A pioneer in neural network speech recognition, Alex invented time-delay networks in 1989 as part of his PhD at CMU, having previously graduated from MIT with a BSc in 1979. In addition to his academic career, he has co-founded 10 successful commercial ventures. One of these, Jibbigo, was acquired by Facebook in 2013, leading Alex to found Facebook's Language Technologies group. He has received more prizes and distinctions than we have space to list here, and is a fellow of the IEEE and a member of the German Academy of Sciences.

After completing his PhD at RWTH Aachen, Hassan started off as a researcher, but quickly branched out and set up a speech-to-speech translation company. He has served as a CEO or Chief Scientist for several ventures in the speech recognition industry. He joined eBay in 2013 and became Head of AI before leaving to head up Amazon's AI efforts as a Director of AI. After almost 3 years at AWS he recently joined Facebook as a Director of AI.Hassan serves as a board member and advisor for a number of AI companies which he helped to found, including Witlingo and Gyant. Hassan also makes angel investments through Keiretsu.

A pioneer in the field of machine translation, Marcello’s research focuses on methods to integrate human and automated translation. Marcello is the co-founder and scientific advisor of MateCat and ModernMT, a project which aims to deliver real-time domain-adaptive neural machine translation. Marcello has co-authored over 180 scientific publications on machine translation, language modelling, speech recognition and information retrieval. He has been a committee member at all the major international industry conferences and is also a senior member of the IEEE and the ACM. Marcello graduated “summa cum laude” from the University of Milan in 1989.

Lukasz’s research focuses on deep learning applied to natural language processing, and he has recently been working on the use of attention models and transfer learning. Lukasz is a key contributor to Tensor2Tensor, an open-source TensorFlow library containing implementations of several state-of-the-art neural models. He earned a PhD from RWTH Aachen in 2008 and Master’s degrees in mathematics and computer science from the University of Wroclaw in 2003.

Riccardo Sabatini is a world renown scientist and entrepreneur specialized in numerical modeling of complex system, ranging from material science, financial markets, computational genomics and drug design.
Speaker at international events and conferences, including TED and WEF.
Author in top ranking scientific journals, consultant for Fortune500 companies, inventor of several patents in biotech and IT, angel investor and board member for some groundbreaking startups in the field of artificial intelligence.
Today he’s working on how to solve drug design at genomic scale with his company, Orionis Biosciences.

Max Pumperla is a data scientist and engineer specialising in deep learning and its applications.
He currently works as a deep learning engineer at Skymind and is a co-founder of aetros.com.
Max is author and maintainer of several Python packages, including elephas, a distributed deep learning library using Spark.
His open source footprint includes contributions to many popular machine learning libraries, such as keras, deeplearning4j, and hyperopt.
He holds a PhD in algebraic geometry from the University of Hamburg.

Novi is a co-founder and co-director of Predictive Analytics Lab (PAL) at University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. In addition to undertaking high quality research and publishing in top machine learning and computer vision conferences/journals including NIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICCV/ECCV, JMLR, and TPAMI, the PAL group also creates significant impact by providing support, technology, and highly-trained specialists to a new generation of technology companies. Prior to Sussex, Novi was a Newton International Fellow of the Royal Society at University of Cambridge, UK. He is an Associate Editor of TPAMI and an Area Chair of NIPS 2017 and 2015.