About Our Speakers:
Waleed Ayoub is a product and technology leader with nearly 20 years of hands-on experience empowering talented teams and building impactful enterprise SaaS products. Waleed specializes in transforming data and machine learning from an operational afterthought to a revenue-generating asset for the world's largest enterprises. At Kinaxis, Waleed is on a mission to bring "intelligent decision automation" to the enterprise. Prior to joining Kinaxis as their SVP of Solutions R&D, Waleed most recently was the CTO of Rubikloud, running product, engineering and client delivery practices; leading them to a successful exit in 2020. Waleed holds a Bachelor of Applied Science and Engineering with a specialization in Quantum Physics from the University of Toronto and enjoys serving in an advisory capacity with various tech start ups and analytics programs.
Dr. Foteini Agrafioti is the Chief Science Officer at RBC and Head of Borealis AI. She is responsible for RBC’s intellectual property portfolio in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning. She serves as co-chair of the Advisory Council on Artificial Intelligence, advising the federal government on how to build on Canada’s strengths and global leadership in AI.Prior to joining Borealis AI, Foteini founded and served as Chief Technology Officer at Nymi, a biometrics security company and maker of the Nymi wristband. Foteini is the inventor of HeartID, the first biometric technology to authenticate users based on their unique cardiac rhythms. She is a TED speaker and serves on the editorial review boards of several scientific journals. Foteini was named “Inventor of the Year” in 2012 at the University of Toronto where she received a Doctorate in Electrical and Computer Engineering and was named one of Canada’s “Top 40 Under 40” for 2017.
Avi Goldfarb is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare, and Professor of Marketing, at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Avi is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Avi’s research focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the digital economy. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University and he has published academic articles in marketing, statistics, law, management, medicine, political science, physics, computing, and economics. Avi testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on competition and privacy in digital advertising. He co-authored the bestselling book Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence.
Nicholas Howard currently leads a team of over 150 engineers, product managers, and data scientists to support the business and drive innovation throughout Assurance IQ. He started his career in the U.S. Army as an infantry officer in 2002, serving over three years of combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, earning two bronze stars in the process. Afterwards, he earned an MS from MIT in Operations Research, and then served as a professor of mathematics at the United States Military Academy, where he taught multivariate calculus, probability, and statistics. After three years of teaching, he left the Army and moved into the tech world, working at startups in the healthcare and supply chain industries where he focused on optimization, analytics and data science before joining Assurance IQ in 2018.
Moderator: Brian Keng is a Research Director at Borealis AI, and an Adjunct Professor in Data Science at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. At Borealis, he leads the incubator program building out innovative AI-enabled products and capabilities for the financial services industry. At Rotman, he plays a key role in shaping data science education and research through his work with the TD Management Data and Analytics Lab and the Master of Management Analytics program.
Questions: Brian Keng brian.keng@rotman.utoronto.ca