Prof. Dr. Max Welling is a research chair in Machine Learning at the University of Amsterdam and a VP Technologies at Qualcomm. He has a secondary appointment as a senior fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). Max Welling has served as associate editor in chief of IEEE TPAMI from 2011-2015. He serves on the board of the NIPS foundation since 2015 and has been program chair and general chair of NIPS in 2013 and 2014 respectively. He was also program chair of AISTATS in 2009 and ECCV in 2016 and general chair of MIDL 2018. He is recipient of the ECCV Koenderink Prize in 2010. Welling is co-founder and board member of the Innovation Center for AI (ICAI) and the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). He directs the Amsterdam Machine Learning Lab (AMLAB), and co-directs the Qualcomm-UvA deep learning lab (QUVA) and the Bosch-UvA Deep Learning lab (DELTA). He has over 300 scientific publications in machine learning, computer vision, statistics and physics and an h-index of 68.

Mildred Z. Solomon, EdD is the President of The Hastings Center, the nation’s founding bioethics research institute, focused on examining the social and ethical implications of health and health care, science, and emerging biomedical technologies. She is also Professor (part-time) of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where she runs a Fellowship in Bioethics and has trained over 200 scientists, physicians and other kinds of professionals from across the United States and around the world. Dr. Solomon’s own research covers a broad spectrum of topics — including, for example, the ethics of end-of-life care, organ transplantation, medical professionalism, and responsible conduct of research. She recently completed a two-year term on the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Technology, Values and Policy. She has served on committees of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, on the US Secretary of Health and Human Services’ Advisory Committee on Organ Transplantation, and is currently a member of the Global Health Advisory Committee of the Open Society Foundations’ Public Health and Human Rights Programs. Dr. Solomon has over 70 academic publications in peer-reviewed journals and is also frequently cited in the mainstream media, including the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, New York Review of Books, The Daily Beast, Forbes, Science News, The Scientist and other outlets. A frequent public speaker, she has presented at Aspen Health, the New York Academy of Sciences, academic medical centers, and numerous public venues. Before leading The Hastings Center, she was Senior Director for Implementation Science at the Association of American Medical Colleges and before that, Vice President of Education Development Center, an independent research institute in Boston, MA. Dr. Solomon holds a B.A from Smith College and a doctorate in educational research methods from Harvard University.

Ann Aerts has been Head of the Novartis Foundation since January 2013. During this time, she has been leading an organization committed to catalyzing innovations that transform the health of low-income populations. Since 2019, the Novartis Foundation sharpened its focus to concentrate on how digital technology, data science and artificial intelligence can reimagine health and care around the world.

Ann holds a Degree in Medicine and a Masters in Public Health from the University of Leuven, Belgium, as well as a Degree in Tropical Medicine from the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium.

Passionate about improving health outcomes through data science and digital technology, Ann applies her relentless commitment to overcoming global health inequities to pioneer solutions that can advance health and care globally. Ann chairs the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development Working Group on Digital Health, is a member of the Governing Council of the UN Technology Bank for Least Developed Countries and the International Advisory Board of the Commonwealth Centre for Digital Health. In 2017-2018 Ann served as a member of the US National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine Committee on Improving the Quality of Health Care Globally and currently sits on the US National Academies of Medicine Commission on Healthy Longevity. Ann has authored numerous publications on digital health, infectious and noncommunicable diseases, and multisector partnerships that address global health challenges.

Dr. Peter Lee is Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Healthcare. He leads an organization that works on technologies for better and more efficient healthcare, with a special focus on artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Dr. Lee has extensive experience in managing the process of going from basic research to commercial impact. Past illustrative examples include the deep neural networks for simultaneous language translation in Skype, next-generation IoT technologies, and innovative silicon and post-silicon computer architectures for Microsoft’s cloud. He also has a history of advancing more “out of the box” technical efforts, such as experimental under-sea datacenters, augmented-reality experiences for HoloLens and VR devices, digital storage in DNA, and social chatbots such as XiaoIce and Tay. Previously, as an Office Director at DARPA, he led efforts that created operational capabilities in advanced machine learning, crowdsourcing, and big-data analytics, such as the DARPA Network Challenge and Nexus 7. He was formerly the Head of Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department. As a thought leader, he has spoken and written widely on technology trends and policies, spanning the fields of computing technology, healthcare, and innovation ecosystem. He is a member of the Boards of Directors of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine. He served on President’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. He has led studies for the National Academies on the impact of federal research investments on economic growth and testified before the US House Science and Technology Committee and the US Senate Commerce Committee.

Dr. Shahram Ebadollahi is the Global Head of Data Science and AI at Novartis. In this capacity, he is responsible for defining and shaping the strategy for applications of data science across the pharmaceutical pipeline, from early discovery to manufacturing. He also oversees globally the execution of the strategy and operations of the data science and AI efforts and teams across Novartis.

Before joining Novartis in September of 2018, Dr. Ebadollahi spent 14 years with IBM and had a series of senior executive roles. He was the technical founder of IBM Watson Health, IBM’s first ever business focused on applications of technology and AI to the domain of healthcare and life sciences. In that role, he oversaw innovations, development, and served as the Chief Science Officer of IBM in the area of healthcare. Prior to starting IBM Watson Health, he had started the health informatics research and computational health, with the aim of innovating and applying data-driven and knowledge-driven advanced analytics to the broad domain of healthcare and life sciences. As the Vice President of Health Informatics Research, he oversaw a global team of scientists and innovators in this domain.
One of the latest innovations he started and oversaw before his departure from IBM was applications of blockchain technology to healthcare, which resulted in collaborations with the FDA, CDC and more recently the formation of the Health Utility Network between IBM and a number of health insurance companies and banks.

Dr. Ebadollahi has a PhD and MBA from Columbia University and is a member of a number of scientific and business advisory boards at the intersection of technology innovation, data science and novel business models with focus in the domain of healthcare and life sciences. He has published and overseen graduate level research in the area of analytics for healthcare and has conducted research with funding from national institutions such as NIH. He is a frequent speaker and panelist at events at the intersection of technology innovation and healthcare.

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

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

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

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

Elissa was appointed Executive Director of the CIFAR Pan-Canadian AI Strategy in January 2018 and Associate VP Research in March 2019.  Elissa completed her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of British Columbia in 2006.  Following a post-doc at Lund University, in Sweden, she decided to pursue a career in research strategy, policy and leadership.  From 2008 – 2015 she held senior leadership positions at University of Toronto’s Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation, advancing major institutional strategic research priorities, including establishing and leading the SOSCIP research consortium.  At CIFAR, she is working with Canada’s three national AI Institutes in Edmonton (Amii), Montreal (Mila), and Toronto (Vector Institute) and researchers across the country to advance Canada’s leadership in AI research and Innovation.  She is a member of the federal government’s AI Advisory Council and the OECD Network of Experts on AI.