Over the last two decades, Nicole Allen has worked in news and data product development in the media and financial industries. Her experience includes the development of pioneering financial applications leveraging text and AI to managing the complexities of content acquisition and licensing agreements. Nicole completed an undergraduate degree in economics and Chinese language at McGill University and a Master’s degree at the Australian National University.

Ted Merz is the founder of Principals Media, a writing agency that specializes in personal narrative and thought leadership for CEOs. He also advises and invests in AI fintech startups. He spent three decades at Bloomberg. He spent almost a decade as the Global Head of News Product, overseeing content acquisition, automated content and AI news applications. Before that he spent 15 years in executive roles at Bloomberg News, including as New York Bureau Chief and Managing Editor for the Americas. 

Aziz leads data science programs to improve returns on public and private investments. He currently advises private equity firms on sourcing and diligencing deals and on portfolio value creation. Previously, he led the private equity data science program at Two Sigma, supporting $2Bn in investments. Prior to that, he founded RationalAi, and built it into a multi-million dollar risk analytics firm, supporting clients such as Bloomberg.. Prior to that, he was Chief Risk Officer at Amazon Lending. Aziz has also led analytics for managing operational, environmental, liability and credit risks for AIG, Moody’s, and several financial institutions and federal agencies. Aziz holds a Ph.D. in Finance from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Stefano is a research scientist and CEO of Epistemic AI, which he founded with noted AI and neuroscience NYU professor David Heeger. Epistemic AI is a research intelligence platform connecting the world’s biomedical knowledge for Fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies and biotech.

Prior to founding Epistemic AI, Stefano researched language understanding at Bridgewater Associates and Elemental Cognition under Dr. David Ferrucci, co-founded a multilingual news analytics AI company, and led NLP and AI projects at Bloomberg LP.

Stefano holds an M.S. in Computer Science and was the recipient of the Italian H2CU scholarship for Columbia University. He is co-inventor of Artificial Intelligence patents and was the organizer of two of the largest AI communities in NYC with multiple thousand members (NY Knowledge Engineering Meetup and City AI Meetup).

Richard’s domain expertise in systematic and discretionary investment management was attained over a 30-year career as a Portfolio Manager and COO overseeing multibillion-dollar funds. His career highlights include:

·       Launching and running a hedge fund incubation business funded by Man Group

·       Chief Operating Officer at Castlerock Management

·       Head of Equities and Senior Portfolio Manager at Guardian Life Insurance

·       Senior Portfolio Manager at Citigroup Asset Management

·       Head of Investor Relations at Citigroup

Sonu is a Director of Machine Learning Engineering/Distinguished Engineer at Capital One. She leads machine learning engineering efforts in retail banking. She and her team focus on areas including productized machine learning models and a range of AI applications. She is interested in representation learning, practical applications of foundational models and all things ML! Prior to Capital One, she was an engineer at Bloomberg and a quantitative trader in a statistical arbitrage group. She completed her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania.