Speakers

Jaime Teevan

Microsoft

Attending to What Matters
Tuesday 12th, 9:00–10:00

Jaime Teevan is Chief Scientist for Microsoft's Experiences and Devices, where she is helping Microsoft create the future of productivity. Previously she was the Technical Advisor to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research AI, where she led the Productivity team. Dr. Teevan has published hundreds of technical articles, books, and patents, and given keynotes around the world. Her research earned her the Technology Review TR35 Young Innovator, Borg Early Career, Karen Spärck Jones, and SIGIR Test of Time awards. She holds a PhD from MIT and a BS from Yale, and is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington.

Rohit Prasad

Amazon

Alexa Everywhere: AI for Daily Convenience
Wednesday 13th, 9:00-10:00

Rohit Prasad is vice president and head scientist, Amazon Alexa, thevoice service that powers Amazon’s family of Echo products, Amazon Fire TV, and third-party offerings. Prasad leads research and development in Artificial Intelligence technologies aimed at making interaction with Alexa a magical experience for customers. Prior to Amazon, Prasad was deputy manager and senior director of the Speech, Language and Multimedia Business Unit at Raytheon BBN Technologies. In that role, he directed US Government sponsored research and development initiatives in speech-to-speech translation, psychological health analytics, document image translation and STEM learning. Prasad is a named author on more than 100 scientific articles and holds several patents. He earned his master’s degree in Electrical Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, and a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology, India.

Invited Speakers

Aleksandra Korolova

University of Southern California

Privacy-Preserving WSDM
Wednesday 13th, 14:45–15:30

Aleksandra Korolova is a WiSE Gabilan Assistant Professor of Computer Science at USC, where she researches algorithms and technologies that enable data-driven innovations while preserving privacy and fairness. Prior to joining USC, she was a Research Scientist at Google. Aleksandra received her PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, where her PhD thesis has been recognized by 2011-2012 Arthur L. Samuel Thesis Award for the best PhD thesis in the Computer Science Department. Aleksandra is a co-winner of the 2011 PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies for her work on exposing privacy violations of microtargeted advertising and a runner-up for the 2015 PET Award for RAPPOR, the first commercial deployment of differential privacy.

Maarten de Rijke

University of Amsterdam

Reinforcement Learning to Rank
Thursday 14th, 11:45–12:30

Maarten de Rijke is University Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Information Retrieval at the University of Amsterdam. He holds MSc degrees in Philosophy and Mathematics (both cum laude), and a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science. He worked as a postdoc at CWI, before becoming a Warwick Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK. He joined the University of Amsterdam in 1998, and was appointed full professor in 2004. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and a recipient of a Pioneer Personal Innovation grant, the Tony Kent Strix Award, the Bloomberg Data Science Research Award, the Criteo Faculty Research Award, the Google Faculty Research Award, the Microsoft PhD Research Fellowship Award, and the Yahoo Faculty and Research Engagement Program Award as well as a large number of NWO grants. He is the director of the newly established Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence and a former director of Amsterdam Data Science. His research focus is at the interface of information retrieval and artificial intelligence, with projects on online and offline learning to rank, on recommender systems, and on conversational search.

H. V. Jagadish

University of Michigan

Responsible Data Science
Tuesday 12th, 14:45–15:30

Professor H. V. Jagadish is Bernard A. Galler Collegiate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Distinguished Scientist at the Institute for Data Science, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Prior to 1999, he was Head of the Database Research Department at AT&T Labs, Florham Park, NJ. Professor Jagadish is well known for his broad-ranging research on information management, and has approximately 200 major papers and 37 patents. He is a fellow of the ACM, “The First Society in Computing” (since 2003) and of AAAS (since 2018), and has served on the board of the Computing Research Association (since 2009). He has been an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Database Systems (1992-1995), Program Chair of the ACM SIGMOD annual conference (1996), Program Chair of the ISMB conference (2005), a trustee of the VLDB (Very Large DataBase) foundation (2004-2009), Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2008-2014), and Program Chair of the VLDB Conference (2014). Since 2016, he is Editor of the Morgan&Claypool “Synthesis” Lecture Series on Data Management. Among his many awards, he won the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award in 2013 and the David E. Liddle Research Excellence Award (at the University of Michigan) in 2008. His popular MOOC on Data Science Ethics is available on both EdX and Coursera.