLG technology supported by key patents.”
Jeffrey Shebetich is a Product Owner within the Advanced Innovation Group at Philips, currently supporting several experimental products built around conversational user interfaces. His role generally consists of exploring new technologies and then applying them to validated customers needs. Through the help of Natural Language experts, Data Scientists, Sleep Clinicians and various other specialists; their team continually drives towards the mission to improve the lives of 3 billion people a year by 2025.
Prior to this, he has worked with various corporations (Orbitz, Barnes and Noble, American Eagle) and startups in the product development of mobile applications.
Jen is the Co-Founder and CCO of Vixen Labs - a strategy, experience design and marketing consultancy for voice and conversational interfaces.
Jen’s expertise lies specifically in voice strategy and user experience (VUX), covering all areas of conversational experience design, from structure and interaction design to character design and scripting. She has a particular passion in the psychology of voice-based interactions and the opportunities for the technology in the areas of mental health, creativity and education.
She regularly speaks internationally on all things voice, as well as playing an active role in the community as part of the global leadership teams for Voice2 and Women in Voice networks.
I am a digital marketing strategist, adjunct professor of digital marketer at Cleveland State University, podcaster, online course creator, and founder of The Front Row mastermind.
Jenni has been creating voice user interfaces since 2000 and is currently Principal, Conversation Design at Banter Technology. She has been involved in all aspects of projects from requirements to design, usability testing, tuning, and ongoing evaluation and improvement of systems in production. Jenni’s designs have improved customer conversations for dozens of organizations in variety of business domains. Since 2016, Jenni has been designing conversations for smart speakers, cars, and robots. She was a founding Board Member of the Association of Voice Interaction Design(AVIxD) and spearheaded the creation of AVIxD’s VUI design guidelines.
Jennifer Arnold leads partner engineering at Viv Labs. Over the past 15 years, she's held various product management and business development roles focused on mobile and data center software, silicon and technologies. She has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and MBA. Jennifer is passionate about driving the expansion of Bixby’s services ecosystem through strategic partner engagements.
Jeremy Wilken is a software engineer at VMware and Google Developer Expert for Google Assistant and Angular. He runs the Design for Voice podcast, which focuses on educating about practical design techniques for voice experiences. He is the author of Ionic in Action and Angular 2 in Action, as well as a regular speaker at events around the world. Jeremy lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and daughters. When he isn't coding, you can find him brewing beer.
"I am a visionary entrepreneurial Data Scientist, recognized as a technical evangelist, innovator, and communicator in cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, enterprise data sciences, and machine learning. I help companies realize new capabilities and potential by teaching others how effective use of yesterday’s data can shape today’s human behavior to produce desired results tomorrow.
Company leaders, investors, and stakeholders reach out to me regarding recent work in developing practical methods for unifying AI capabilities and big data infrastructure to ‘bend the business curve’ in solving real problems facing today's businesses; and, I am often asked to speak at company and industry events and write pieces that translate complex modeling into clear business understanding."
"Jess is CEO & Cofounder of Opearlo, a YC backed startup producing some of the most popular voice apps on Amazon Alexa, inc. Find My Phone, Guess My Name, and the kid favourite Panda Rescue. An Amazon Alexa Champion and nominee for the Alexa Award ""Executive of the Year,"" Jess is an active member of the voice community who regularly speaks at conferences/meet-ups about her direct experience working in voice, covering topics such as lessons learnt and voice design.
Jess is a regular speaker at conferences, covering voice topics such as lessons learned, voice design, and monetisation on Alexa. She is also a voice design tutor and mentor for CareerFoundry’s Voice Design course."
Jessica Dene Earley-Cha is a Developer Advocate for Google Assistant. She loves to connect with developers and explore VUI (voice user interface) to add another dimension to how user interact with technology. Jessica is part of the leadership team for WomenInVoice@. You’ll find her either spending time with her dog, collecting strawberry knick knack or biking around town.
Jessica Hall is VP of Product Strategy and Design at 3Pillar Global, and author of "The Product Mindset: Succeed in the Digital Economy by Changing the Way Your Organization Thinks" (available fall 2019). 3Pillar Global is an Inc. 5000 developer of client-facing web and mobile applications. Jessica leads teams creating digital products that customers crave and that drive business growth. With wide ranging experience, she’s passionate about helping clients succeed.
Jessica has scaled MDC Ventures into a global operation spanning the entire MDC network, evaluating hundreds of early stage companies a year while educating partners on the emerging trends driving the industry. Via the MDC Ventures advisor network, Jessica has created a powerful micro community driving cross pollination of innovation insights across more than 15 agencies. She’s sourced and lead investments in emerging companies including Msg.ai, Gradient.io, Veritonic, Catch & Release and Mezzobit (acquired by OpenX).
Jim co-founded Sonde Health to focus on extending vocal biomarker analysis technology to give today’s voice assistants disruptive capabilities to measure health directly and proactively across a range of mental and physical health conditions. He has over 25 years of experience harnessing innovative technologies to provide solutions to important biological measurement needs. Beginning at MIT and MIT Lincoln Laboratory and continuing at PureTech Health, he has helped build teams and solutions impacting a broad range of applications including biodefense, human DNA identification and characterization, and distributed human health and performance monitoring.
Currently, Jim is the founding CEO of NeuroLex Labs, a company that is making voice computing accessible to everyone. He is also the author of Introduction to Voice Computing in Python, a textbook that outlines a new definition for voice computing with 200+ starter scripts on GitHub to train the next-generation of voice computing experts. Previously, Jim was a founding Partner of NeuroLaunch and CyberLaunch which invested in and grew over 22 companies in the neuroscience, cybersecurity, and machine learning verticals. He holds BS in biomedical engineering from Georgia Tech.
Conversation Designer & UX Researcher | Founder of Women in Voice | PhD Candidate UArizona | Alexa Award Finalist 2019
Joanne Lin is a Principal at Newark Venture Partners, an early-stage venture fund that invests in Seed/Series A stage B2B technology companies. As Principal, Joanne leads the fund's direct investment strategy focusing on the sourcing and diligence of potential deals and on-going portfolio management.
Prior to joining Newark Venture Partners, Joanne was an education investor with University Ventures focusing on companies transforming the higher education space. She was co-founder of a Newark-based social enterprise aimed at expanding community access to digital manufacturing technology. Joanne also has 10 years of finance experience at JPMorgan, and is a TeachForAmerica alumna. Joanne has a M. Ed from Hunter College and a BA in Economics from Barnard
Jochen Emig is the Founder and CEO of ONSEI GmbH, an agency that consults on, builds and maintains conversational interfaces for companies such as Allianz, car2go, Edeka and Telekom. Prior to starting ONSEI in Berlin, Germany, Jochen worked as a developer and technical lead at startups in Japan, Singapore and the US.
Mr. Maloff is a globally recognized expert and author on Internet, its uses for business purposes, the convergence with traditional telephony, and communications implications of regulations such as HIPAA and CALEA. He currently serves as Senior Vice President – Strategic Alliances and Chief Compliance Officer for Phone.com (www.phone.com), and has responsibility for the Channel Partner Program, large scale business development, law enforcement compliance, HIPAA compliance, and assistance with network-related strategies and tactics. In addition, Mr. Maloff has been an Adjunct Professor at Colorado Technical University since 2009 and has taught information technology courses (such as Disaster Recovery and Network Design and Implementation), various Marketing classes, and Organizational Behavior Principles.
Maloff has written several books, spoken at industry conferences worldwide, and written numerous articles.
Dr. Joel Park is a board-certified emergency medicine physician with expertise in data science and machine learning in the healthcare sector. He is a Clinician – Data Scientist at Chainhaus and a practicing attending physician at New York Presbyterian Hospital - Weill Cornell Medical Center. Dr. Park earned his medical degree at Rutgers University – New Jersey Medical School and completed his residency at New York Presbyterian – Universities of Columbia and Cornell. Dr. Park’s responsibilities include utilizing data science and machine learning algorithms for operational and clinical data with the goals of implementing changes from data insight. He performs exploratory data analysis and predictive modeling for emergency medicine department operations including work on patient boarding, surge protocols, and ED metrics.
Joel is an innovative and creative scientist who leverages experience in neurobiology, physics, instrumentation and statistics to generate and analyze large data sets. Currently, he is a Sr Manager at Biogen in the Quantitative Medicine and Clinical Technologies group. Joel started his career at Vanderbilt University where he obtained a PhD in the center for molecular neuroscience under Dr. Louis J DeFelice studying neurotransmitter transporter. After graduate school, Joel was hired as the managing director of imaging at the Stowers Institute for medical research. He was responsible for the development of light microscopy-based methodologies and image analysis. Joel left this position to purse work with Dr. Michael Ehlers at Duke University studying key molecular components for synaptic plasticity. He served as a technology lab lead within the Neuroscience Research Unit at Pfizer to build a strong technology base for advanced experimentation and informatics support. Joel served as a translator between the biologists, statisticians, physicists, and computer infrastructure professionals. Throughout his career, Joel has done pioneering work in analytics and informatics to help provide a quantitative structure to extract meaningful data from imaging sources. He leveraged these skills in leadership positions in small biotechnology startup Biomedical Data Analytics. He has the skills and knowledge base to assemble multifaceted teams to develop and build novel technologies. CEO/Co-founder of Biomedical Data Analytics (BDA) focused on software-as-a-service (SaaS) for contract research. BDA provides advanced analytical tools on a proprietary cloud based platform to extract additional information from clinical and pre-clinical data. He has a unique perspective as a laboratory scientist, with extensive computational experience. The synergy of these efforts resulted in delivering novel AI methods to monitor videos of autistic patients to augment current clinical efforts for underserved rural populations. In addition to his efforts at BDA, Joel is the lead instructor for Northeastern University’s Level Data Analytics program and Instructor in the Master of Professional Studies in Analytics programs. He teaches the analytics core sections, predictive analytics, programming, machine learning and big data for students pursuing a career in data science. These efforts have lead Joel to his current work at Biogen in the Quantitative Medicine and Clinical Technologies group. The QMCT group is devoted to using quantitative approaches to develop more robust outcomes in clinical trials with an overarching goal to provide higher success rates.
As NPRÕs Vice President for New Platform Partnerships, Joel Sucherman guides strategy and leads the teams that build NPRÕs presence on voice assistants and other emerging platforms. Under SuchermanÕs leadership, NPR has become a preeminent brand on smart speakers, developing skills and actions on Alexa and Google Assistant platforms used by millions of people each month. SuchermanÕs teams were also responsible for NPR One, an IOS and Android app that uses a combination of algorithms and human curation to provide a personalized radio news/podcast experience. Prior to working in public radio, Sucherman was instrumental in the digital transformation of USA TODAY, re-imagining storytelling for the ÒNationÕs NewspaperÓ on various platforms.
With over 30 years of experience in data analytics and marketing, Joel Wilson is the Founder and CEO of matchbox.io. Having created marketing technology solutions for clients such as Procter & Gamble, Verizon, ESPN, and UnitedHealthcare, Joel established Matchbox in 2017 in order to create cutting edge solutions in the emerging field of voice-first technology. Matchbox has since become one of the leading creators of educational voice games, including some of the most popular and highest rated games Question of the Day and Kids Quiz.
John Alioto is a senior technical leader, Evangelist and software architect. He currently serves as the Chief Evangelist at Viv Labs where he brings the good news about the Bixby Platform to developers. He is the former CTO of Technical Evangelism & Startup in Microsoft’s Developer Experience and Evangelism group (DX) in the United States. John is the former CTO of Microsoft DX West Region where he ran DX’s startup mission in Silicon Valley. Before joining Microsoft, John served as a co-founder and CTO of a security startup focused on Machine Learning. John has more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry and a degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. John enjoys all types of fitness activities, has two kids and two dogs and once held weapons grade plutonium in his hand.
John is currently VP at ID R&D, Inc., a New York-based provider of multi-modal biometric technologies with best-in-class voice biometrics for mobile and web. He began his work with biometrics in 2006 at Voxeo Corp, acquired by Aspect Software in 2013 where John served as VP of Product Management. In 2015, John became president of Voice Biometrics Group, then joined the team at ID R&D in September 2018. John has 35 years of experience in voice, IVR, and contact centers at Dialogic, Intel, Voxeo, Aspect, and AT&T. He earned his MSEE from Stanford and a BSEE from North Carolina State University, where he also serves as a member of the Strategic Advisory Board for the ECE Department.
John G is an Alexa Champion and creative producer exploring the impact of voice on the creation and consumption of digital culture. He’s published 20 Alexa skills, including Chop Chop, an award winning multi-modal kitchen companion. He worked with the NFL to design & build their first Alexa skill and won the Alexa Hackathon at re:invent. His work draws from experience in audio engineering, music production, talent & brand management, creative development and content strategy on emerging platforms. At The Walt Disney Company & Maker Studios, John collaborated with some of the world’s most prolific video creators across kids, music, comedy, & gaming to grow audience and develop new IP in partnership with platforms, publishers and brands.
John has over 25 years of experience in software development and architecture with experience in Fintech, manufacturing, insurance, and healthcare. Systems he created while working for Microsoft Consulting Services have won multiple industry innovation awards. Most recently he co-founded Whetstone Technologies, where he has launched VoiceConnectr℠ - a next-generation cloud-based platform for delivering innovative cross-platform voice-first multi-modal solutions.
John Kelvie is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bespoken, the leaders in automated testing and monitoring for voice. We have more than 5,000 developers using our software, 1,000 voice apps being monitored, and we work with brands like Mercedes-Benz R&D, the NFL, Expedia and many more to ensure they are building the best possible voice experiences.
John Morabito is a skilled and multifaceted marketer, speaker and blogger with over 8 years of experience in SEO, PPC, and performance digital marketing channels. With a background starting in dentistry, then electronics he’s a former in-house marketer turned SEO Director on the agency side with a deep passion for educating peers and clients. He specializes in technical and off-site SEO, within the e-commerce & CPG verticals for brands like Drybar, Hain Celestial, and jane iredale. In 2018 as Director of SEO at Stella Rising, he was honored with a nomination for Search Personality of the Year, and his team won the Search Engine Land Award for Best Large Agency — SEO. Nominations & Awards: SEO Team of the Year Drum Search Awards 2017 Search Engine Land Large SEO Agency of The Year 2018 Best Large Agency SEO Team US Search Awards 2018 Best SEO Campaign US Search Awards 2018 3x Best SEO Campaign Drum Search Awards 2018 Best SEO Team Drum Search Awards 2018 Search Personality of the Year 2018
Jon Arnold is Principal of J Arnold & Associates, an independent analyst providing thought leadership and go-to-market counsel with a focus on the business-level impact of digital transformation in the workplace. Core areas of expertise include unified communications, cloud services, collaboration, Internet of Things, future of work, contact centers, customer experience, video, VoIP, and social media.
He has been consulting in many of these areas since 2001, and his independent practice was founded in 2005. JAA is based in Toronto, Ontario, and serves clients across North America as well as in Europe.
Jon’s thought leadership can be followed on his widely-read JAA’s Analyst Blog, his monthly Communications and Collaboration Review, and ongoing commentary on Twitter and Linked in. His thought leadership is also regularly published across the communications industry, including BCStrategies, Ziff Davis, No Jitter, TechTarget and Internet Telephony Magazine.
Jon began his career in the games industry as a narrative designer and writer of interactive stories. He co-founded Earplay in 2013 to create the worlds first voice operated interactive audio drama, Codename Cygnus. In the years since, Earplay has become the world’s premier creative platform for publishing and powering interactive audio experiences across voice‐enabled devices. Named 2018 Developer of the Year at the Alexa Awards, Jon and Earplay have worked with Universal Interactive, USA Network, A+E Networks, Warner Brothers, Hasbro, Disney Interactive, Amazon Studios, VICE Media, Bose Corporation, and Viacom.
Conversation designer with experience delivering multi-modal conversational interactions in mobile apps. This includes dialogue design, VUI, configuration, usability testing, localization, NLP/speech and analytics. My background is as a linguist with expertise in speech and conversation/discourse. 10+ years of experience in research, experiments, surveys, stats, quantitative and qualitative data analysis and fluency in German and French.
One of the few entrepreneurs in the US to build a gigabit fiber network from scratch, Joshua is a serial entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience. The ISP he built, Wicked Broadband, featured in Wired and Forbes is a testament of net neutrality support and underlying principles long before they became a buzz phrase. Joshua is an Air Force Captain, an aerospace engineer, and a hacker at heart. He oversees all aspects of Mycroft and is a firm supporter of the open source movement committed to an open future for AI.
Joti Balani is managing director of Freshriver.ai which focuses on building custom, human-centered enterprise grade bots that generate economic and brand value while being emotionally intelligent. She has helped B2B and B2C enterprises build data-driven, CX-focused product portfolios leveraging conversational AI, mobile and cloud services. She combines her multi-disciplinary expertise in product development, software engineering and marketing to create outcome focused enterprise capabilities. She has led product and technology innovation at both startup and Fortune 1000 enterprises including AT&T, American Red Cross, Texas Instruments, Zayo group, Medocity, Anexinet and Cross River Fiber. She also founded the Sisters Circle, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering women and children with education and opportunity. She has an MBA from University of Dallas and B.Sc. Computer Science from University of Bahrain, Arabian Gulf. You can reach her at www.linkedin.com/in/jotibalani.
Joyce Even is a health care executive with 30+ years of in-depth understanding of health care, financial, data/systems, and content creation and management. As vice chair of Mayo Clinic Global Business Solutions, she is responsible for extending Mayo Clinic’s health and wellness knowledge globally via multiple formats, languages and delivery channels, which includes innovation in voice and chat ready content. Joyce leads a team of talented professionals who create and deliver medically-reviewed original, evidence-based content that is leveraged by health care platform developers, hospitals and clinics worldwide. Our content is designed to activate individuals to effectively manage their health at any stage of life, improve outcomes, and reduce costs. We are honored to have received multiple awards over the past several years including the recent 2019 Alexa Skill of the Year for Healthcare Award for the Mayo Clinic First Aid skill.
Juby George-Vaze, RN, CCM, MBA is the CEO & Chief Innovation Officer of Globex Health, a company that she founded to help hospitals, providers and employers successfully navigate the new healthcare landscape using her immersive clinical knowledge and the latest Big Data Analytics, Telehealth, AI, Population Health and Blockchain Payment technologies. Capitalizing on newer reimbursement guidelines and proprietary technology, Globex Health have expanded into enablement of telehealth & remote monitoring, bringing post-acute care, chronic disease management and eldercare/post acute care into the population health umbrella. AI/Bot based tools and IoT are also components of solutions. Juby’s 20+ years of experience in various roles have enabled her to understand healthcare from the different parts that makes up the whole continuum. She has worked as a nurse, operations manager, disease management cost containment expert, financial administrator and technologist. She also brings the perspective of the patient, living successfully with chronic conditions and rare genetic disease. Prior to Globex Health, at Anthem & its many subsidiaries including Empire BC/BS, she led transformations to various payment models, including Value-Based Payment, Pay for Performance, Shared Risk and Accountable Care Organizations in addition to developing and running many complex disease management programs and working on it’s AmericanWell practice version products. Juby currently serves on the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Blockchain Task Force and Nurse Informatics Group. She is also on the Board of Directors of the New York Chapter of the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA). She serves on the New Jersey Tech Council’s Life Sciences Advisory Council and is a co-orgainzer of Health 2.0 NYC – The NY Healthcare Innovation Group. She is also advisor and mentor to several startups including health tech and blockchain companies. Juby is licensed as a Registered Nurse in New York and New Jersey and is Certified Case Manager (CCM). Juby holds an MBA in Health Systems Management and a Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc), both from Pace University.
Judith A. Sheft is the Associate Vice President Strategic Relationships and External Affairs at New Jersey Innovation Institute at NJIT. She is involved with regional economic and cluster development having responsibilities for the HealthIT Connections entrepreneurial cluster development program, the NJIT I-Corps Site and the Procurement Technical Assistance Center. She is engaged with technology /IP innovation and commercialization efforts working with faculty and students to create startup companies and establishing licensing relationships with corporate partners. She advises external startups at NJIT’s high technology / life sciences business accelerator/incubator. She is on the Board of Advisors to the NJIT Murray Women’s Center and serves as a mentor and coach to students and faculty. She is a member of the NJ – Israel Commission and serves on the Board of Greater Newark Enterprise Corporation, StartUp Newark, Women’s Center for Entrepreneurship Corporation, Einstein’s Alley, SheTek and NJEDA Technology Advisory Board, working to assist early stage tech and life sciences entrepreneurs foster regional economic growth. She was a co-chair of Governor Murphy’s transition advisory committee for Technology Government and Innovation (2017).
Justin Hendrix is Executive Director of NYC Media Lab, a public-private partnership between the City’s industry and its universities to drive emerging media and technology innovation and entrepreneurship, and the founding Executive Director of RLab, a new 16,500 square foot facility including co-working labs, classrooms, studios, and more in the Brooklyn Navy Yard that is New York’s City’s home for VR, AR and spatial computing. RLab is the nation’s first city-funded center for research, entrepreneurship and education in virtual and augmented-reality, spatial computing and other emerging media technologies. Previously he was Vice President, Business Development & Innovation for The Economist. He holds a BA from the College of William & Mary and an MSc in Technology Commercialization from the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin.
Kasia Ryniak is a co-founder of Upside - one of the leading European strategic and technological agencies that focus on bringing brands to voice platforms. She helps companies to understand the power of voice and design great Voice User Interfaces. Kasia truly values sharing experience and knowledge in the field of voice - she's a co-organizer of Create For Voice meetups in Poland, member of Women in Voice community, founder and a lead writer at the first Polish web portal promoting a deeper understanding of voice technologies.
Kate Kallot is director of AI & Machine Learning Ecosystem within Arm, a Softbank Company. A technology-driven AI enthusiast, she specializes in creating strategic alliances that empower the ecosystem to drive innovation.
Kate joined Arm from Intel, where she was director of AI Vision Solutions Ecosystem, with a focus on computer vision and deep learning. She has extensive experience in product management and business development for AI, IoT, robotics, AR/VR, and drones.
An entrepreneur, developer, maker, and innovator, Kate has a special interest in Tech for Good and a strong belief in the power of AI to drive social change.
An entrepreneur, developer, maker, and innovator, Kate has a special interest in Tech for Good and a strong belief in the power of AI to drive social change.
Katherine Watier Ong, CEO of WO Strategies, is an online marketing consultant, coach, and public speaker. She has over 20 years of experience providing digital marketing strategies for brands including Cancer.gov, HealthIT.gov, NOAA Fisheries, New York Health Benefits Exchange (NYStateofHealth.gov), American College of Cardiology, Cleveland Clinic, Environmental Working Group, and RollCall.com. She previously ran the digital marketing and analytics team for Ketchum PR globally.
She has spoken about SEO and digital marketing at the Voice Summit, SES Chicago, Online Marketing Summit, EXl Pharma Conference, as well as DC AMA and PRSA events. She has been featured in Humans of Analytics and on Forbes’ Outstanding Women in Analytics list.
She earned both an MA from Georgetown University in Tech Marketing and Business (where she conducted the first consumer adoption study of wearable computers), and a BA in Social Psychology from Hampshire College.
Katherine Prescott is the Founder & Editor of VoiceBrew, a digital media company focused on helping people get the most out of Alexa. Prior to launching VoiceBrew, Katherine was Senior Vice President and Head of Corporate Strategy at Highbridge Capital Management, a global alternative investment firm where she spent eight years. She graduated from Harvard College in 2009.
Ms. Bird counsels employers on employment and human resources issues, presents workplace training programs, conducts and assists in investigations, and litigates as necessary in these areas. Her clients range from small, family-owned businesses, hospitals, and higher education institutions to regional based companies with thousands of employees. She represents her clients in proceedings in federal and state courts, and state and federal civil rights agencies, as well as arbitrations and mediations.
Kevin Park has had a distinguished career as a leader in business and technology. Currently he’s a faculty member at NYU (2013) and NYiT (2007) and co-founder/director of UX design at ObjectivEye, a startup that provides a deep understanding and customized UX/UI design and analysis to the AR/VR industry. Kevin is co-creator of the AR/VR Diploma program and UX Design Professional Diploma program at NYU and AR/VR Certificate program at NYiT. Their mission is to bring students through a fast-paced program that will advance their understanding of AR/VR and UX/UI in the world today. Kevin has well over 20+ years of professional experience in the art, design and emerging tech culture. He’s worked as a Senior UX Design Manager at The Metropolitan Museum of Art for 17 years, Design Consultant for Pentagram, Antenna International, Smithsonian Museum, MoMA, Guggenheim, The Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University, McDonald’s. Kevin has been influential to the culture of design and remains unmatched through his passion of bridging the gap of AR/VR technology through our daily lives today.
Kevin Teman begun his career in iPhone development with the creation of the first phone, striving to create interfaces that felt ahead of their time. In his late 20s and early 30s, Kevin struggled to find a life partner, turning to dating apps and services in the process. When Kevin used human matchmaking services, his eyes were opened to a whole new world of effective matchmaking techniques and he felt for the first time he had a solid chance of finding a suitable partner. Kevin created the first talking artificially intelligent matchmaker to bring those effective techniques into an AI that could be used by anyone to find love.
Kourtney Bitterly is Lead for The New York Times’ R&D group. Her role is to understand how emerging technology and consumer behavior will impact the way media is consumed and created, and articulate future-focused strategies in response. Her current area of exploration is how voice-assistant platforms will shape content accessibility and content. Kourtney comes to The Times from Matter, a venture capital firm and startup accelerator focused on investing in media startups. At Matter, Kourtney was Director of Partnerships and led the partner accelerator program. Prior to that, she directed Kickstarter’s effort to reshape the way it partners with creators, headed up strategic partnerships at theSkimm, and led business development at IDEO New York. She began her career working as a researcher for television news. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English and Spanish Literature from the University of Notre Dame.
Kyle Seaman leads product for the Sonos Software Platform, with a focus on delivering the APIs and integrations that expand the platform and continue to bring the best sound experiences to everyone.
Kyree is a proud native Philadelphian who has lived all across the city. Originally on track to pursue a career in marketing, she serendipitously discovered the user experience field and fell in love with it. She is currently a User Experience Researcher at Comcast, leading research efforts to enhance current Xfinity products and services and inform the design of future projects. Now wanting to introduce others to the user experience field, she founded Onyx Valley, a community building organization designed to identify and prepare diverse talent for careers in the tech field. Launched in 2016 out of the Institute of Hip Hop Entrepreneurship’s startup incubator, Onyx Valley has hosted several events and workshops to generate interest in user experience. Onyx Valley is currently gearing up to launch the first wave of projects for Onyx Valley Studios, a student-led design consultancy agency. Kyree is a graduate of Howard University’s School of Business and completed her Master’s degree in Design at Carnegie Mellon University.
Laura is a Google Developer Expert, mentor, and advocate. She has been involved in the tech industry for over 10 years. During the last two years, she has been traveling and doing talks in more than 20 cities around the world promoting the use of disruptive technologies and the concept of voice first. Currently, she consults within IT, voice strategy and she is one of the organizers of GDG Cloud London and a Women Techmakers Ambassador.
An award winning composer, he co-created the long running “America’s First Family” theme, and is a two time Emmy nominee for original music composition for NBC’s Today show. He is an Emmy Nominee for Best Promotional Announcement on MSNBC, and is honoured by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for his contributions to NBC's "Saturday Night Live."
Laurence Minsky is renowned in professional and academic circles for his strategic and creative leadership and broad-reaching industry expertise which includes brand development, advertising, brand activation, content marketing, new product development, direct response marketing, local store marketing, channel communications, as well as online, mobile, and social marketing. He is also known for developing effective award-winning cross-channel solutions that boost marketing ROI.
He currently serves as an associate professor in the Department of Communication in the School of Media Arts at Columbia College Chicago and as a strategic and creative marketing consultant for agencies, corporations, and nonprofits across the globe.
Laurence is also the co-author of The Activation Imperative: How to Build Brands and Business by Inspiring Action (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Audio Branding: Using Sound to Build Your Brand (Kogan Page 2017), executive editor of The Get A Job Workshop: How to Find Your Way to a Creative Career in Advertising, Branding, Collateral, Digital, Experiential & More (Copy Workshop, 2013), the author of How to Succeed in Advertising When All You Have Is Talent Second Edition (Copy Workshop 2007) and Advertising Under One Hour (Under One Hour LLC 2-18) and a contributor to Advertising and the Business of Brands Media Revolution Edition (Copy Workshop 2009). As an industry thought-leader, he has been published by the Harvard Business Review, European Business Review, MarketingProfs, and others, and has been quoted in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Exame (Brazil’s largest business and economics magazine), Shopify’s blog, Crain’s Chicago Business, and many more.
His agency experience includes a tenure at Frankel (now Arc Worldwide) and engagements with more than 25 other agencies as a consultant. And, he has created strategic and communications solutions for many blue-chip clients, including AARP, Laila Ali, Amazon, Ambius, AON, Bay Valley Foods (various brands), Beltone, Black & Decker Spacemaker, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Coca-Cola Products, Connie’s Pizza, DTE Energy, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Fleetwood Homes, Frito-Lay, George Foreman Products, Kraft Foods, The Lakeside Collection, Lamin-Art, Mayo Medical Laboratories (Mayo Clinic), McDonald’s, MetLife, Midtown Athletic Clubs, Motorola, PetSmart, Spacelabs Healthcare, Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA), True Value, Unilever, United Airlines, United States Postal Service, Westinghouse, Vita Foods, and many more.
An award-winning creative with more than 125 industry accolades to date, he has served on the juries of many leading industry award shows, including Lürzer’s International Archive 200 Best Digital Artists Worldwide 2015/2016, The One Club Young Ones Competition, and the Design of the Times, and he is a long-standing member of the One Club for Art and Copy, the Authors Guild, and the American Academy of Advertising.
As a voice actor, Lea Gulino has worked on everything from Videogames to National Commercials. Lea holds a BFA from New York University Tisch School of the Arts. She has recorded ADR at Skywalker Sound, extended projects for Dolby and over 8 years of IVR for Cisco Systems. Lea currently serves on the Advisory Board of SAGAFTRA San Francisco/Northern California and is a member of the National Voiceover Committee. She lives with her husband on their wooden boat in and around San Francisco Bay.
Leenda Nicole Dejel graduated from MSU with a degree in Dietetics. After learning that hospital life was not for her, she founded CatheXis Talent as a philanthropic business venture stemming from her experience in the talent industry throughout college. CatheXis started booking talent from actors, dancers, DJs, models, and other categories in the entertainment industry, to booking yoga teachers for the NBA. With over 10 years of yoga experience Leenda started teaching yoga for the Denver Nuggets basketball team before volunteer teaching in the Colorado prison system. With volunteering and mentoring being the differientiator, CatheXis Talent gives opportunities to 'people that care about other people' in order to promote positive role-models for society and have the greatest positive impact. The name "CatheXis" was inspired to remind Talent that 'the struggle is the way', and that through transmutation of emotional frustrations through definitely planned work we can all choose where we put our energy and how we play the cards life deals
Lisa Falkson is currently Senior VUI Designer at Amazon. She is the editor and author of “Ubiquitous Voice: Essays from the Field” and has over 15 years of industry and research experience, specializing in the design, development and deployment of natural speech and multimodal interfaces. Her most recent work includes next-generation voice user interfaces at NIO and CloudCar, as well as Amazon’s first speech-enabled products: Fire TV, Fire Phone and Echo/Alexa. Prior to that, she focused on early iPad/iPhone interfaces at Volio, and speech-enabled IVR applications at Nuance. Lisa holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the Speech and Auditory Perception Laboratory at UCLA.
Maarten Lens-FitzGerald instigates movements that shape the future as a keynote speaker, consultant, and entrepreneur. His latest movement and new medium is Voice. He is Global Head of Voice at the European digital product agency Nodes and he founded the event series Open Voice, bi-monthly and on average 180 attendees. Also, he started the weekly Open Voice newsletter with the current Voice news as well as the Voice Cast, a podcast show with Business News Radio. All in English and for the European market. Previously Maarten founded and exited successfully the largest Augmented Reality platform Layar and the future of work platform Teamily.
Overall Voice is Maartens 5th new medium, after AR, mobile, email, and web. Throughout his career, he keynoted at many events from World Economic Forum, TED to Mobile World Congres. He advises c-level and boards of local and international top companies on how to frame use the new opportunities of the new media. This summer he will publish his first book 'Voice'.
As a conversational linguist and an ethnographer, Madeleine Adkins brings an in-depth knowledge of language to all her professional pursuits. A speaker of five languages who has lived in Europe, Asia, and North America, Madeleine’s international perspective has enhanced her work in the fields of intercultural business communication, education, research, and writing. Her new goal is to draw on her background and contribute to the development of conversation design in the world of voice.
Mahek A. Shah leads the Value Measurement for Health Care projects at Harvard Business School. As Senior Researcher & Project Director, he designs and implements time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) globally to help providers, governments, and employers understand the actual costs of care delivery. He focuses on maximizing value for all stakeholders through reorganization of care delivery & disruptive innovation, improving the care experience for all. He sits at the intersection of health, business, and technology. Dr. Shah is the co-author of several Harvard Business School case studies. He's published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, World Health Organization, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. Shah delivered a TEDx talk at Harvard: Bringing Patient-centered Design to Healthcare. Shah speaks globally on the future of health care delivery, value-based care, innovative delivery models, and the business of healthcare. Previously, Dr. Shah worked on Wall Street as an investment banker at Citigroup.
Malte Kosub is co-founder and managing director of Future of Voice GmbH. The company was one of the first in Germany to work with Amazon’s Alexa; in fact, it was appointed by Amazon as the first and by now only “German Alexa champion”. Within his role in the company, Malte advises customers such as Vodafone, Allianz, ERGO, Bauer Media and Unilever on the topic of voice assistants. Before founding Future of Voice, Malte previously founded the e-commerce startup “Wandnotiz”, which was then sold in early 2017 to a medium-sized printshop network. Beyond this, he brought to life the largest music competition for schools in Germany: “Talented”. He has received several awards for his outstanding voluntary work, including awards from the German ministry of economics and from the Hermann Ehlers Foundation. He is faculty member of the Futur/io Institute as well as Kairos Society Fellow. Malte completed his economics degree at the University of Hamburg, at Harvard University, and at MIT.
Mandy Chan is a Developer Advocate for the Google Assistant, where she is responsible for creating practical tools and content for the developer community. At I/O 2018, Mandy and the team published two Codelabs to guide developers on how to build Actions. Since then, the Codelabs have trained thousands of new developers from around the world. She is a frequent speaker at different developer conferences, including the Grace Hopper Conference and Google IO 2019. You can find her talk at bit.ly/io19-aog She was invited as a guest on the Google Cloud Platform Podcast. You can hear more about her recent activities on bit.ly/gcp-mandy. Prior to Google, she made many early contributions to the voice community. One of her most frequently downloaded open source projects is called SSML Builder. You can learn more about Mandy by following her on Twitter (@MandyChanNYC)!
Marc Ladin was a tech startup CMO for the first 25 years of his career and now is a full-time investor in voice tech startups. Marc launched VoicePunch.VC, an early stage investment fund focused on cross-platform startups in voice and related technologies. Before becoming a full-time investor, Marc led the marketing and strategy functions at several successful tech startups in the communications space, including TigerText, Everbridge, Internet America, and PDQ.net.
Mark Greenfield is a highly regarded, influential member of the higher education web community. He is an experienced consultant and an award winning speaker who frequently presents at a wide range of conferences, meetings and special lectures where his thought-provoking commentary on the impact of emerging technology challenges audiences to rethink their basic assumptions about web communications and technology. Mark has worked at the University at Buffalo (UB) for over 30 years in a variety of technology related roles. He currently serves as the Web Accessibility Officer providing central oversight, technical expertise and guidance, leadership and vision to support campus accessibility efforts. Mark has also served as a visiting instructor in UB’s former School of Informatics where he taught a course on web accessibility. His research interests include accessibility, inclusive design, emerging technologies, social media, the Millennial Generation and their use of technology, and the impact of globalization and technology on the academy.
Mark Mezrich is the Vice President, Voice Products for Viacom Media Networks, building voice-first experiences across platform for Viacom’s brands such as Nickelodeon, MTV, BET, and Comedy Central. He and his team have created some of the most popular activations on voice platforms today, from The SpongeBob Challenge to Comedy Central Stand-Up. Previously, Mark oversaw music products for MTV, VH1, and CMT.
Mark Tucker is a software architect and an Alexa Champion with over 20 years of software design and development experience. He is the organizer of the Phoenix Alexa Meetup and the Phoenix Chapter of the Ubiquitous Voice Society. Mark is interested in ways that voice technology can help non profits. His passion project is Speech Markdown.
"Mark Webster is Director of Product at Adobe, focusing on voice integration for Adobe XD. He is also responsible for driving product strategy for emerging technologies within XD. Mark joined Adobe through the acquisition of the company he founded, Sayspring, which offers a design and prototyping platform for voice interfaces.
Prior to Sayspring, Mark was Director of Product for Groupon, focusing on entertainment and events. He landed at Groupon after SideTour, an e-commerce marketplace for local activities he co-founded, was acquired by Groupon in September 2013. Mark started his career with a five-year stretch at the National Basketball Association, where he worked in Creative Services.
Mark shares his thoughts on voice and the future of design on Twitter or Medium."
Marli Mesibov is the VP of Content Strategy at the digital UX agency Mad*Pow. Her work spans strategy and experiences across industries, with a particular interest in healthcare, finance, and education. She is a frequent conference speaker, a former editor of the UX publication UX Booth, and was voted one of MindTouchÕs Top 25 Content Strategist Influencers in 2016. Marli can also be found on Twitter, where she shares thoughts on UX Design, content strategy, and Muppets. You can learn more about her and her work at http://marli.us
Martine Van Der Lee, Director Social Media, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines“At KLM Royal Dutch Airlines I’m responsible for KLM’s activities on social media. This concerns our pillars service, brand, commerce and development. Conversational interfaces like smart speakers are very important to us: we need to be where our customers are and offer them the best possible service. Voice is perfect for just that! Over the past years we have been pioneering new platforms and AI solutions to become ever more faster and more personal – at the same time. KLM launched as one of the first travel brands on Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat and Google Assistant. Entering this new era, to us it’s always about humans first, technology second, meaning that our focus is on using technology to give the best personal service.” Innovative leader in voiceThe Dutch pioneering spirit that is so characteristic of KLM is reflected in our use of innovative technology, such as voice-activated systems. The technology itself is not of prime importance, but rather the extent to which it makes life easier for our passengers before, during and after their flight. By experimenting with the possibilities, KLM aims to remain an innovative leader offering the very best passenger experience. KLM previously launched a travel guide on Google Home and Amazon Alexa, which helps people find a suitable holiday destination. Also a departure planner is available on Google Home that lets users know when it is time to head off to the airport. Customers can furthermore find and book flights, and to get customized advice on what they should pack, based on their KLM destination, the duration of their trip and local weather forecasts. KLM on social mediaKLM has been a pioneer in social media services and campaigns since 2009. We have more than 28 million friends and followers on a variety of social media. Through these channels, KLM receives more than 180,000 messages a week, 35,000 of which are questions or comments. The world’s largest social media team, consisting of 360 service staff, respond to the messages personally. KLM offers customers support 24/7 on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WeChat, and KakaoTalk in Dutch, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. KLM was the world’s first airline to offer its customers flight documents and status updates via WhatsApp, Messenger, and Twitter. What’s more, it was the first western airline to use the Chinese social media channel WeChat. Any questions or looking for more information about KLM on social media? Discover all KLM’s social services on social.klm.com.
Career Brand Management and Marketing Strategy Leader for well-known B2C/B2B2C brands at best-in-class global organizations and startup experience, including Advisor to eading interactive audio stories platform, Earplay.
Matt Ware's been around digital a long time; back before the Y2K bug was even a thing. Prior to becoming Head of Operations at First, Matt helped realise the value of digital at Sensis, News Ltd, Reed Business Information and Dynamic Creative.
Over the last 20 years Matt has worked in the fields of SEO, Performance Media, Social, Mobile and CRO with a specific focus on how to improve Customer Experience and Engagement using Data and Analytics.
Most recently Matt has started to explore the value of AI, Machine Learning and how Voice enabled devices can be used to interact with customers in real time to answer their questions and needs.
Some of the clients Matt has worked with include: Kmart, Target, Suncorp, AAMI, Officeworks, Flight Centre, Fairfax, TradeMe, BigW, Fiji Airways, UNSW, Dymocks, Grays Online, TAB and Qantas to name just a few.
Matt's relentless pursuit to know his clients and their competitors inside and out places him in a unique position to bring vital insight to First's clients.
A self-described military brat, Melissa spent her formative years moving from place to place across the U.S. A SCAD educated graphic designer and former owner of a patent illustration business, she oversees all aspects of design for Novel Effect. She loves fancy pens and has an growing collection of sketchbooks waiting to be filled. She lives in Seattle with her husband and their four children, only two of which have fur.
I have two decades of experience in creating, operating and marketing live events. My strong entrepreneurial skills and tendencies include strategic planning, fundraising and execution. I am passionate about my work and the people I work with. I've lead diverse teams, often in heavily unionized environments. I am currently partnered with Satisfi Labs to bring an intelligent ticketing agent to live events powered by AI and NLP technology.
Michael L. Atkinson is a serial restaurant technology investor, entrepreneur and strategic advisor to brands, investors, investment banks and technology innovators. As a former restaurant operator and CFO, Michael has a unique perspective on emerging technologies transforming the restaurant industry. Michael founded and is Chairman of FohBoh.com and inFOH.com and CEO of Orderscape.com, a leading-edge voice search and conversational commerce software platform to voice-enable full-menu food ordering using voice assistants and mobile voice platforms like Alexa and Google Assistant/Home.
Michael@orderscape.com
@michaelatkinson"
Michael is an Irish electronics engineer who has worked in the Assistive Technology field for the last decade. He’s worked in some of Ontario’s leading rehab hospitals for both kids and adults, helping individuals with mobility issues communicate, drive their wheelchairs, and control their homes independently. Michael has worked with over 350 clients with various levels of need, from Cerebral Palsy to ALS, and has enabled his clients greater control over their environment. Michael’s mission is to remove barriers so everyone can access the world in which they live.
Mr. Lubben has extensive experience with financial, corporate, and business matters for a variety of private and public companies, including healthcare companies, banks, governmental authorities, and charter schools. Mr. Lubben’s practice focuses on transactional work, with an emphasis on real estate financing transactions, issues relating to the Uniform Commercial Code, and cross-border transactions. He also represents companies involved in the healthcare field, both on a transactional basis and for general counsel purposes. He regularly counsels clients with respect to joint ventures and strategic alliances; shareholder disputes; sales, distribution, and agency agreements; the formation and structure of business entities; and the merger, acquisition, and disposition of business interests. He has represented investors, banks and other financial institutions, governmental authorities, and businesses involved in, among other matters, secured commercial financings; lease securitizations and financings (including new market tax credits transactions, mezzanine lending, sale-leasebacks, and lease-leasebacks); syndications and participations in multi-lender financings; trading of distressed debt; bond indenture financings; securitizations; workouts of commercial and industrial loans, including debtor-in-possession financings; real estate loans; letters of credit; restructurings of large businesses; and foreclosures. To view Mr. Lubben’s full biography, visit: www.gibbonslaw.com/professionals/michael-j-lubben
Michael Meyer, CISSP, CIPP/US, CIPM, FIP, CISM, CRVPM II, CRISC, CISA, is the Chief Risk and Security Officer (CRO, CSO) of MRS BPO LLC. He is responsible for overseeing the company’s governance and strategy for enterprise risk management, security, and compliance. Michael’s team provides independent oversight, guidance for managing risk, ensuring security and compliance, including the development and implementation of risk management and technology strategies for clients. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Rutgers University and a master’s degree in Technology Management from Georgetown University.
Michael Novak is a Digital Transformation expert and business executive with over 15 years of experience helping enterprises leverage emerging technologies to make better business decisions, drive revenue growth, and increase customer satisfaction. He is focused on how voice AI can reduce workflow friction and increase productivity in industries such as Smart Cities, Transportation, Logistics, and Healthcare.
Michele Siekerka, Esq. has served as the President of the New Jersey Business & Industry Association since October 2014. In that time, Michele has led the organization in expanding NJBIA’s voice on critical policy issues impacting New Jersey businesses, including championing our state’s efforts to regain its standing as the Innovation State, while also expanding member services and resources.
Michelle Levine is a Senior Business Development Manager at Amazon, where she has worked for 8 years. She accelerates the Alexa business by building relationships and connecting-the-dots with traditional and digital advertising agencies, consultants, innovators, tool creators, global holding companies, and developers around the world. Michelle is fostering a network and global community of partners who can build engaging content across voice-enabled devices
Michael serves at the Chief Revenue Officer for NTENT, responsible for all sales, marketing, customer support and revenue generation. For more than 20 years’, Michael has led mobile and digital growth and strategy operations in the telecom marketplace. He co-founded and led digital/ad tech startups including Sundial.com and Pinsight Media, a subsidiary of Sprint. He previously served as VP of Business Development for Neustar and VP of Digital at Sprint Nextel, with additional management roles at Fortune 500 companies like Motorola and Deloitte Consulting.
Mitul Tiwari is the CTO and Co-founder of Passage.AI. His expertise lies in building data-driven products using AI, Machine Learning and big data technologies. Previously he was head of People You May Know and Growth Relevance at LinkedIn, where he led technical innovations in large-scale social recommender systems. Prior to that, he worked at Kosmix (now Walmart Labs) on web-scale document and query categorization, and its applications. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He has also co-authored more than twenty publications in top conferences such as KDD, WWW, RecSys, VLDB, SIGIR, CIKM, and SPAA.
Nagaraj is the Director of Emerging Technologies at V Group Inc. and a well-recognized name in Voice Analytics, Conversational AI and NLP domains. With over 20 years of experience in various technologies, Nagaraj plays a key role in advising and guiding the organizations on technology and go-to-market strategies.
He spearheads V Group’s efforts in developing revolutionary products and solutions by leveraging various technologies that transforms business and reach an unseen level of user-first engagement.
He was instrumental in implementing the first ever speech recognition system for telecom and developing unique voice analytics solutions. He is currently focused on voice commerce and voice enabled e-sports.
Dr. Nagendra Kumar Goel is the CEO of GoVivace Inc. that develops speech technology for call analytics, transcription, dictation, IVR and voice biometrics. He has been leading the effort on identifying speaker characteristics that can be used for emotionally intelligent dialogue. He has authored eight patents and several conference and journal publications. He received his Ph.D. from the Center for Language and Speech Processing at the Johns Hopkins University. Prior to founding GoVivace, he worked worked on speech technology at various organizations, such as Mocrosoft, Entropic Inc., LSI Logic, Apptek and IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.
Nara Kasbergen is a senior software engineer at NPR (National Public Radio), where she is the technical lead for emerging platforms. Her cross-functional team of developers, designers, product owners, agile project managers, and a QA specialist has designed and delivered voice-first experiences such as the "Play NPR" integration for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, an NPR One skill for Alexa, a visual newscast for multi-modal voice interfaces, and many more exciting projects still in the pipeline. She also regularly presents on the implementation, technical strategy, and ethics of voice platform development at conferences and meetups around the world.
Nathan Treloar has served in executive leadership roles in several successful high growth software companies including Orbita where he’s led efforts to launch the company’s leading conversational AI technologies and services for healthcare organizations. Entities like Amgen, Mayo Clinic, and Deloitte use Orbita to create and deliver HIPAA-compliant voice- and chatbot-powered virtual assistants designed to increase operational efficiencies and improve consumer, patient, and member experiences. Previously, Nathan held key executive positions at FAST Search, Microsoft, RAMP, and, Ektron. He is a respected expert and speaker on voice and chatbot technologies, IOT, search, text and data mining, content management, and knowledge management. He has advised hundreds of the world’s largest companies and government agencies on these applications.
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ntreloar/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ntreloar?lang=en
@ntreloar
Navya is a Product Manager of Voice Platforms at Gannett – USA TODAY NETWORKS and is instrumental in launching Voice applications for 100+ Gannett’s national and local news properties. Previously, Navya was a Product Manager at Witlingo and has overseen the deployment of several of the enterprise skills, including the Motley Fool, Meetup, Fish & Richardson, and Cooley LLP. Navya holds a Master’s Degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Neala Gollomp serves as Senior Director of Product Management at Comcast Cable. In this capacity, she runs product for the X1 Voice, which includes driving device development, user experience and AI. Prior to this position, Neala ran 3rd party (OTT) integrations on the X1 platform, like Netflix and YouTube. Neala started her career in the consulting space at Accenture and then continued to move into the technologyduring her time at Amazon. Neala graduated from Cornell University with a BA inGovernment and Near Eastern Studies and lives in Philadelphia with her husband, their 1 year old daughter and their 2 labradoodles.
Neha Javalagi is a Product Lead at Witlingo. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering from Maharashtra Institute of Technology, where she graduated with distinction. In addition to being a developer and an active builder of Alexa skills, Neha is also passionate about using user-centric design thinking for creative problem solving with the context of voice experiences. With her background in software design, interaction design and creative writing, she believes that conversational interaction design lies at the intersection of her passion and purpose. When she’s not design thinking, you’ll find her always thinking about design.
For the last six years, I’ve lead the design team responsible for voice UX across physical and digital interfaces for Comcast. Prior to that, my work at frog design delivered innovative experiences for companies like GE, Disney and Honeywell. passionate about visual design while recognizing the connection between interaction and technology. I have an ambitious and yet realistic vision of what it takes to bring ideas to market, as well as what boundaries to push to foster new ideas. I am equally fascinated with good design and good gadgetry. Passionate about physical design, the digital design and the environments they foster and create.
Nekpen Osuan, PMP is a Manager at Deloitte Consulting where she leads the consulting expansion for Analytics and Cognitive Insights. She is also the CEO & Co-Founder of @WomenWerk, a womenÕs empowerment non-profit reaching 5500 women and girls annually in New York City. Nekpen enjoys building diversity and inclusion in tech and social impact. She was recently named a BlogHer 2018 Voice of the Year, the 2017 Baylor University Young Alumna of the Year, a 2018 92Y Woman in Power Fellow, a 2018 Walkers Legacy Women in Leadership Honoree, and a 2017 Council of Urban Professionals Fellow. Nekpen serves on the DNCÕs Young Professionals Committee and Women's Leadership Forum, and is a volunteer on professional boards for The Lower Eastside Girls Club, The New Leaders Council, and the famed Apollo Theatre.
Passionate about a voice-first future, Nick develops Alexa Skills and Google Actions through his company, Invoked Apps. Nick’s company is best known as the first author of ambient sounds for sleep and relaxation on Alexa and Google Assistant, reaching over 2 million customers every month. Aside from helping people get a good night’s rest, Nick also created “Opening Bell,” the first open-source Alexa Skill capable of looking up U.S. stock prices using spoken company names.
Nick is recognized as an Amazon Alexa Champion and Google Developer Expert for his continuous contributions in the voice-first community.
Nico Acosta is a Director of Product and Engineering for Twilio AI. Prior to Twilio, Nico was an entrepreneur in the mobile space. Nico has lived in Bogota, London, Chicago, and currently lives in San Francisco. He holds a degree in Computer Science from La Universidad de Los Andes and an MBA from Kellogg.
Nicolas leads the product design team at Potato, a digital product studio based in the US and the UK. Potato design, build and launch groundbreaking digital products and services. Their clients include Google, Mozilla and the BBC. At Potato, Nicolas has led Cannes Lion and Clio award winning voice projects for gaming clients. He has been featured talking about voice technology in Venture Beat, Advertising Week and .NET magazine. Prior to Potato, Nicolas worked at start-ups in both advertising and legal sectors on projects such as augmented reality and AI applications.
Dr. Nicol Turner Lee (she, her) is a fellow in the programÕs Center for Technology Innovation and a contributor to TechTank. She comes to Brookings from the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council (MMTC), a national non-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting and preserving equal opportunity and civil rights in the mass media, telecommunications, and broadband industries, where she served as vice president and chief research and policy officer. At the Center for Technology Innovation, Dr. Turner Lee researches public policy designed to enable equitable access to technology across the U.S. and to harness its power to create change in communities across the world. Dr. Turner-LeeÕs research also explores global and domestic broadband deployment, regulatory, and internet governance issues. She is also an expert on the intersection of race, wealth, and technology within the context of civic engagement, criminal justice, and economic development. Dr. Turner Lee graduated from Colgate University magna cum laude and has a M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University.
With over 25 years' experience in both Law and Technology Nigel has a unique perspective as both a client and a user. Nigel's vision of what speech could be was the foundation for Intelligent Voice and his drive and passion for progression has proven infectious. Engaging and insightful, Nigel's knowledge of the industry comes across in his talks. As a regular presenter for NVIDIA at GTC summits as well as part of the Innovation series events, most recently with HPE and IBM, Nigel has proven himself a capable and informative speaker.
Nik Bhattacharya is the Co Founder & CEO of Convessa, a deep-tech company focused on voice as the future of workplace computing. Nik previously co-founded Hit Wicket, an agency focusing on radical innovation. He has 20 years of experience in the software industry. Nik has degrees in Finance from Wharton Business School and Computer Science Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to being a deep expert in mobile technologies, since 2012, Nik has founded two software companies along with his business partner and co founder Dan McCafferty. Nik also has a very keen design-mind and is a big believer in developing user experiences that are extraordinary. During his 6 years at frog design, one of the world's leading innovation firms, he was a principal software architect working with product designers to create some of the world's most cutting-edge innovations.
Niko Vuori is the founder and CEO of Drivetime, the world’s first gaming company targeting the driver of the car. 110 million Americans commute to work solo by car every day – Drivetime is offering this desperately underserved audience voice-powered interactive entertainment for the first time. Niko has over a decade of experience building gaming experiences on diverse technology platforms, ranging from desktop web, to social networks, to mobile – and now emerging voice platforms.
Prior to founding Drivetime, Niko was co-founder of successful mobile gaming company Rocket Games (sold to Penn National Gaming in 2016) and held several leadership positions at social gaming pioneer Zynga, most notably as General Manager of the company's flagship game, Zynga Poker, where he was responsible for all aspects of the studio's >$250M/year business, across mobile and web.
Niko has a BA from the University of York and an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley where he specialized in Entrepreneurship.
Noah is a summer hire working at Prudential Financial. He specializes in accessibility technology to improve every possible way for anyone working at the company. He was born deaf in his hearing family and fortunate enough to have his mother sign well. She placed him in a deaf school, then he transferred to the mainstreamed program starting his sixth grade year. He is a recent graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology. He aims to go back to there for his MBA this fall.
Noelle LaCharite is an evangelist at heart. She is passionate about Mindful Leadership, work-life harmony and empowering people to achieve their potential through emerging technology. She also specializes in helping brands develop skills for Amazon Alexa. She is the co-founder of a skill development company, Voice Skills Inc. She has spent many years as a trainer, architect, and evangelist for IBM, RedHat, EMC, Amazon and now Microsoft, whee she is now Director of Evangelism for DevCollective. She has taught thousands of people the value and importance of voice technology, Democratizing AI, and mindful leadership and has delivered keynotes, workshops and conferences around the world.
Pat Higbie is an entrepreneur with a career of building technology firms from the ground up. He began working in voice technology in 2008 at Xtone and founded XAPPmedia in 2012. XAPPmedia pioneered voice interactive advertising and launched the first XAPP Ad in 2014 and has built, deployed and manages over 1,200 voice apps that operate through Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana voice assistants for leading national brands and media companies. Earlier in his career, Pat founded and served as CEO of DataFocus, a pioneer in data modeling and relational data base design. That business was split and acquired by CIBER and PTC. Pat received a BS in Civil Engineering with High Honors from the U. S. Coast Guard Academy and an MS in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois where he was inducted into the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. He is a registered Professional Engineer in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Pat has over 25 years of business development experience across a wide range of security, cloud and enterprise technologies. He currently serves as Chief Revenue Officer at Privakey, where he is charged with leading the commercialization of the company’s authentication and intent verification solutions.
Before joining Privakey, Pat led WorkZone’s sales and customer success teams for its saas project management software. He also launched and operated Encelium lighting controls in the United States until the company was successfully acquired in 2008. Earlier in his career, Pat held various engineering and product management roles in hardware and ecommerce organizations. Pat earned a Masters in Business Administration from St. Joseph’s University in addition to his Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Villanova University.
Paul works with builders to design and develop the next generation of customer experience - a voice based ambient computing user experience. Prior to Amazon, he was VP of Technology at Disney Interactive. Paul regularly speaks to creators around the world and is a toxophilite at heart. Let’s continue the conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Twitch @PaulCutsinger.
Paul Jackson is a Senior UX Designer in the Voice + AI team at the BBC. He has been designing, prototyping and building digital products for over 15 years, counting Disney, Honda and Nintendo amongst his previous clients.
In 2018 Paul lead the design of the BBC Kids Skill – a collection of interactive games, stories and songs aimed at a preschool audience – which was released on Amazon Echo.
Paul-Louis Nech is a R&D Engineer at Algolia, where he develops tools for Android developers. He currently focuses on the intersection of mobile platforms, search engines & conversational interfaces… Which you can tell from hearing him utter weird sentences to hand-held devices and debating STT's handling of regional accents.
A developer of voice conversations for the last 14 years, and leading teams at both small and large organizations. Over this period, Pete has developed voice solutions for many popular brands to provide customer care and self service. He's also created helpful voice skills for both Amazon and Google. Most recently, Pete is was a finalist at Samsung's Developer Showcase where he showed off a Bixby assistant that would perform personalized voice search for an online store. Now, he's advising brands to get them onto the Bixby platform. You can find out more information on his personal site: http://petehaas.com or his voice agency: http://conversationcurve.com
Pete Warden is a founding member of the TensorFlow team at Google, and technical lead on the embedded machine learning group. His startup Jetpac was acquired by Google in 2014, and he has previously worked at Apple. He occasionally blogs at https://petewarden.com/
With over 10+ years experience leading companies in both software and hardware (IoT), Peter has a passion for crafting new user experiences surrounding emerging technologies. Peter is an avid entrepreneur holding equity in several startup companies in the Orlando area. He is also a founder and partner of Six Fold Ventures, a startup venture capital firm focused on developing emerging technology companies in the AI (artificial intelligence), VR/AR and Blockchain space.
Mr. Ulrich’s experience is in U.S. income taxation of corporations and individuals, including structuring and income tax planning for taxable acquisitions and tax-free reorganizations, incorporations, and the formation of other business entities. As such, Peter works often with tax-free reorganizations, Section 351 transactions, Section 338(h)(10) transactions, the consolidated return regulations, and related provisions of the Internal Revenue Code. Peter is frequently involved in structuring international transactions to take into account tax rules relating to income sourcing, withholding, tax credits, branch profits tax, Subpart F, and the effects of applicable U.S. income tax treaties. Peter also assists a number of nonprofit clients with obtaining and maintaining federal tax-exempt status, treatment of unrelated business taxable income, and planning to minimize the negative implications of UBIT. Counseling for nonprofit clients also includes assisting organizations with registration for solicitation purposes, planning for lobbying and legislative activities, and structuring of affiliated organizations. Other areas of practice include state and local taxation of businesses and individuals including multistate taxation, application of sales and use taxes, and the issue of nexus or taxability of corporations and other taxpayers. Mr. Ulrich is a Certified Public Accountant in New Jersey (inactive) and received an L.L.M. in Taxation from New York University.
To view Mr. Ulrich’s full biography, visit: www.gibbonslaw.com/professionals/peter-j-ulrich
Peter's first career was in electronics, which was followed by building a company from zero to 400 staff, and a successful IPO. Not only was Peter chief designer of the company’s comprehensive ERP suite, he also designed the system’s 4th generation database and custom programming language. Peter also has a keen interest in cognitive science and the inter-relationship between philosophy, psychology, ethics and computer science. Since the early 90's he has been researching AGI (artificial general intelligence), and in 2001 started Adaptive A.I. Inc., with the express goal of developing this technology. In 2008 Peter founded SmartAction.ai, which offers the only call automation solution powered by a (proto) AGI engine. He now heads up Aigo.ai Inc., which has developed and is commercializing an advanced conversational general-purpose personal assistant. Peter often writes and presents on various philosophical topics including rational ethics, freewill and artificial minds; and is deeply involved with futurism and radical life-extension.
Philipp is a seasoned automotive industry expert. He was the Founder and CEO at S1NN GmbH (acquired by Harman International) and instrumental with in-car audio and connectivity, delivering a highly sophisticated infotainment systems to automotive customers; Audi, Bentley, Porsche and Tesla. Prior to joining CloudCar, Philipp also held Executive level positions in TradeBeam, Harman/Becker, and Bose. Philipp holds degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Business Administration from the Technical University Berlin.
Phoebe is a voice specialist with a background in audio engineering and audio branding. With her expertise, she helps brands prepare for a sound and voice-activated future.
Polina is a strategist, designer, and thought leader focused on voice-first products, Machine Learning and Product Delivery craftsmanship. She is interested in creating novel products and meaningful experiences that help businesses grow and simultaneously inspire, engage and empower users. As co-founder of Voice Tech TO Polina is dedicated to growing and supporting the community of practitioners, who are interested in voice and helps develop plays and tactics to ensure successful voice-first product delivery.
Pranav currently leads product marketing, growth and on-boarding for Twilio Autopilot. During his 4+ years at Twilio, he managed product marketing for Twilio SMS and worked in solutions engineering, helping customers design and build solutions powered by Twilio APIs. He has a Masters in Engineering Management from Duke University and likes to play soccer, hike and mountain bike in his spare time.
Rachel Batish is VP of Product at Audioburst where she leads where she leads product roadmap and strategy thinking, connecting unique audio and content listening experiences to consumers on cars, 3-party-speaker and headphones devices and apps. Prior to Audioburst, Batish was founder of Conversation.one, a build-once-deploy anywhere platform for voice and chat conversational applications, focusing on non-developers and complex use cases. She held a similar role at Zuznow. Rachel is also the author of Voicebot and Chatbot Design and has founded and participated in a number or organizations to promote networking and education in the AI and voice space including TechStars and NYC Enterprise and Mobility Meetup. Batish received her BA in Political Science and International Relations from Technische Universitat Dermstadt and MA in European Studies from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She resides in Silicon Valley.
Rachel Reed leads development and strategy for Meredith Corporation’s Innovation Group, ensuring its portfolio of 42 iconic brands — from People to Real Simple to Food & Wine — is first-to-market with new consumer-facing experiences across emerging technology platforms. Rachel’s expertise sits at the intersection of technology and media, and helping brands tell their stories and reach key audiences across new engagement points. Her current focus is in the audio and voice space, and she has overseen the launch of dozens of new product offerings, from Podcasts and Daily Briefings to Alexa Skills and Google Actions. Rachel lives in Manhattan and has a BA from The Johns Hopkins University.
Raika designs meaningful products, services and experiences for both people and businesses. Inspired by the future and what could be, Raika found her home at Moonshot where through a user-centered and empathic design process, she seeks to create next-generation user experiences in voice. Partnering with brands to embrace new technologies and build authentic relationships with their customers. Raika’s expertise includes voice, chatbots, responsive sites, iOS and android apps, digital-out-of-home, and store of the future experiences for industries including Retail, Logistics, Food Services, Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare, Telecommunications, Human Resources, Publishing, and Automotive both in the US and European markets.
Rainer is a serial entrepreneur working in the Music & Tech space since 1996. Raised in Wolfsburg, he studied Administration Science in Constance, Hamburg and London. Rainer is the founder and CEO of laut.ag, publisher of laut.de - the most popular german music magazine - and laut.fm - the largest online radio platform in Germany. Rainer is a vice-chairman of the Focus-Group Audio in the Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft (BVDW). He is a dedicated programmer of his own online music radio station on laut.fm/rnr.
Rashmi is an award-winning technologist and leader with 20+ years of experience. She is currently Senior Director, Early Customer Engagement at HARMAN, responsible for go-to market strategy and leadership of early customer pursuits to address new and emerging Business Models and Cross-Divisional/Department product portfolio. Rashmi oversees and cultivates client relationships while driving technical knowledge and strategy across Business Units to bring unique and new products and experiences to the market.
Voice tech? Dry cleaning? Add your business to Google/Alexa with your Voice? Enterprising entrepreneurs from The Ohio State University are helping business owners adapt to their customers. Business by Voice, Order Placement, In Skill Purchasing, Google Transactions, SMS/Email Notifications, and more that can help any industry-oriented business.
Rebecca Evanhoe is a conversational designer for Amazon Web Services’ Emerging Technologies team, and an author. For the last 8 years as a conversational designer, she has created virtual characters for conversation-based learning games, chatbots for fun and service, and interactive voice experiences.
Richard is co-founder of Send Me a Sample, the world’s first voice first brand activation platform. Send me a Sample (SMaS) is the world’s first and only voice platform that allows brands to deliver product sampling direct into consumer’s homes. It offers brands more effective targeting, zero risk and wastage for product trial, but also downstream purchase funnel conversion ongoing customer relationship building. SMaS launched in September 2018 in the UK and has received a huge amount of interest from major brands. By the end of the year we had completed more than 10 campaigns for clients Coca Cola, Diageo, John Frieda, Kind Snacks, King of Shaves and L’Oreal. Send Me a Sample is currently available in UK, USA and Germany but aims to be available in all major voice markets.
Rob Bennett is CEO of rehab, a leading creative technology company that specializes in delivering 1:1 consumer experiences for brands. Headquartered in London, with offices in New York City, Warsaw and Los Angeles, Rehab delivers emerging technology solutions and services across multiple disciplines including strategy, creative, user experience (UX), design, creative technology and development. Rob’s fresh outlook has been published in the likes of AdWeek, The Drum and Real Business. From Emmy award-winning work with HBO, to creating first-of-its-kind AI experiences with Google, rehab is ahead of the curve. The agency also counts Nike and Estée Lauder among its clients, helping them make people’s day-to-day lives that little bit easier. Alongside this, following recent research on how being in a good mood can affect how well the flu vaccine protects you, rehab has partnered with the University of Nottingham to develop a digital intervention tool designed to affect mood and create a positive state of mind, with the goal of ensuring treatment is more effective and, in turn, saving the NHS money. Rob’s unique and varied experience has made him a passionate advocate of moving beyond the status quo of conventional advertising. Alongside this, his in-depth knowledge on how to best adapt and make use of the opportunities offered by AI, voice and machine learning means that he can offer vital insight into how these interactions have the potential to transform the lives of consumers and reach a whole new level of user-first engagement that provides true value to the individual.
Robby has spent much of the past decade creating controversial interfaces for technology leaders such as General Magic, BMW, Schwab, Dell and Microsoft, where he served as Creative Director of the Social Interface Group. He has published a number of papers on the creation of believable agents and conversational interfaces. During his misspent youth, Robby was a prominent "session player" in New York, Los Angeles and London. He is also a Grammy Award winning composer and producer with several film and television scores to his credit.
Robert has been working in the connected car area since 2014 and is a Software Engineer at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America based in Sunnyvale, CA. He used to be a Scrum Product Owner for web frontend development before focusing on the connection of IoT and mobility use cases. On this quest, he is part of the engineering team who integrates voice assistants with connected car interfaces to enhance vehicle interaction. He is passionate about meaningful speech applications and finding the ÒeverydayÓ use cases in the mobility sector.
Mr. Coyne practices corporate transactional law, primarily in the area of mergers and acquisitions and strategic alliances. He focuses on middle-market deals for clients ranging from closely-held businesses to large international groups. Through such transactional work, Mr. Coyne has developed extensive knowledge of intellectual property protection, executive employment arrangements, corporate structures, supply chain contracts, cross-border M&A issues, and complex indemnities. Whether on the sell-side or the buy-side, he understands the key business value drivers and helps his clients realize their goal of a quick and successful sale or strategic alliance.
To view Mr. Coyne’s full biography, visit: www.gibbonslaw.com/professionals/robert-f-coyne
Mr. Johnson—a corporate attorney focusing on mergers and acquisitions, and a former Assistant Counsel to the Governor of New Jersey from 2010 to 2012—relies on his corporate training and experience to inform his comprehensive corporate practice. Helping business clients expand their markets and establish significant presence throughout the region, Mr. Johnson represents public and private companies, commercial banks, and governmental agencies in connection with mergers and acquisitions, stock and asset purchase transactions, securities regulations, corporate governance matters, credit facilities, public finance, contract drafting, cross-border transactions, and general corporate matters. He also has represented clients in negotiations with the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance for specific exemptions and obtaining certain licenses.
To view Mr. Johnson’s full biography, visit: www.gibbonslaw.com/professionals/robert-johnson
Mr. Rudnick’s practice broadly focuses on strategic intellectual property transactions, licenses, and client counseling directed to freedom to manufacture and clearance of new products and services, building and leveraging patent portfolios and deploying cost-effective strategies in defending against non-practicing patent entities. He also has experience in developing tailored information security programs and data privacy-related agreements to achieve clients’ business goals and comply with applicable laws and regulations, while managing risk and potential liability. Mr. Rudnick regularly counsels clients in a wide variety of intellectual property matters, including patent procurement and portfolio development strategies; generation of value from patent portfolios; patent and technology licensing; patent clearance studies; patent non-infringement/invalidity evaluations and opinions; corporate mergers and acquisitions; and patent prosecution, especially in the medical device and telecommunication technologies. In addition, Mr. Rudnick has significant business and legal experience negotiating and providing counsel in connection with intellectual property-based transactions, as well as transactions related to data privacy and security. He has also counseled and defended clients from aggressive patent licensing entities such as non-practicing entities (a/k/a “patent trolls”). He spent time in various in-house roles at AT&T and subsequent spin-off companies Lucent Technologies and Avaya Inc.
To view Mr. Rudnick’s full biography, visit: www.gibbonslaw.com/professionals/robert-e-rudnick
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Roger Kibbe is a developer evangelist for Viv Labs, the engine behind Samsung’s Bixby 2.0. As a developer evangelist, Roger gets developers excited about building amazing new conversational AI experiences. Roger has over 20 years of experience leveraging technology for strategic business advantage. Prior to Viv Labs, Roger founded both a voice product startup and voice consulting firm. Prior to that, Roger spent many years leading Omnichannel technology strategy for Gap Inc and has many years of technology consulting experience. Roger has a degree from UC Berkeley.
Ryan Bales is the Director of Analytics Engineering at DialogTech. HeÕs an active member of the Cleveland technology community, CLE Data Science and R Meetup groups. Ryan is a content contributor and class facilitator for the Python Data Science course track at DriveIT. When not writing code or trying to learn more about data science you can find Ryan trying to not lose at online video games. Ryan lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
The tech industry is undergoing a once-in-a-decade user interface and platform shift with the introduction of voice technology and virtual assistants. The convenience offered by an always-on, hands-free, and natural language understanding interface reduces friction in the client experience and brings financial services to the user: at home, in the car or on-the-go. Ryan manages a team of conversational designers, developers and engineers that are helping to foster voice as a new digital engagement channel for the bank.
With over 13 years of global FinTech experience, Ryan's previously managed high-performing SecDevOps and engineering teams in Capital Markets and Global Asset Management, founded a successful graphic design and software development company, multi-provisional patent holder in natural language processing, and enjoys making his life needlessly more complex with home automation and robotics. Proud father of 2 daughters.
A career of almost 20 years in the service of corporate communication, in the Publicis group and in integrated communication services, I now work as a freelance, with companies and agencies for consulting and consulting operational support with a strong expertise in conversational interfaces. I am also currently working on the creation of a new company - Urban Voice - specialized in the creation of multimodal voice experiences for the smart city. The skill "Mes Déchets à Rueil" (My waste in Rueil) is the first achievement signed by Urban Voice, a proof of concept incubated by Rueil Digital (an association leading the digital transformation in the city of Rueil Malmaison, Paris Area). We are now in discussion with other french cities to make local adaptations of this skill and create other voice apps for smart cities (in other areas than waste). I am also a member of the early leadership team @womeninvoice and teacher "Voice and Digital" for students of Digital Marketing and Business at EFAP (French communication school - campus also in NY) in France (Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Lille).
Sage Wohns is the cofounder and CEO of Agolo, a CRV and Microsoft backed company that uses artificial intelligence to summarize information faster, and with better coverage, than any person in the world. Sage believes that if we can responsibly apply the capabilities of AI, it can empower us toward insight and ingenuity of which only the human mind is capable.
After completing his MBA at Columbia Business School and leading Multilingual Engineering at Rakuten in Tokyo, Sage enjoyed a brief stint farming radish in the countryside of Hokkaido before returning home to pioneer the AI-startup boom in New York City. He blended his programming and business-strategy experience to launch Agolo, which has since become a trailblazer for the mainstream use of AI in finance and news organizations, and the winner of Citi’s Top Business Intelligence Tool prize .
Besides being a proud nerd and Seattle native, Sage is also an accomplished cellist, fluent Japanese speaker, and avid mountaineer. Don’t get him started on comic books.
Sanjay is the Director of Launch – Emerson College’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. In this capacity, he is focused on fostering entrepreneurship among students and on infusing innovation into the larger college. As a part of this vision, he is helping to position Emerson College as the leader in next-generation marketing communications. Prior to academia, Sanjay spent a decade on Madison Avenue – founding an early mobile marketing agency, running the mobile unit for Publicis in the U.S., and running an ad-tech DSP / DMP. Previously, Sanjay spent over a decade in management consulting advising telecommunications, media, and high technology firms on strategy, operations and IT issues. Sanjay began his career in finance and accounting at IBM. Sanjay has served as a featured speaker and panelist at industry trade and media events such as AdTech, Digital Hollywood, and OMMA as well as at various client summits. He has also been an adjunct research associate at the Harvard Business School where he authored papers and cases and helped develop a course on Internet business models. Sanjay received his B.S. at the University of California at Berkeley and his M.B.A. at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Sanjeev’s 30+ year career has gone from coding parts of the Microsoft Windows operating system to creating a prototype that became MSN Messenger to creation of Platform-as-a-Service solutions on public cloud infrastructures. As CEO of Whetstone Technologies, Sanjeev has led the launch of VoiceConnectr℠ - a next-generation cloud-based platform for delivering innovative cross-platform voice-first multi-modal solutions.
Sara Holoubek is the CEO and founder of Luminary Labs, a consultancy that develops strategies and innovation systems to help Fortune 500, government, and nonprofit organizations thrive in the face of change. She is also an active early stage investor. Sara is particularly passionate about the thorny problems that matter such as stemming chronic disease, closing the skills gap, rethinking the future of work, and using data to make smart cities safer.
Sara writes and speaks extensively on the intersection of technology, innovation, and humanity. She has been recognized by LinkedIn as a Top Voice in Technology, Mashable as a female founder to watch, SmartCEO magazine as a New York Brava award winner, and PepsiCo WIN for her contributions to women in technology. Sara holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and an M.B.A. from HEC in France.
Sara MacSween has enjoyed a diverse career in marketing and sales. She has done every type of marketing expect for holding a sign on the street. She has worked in over 30 industries across four countries. Her marketing consultancy just celebrated its 12 birthday. She is currently a Lecturer in the Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Hospitality and Tourism Department in the Bryan School of Business and Economics at UNC Greensboro. Sara uses a variety of hands-on learning activities with her students. She holds degrees in journalism and history from UNC Chapel Hill. She earned her MBA from the University of Strathclyde and is currently a doctoral student at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests include consumer behavior, motivation and sales agility.
Since 2018, Sarah Andrew Wilson has been the Vice President of Content Strategy at Matchbox.io, overseeing content for some of the most popular Amazon Alexa skills, including Question of the Day and Kids Quiz. She previously spent over 20 years in the music industry, working with internationally renowned performing artists and educators at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, Levine Music, Wolf Trap Foundation, and Washington National Opera. She holds an Executive Certificate in Arts & Culture Strategy from the University of Pennsylvania, and music degrees from the University of North Texas (B.M.) and Arizona State University (M.M.).
Sarah Storm (she/her) is the Vice President of Smart Speaker Content at John Marshall Media. She is a multi-modal storyteller, coach, and strategist who pairs her extensive experience in the performing arts world with expertise in crafting and facilitating great Voice-First experiences. She’s proud to have contributed her thoughts to the audiobook This Week In Voice Presents: Perspectives On Gender In #VoiceFirst Technology. Sarah lives in Brooklyn with her spouse.
Sascha is a professional developer and user experience enthusiast. His true passion is to improve the human-computer interaction: He loves to build conversational and multimodal experiences with text and voice. Sascha works as a consultant, speaker, and author who focusses on understanding, innovation, and value. As such he is committed to the interests of all kinds of developers and users. He is board member of the Usability & User Experience working group at the federal association BITKOM. Furthermore, he is Google Developer Expert and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional. Before he joined the Conversational AI Platform Company Cognigy, he worked at Deutsche Telekom and as Senior Technology Evangelist for Alexa at Amazon.
Scot has been working in the fields of design, user experience and digital strategy for the past 20 years.
During his career, he has seen the advent of web, mobile and now Voice. He uses this knowledge to help clients create relevant and useful applications of existing and emerging technologies to enhance their overall customer experiences.
Scot has worked with a range of clients across a variety industries, most notably healthcare and consumer package goods.
A successful marketing technology professional, enterprise software sales leader, entrepreneur, advisor, composer, husband and father of four kids.
- Founded Veritonic, which provides Marketing Intelligence for Sound.
- Helped start Optimost which pioneered online Testing(AB/MVT) and Targeting as the first company to bring optimization solutions to the market in 2002.
- Instrumental in taking Optimost from inception to a $54 million acquisition by Interwoven/HP (NYSE: HPQ).
- Managed and built a global Sales and Services organizations at OrderGroove and Optimost, that works with over 500 clients across all verticals
- Loves working with marketers to better understand what works and what doesn't. Also as mentor and advisor for early stages companies looking for guidance on Sales Methodology, Technology Sales, growing License Revenue and Team Building.
Scott has been in the localization and globalization profession for over 40 years, working with some of the most well known companies in the world. Starting with the US Government and then spending over 17 years as part of Microsoft's original Localization Pilot Team, he worked to develop the tools and processes that became the standard from which the localization industry works today. For the last 12 years, he has worked with technology and service companies that continue push the language industry forward using neural machine translation, marketing localization automation, voice data services to ensure clients have a true continuous global presence.
I'm an international EdTech Entrepreneur with businesses operating in the UK, USA and Poland. For the last 15 years I've bootstrapped my core business Webanywhere and in the last 3 years I set up Ventures Anywhere as my start up vehicle. Ventures Anywhere is the owner of Sound Branch a multi-modal voice messaging platform which works on the web, iOS, Android and Google Assistant. Sound Branch is disruptive as it allows for "Massive Voice Only Online Conversations". In the general puiblic this can help democratize radio and encourage free speech and debate. For internal comms Sound Branch brings about a more personable way to communicate. Sound Branch is the platform for nanocasting where you say it in 10 seconds. You start with a 10 second seed and then you and others get branching to build a beanstalk!
Shane Mac is the Chief Automation Officer at Conversocial, where he is responsible for leading adaptive automation innovation for automated consumer messaging experiences. Previously, Shane was the co-founder and CEO of Assist, the leading enterprise chatbot platform for messaging and voice, which was acquired by Conversocial early 2019. In that role, he developed technology that powered some of the world’s largest brands like 1-800-Flowers.com, Sephora, T-Mobile, Hyatt, Fandango, and the NBA; and launched the first-ever commerce experiences on Facebook Messenger and Google Assistant.
Shanthan Kesharaju is the founder of Sermo Labs and a Director of Product Management at Fidelity Investments. Sermo Labs was founded in 2018 with a primary mission to make education fun and engaging for kids through voice experiences like Alexa. Some of the flagship skills from Sermo Labs thus far have been Alexa Skills like ’1-2-3 Math’, ‘World Mathematics League’ and ‘Hungry Birds’. 1-2-3 Math and World Mathematics League skills, besides featured and finding a recurring spot on ‘Amazon’s Top Trending’ skills list, have also been recognized as ‘“Amazon’s Best Alexa Skills of 2018”. Shanthan Kesharaju has won multiple Amazon Alexa Hackathons and continues to explore new and innovative ideas in the voice arena. Shanthan believes that learning should be an ‘all-inclusive universal process’ and is passionate about championing for ‘Technology for a Cause’ where he is also focusing on enabling kids with special needs learn with Alexa using Computer Vision. At Fidelity Investments as the Director of Product Management, Shanthan is leading the Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning product portfolios. Shanthan has an MBA from Duke Fuqua School of Business, Masters in Information Systems from Oklahoma State University and is currently pursuing MS in Analytics from Georgia Tech.
Serial entrepreneur Shilp Agarwal brings over 20 years of retail experience to his role of Co-Founder & CEO of Blutag. Blutag is a Techstars company (Oct 2018) backed by Amazon's Alexa Fund and is an Amazon recommended platform for retailers to publish their voice apps. With experience in all aspects of e-commerce & retail technology, Shilp has grown into a leader in the voice AI space and speaks at various industry conferences, as a guest host on television shows and regularly holds retail tech talks all across New York City.
Shwen is a recognized pioneer in digital health and social pharma, as well as a well-respected industry thought-leader who was named a Top 40 “Healthcare Transformer” by MM&M in 2015 and a PR Week and MM&M "Health Influencer 50" in 2017 & 2018. He sits on various advisory boards, including: Google (Healthcare), SXSW (Health), MM&M Healthcare Transformers, conversationHEALTH and the Digital Health Coalition.
Shwen brings over a decade of experience leading digital strategy and driving innovation in commercial, communications, and clinical organizations, both on the client-side and at leading creative agencies. He is often featured in industry publications, speaks regularly at industry events and chairs the Digital Innovation Day for the Digital Pharma Series (East, West and EU). In 2017, he spoke on Innovation in Healthcare at the prestigious Cannes Lions Health festival.
Shwen is also very involved in the health tech startup community and organizes startup bootcamps, runs startup pitch contests and plays an active role running healthcare hackathons around the world as part of the MIT Hacking Medicine team.
Hello! I’m a freelance creative technologist with over 15 years experience developing, leading and managing products and projects for major brands at home and abroad.
Right now I'm devising, validating and delivering content formats for smart speaker platforms such as Amazon Alexa with the BBC.
Previously, I've set up and led innovation programmes, designed multiple digital products and provided strategy recommendations for a former client that led to over £million more business.
My content credentials 'best of' looks like this: a lead role in 3 digital BAFTA award wins, TV credits and appearances, a UXUK award and a #1 App Store kids app.
Proud father and husband, Keynote speaker, philosopher. Executive Director of Commercialization at NJIT University. Previously served 12 years as Chairman and CEO of Wayside Technology Group, (NASDAQ: “WSTG”). Started career at Ernst & Young in Amsterdam, Holland. A graduate of the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Business School, I also serve on the board for the New Jersey Technology Council (NJTC) (Chairman of the board 2007- 2015). Received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year® 2011 Award in the Technology Services Category. Black belt in Taekwondo, I ran a lot of marathons and some ultra-marathons; longest running race completed was a 100KM race.
Sina Kahen hails from the medical devices and voice technology industries. He is currently the Head of Strategy and Design at VAICE, a pro-bono consulting group that help brands discover the benefits of voice and conversational AI, from strategy to experience. He identifies the challenges presented after the recent wave of voice technology adoption, and aims to solve them with principles from design-thinking, biomimicry, and philosophy. He graduated as a Biomedical Scientist, and has an MBA from Imperial College Business School.
Sohan is an Alexa Evangelist at Amazon. A thought-leader in the space, his role involves inspiring people to build incredible voice experiences using Alexa. As part of his job, Sohan interacts with developers, agencies, brands, enterprises, game studios and smart home manufacturers, helping them shape their voice strategy for the future. Sohan has earlier worked as a developer evangelist for Gupshup and InMobi and has spoken at conferences around the world. He has written articles for publications such as Economic Times, GadgetsNow and Developer Economics.
In his spare time, Sohan is a pop culture nerd who also likes playing frisbee.
Stefanie Fail is the Global Lead for Conversation Experience Design at Nuance Communications. She has over 12 years of experience designing conversational voice AI interfaces for some of the largest US and Global enterprises. Stefanie holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from The New School for Social Research in New York City, where her research focused on psycholinguistics, human-computer interaction and survey research methodology.
Stephanie Ciccarelli is the Co-Founder and Chief Brand Officer at Voices.com. As the top champion of the brand, she oversees the creation and review of content, and leads the industry in conversation.
For over 25 years, Stephanie has used her voice to communicate what is most important to her through the spoken word, written word, and song. Possessing a great love for imparting knowledge and empowering others, Stephanie has been a contributor to The Huffington Post, Backstage Magazine, and the Voices.com blog, which has a readership of over 30,000. She is also a popular public speaker and mentor, as well as the host of Sound Stories, a podcast series for creative professionals.
With a Bachelor of Musical Arts from the Don Wright Faculty of Music at Western University (2006), Stephanie has special skills in vocal education and performance. Having studied music intensively at the conservatory and at the university level, Stephanie has won awards for academic achievement and vocal performance.
Stephanie is the author of Voice Acting For Dummies (Wiley Publishing, 2013), The Podcasting Ebook: Your Complete Guide to Podcasting (2005), and The Definitive Guide To Voice-Over Success (2005).
Stephanie is a UX / Voice UI Designer & Entrepreneur. She is the Founder CEO of Design Voice a company that makes voice-first experiences in English and Spanish. She loves technology and the creation of user experiences. She has been co-founder of 3 startups and winner of multiple technology and innovation contests. Designing with purpose is her main goal in order to create amazing experiences.
Steve Keller is the Sonic Strategy Director for Pandora, the largest streaming music platform in the US. Recognized as one of the leading experts in the field of audio branding, he blends art and science into award-winning sonic strategies and creative content for a variety of global agencies and brands. With a degree in psychology and over 30 years of experience in the music and advertising industries, Steve’s work explores the ways music and sound impact consumer perception and behavior. Recent experiments have examined the relationship between sound and taste, the existence of audio archetypes, the relationship between personality traits and music preference, and how bias impacts the aesthetic judgements of advertising professionals. He is the recipient of the iHearMedia Scholarship for Leadership in Audio Innovation, and is currently completing his thesis for an Executive MBA through the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, focusing on how brands can more effectively measure and predict returns on audio investments.
Steve is the founder, and chief dabbler at Dabble Lab, a private technology R&D company. Dabble Lab is best known in the voice community for SkillTemplates.com a free repository of code templates for building Alexa skills, and for the Dabble Lab YouTube channel which provides over 150 free video tutorials to help developers quickly learn how to build solutions for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, Samsung Bixby, and Twilio Autopilot. Prior to Dabble Lab, Steve founded enthusem.com, an award-winning marketing automation company which he sold in 2014. Prior to enthusem.com, Steve founded and exited from Prospect Links which became part of Ricoh (TYO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange), and Member Logics which became part of J2 Global (JCOMM on NASDAQ).
Amplifi Media guides companies in the development of podcast and smart speaker strategies. Clients including ABC News, Trader Joe's (top "branded" podcast) Dave Ramsey (3rd largest radio show, 5th largest podcast), Beasley Media Group, Spoken Layer (smart speaker content for publishers including The Daily Beast, Los Angeles times, Gatehouse Media, Politio and Gannett), Drive Time Metrics (measuring audo consumption in vehicles)and others. Steve was a co-founder and EVP of Saga Communications which grew to over 100 radio stations and trades on the NYSE. He is Co-Founder of Sonic Ai, which provides content strategy and development for smart speaker initiatives and is a frequent speaker about on-demand audio and smart speakers.
Steven Kuyan is managing director of the NYU Tandon Future Labs – a network of business incubators and accelerators that support early stage ventures in New York City. The Future Labs support entrepreneurs in technology-specific fields, such as: artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented/virtual reality, video and virtual machines, among others. To date, the unique process has graduated 97 companies – 18 as acquisitions totaling more than $700 million – for a combined valuation of graduates exceeding $1.5B billion. Furthermore, the companies graduating from the Future Labs have helped contribute to a $4 billion impact for NYC. Steven co-founded the Future Labs while serving as an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at NYU – his alma matter and the institution where he continues to teach. Prior to launching the Future Labs, Steven founded and co-founded three ventures in mobile, B2B logistics, and retail. He currently oversees management of the Data Future Lab, Digital Future Lab, Veterans Future Lab and the AI NexusLab – the first program in the U.S. designed specifically for early stage artificial intelligence startups.
Mr. Sholk concentrates in the areas of campaign finance, employee benefits, executive compensation, employment and severance agreements, and tax-exempt organizations. He regularly counsels corporations on the formation and operation of political action committees and compliance with federal and state pay-to-play laws. He is actively involved in negotiating and drafting employment and severance agreements for executives and structuring nonqualified deferred compensation arrangements and equity compensation plans. To view Mr. Sholk’s full biography, visit: www.gibbonslaw.com/professionals/steven-h-sholk
Stuart Crane is a software entrepreneur of 30+ years. Stuart co-founded a software company, CPR+, in 1993 and grew it successfully for 20 years to become the leading provider of enterprise software to the Specialty Pharmacy industry. After CPR+ was acquired in 2013, Stuart founded Voice Metrics, a company building software platforms for businesses to connect data to Voice Assistants, supporting Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri. Voice MetricsÕ most recent platform is SurveyLine Ð Surveys By Voice, allowing any company or individual to create surveys to be taken BY VOICE. Stuart can be reached at: stuart@stuartcrane.com
Stuart R. Patterson is the cofounder and CEO of LifePod Solutions, a pioneer in the provision of voice-first Virtual Caregivers offering professional and personal caregivers the ability to configure 2-way voice dialogs to monitor and support those in need of care. Stu has led early-stage ventures in a variety of markets including: voice/virtual assistants and caregivers, speech recognition/synthesis, mobile apps and services, video content and identity management, clean-tech, and digital healthcare solutions. As CEO/COO and advisor, Stu has managed and supported the growth, IPO or sale of: Sidekicks, Ramp (acq. by Cxense), Xtone, SunBug Solar, Nexamp, eQuilibrium (acq. by EnerNOC), AgION (now Sciessent), Courion, Scansoft (now Nuance), SpeechWorks (IPO), Voxware (IPO) and Vicorp Interactive Systems. He holds a BA from Harvard College and an MBA from the Yale School of Management.
Sunayna Tuteja is the Global Head of Strategic Partnerships & Frontier Technologies at TD Ameritrade. With more than ten years of diverse global experience, she has a proven record for building new ventures from scratch and leading change that is critical in shaping the future of business.
At TD Ameritrade, Sunayna leads an entrepreneurial "tiger team" with a mission to build the next generation of products, experiences and business models to break down barriers in investing and empower more people for financial success, via the ecosystems they use every day. In this role, Sunayna leads strategy and commercialization for disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Voice and Virtual Reality, with the goal to solve problems, and create meaningful experiences for investors. Over the last 6 months, her team has delivered industry-first partnerships and products with startups and global technology companies including Apple, Amazon, Google and Tencent.
A life-long learner, Sunayna is working on her JD at Stanford Law with a focus on the impact and influence of disruptive technologies, and the future of jurisprudence. Partnering with the Stanford Innovation Lab, she works closely with the start-up and VC community helping to advance public and corporate innovation. Sunayna was recently recognized as one of Top 16 Women in Wealth Tech by Think Advisor Magazine. Outside of work and school, you can find Sunayna adventuring the skies in her Cessna. You can stay connected on Twitter @Sunayna.
Susan is a persistent advocate for user-centric design and has deep experience in linguistics, voice interaction design, and speech technologies. She has built multidisciplinary teams in industry and academia and holds a Doctorate in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. Susan was Program Chair of the SpeechTEK Conference (2007-2016) and was the founding President of the Association of Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD). She enjoys speaking and writing about conversational user experiences and currently serves as CEO of Banter Technology.
Susan Westwater is a senior strategist who uses customer-centric approaches and content strategy skill sets to achieve business growth. Passionate about customer experience, she is experienced in managing global, national and regional product launches and content initiatives across large organizations. She also is a part of Women in Voice Leadership. Susan and Scot co-founded Pragmatic, an experience consultancy who helps clients navigate the modern digital landscape to develop solutions that are relevant to clients’ customers and business.
Tal Wenderow joined Beyond Verbal as President & CEO in Feb 2019. Tal is a seasoned healthcare executive with ample experience in developing and commercializing innovative & disruptive technologies. Before joining the company, Tal co-founded Corindus Vascular Robotics [NYSE:CVRS] and in his last position served as the Executive Vice President of International & Business Development responsible for global sales and business partnerships of Corindus. Tal holds a Bachelor of Science, Summa Cum Laude, in Mechanical Engineering from Technion in Israel and completed Executive Program for Life Sciences at the Merage Foundation, Merage Business School, University of California, Irvine, CA, having numerous patents issued based on his inventions.
Dr. Teri Fisher is a Physician and Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He is an experienced keynote speaker, educator, briefcaster, and podcaster, who loves sharing his excitement and passion for artificial intelligence and voice-first technology. One of his particular interests is the intersection of voice technology, marketing, and flash briefings. He is the founder of Alexa in Canada, the leading Amazon Alexa resource for Canadians; and Briefcast.FM, the premier flash briefing network. He is the host of the weekly “Alexa in Canada” Podcast and the daily "Voice in Canada" Flash Briefing, the #1 rated Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing and News Skill in Canada. He is also the creator of the most comprehensive (and entirely FREE!) flash briefing course on the market: Flash Briefing Formula. Dr. Fisher also has a strong passion for education, healthcare, and technology. He is the founder and host of “Voice First Health”, the industry-leading blog and podcast that highlights the intersection of voice technology and healthcare. The mission of Voice First Health is to develop a community to advance voice technology and health innovation, and together revolutionize the healthcare experience for patients and providers. Dr. Fisher has been a featured guest on technology and marketing podcasts, and he is a frequently sought-after speaker about marketing and voice, in addition to the future of medicine in the context of voice. Dr. Fisher holds Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Education, Master of Science, and Medical Doctorate degrees. You can listen to his top-rated flash briefings and podcasts at: https://VoiceInCanada.cahttps://AlexaInCanada.cahttps://VoiceFirstHealth.com
You can access his complete flash briefing course at: http://FlashBriefingFormula.com
Connect with Dr. Fisher on Twitter @DrTeriFisher
Theodora (Theo) Lau is speaker, writer, and advisor, whose work seeks to spark innovation to improve consumer financial well-being and health. As founder of Unconventional Ventures, she focuses on developing and growing an ecosystem of financial institutions, corporates, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists to better address the unmet needs of consumers (e.g. older adults), with keen interests in women and minority founders. As part of her work, she regularly mentors and advises FinTech startups; she is also recognized as LinkedIn Top Voice for Economy and Finance, and Top FinTech influencer by various publications including Onalytica, Retail Banker International, and FinTech Finance. She co-hosts Rhetoriq, a podcast on longevity and fintech, and runs a weekly blog on Irish Tech News. She is a frequent contributing writer and speaker for top industry publications and conferences.
Thibault Duchemin grew up the only hearing person in a deaf family, interpreting for them since age 5. After a double master's degree in Artificial Intelligence in Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and UC Berkeley, he founded Ava to make the every day life of 450 million deaf & hard-of-hearing people 24/7 accessible, by building the fastest AI captioner for conversations. Today, Ava enables social and professional inclusion, making communications also accessible in the world's largest companies, schools, conferences, and museums. Thibault is part of the board of trustees of the Hearing Loss Association of America, is a Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient and was named Humanitarian of 2017 and Innovator Under 35 by the MIT Technology Review.
Tim is co-founder of 169 Labs in Munich and Cologne, one of the leading german voice assistant agencies. With expertise in UX / UI design and several years of conversational design experience he is now responsible for the conception, design and marketing of voice applications. Tim is also one of 38 Alexa Champions worldwide.
For the past 12 years, I’ve led and executed design projects across a range of modalities (voice, touch, camera, device orientation) and device types (smart speakers, phones, smartwatches, smart glasses, TV, in-car IVI). I’m currently a Principal UX Designer on Amazon Alexa where I’m tackling some of the hardest problems in speech technologies and experiences. I lead design on many emerging topics of speech and develop CX strategies towards Alexa's north star. Prior to working this role, I’ve led many new, exciting projects including Alexa in cars, Alexa voice shopping, Dash Buttons, Amazon Apple Watch app, Fire Phone, and app navigation for the Amazon App.
Tobias has been active in digital media for over 20 years, starting with AOL in 1996. While there, he held a variety of leadership roles including General Manager of AOL Local and VP of AOL International, based in London. Tobias left AOL in 2003 to found Leads.com, a pioneering search agency which was acquired by Web.com in 2005. In 2009, Tobias co-founded WillowTree, a leading mobile agency which has grown to over 300 employees. Tobias holds a BSE in Finance (Wharton) and a BSE in Systems Engineering, both from the University of Pennsylvania.WillowTree is a leader in helping clients such as HBO, Orange Theory, 21st Century Fox, Regal Cinemas and Synchrony Bank design and develop voice application strategies.
Tom Doyle brings over 30 years of experience in operational excellence and executive leadership in analog and mixed-signal semiconductor technology to Aspinity. Prior to Aspinity, Tom was group director of Cadence Design Systems’ analog and mixed-signal IC business unit, where he managed the deployment of the company’s technology to the world’s foremost semiconductor companies. Previously, Tom was founder and president of the analog/mixed-signal software firm, Paragon IC solutions, where he was responsible for all operational facets of the company including sales and marketing, global partners/distributors, and engineering teams in the US and Asia. Tom holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from West Virginia University and an MBA from California State University, Long Beach.
Tom is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Newark Venture Partners (NVP), a $50M venture fund and accelerator based in downtown Newark, NJ. NVP is backed by Amazon, Prudential and a number of other notable investors, entrepreneurs and politicians. In addition to driving financial returns, NVP mission is to attract and grow great tech start-ups in Newark, build the local tech/business ecosystem and drive economic benefits to the city in the form of jobs, residents, taxes and foot traffic. www.Newark.vc Tom also manages RosePaul Investments, his family office, and its proprietary fund, RosePaul Ventures that invests in tech start-ups and VC/PE funds. RosePaul's tech start-up portfolio is focused on software enabled business. www.rosepaul.com He is an active early stage investor and adviser to start-ups, venture capital, private equity and growth-stage companies. Tom is member of New York Angels, an early stage investment group. He serves as a board member and adviser to a number of early stage ventures. Prior to this Tom was a Partner at the management consulting firm Baldwin Bell Green (BBG) where he focused on Financial Services, Technology and Private Equity clients. His practice area was advising senior management in the areas of Strategy, Operations and IT. Prior to joining Baldwin Bell Green in 2008, Tom worked independently for 7 years as an adviser to private equity/venture capital firms and on two occasions joined the management team of a portfolio company. Prior to 2000, he spent 7 years as a management consultant at Mitchell Madison Group where he was a Partner. Prior to business school, Tom worked at Morgan Stanley in technology development and investment banking. Tom holds a BA in Physics and Philosophy from Clark University and an MBA from Dartmouth. He lives in NYC with his wife and two children.
Uday is a human centered designer specializing in cognitive science. He focuses on making machine intelligence empathetic. Uday launched his career as an entrepreneur straight out of college. In 2013 he founded and successfully ran an Artificial Intelligence research lab, that helped early stage companies design the product & take it to market. With a unique experience in design, technology & entrepreneurship, Uday founded BOND.AI in 2016. Uday was recognized as an International Innovator by the New York economic development corporation & has presented at various international conferences such as Money 2020, IBM Tech Talks, Paris Fintech Forum, Finovate, BankAI & more.
Valerie Vacante Founder, Managing Partner, Collabsco Valerie Vacante is the Founder of Collabsco, a strategy and innovation firm based in Austin, Texas. In a connected world of entertainment, play, living and learning Valerie has pioneered digital products and experiences across IoT, AR, VR and beyond. Valerie launched the first-ever connected play landscape, mapping 115+ connected play experiences, emerging technologies and business growth opportunities. She expanded Collabsco’s innovation efforts across the US, Europe and South America helping companies build their portfolios through collaborations with inventors, startups and global brands. Valerie is also the Co-Founder of TechUp, a curated service that showcases innovative products on a global stage. In between driving what’s next in technology, culture and design, Valerie serves on the SXSW Innovation Advisory Board, CES KAPi Awards Judge, Global Mentor to MassChallenge, International Speaker and Writer. You can find her almost anywhere creators are designing the future.
Vijay Balasubramaniyan is Co-Founder, CEO & CTO of Pindrop. He’s held various engineering and research roles with Google, Siemens, IBM Research and Intel.
Vijay holds patents in VoIP security and scalability and he frequently speaks on phone fraud threats at technical conferences, including RSA, Black Hat, FS-ISAC, CCS and
including RSA, Black Hat, FS-ISAC, CCS and ICDCS. Vijay earned a PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. His PhD thesis was on telecommunications security.
Vince Farquharson is a multiplatform Interaction Designer at NPR. Besides voice-UI "home assistant" devices, He has designed for large screens (Xbox, Fire TV, Android TV), smart watches, and smart refrigerators. He is passionate about diversity and inclusion in Design. He believes great ideas come from everywhere.
Vineet Sinha drives Salesforce's initiatives to push and explore boundaries for emerging technologies. In this role, Vineet's work involves making voice-enabled devices to have sophisticated conversations with users and using vision tracking to trigger better user experiences. Previously he has started multiple companies and has led efforts for building smart users interfaces around large data sources. Vineet has a PhD from the CS+AI Lab at MIT focusing on these challenges.
Waleed currently heads a technology innovation lab, VirtualForce.io, that incubates next generation technology products and digital innovations. His team is aimed at solving complex business problems through deep tech and digital transformation in areas like Healthcare, VOICE, AI/ML, FinTech and Blockchain. Waleed got his MBA from Yale University, and studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Michigan Ann Arbor.
I’ll admit it: I love talking with robots and teaching them to talk back. It’s been that way since I was a kid chatting to my toys with sadly no response. Since then, and for 20 years I’ve taught robots all over the World to carry on natural conversations for the Fortune 500 and their customers. Now at Google, I help internal groups and external partners develop and maintain best practices of conversation design for the Google Assistant.
Wei is the principal evangelist for Arm AI ecosystem. She has a breadth of hands-on expertise in AI, IoT and Mobile, and also extensive experience fostering new developer communities. Wei has a passion to work with partners and developers, and bring them the frictionless developer experience.
Prior to Arm, Wei worked for Samsung Mobile and Samsung Semiconductor, covering different roles ranging from developer evangelist, to engineering manager.
Wes Gould is Partner and CTO of REDspace, a software company building the future of television, entertainment, and learning. Under Wes’ leadership, the company has grown to a team of over 200 technical engineers. As the digital tech partner to global entertainment brands, REDspace builds engaging voice and interactive solutions for clients such as Turner/Warner Media, Viacom, Sony Pictures Television, and Akamai. An industry leader, Wes serves as a Member of the Television Academy and regularly speaks at conferences and events around the world.
Wesley leads BNY Mellon Pershing's voice and larger conversational AI strategy. He's a veteran of the New York startup scene, where he helped to build the brain (and the team) behind x.ai's Amy and later founded the voice computing startup John Done. He lives in the NYC suburbs with his wife, two daughters, and a dog of highly-questionable pedigree.
Will Hall is the Chief Creative Officer at RAIN, leading combined teams of strategists, engineers, and designers. He serves on multiple advisory boards, and has been declared the "winner" of Pinterest. Over the past 15 years, he's worked at agencies with key clients including Amazon, Adobe, Facebook, Sony, Adult Swim, Nike and others. He is also an adjunct professor of Design and Technology at NYU.
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Will Mayo founded SpokenLayer to power media and brands on voice platforms like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Media clients include Oath, Gannett, McClatchy, Hearst, GateHouse Media, Medium, A+E, LinkedIn, and hundreds more. Brand clients include TD Ameritrade, Bose, and the Salvation Army. SpokenLayer is backed by visionary investors like The Guardian, Matter, Betaworks, Graham Holdings, and North Base Media. Prior to starting SpokenLayer, Will worked at Goldman Sachs and Intel and earned a masters in Computer Engineering and Ergonomics from Lehigh University.
Yingbo Zhou is Lead Machine Learning Research Scientist at Salesforce, with focus on robust learning frameworks, weak or self-supervised learning, and continual learning. Yingbo has his sights set on solving real world problems with state of the art machine learning methods including Deep Learning, Speech Recognition and Computer Vision.
Yongkook Kim is a mainframe engineer/architect.
Yongkook started his career as a logic design engineer for IBM Z Cryptographic Coprocessor in IBM Pougkeepsie, NY. He's been a technical advisor for Z clients in NY Metro area for 12 years and is now a Solutions Architect at Vicom Infinity, an IBM Premier Business Partner. His recent interests are connecting IBM Z with new technologies such as Open Source SW, Blockchain, IoT and Voice Interface.
Zachary Haynes is Director of Global Business Development of the Dictionaries Division at Oxford University Press, responsible for Oxford’s Global Language Solutions and "Powered by Oxford", a licensing service that aggregates the world’s best foreign language data in partnership with innovative platforms, products and services. He is also the business lead for the Oxford Dictionaries API. Zachary holds a degree from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
I'm a young Afro-Caribbean millennial who's always had an affinity for solving problems and using cross-cultured experiences to do it. From studying Ethnomusicology to starting my own greeting card business, now as a User Experience Designer @ Deloitte Digital, my thought process has grown to be very unique to understanding and aligning with people’s culture, emotions, and ideologies. With focuses such as multicultural design and accessibility, I help entrepreneurs and companies to redesign their digital and physical user experiences. When I'm not doing UX, I spend time with my family, my dog, tinkering with new ideas as well as volunteers my time with multiple non-profit organizations.
Zohar is the CEO and Co-founder of Wibbitz, the automated video creation company trusted by leading brands, publishers, and agencies. Before founding Wibbitz in 2011, Zohar’s entrepreneurial drive lead him to launch several startups at a young age. His passion for media and advanced technology has helped to pioneer the use of automation and change the digital video landscape. He speaks frequently at events such as the TEDx, World News Media Congress, and SXSW. Zohar was selected by Geektime as one of the Top 5 Israeli Entrepreneurs for 2013, the 40-under-40 list for 2014 by TheMarker Magazine, and the 2018 40-under-40 list for the Young Jewish Professionals organization.
