While researching the Bay Area’s start-up culture for her upcoming comedy film on AI, Vero Bollow came to the conclusion that there should be a place for artists, scientists, and engineers to hang out, be curious and launch new ventures together, so she decided to found Stochastic Labs. Vero’s first feature film, The Wind and the Water, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival before playing to sold-out audiences at festivals worldwide and eventually breaking box office records in Panama, it’s country of production. A graduate of UC Berkeley, she holds master’s degrees from MIT and the Columbia School of Journalism. She is also the director of the Minerva Foundation.

Rachel Chanoff is the founder and director of THE OFFICE performing arts + film, her New York City-based programming, consulting, and production company. She is the Curator of Performing Arts and Film for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), Director of Programming of the CenterSeries at the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance at Williams College, Consultant to the Feature Film and Theater Programs for the Sundance Institute and to the RAWI screenwriters lab in Jordan, Curator of The New York Jewish Film Festival and The Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Artistic Director of the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival. Rachel is proud to serve on the board of the 52nd Street Project and Working Films.

Dr. Sanjoy Som founded Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, a non-profit virtual research institute with an interdisciplinary approach to studying the relationship between Earth system science, space exploration, and the future of humanity. Dr. Som also serves as a research scientist at NASA Ames.

Jack Mostow is a Research Professor Emeritus of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. As of 2017 he leads the RoboTutor team (www.robotutor.org), a $1M Finalist in the Global Learning XPRIZE Competition. RoboTutor expands on prior work on Project LISTEN’s Reading Tutor, which listens to children read aloud, to teach writing and numeracy as well. RoboTutor offers exciting opportunities for interdisciplinary work in intelligent tutors, educational data mining, graphic design, speech technologies, cognitive and motivational psychology, human-computer interaction, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Robert Cowan, MD, FAAN is Professor of Neurology and Chief of the Division of Headache Medicine at Stanford University. Prior to coming to Stanford he was ta senior clinical research scientist in molecular neurobiology at Huntington Medical Research Institutes (Pasadena, CA). Dr. Cowan attended University of Southern California, Keck Medical School, completed a residency program at USC Department of Neurology and served on faculty there until 2000. He is Board Certified in the areas of: Psychiatry and Neurology and Pain Medicine. He also holds subspecialty certification in Headache Medicine. Dr. Cowan is widely published in various scientific journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association Cephalalgia, and Headache. He has authored book chapters lectures both nationally and internationally on a variety of headache topics, and has appeared on NBC, CBS and has been featured in articles ranging from the San Francisco Chronicle to Vogue Magazine. Dr. Cowan has held several nationally elected positions, including chair of the sections on Chronic Daily Headache and In-office Patient Education for the American Headache Society. He is immediate past President of the Headache Cooperative of the Pacific, is a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology and the American Headache Society. He is on the boards of the Alliance for Headache Diseases Advocacy, the Headache Cooperative of the Pacific, the American Headache and Migraine Association, and the American Council for Headache Education. He is a reviewer for several peer-reviewed journals, including Headache and Cephalalgia. He is an editor for Headache Currents. Dr. Cowan is the author of The Keeler Migraine Method (Penguin/Avery, 2008). Along with Dr. Alan Rapoport, Professor of Neurology at UCLA School of Medicine, Dr. Cowan co-founded BonTriage which develops computer-based tools to aid in the diagnosis, education, and care of people with chronic medical conditions. Dr. Cowan’s primary research nterest is the pathophysiology of chronic daily headache, utilizing functional imaging, body fluid analysis and deep phenotyping. He has been the recipient of NIH, foundation, industry and individual grants and gifts for his research.

Dr. Boston works in the fields of micro- and astro-biology, having pioneered collaboration between the two fields. She explores the deepest caves to find the microscopic clues to which planets could harbor recognizable life and detect the presence of such life. Dr. Penelope Boston plunged into the wonders of exobiology at a very young age. She grew up traveling the world with parents who were traveling performers, frequently delves into deep caves to do research, has worked with Dr. Carl Sagan on a project and serves on several scientific advisory panels with Dr. Frank Drake, A current professor at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, author of over 150 publications, and co-founder of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute and organizer of multiple conferences, Dr. Boston has devoted her career to teaching and understanding overlapping scientific disciplines.

 Dr. Felipe Orduña Bustamante is a senior researcher of the Acoustics and Vibrations Group, ICAT-UNAM. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Physics (UNAM, 1987), a Master’s and Doctorate in Sound and Vibrations (University of Southampton, England, 1990 and 1995). He works on acoustic instrumentation and measurements, digital signal processing, musical acoustics, and music technology. He is the author of many articles, reports and patents included in international academic indexes. Tutor and graduate professor in Engineering and Music, initiator of the areas of Instrumentation and Musical Technology.

Sam Gershman received his B.A. in Neuroscience and Behavior from Columbia University in 2007 and Ph.D. in Psychology and Neuroscience from Princeton University in 2013, where he worked with Ken Norman and Yael Niv. From 2013-2015 Gershman was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, working with Josh Tenenbaum and Nancy Kanwisher. He currently is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Center for Brain Science at Harvard. His research focuses on computational cognitive neuroscience approaches to learning, memory and decision making. 

Sally Martin Katz is Curatorial Assistant of Photography at SFMOMA and Ph.D. candidate in Art History, focusing on History of Photography, at the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. Before moving to the Bay Area, she lived in Paris, where she completed a Master of Arts degree in Art History as well as a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography, both from the Sorbonne. While living in Paris, she served as assistant to the director and the head of exhibitions & communications at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson and worked on the photographic archive of the Greek, Roman & Etruscan Antiquities Department at the Musée du Louvre.

Recently retired after 25 years as Head of Drew School in San Francisco and 20 prior years as an English teacher and administrator at Tabor Academy (MA) and Lick-Wilmerding (CA).  A former member of the Executive Committee the California Association of Independent Schools. AB, MALS Dartmouth College. Sam is currently a Dartmouth class officer for ‘71. He has served as a trustee on three independent schools’ boards and for the Teach With Africa organization. He reads avidly, rides a Bianchi and journals daily.

For the past several years Paul Roossin has been the principal technologist for two medical company start-ups whose suite of products leverage modern Artificial Intelligence techniques to automate diagnostic and therapeutic processes. Prior to this work, Paul was the Science Director of Nanotronics Imaging, Inc., a New York-based microscopy, computer vision, AI, and robotics company that designs and delivers automated inspection and analysis solutions to the semiconductor, pharmaceutical, and materials industries. Paul trained as a neurobiologist at The Rockefeller University where he performed pioneering investigations into the neural substrates of memory consolidation and recall. His interest in artificial intelligence led him to join IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center, where he and his team created the world’s most accurate machine translation system, first used for translating French texts into English. The statistical and information theoretical techniques they pioneered have become the basis for the methods used by all modern translation software. At IBM Research he also designed, produced, and marketed MedSpeak Radiology, the world’s first commercially available continuous speech, large vocabulary speech recognition system. This system and its progeny are currently used to automatically transcribe nearly all radiology reports in the US. As an entrepreneur, he and two colleagues founded ConsumerSearch.com, a consumer product meta-review website; it grew to be one of the largest shopping sites on the web and was sold to The New York Times Digital in 2007. Other prior experience includes CTO positions at the technology startups Tribeca Software and Revonet, Inc., and he was a founder and general manager of Blueshift Ventures, LLC, an early-stage life sciences and technology venture capital firm based in New York City. He is also the founder and CEO of Mental Machinery, Inc., a science and technology consulting firm.

A member of the New York Academy of Science and the Society of Sigma Xi, Paul’s active interests include medical and science policy, the development and use of artificial intelligence technologies, and educational outreach. He was featured as one of the 100 smartest individuals in the New York City area in a New York Magazine cover story. Paul received a B.A. cum laude from New York University in biology and computer science and from 1980 to 1985 was a Ph.D. Fellow at both The Rockefeller University and the Courant Institute of Mathematics.

Vincent Conitzer is the Kimberly J. Jenkins University Professor of New Technologies and Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Economics, and Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He received Ph.D. (2006) and M.S. (2003) degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and an A.B. (2001) degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. Conitzer works on artificial intelligence (AI). Much of his work has focused on AI and game theory, for example designing algorithms for the optimal strategic placement of defensive resources. More recently, he has started to work on AI and ethics: how should we determine the objectives that AI systems pursue, when these objectives have complex effects on various stakeholders? Conitzer has received the Social Choice and Welfare Prize, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, an NSF CAREER award, the inaugural Victor Lesser dissertation award, an honorable mention for the ACM dissertation award, and several awards for papers and service at the AAAI and AAMAS conferences. He has also been named a Guggenheim Fellow, a Sloan Fellow, a Kavli Fellow, a Bass Fellow, an ACM Fellow, a AAAI Fellow, and one of AI’s Ten to Watch. He has served as program and/or general chair of the AAAI, AAMAS, AIES, COMSOC, and EC conferences. Conitzer and Preston McAfee were the founding Editors-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (TEAC).

David Bianciardi is founder and principal of AV&C, an experience design studio creating digital landmarks in the physical world.

David started his career as a composer and sound designer, using software and technology to make things “talk to each other” to create designed experiences. Today, his transdisciplinary team of artists, designers, technologists, engineers, developers and producers create responsive and expressive media installations in the built environment that foster relationships between storyteller, place and audience.