Faisal Farooq
VP of Engineering, Pinterest
Tuesday, August 11th, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM
Faisal Farooq, PhD is an established leader in AI, developing business and growth strategies, conducting bleeding edge research, developing planet scale machine learning systems, managing large teams. He is the recipient of the ACM SIGKDD Lifetime Service Award for 2024. Faisal is currently the VP of Engineering at Pinterest. Prior to that he was a Director at LinkedIn (Microsoft) and the founding head of the Health AI research group at Qatar Computing Research Institute at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Before moving to Qatar, he led cutting edge research and delivered AI products to the healthcare market at IBM Watson. Faisal was responsible for delivering a highly successful machine learning/NLP-based system, one of the largest deployed in US healthcare. He was nominated as a Key Expert (Distinguished Scientist), the highest research status in Siemens. Faisal has authored 20+ patents, 50+ scientific publications, organized 15+ conferences and workshops (NeuRIPS, ICML, KDD, ICPR). In 2018, he was appointed as the General Chair of KDD and in 2017 Associate General Chair.
Alex Smola
CEO & Co-Founder, Boson AI
Tuesday, August 11th, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Alex Smola studied physics at the Technical University of Munich, at the University of Pavia, and at AT&T Research in Holmdel. During this time he was a member of the Maximilianeum in Munich and of the Collegio Ghislieri in Pavia. He received his Master’s degree from the Technical University of Munich in 1996 and his doctorate in computer science from the Technical University of Berlin in 1998. Until 1999 he was a researcher in the IDA Group of the GMD Institute for Software Engineering and Computer Architecture in Berlin, now part of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, after which he worked as a researcher and group leader at the Research School for Information Sciences and Engineering of the Australian National University. From 2004 he was Senior Principal Researcher and Program Leader of the Statistical Machine Learning Program at NICTA, now part of Data61 at CSIRO.
From 2008 to 2012 he worked at Yahoo! Research, and in spring 2012 he moved to Google Research in Mountain View, where he stayed until the end of 2014. From 2013 to 2017 he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He co-founded Marianas Labs in early 2015, and in July 2016 he joined Amazon Web Services to help build AI and machine learning tools for everyone. In 2023 he co-founded Boson AI.
Paul Bennett
Director of Research for Generative AI, Spotify
Tuesday, August 11th, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Paul Bennett is Director of Research for Generative AI at Spotify, where his research focuses on adapting and aligning large language models to support creators and audiences in responsible, human-centered ways. His work spans domain adaptation of generative models, preference alignment, and scalable evaluation frameworks that enable models to operate reliably under real-world ambiguity.
Paul’s recent research explores how to teach generative systems to reason in structured domains through representations like semantic identifiers, optimize continuously to reflect nuanced human preferences, and generate contextualized narratives that enhance user experience. Across this work he studies how model design and evaluation choices influence alignment with user and creator intent, safety, and controllability.
Prior to joining Spotify, Paul was a Partner Research Manager in the Augmented Learning and Reasoning group at Microsoft Research. His research has been published broadly in machine learning and human-centered computing venues and recognized with multiple awards, including a SIGIR Test of Time Award. His work reflects a commitment to advancing generative AI research that bridges technical depth with human-centered design and safety.
Sakshi Jain
Engineering Director and AI Researcher, LinkedIn
Wednesday, August 12th, 10:00 AM-11:00 AM
Sakshi Jain is an Engineering Director and AI researcher at LinkedIn, where her work focuses on trustworthy machine learning, responsible AI, privacy-preserving AI, and GenAI safety at the scale of large social networks. She holds multiple patents in applied AI systems and has published research in AI fairness, privacy, security, abuse detection, and statistical learning, with work appearing in venues such as FAccT, NDSS, PETS, and ACM CCS.
Her research has addressed practical challenges in securing large online platforms, including account takeover detection, jobs fraud, coordinated abuse, active learning under limited reviewer capacity, and statistical models of user authenticity. She has also led work on scalable fairness testing, explainable AI, privacy-preserving machine learning, federated learning, differential privacy, LLM benchmarking, automated red teaming, and safety evaluation for GenAI systems.
Sakshi received M.S. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and dual degrees in Engineering Physics and Nanotechnology from IIT Bombay.
Ankur Teredesai
Co-Founder and CEO, CueZen Inc.
Professor, Computer Science & Systems, University of Washington
Wednesday, August 12th, 11:00 AM-12:00 PM
Ankur Teredesai is the founder C.E.O of CueZen and a tenured full Professor of Computer Science and Systems at the University of Washington. He is widely recognized as a machine learning researcher and serial entrepreneur working at the intersection of AI, clinical informatics, and population health. He served as General Chair of ACM KDD 2019 and as ACM SIGKDD Information Director for twelve consecutive years. His research spans graph neural networks, recommendation systems, reinforcement learning for health, and responsible AI systems. He has founded and led AI health ventures serving millions of individuals across national health programs in the United States, United Kingdom, and countries in Asia, with deployments spanning wellness, preventive care, and chronic condition management across public and private health systems.
Moontae Lee
Head of Superintelligence Lab, LG Research
Wednesday, August 12th, 1:30 PM-2:30 PM
Moontae Lee is Vice President and Head of the Superintelligence Lab at LG AI Research and an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. A frontier AI researcher with more than 15 years of experience in machine learning and over six years of building large language models, he develops full-stack AI systems spanning data and evaluation, pre- and post-training, preference alignment, agentic orchestration, and scalable deployment. His current research focuses on self-improving AI agents, adaptive reasoning and retrieval, learned evaluation, and large-scale multi-agent systems—particularly benchmarks and reinforcement-learning environments in which models continually learn from expert workflows and real-world experience. At LG, he has contributed to the EXAONE foundation models and coding agents. He is currently leading the research and development of enterprise AI and agent platforms, translating frontier research into production-scale AI services. His research has received the NAACL 2025 Best Paper Award, the NAACL 2024 Social Impact Award, and the EMNLP 2025 SAC Highlights Award. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University and his M.S. from Stanford University.