Xiaomo Liu

Director of Data Science, S&P Global Ratings
Xiaomo focuses on using machine learning and natural language processing to improve credit rating practices. Prior to S&P, Xiaomo was a senior research scientist at Thomson Reuters, where he invented AI algorithms and systems to help news and legal professionals to automate their workflow. His work has been reported by numerous news media and won industry awards. Xiaomo holds a PhD in computer science from Virginia Tech and published more than 30 peer reviewed papers and 3 US patents. Xiaomo has serviced as PCs in various conferences like KDD, IJCAI, CIKM, IWSC etc. He also organized workshops in conferences.

Manuela M. Veloso

Managing Director, Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research
Manuela is on leave from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) where she is Herbert A. Simon University Professor in the School of Computer Science, and where she was the Head of the Machine Learning Department until June 2018. Manuela recently joined J.P.Morgan Chase to create and head an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Center. She researches in AI, Robotics, and Machine Learning. At CMU, she founded and directs the CORAL research laboratory,for the study of autonomous agents that Collaborate, Observe, Reason, Act, and Learn, www.cs.cmu.edu/~coral. Veloso is AAAI Fellow, ACM Fellow, AAAS Fellow, and IEEE Fellow, Einstein Chair Professor of the Chinese National Academy of Science, the co-founder and past President of RoboCup, and past President of AAAI. Veloso and her students research a variety of autonomous robots, including mobile service robots and soccer robots. See www.cs.cmu.edu/~mmv for further information, including publications. Manuela was the Program Chair for IJCAI-07 and Program Co-chair for AAAI-05. She also served as organizers for multiple workshops.

Sameena Shah

Managing Director, J.P. Morgan AI Research
Sameena is a highly accomplished technology leader with over 20 years of educational and industry experience in engineering, AI, and leading development teams that created top AI technologies in the world for financial, news, commodities and legal businesses. Previously, Sameena was Managing Director, Head of Data Science at S&P Global Ratings where she led the firm’s strategy and development for Augmented Intelligence. Prior to that, Sameena worked at Thomson Reuters for seven years in roles of increasing responsibility that involved building state of the art AI systems resulting in business growth and operational efficiencies. Sameena is also the Founder and CEO of Aylan Analytics LLC, and has worked at Yahoo! Research, a NYC based hedge fund, an International hedge fund, and a global startup. Sameena has a PhD in Distributed Machine Learning and a Masters in Computer Science from IIT Delhi. She is the winner of the top PhD in the country award, Cloudera top AI/ML application award, several best paper awards and recognitions. She has contributed 41 Publications, and 11 Patents. She has organized several workshops in AAAI, KDD, etc.

Armineh Nourbakhsh

Executive Director, J.P. Morgan AI Research
Armineh is Vice President of AI Research at J.P. Morgan Chase. Her career spans a decade of applied research in Natural Language Processing in areas such as targeted sentiment analysis, event detection and verification, information extraction, and social data mining. Prior to J.P. Morgan, Armineh was a Director of Data Science at S&P Global, where she led efforts to transform operational workflows related to the ingestion and processing of financial disclosures. In addition to numerous publications and patents, Armineh’s research has been deployed in award-winning AI-driven technologies such as Reuters Tracer, Westlaw Quick Check, and the SocialZ Verve index.

Gerard de Melo

Professor, University of Potsdam (Chair for AI and Intelligent Systems)
Gerard has developed core natural language processing, data mining, and machine learning methodologies. He received his doctoral degree from Saarland University / the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany and spent two years as a post-doctoral research scholar at ICSI/UC Berkeley. He then worked as an assistant professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing and at Rutgers University in New Jersey prior to joining the University of Potsdam. He has published more than 120 peer-reviewed papers and received multiple best paper awards. He served as area chairs and senior program committee members for ACL, COLING, EMNLP, NAACL, WWW, IJCAI, etc. He also has organized five workshops in various conferences.

Le Song

Associate Professor, Georgia Tech, and Sr. Director of AI, Ant Financial
Le is a Sr. Director of AI at Ant Financial and Associate Professor at Computational Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. Le is heading the machine learning group at Georgia Tech. He developed core machine learning methodology, including kernel methods, feature space embedding methods, graphical models, probabilistic and stochastic modeling, deep learning models, etc. Le received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Sydney, Australia. He worked as a postdoc fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and a research scientist at Google Research before joining Georgia Tech. He has published more than 140 peer-reviewed papers and received multiple recognitions including best paper awards in NIPS 2013 and ICML 2010. He has organized six workshops in various machine learning conferences and gave tutorial talks in KDD, ICML, and WWW.

Quanzhi Li

Senior Manager, Alibaba Group
Quanzhi is a senior manager at Alibaba Group.His research interests are NLP, information retrieval, data mining, and machine learning. He has worked on many AI projects in financial domain during his tenure at Alibaba, Thomson Reuters, FactSet and Financial Times. He has published 50+ peer-reviewed papers and is the organizer of the yearly IEEE International Workshop on Big Data for Financial News and Data.