PHLAI - Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Responsible and Practical Artificial Intelligence
September 9, 2021
Explore “Emerging Artificial Intelligence Technologies” and “AI Applications” at the fifth annual PHLAI conference.
AI is all around us playing an active role in our daily lives from Xfinity Voice Remote, Smart Assistants, Disease Mapping, Virtual Travel Booking Agents, Conversational Bots, Search Engines, Product Recommendations to Self-Driving Cars amongst many other applications. As the use of AI scales, machine learning automation is a key contributor to maximizing productivity and creating opportunities for business, the economy, and society.
Conference Tickets
Contact [email protected] if you have any questions.
Speakers and Presenters
Rhona Bradshaw serves as Senior Vice President of Digital Experience and Platforms at Comcast Cable. In this role, Rhona oversees all digital strategy, platforms, and experience across Xfinity residential sales and customer care channels. She is responsible for accelerating the convergence of Xfinity’s digital channels to support evolving consumer preferences, including how artificial intelligence and machine learning are applied within these experiences to create a more convenient and personalized customer experience.
A native of Ireland, Rhona brings with her several decades worth of international experience in marketing, customer experience, and digital transformation, at leading consumer brands. Prior to joining Comcast in 2019, Rhona spent 12 years as Group Director of Digital Experience Transformation at Liberty Global and has held several other leadership positions including Head of Marketing at UPC Ireland (now Virgin Media Ireland) and Director of Digital Transformation at Virgin Media in the UK.
Rhona is an active member of the Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT) organization, having served as Treasurer and President of the UK chapter for four years. She is particularly focused on supporting and championing the careers of young women and continues to support WICT now that she is in the USA.
Rhona holds a B.A. in business studies with a major in marketing from the University of Limerick in Ireland.
Arpit is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on Conversational Technologies, Affective Computing, and Blockchain and Decentralized services. Prior to his current role, he was part of Comcast's Advanced Engineering team working on iOS and Android applications, and with the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist.
Arpit was recognized as one of Philadelphia's 10 Tech Disruptors of 2017 by the Philadelphia Business Journal. He helps run the Comcast Blockchain and Decentralized Services Guild as well as the Philadelphia Google Developers' Group.
With 6,000+ research citations, 50+ patents, 35+ peer-reviewed research publications, and the outstanding PhD thesis award from UIUC for his PhD thesis in Machine Learning, Ashutosh is one of the world’s experts in machine-learning. He founded Eightfold.ai in 2016 with the goal to find the right career for everyone in the world. Now, they help companies like Hulu, Twilio, Postmates, and Capital One retain top performers, upskill & reskill their workforce, recruit top talent efficiently, and reach diversity goals. Eightfold.ai is valued at $2.1B after their recent series E funding and received an honorable mention in Fast Co’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards. Prior to Eightfold.ai, Ashu founded BloomReach.
As part of Comcast’s Platform Architecture & Engineering team, Dill provides platform services to the developers at Comcast. He has worked in IT for over 15 years with the majority of his experience in data science, structures, analytics, software engineering, microservices architecture, and cloud-based platform technologies, such as CF or Kubernetes. Dill is a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect and Certified Cloud Foundry developer. In his spare time, Dill loves traveling and star-gazing/astrophysics.
Don is responsible for Pega’s industry-leading platform and CRM applications. He has 20 years of experience delivering enterprise software solutions for Fortune 500 organizations, with a focus on digital transformation, mobility, analytics, business process management, cloud and CRM. Don has led enterprise software implementations and provided technology and architecture consulting to senior business and technology executives from Fortune 500 organizations, including American Express, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, and BP. Don holds a BS in Physics and Philosophy from Boston College.
In his role at Comcast Labs, Hamed is responsible for identifying and harnessing developments in Big Data and NLP (Natural Language Processing) for advanced predictive analytics, ranging from image recognition to inventory management. His current focus areas include quantum annealing, gate-based modeling, and algorithm design.
Hamed joined Comcast Labs in 2017 to help create and implement innovative ideas in software. He excels at data ingest design and implementation (real-time and batch) for voice, video, weblog, sensor, machine, and social media data, as well as data discovery routines for known and new data sources. A software engineer with a Master's degree in Computer Engineering from Boston University and an MBA from UCLA, Hamed is currently pursuing a doctorate degree in Computer Science from Harvard University.
Hamed's 20+ years of applied experience give him an exceptional ability to analyze the impact of innovation on the bottom line. His familiarity with the oil & gas, construction, and travel/leisure sectors makes him a well-rounded contributor to the team. When he's not working, Hamed is big into designing microcontroller circuits for robotics projects, and is furthering his Computer Vision studies with self-driving cars. He also enjoys music, travel, and exploring different world cultures.
Nisha Talagala is the CEO and founder of Pyxeda AI. She is also the founder of AIClub.World which is bringing AI Literacy to K-12 students and individuals worldwide.
Nisha has significant experience in introducing technologies like Artificial Intelligence to new learners from students to professionals. Previously, Nisha co-founded ParallelM which pioneered the MLOps practice of managing Machine Learning in production for enterprises - acquired by DataRobot. Nisha is a recognized leader in the operational machine learning space, having also driven the USENIX Operational ML Conference, the first industry/academic conference on production AI/ML. Nisha was previously a Fellow at SanDisk and Fellow/Lead Architect at Fusion-io, where she worked on innovation in non-volatile memory technologies and applications.
Nisha has more than 20 years of expertise in enterprise software development, distributed systems, technical strategy, and product leadership. She has worked as technology lead for server flash at Intel - where she led server platform non-volatile memory technology development, storage-memory convergence, and partnerships. Prior to Intel, Nisha was the CTO of Gear6, where she designed and built clustered computing caches for high-performance I/O environments. Nisha earned her PhD at UC Berkeley where she did research on clusters and distributed systems. Nisha holds 73 patents in distributed systems and software, over 25 refereed research publications, is a frequent speaker at industry and academic events, and is a contributing writer to Forbes and other publications.
As a principal machine learning researcher at Comcast, Scott current works on the Search team building deep learning models to rank results for customers on X1 and Flex. In the past, he had trained contextual bandit models for recommendations for the Xfinity Assistant while utilizing off-policy evaluation techniques. His previous roles include data science stints in advertising, healthcare, and finance. He holds a doctoral degree in mathematics from Drexel University. In his spare time, Scott enjoys cooking, reading, and spending time with his family.
Stop back soon to see more speaker announcements
Schedule
Thursday, September 9, 2021
11:00 AM — 5:00 PM Eastern (ET)
11:00 AM – 5:00 PM
The PHLAI 2021 schedule will be announced soon.
Follow us online
Tag us on social media with hashtag #ComcastLabsConnect and #PHLAI
Contact the Organizer
Questions? Email [email protected] for help.
