ABOUT THE SPEAKER: As the European Lead for Accenture's Applied Intelligence Services, Jean-Laurent Poitou helps Fortune 500 and public sector clients transform their business, applying artificial intelligence, data science, data engineering, robotics and automation to create new sources of revenue, provide outstanding digital customer experiences and leverage insights for competitiveness. During his 28 years at Accenture, Jean-Laurent has helped companies establish pan-European or global capabilities. He previously served as Accenture's Managing Director for Communications, Media & Technology (CMT), Growth & Strategy, championing the development and implementation of the CMT operating group strategy. Before taking that role, he was the Managing Director of Accenture's global Electronics & High Technology industry group. In this role, he developed and implemented Accenture's industry strategic programs and participated in larger deals for the practice, including the professional electronics, consumer electronics, aerospace, defense, semiconductor and software industries. Jean-Laurent holds an Engineering degree from Paris Ecole Polytechnique. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Prof. Dr. Dirk Pleiter is the Research Group Leader at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Regensburg. At JSC, he is leading the work on application-oriented technology development. Currently, he is also Principal Investigator of Exascale Labs at JSC and Work Package Leader within the Human Brain Project. He has played a leading role in several projects for developing massively-parallel special purpose computers, including several generations of QPACE. He is the author and co-author of more than 170 scientific papers, conference contributions and book chapters in the areas of theoretical high-energy physics and computer science.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Alison Kennedy is the Director of the Hartree Centre, based at the UK's Science and Facilities Council's National Laboratory at Daresbury.  The Hartree Centre receives funding from BEIS with a remit to improve the global competitiveness of UK industry by facilitating the adoption of High Performance Computing (HPC), High Performance Data Analytics, and Cognitive Computing techniques by companies of all sizes. Prior to joining the Hartree Centre, she was the Executive Director of EPCC, the national HPC centre based at the University of Edinburgh, and recently completed a term of office as the Managing Director and Chair of the Board of Directors of PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe). She began her working life as a real time systems programmer in industry and has now worked in HPC for almost 25 years, managing large collaborative projects in HPC, Data and AI.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Timo Stich is a Senior Research Scientist at ZEISS. His focus is on machine learning and computer vision. Prior to joining ZEISS he was Developer Technology Engineer for NVIDIA Corporation and Research Staff in Computer Graphics and Image Processing at the Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science and the Computer Graphics Lab of Brunswick University, Germany. He received a diploma degree in Computer Science from Mannheim University, Germany and a Ph.D. degree from the Brunswick University, Germany.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Adriano Di Florio holds a Master's Degree in Nuclear, Subnuclear and Astroparticle Physics. Currently he is completing his Ph.D. in Physics and is a member of CMS collaboration. His main topics of study include multi-quark states including production, GPU/CUDA based tracking alghorithms, developing ML techniques for track seeds filtering, and GPU/GooFit interpolation algorithms applications.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: G?khan Yildirim is a Senior Research Scientist at Zalando Research and develops Generative Adversarial Network-based methods for fashion design and visualisation. G?khan finished his Ph.D. in the Image and Visual Representation Laboratory (IVRL), école Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. During his Ph.D., he worked on visual-saliency detection methods, which imitate human visual processing via biologically-inspired computer algorithms. After graduation, he pursued several deep learning topics, including image ranking and classification.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Sepp Hochreiter is a German AI researcher. Since 2006, he is the Head of the Institute of Bioinformatics at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz in Austria, and he is now also the Head of the LIT AI Lab. Sepp Hochreiter has made numerous contributions in the fields of machine learning and bioinformatics. He developed the long short-term memory (LSTM) for which the first results were reported in his diploma thesis in 1991. The main LSTM paper appeared in 1997 and is considered as a discovery that is a milestone in the timeline of machine learning. He applied biclustering methods to drug discovery and toxicology. He extended support vector machines to handle kernels that are not positive definite with PSVM model, and applied this model to feature selection, especially to gene selection for microarray data. In addition to his research contributions, Sepp Hochreiter is broadly active within his field - both locally in Austria and internationally.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Mohammad ElGamacy is currently concluding his Doctoral degree in the field of protein design. A pharmacist by training, he did his Bachelor's studies in Pharmaceutical Science at Ain Shams University in Cairo. After working for a year in the fields of drug design and chemical biology, he moved to pursue his Master's degree in Molecular and Structural Biology at the Free University of Brussels and the Catholic University of Leuven. Currently, he is finalising his doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tuebingen.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Mindaugas Eglinskas is the CEO at PIXEVIA (formerly Magma Solutions) and has over 18 years of experience in computer vision, neural networks, and development of mission-critical systems. He lead a project for the Lithuanian Ministry of Defence to create a next-generation unmanned aerial vehicle prototype system. Mindaugas is also an assistant professor at Vilnius University, where his research focuses on neural networks and autonomous systems.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:  Stan Boland is a Co-Founder and CEO of Five AI Inc., a major venture-backed start-up developing driverless car technology to be delivered as a service. He was Co-Founder and CEO of two of Europe's most successful venture-backed communications silicon and software companies, Element 14 Inc. and Icera Inc., one bought by Broadcom and the other by NVIDIA, for an aggregate value of over $1 billion. Icera raised $245M in venture funding and grew to 320 staff before it was bought in 2011 and Element 14's team and technology now delivers over 80% of the world's broadband communications chips and software. Before that, Stan was CEO at computer pioneer Acorn and a Board Member at ARM. His early career includes spells at the aerospace firm Rolls-Royce and the computer company ICL. He is a graduate in Physics from the University of Cambridge, a Board member of the UK trade association TechWorks and a European council member of the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA).

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: As the head of the 'Automated Driving and Active Safety' unit, Michael E. Hafner is responsible for the development of future driving functions on the road to autonomous driving at Mercedes-Benz Cars. His tasks comprise of the development of numerous driving assistance systems to production readiness such as, for example, the active distance control, steering, speed limit, and lane change assistance systems, as well as the various parking systems of all Mercedes-Benz passenger vehicles. In addition, he is responsible for the development of all future systems in the area of fully automated driving and self-driving vehicles.

Dr. Hafner studied electrical engineering and industrial information technology at Karlsruhe University and completed his doctorate in automation technology at Darmstadt Technical University. After joining Daimler in 2002, he held management positions with responsibility for on-board diagnostics and emissions certification before being appointed as an assistant to the Board of Management in Group Research and Mercedes-Benz Cars Development (RD). From 2010 to 2013, he headed the development of E/E brake control and suspension systems before taking over the Driver Assistance Systems and Active Safety unit. Since October 2016, he has also been responsible for all development tasks related to fully automated driving.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Since 1987, Jürgen Schmidhuber has published on self-referential, self-improving Artificial Intelligence (AI) that learns to improve its own learning algorithm, to create an AI smarter than himself, then retire. The media have called him the father of AI. His lab's deep learning methods (such as LSTM) have revolutionized machine learning, are now available on 3 billion smartphones, and are used billions of times per day, e.g. for Facebook's automatic translation (4 billion times per day as of 2017), Google's speech recognition on 2 billion Android phones, Apple's Siri & QuickType on 1 billion iPhones, Amazon's Alexa, etc. His research group also established the field of mathematically rigorous universal AI and optimal universal problem solvers. His formal theory of creativity & curiosity & fun explains art, science, music, and humor. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2016 IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award "for pioneering contributions to deep learning and neural networks,” Scientific Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA (USI & SUPSI), and Chief Scientist of the company NNAISENSE, which aims to build the first practical general purpose AI.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Ryan Hooks has worked at the top of the VFX industry in NYC for 8 years, www.mediadrift.com. 4 years ago he created www.avbl.com the "airBNB for skills", which led him to San Francisco where he started www.isabel.io. For two years he built greenhouses, hardware, and software to create pop-up refugee units that utilize 98% less water. Over the past year and a half he has ventured into AR/AI to help solve one of the greatest challenges to the scaling of efficient methods for plant growth. As of 2018 Huxley is part of Wageningen's Startlife program, with HQ based in Amsterdam. Utilizing his creative and technical competencies to connect the brightest plant scientists and programmers globally.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Ewa Dürr is a Product and Business Strategist in Accelerating Technologies. She is responsible for the strategy of the Google Engineering Center in Munich and advances Cloud AI engineering efforts in Robotics, Manufacturing and Automotive. Before Google, Ewa was an entrepreneur, leading product design and innovation at the tech start-up impacore and executed projects in Europe, LatAm and APAC as a strategy consultant with Bain & Co. Ewa holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and completed an executive program at the Singularity University. Interestingly, Ewa was once a professional orchestra violinist and is a passionate marathon runner (Paris 2017, NYC 2016, Berlin 2015, etc.).

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:  Damian Borth is full professor at University of St.Gallen (HSG) and leading the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Lab at the HSG. Previously, Damian was the Director of the Deep Learning Competence Center at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern and the PI of the NVIDIA AI Lab at the DFKI. Damian's research focuses on large-scale multimedia opinion mining applying machine learning and, in particular, deep learning to mine insights from online media streams. He is the scientific director of the Chartered Financial Data Science Program at "Deutsche Vereinigung für Finanzanalyse und Asset Management (DVFA)" and founding member of Sociovestix Labs, a social enterprise in the area of Financial Data Science. Damian did his postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley and ICSI in Berkeley. He received his PhD from University of Kaiserslautern.