Featured Speakers
Vivienne Sze
Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT
Keynote Speaker
Talk Title: Efficient Computing for AI and Robotics
Abstract: The compute demands of AI and robotics continue to rise due to the rapidly growing volume of data to be processed; the increasingly complex algorithms for higher quality of results; and the demands for energy efficiency and real-time performance. In this talk, we will discuss the design of efficient tailored hardware accelerators and the co-design of algorithms and hardware that reduce the energy consumption while delivering swift real-time and robust performance for applications including deep neural networks, data analytics with sparse tensor algebra, and autonomous navigation.
Bio: Vivienne Sze is Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT. She works on computing systems that enable energy-efficient machine learning, computer vision, and video compression/processing for a wide range of applications, including autonomous navigation, digital health, and the internet of things. She is widely recognized for her leading work in these areas and has received awards, including faculty awards from Google, Facebook, and Qualcomm, the Symposium on VLSI Circuits Best Student Paper Award, the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference Outstanding Invited Paper Award, and the IEEE Micro Top Picks Award. As a member of the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding, she received the Primetime Engineering Emmy Award for the development of the High-Efficiency Video Coding video compression standard. She is a co-editor of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC): Algorithms and Architectures (Springer, 2014) and co-author of Efficient Processing of Deep Neural Networks (Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture, Morgan Claypool, 2020). For more information about Prof. Sze’s research, please visit http://sze.mit.edu.
Kayla Woputz
Data Scientist, Earth Science Researcher and Lecturer, Microsoft
Moderator for Morning Panel 1: Sustainable Computing: Climate
Bio: Kayla Woputz, PhD, is a Data Scientist with Microsoft who specializes in modeling human behavior and their interactions with complex systems. With a Ph.D. in Zooarchaeology and a focus on extinction events, she has extensive experience working at the intersection of humans, built environments, ecosystems, and climate change. After leaving academia and the non-profit sectors, Dr. Woputz transitioned to tech where she now works various tasks related to human behavior, AI and co-pilot response measurements, and responsible AI initiatives.
Sara Beery
Homer A. Burnell Career Development Professor in the MIT Faculty of Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making
Morning Panel 1: Sustainable Computing: Climate
Bio: Dr. Sara Beery is the Homer A. Burnell Career Development Professor in the MIT Faculty of Artificial Intelligence and Decision-Making. She was previously a visiting researcher at Google, working on large-scale urban forest monitoring as part of the Auto Arborist project. She received her PhD in Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech in 2022, where she was advised by Pietro Perona and awarded the Amori Doctoral Prize for her thesis. Her research focuses on building computer vision methods that enable global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring across data modalities, tackling real-world challenges including geospatial and temporal domain shift, learning from imperfect data, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions. She partners with industry, nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies to deploy her methods in the wild worldwide. She works toward increasing the diversity and accessibility of academic research in artificial intelligence through interdisciplinary capacity building and education, and has founded the AI for Conservation slack community, serves as the Biodiversity Community Lead for Climate Change AI, founded and directs the Workshop on Computer Vision Methods for Ecology, and co-leads the NSF Global Climate Center on AI and Biodiversity Change.
Abigail Bodner
Morning Panel 1: Sustainable Computing: Climate
Bio: Abigail's research spans climate, physical oceanography, geophysical fluid dynamics, and turbulence. She investigates, quantifies, and parameterizes multi-scale turbulent interactions in the upper ocean, which play an important role in ocean-atmosphere interactions, yet are on scales much smaller than the grid used in climate models, even at the highest possible resolution. She aims towards a comprehensive understanding of these interactions and thus uses a combination of theory, high-resolution idealized simulations, fully complex climate models, and data driven methods to isolate individual processes and understand their subgrid physical effects on the climate system.
Loretta Mickley
Morning Panel 1: Sustainable Computing: Climate
Bio: Loretta Mickley co-leads the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group at Harvard. Her research focuses on chemistry-climate interactions in the troposphere. Key topics of her research include:
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Impacts of wildfire smoke on human health and regional climate.
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Effects of climate change on air quality and implications for human health.
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Influence of aerosol trends on regional climate.
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Oxidation capacity and fire activity in preindustrial and paleo atmospheres.
Fotini Christia
Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Political Science; Director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), at MIT
Moderator for Afternoon Panel 2: Industry Perspectives: Career Journeys
Bio: Fotini Christia's research had focused on issues of conflict and cooperation in the Muslim world, and she has conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Iran, the Palestinian Territories, Syria, and Yemen. She is currently working to bridge the social sciences, data science, and computation by bringing researchers from these disciplines together to address systemic racism across housing, healthcare, policing, and social media. She also has a new line of research that examines how to effectively integrate AI tools in public policy.
Fotini is the author of “Alliance Formation in Civil War” (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which was awarded the Luebbert Award for Best Book in Comparative Politics, the Lepgold Prize for Best Book in International Relations, and a Distinguished Book Award from the International Studies Association. She is co-editor with Graeme Blair (UCLA) and Jeremy Weinstein (Stanford) of “Crime, Insecurity, and Community Policing: Experiments on Building Trust”, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press (2024). Her research has also appeared in Science, Nature Human Behavior, Review of Economic Studies, NeurIPs, Communications Medicine, IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, American Political Science Review, and Annual Review of Political Science among other journals. Her opinion pieces have been published in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Boston Globe among other outlets. Fotini graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University in 2001 with a joint BA in Economics–Operations Research and an MA in International Affairs. She joined the MIT faculty in July 2008 after receiving her PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University that year.
Lisa Bonalle
Chief Executive Officer at GDS Link
Afternoon Panel 2: Industry Perspectives: Career Journeys
Lisa currently serves as CEO of GDS Link; an AI-enabled real-time credit decisioning software business. GDS Link enables banks, FinTech, and specialty lenders to digitize the underwriting process and make more efficient and effective lending decisions. Lisa has led businesses from start-ups to multi-billion-dollar divisions of Fortune 500 companies. She is an innovator and entrepreneur who has built companies from the ground up. Lisa has extensive M&A experience, having successfully acquired, repositioned, and sold 10 businesses.
Prior to her role at GDS, Lisa was the Group CEO for the Financial Services & Retail sector of Verisk Analytics. As Group CEO Lisa had full responsibility for six separate data and analytics, and SaaS businesses. Her functional expertise includes strategy, product development, operations, analytics, marketing and finance. Lisa has established successful partnerships with several of the world’s largest media companies and has worked with many of the world’s largest financial institutions and retailers.
Vanessa Liu
CEO of Sugarwork
Afternoon Panel 2: Industry Perspectives: Career Journeys
Bio: Vanessa is a serial business builder and technology innovator with over 25 years of experience across SAP, Trigger Media and McKinsey. The businesses she has built and relaunched are leaders in their verticals.
She is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sugarwork, an enterprise SaaS knowledge sharing platform empowering employers to own and maintain the tacit knowledge, skills, and relationships that drive their businesses using generative AI. She was most recently Vice President of SAP.iO, SAP’s early-stage venture arm, where she oversaw SAP.iO’s North American Foundries in New York and San Francisco, and recruited and accelerated 87 enterprise software startups. Prior to SAP, Vanessa was Chief Operating Officer at Trigger Media Group, a $22MM digital media incubator. She co-founded and was the interim CEO of Trigger’s portfolio companies: InsideHook (digital media company &
men’s lifestyle brand; sold to private equity) and Fevo (SaaS technology for group experiences in sports and music; Series C, market leader). She began her career at McKinsey & Company and was an Associate Partner in the Firm’s Media and Entertainment Practice, based in Amsterdam, London and New York. Vanessa currently serves as a Non-Executive director of Appen Ltd. (ASX: APX), a global AI data services company; and Goodman Group (ASX: GMG), a global industrial real estate company. She serves on the Audit Committee for Appen and the Sustainability & Innovation Committee for Goodman. Vanessa graduated magna cum laude with an AB in psychology from Harvard University and cum laude with a JD from Harvard Law School. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Universiteit Utrecht in the Netherlands where she conducted independent research on the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice. She serves as a member of Harvard University’s Board of Overseers, and as a Past President Director of the Harvard Alumni Association (was President from July 2021 - June 2022). She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.
Tina Reich
Independent Board Director and Advisor
Afternoon Panel 2: Industry Perspectives: Career Journeys
Bio: Tina Chan Reich is a member of the Board of Directors of Santander Holdings USA, Inc., Santander Bank, N.A., BILL Holdings Inc. (NYSE: BILL) a SaaS company and member of the S&P MidCap 400, and Altus Power, Inc. (NYSE: AMPS) a clean energy solutions company. She serves as a board member and advisor to Medius, a European-based SaaS company as well as a board observer and advisor to Clara, a Latin American fintech company, and serves as an advisor to a number of global fintech, investment and PE/VC companies. She is a recipient of the 100 AAPI Board Members Making a Difference Award 2024.
Ms. Reich served as Global Chief Credit Officer of the Global Business Financing, Payments and Digital Experiences Group as well as the Global Merchant and Network Services Group of American Express. She is a former Chief Risk Officer and Chief Data Scientist with various leadership positions in credit, payments, technology, digital transformation, and AI/ML.
Ms. Reich holds an SB in Economics from MIT. She is a member of the MIT Corporation, Development Committee. She is also a member of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Dean’s Advisory Council.
Lisa Schirf
Managing Director, Global Head of Data & Analytics at
Tradeweb
Afternoon Panel 2: Industry Perspectives: Career Journeys
Bio: Lisa Schirf is Managing Director and Global Head of Data & Analytics at Tradeweb Markets, a leading, global operator of electronic marketplaces for rates, credit, equities and money markets. In this role she manages the development and execution of the next generation of data and data science solutions across the firm.
Ms. Schirf has over 20 years of business and finance experience. She has held positions at Citadel, Nasdaq, BNP Paribas Investments Partners, and Goldman Sachs. She also founded and was President of HNL Ventures LLC, an early stage investment advisory firm.
Ms. Schirf was awarded the Trailblazer Award at Market Media’s 2023 U.S. Women in Finance Awards, named Market Data Professional of the Year in 2021 by WatersTechnology, and recognized as one of the 50 Leading Women in Hedge Funds in 2017 by The Hedge Fund Journal. She has served as a member of the MIT Sloan Alumni Board and the MIT Sloan Club of New York Board. Ms. Schirf holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a BS in Management from Villanova University.
Julia Taitz
Data Science Manager at Meta
Afternoon Panel 2: Industry Perspectives & Career Journeys
Bio: Julia Taitz is a Data Science Manager at Meta. She currently supports the Instagram Ecosystem team which is the first line of defense to understand, represent, and investigate Instagram’s most important metrics, processes, and future investments. She previously served as a Data Science Manager for Instagram Core Ads. During her time on Instagram Ads, she helped monetize Stories Ads to a best-in-class product and built new zero-to-one contextual experiences. Prior to joining Meta, Julia worked at Spotify, Flatiron School, and Contrary Capital. She is also a co-founder of the Locus Initiative, a 501(c)3 focused on connecting and mobilizing the next generation of givers.
Julia graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in entrepreneurship and computer science. She is also a former American alpine ski racing champion. Along with her avid love of skiing, she enjoys cooking, traveling, and running.
Emily You
Data Scientist at Microsoft
Moderator for Afternoon Panel 3: Sustainable Computing: Systems & AI
Bio: Emily is a data scientist in the Azure Consumption space as part of Microsoft's Customer Zero Data team. She focuses on bringing clarity to Microsoft Cloud usage, analyzing revenue and consumption trends, and delivering insights that help customers maximize the value of the Commercial Cloud. She holds a Master’s degree in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University and a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from UC Berkeley. Beyond her work in data science, Emily is passionate about fostering community among early-in-career professionals. She has led employee groups dedicated to supporting new hires and interns at Microsoft, helping them navigate their careers and grow in the tech industry
Lisa Amini
Director of IBM Research Cambridge at IBM
Afternoon Panel 3: Sustainable Computing: Systems & AI
Bio: Dr. Lisa Amini is the Director of IBM Research Cambridge, which is home to the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and of IBM's AI Horizons Network. She also leads IBM's AI Automation and Scaling Research efforts globally and is an IBM Distinguished Engineer.
Lisa was previously Director of Knowledge & Reasoning Research in the Cognitive Computing group at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center in New York. She was also the founding Director of IBM Research Ireland, and the first woman Lab Director for an IBM Research Global (i.e., non-US) Lab (2010-2013). In this role she developed the strategy and led researchers in advancing science and technology for intelligent urban and environmental systems (Smarter Cities), with a focus on creating analytics, optimizations, and systems for sustainable energy, constrained resources (e.g., urban water management), transportation, and the linked open data systems that assimilate and share data and models for these domains. Previously, Lisa was Senior Manager of the Exploratory Stream Processing Research Group at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center. She was the founding Chief Architect for IBM's InfoSphere Streams product. The Streams product is the result of a Research technology, System S, for which Lisa was also architectural lead from inception. Streams is a software platform for continuous, high throughput, and low latency mining of intelligence from massive amounts of sensor and other machine generated data. She also led her team in formative Smarter Planet/Cities pilots analyzing real-time data for cyber security, manufacturing, telecom, market data analysis, radio astronomy, environmental (water) monitoring, and transportation.
Lisa has served on program committees, hosted panels, and presented keynotes and publications in numerous IEEE, ACM and other conferences and workshops. She has worked at IBM the areas of AI and Cognitive Computing, Smarter Cities, Stream Processing, Distributed and high performance systems, Content Distribution, Multimedia, and Networking for over 25 years. She earned her PhD degree in Computer Science from Columbia University.
Cathy Wu
Thomas D. and Virginia W Cabot Career Development Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT
Afternoon Panel 3: Sustainable Computing: Systems & AI
Bio: Cathy is an associate professor at MIT in LIDS, CEE, & IDSS. Her group studies machine learning for control and optimization in mobility. Broadly, she is interested in AI for Engineering––developing innovative tools that empower engineers to navigate and manage the increasing complexity of modern systems. She is the recipient of a NSF Career Award aimed at advancing learning for generalization in large-scale cyber-physical systems. Her work is supported by NSF, Amazon Robotics, Mathworks, MIT Mobility Initiative, MIT Energy Initiative, US DOT, Microsoft Research, Cintra, and Symbotic. Her service highlights: Board of Governors for IEEE ITSS; Program Co-chair for RLC 2025; Area Chair or Associate Editor for ICML, NeurIPS, and ICRA; Spearheading efforts towards reproducible research in transportation. She previously completed a postdoc with the Microsoft Research Reinforcement Learning group and her PhD in EECS at UC Berkeley. Cathy received a BS and MEng in EECS at MIT. She has also spent time at OpenAI, Waymo, Dropbox, Facebook, and several startups.
Milan Yu
Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University
Afternoon Panel 3: Sustainable Computing: Systems & AI
Bio: Minlan Yu is a Gordon McKay professor at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science. She’s the assistant director of the SRC/DARPA JUMP 2.0 ACE Center for Evolvable Computing. She received her B.A. in computer science and mathematics from Peking University and her M.A. and PhD in computer science from Princeton University. She has actively collaborated with companies such as Google, AT&T, Microsoft, Facebook, and Intel. Her research interests include data networking, distributed systems, enterprise and data center networks, and software-defined networking. She received the ACM-W rising star award, NSF CAREER award, and ACM SIGCOMM doctoral dissertation award. She served as PC co-chair for SIGCOMM, NSDI, HotNets, and several other conferences and workshops.