Speakers

Philip E. Bourne               
Stephenson Dean, UVA School of Data Science

Bourne is the founding dean of the School of Data Science, the newest and 12th school to be formed in the University’s 200-year history. He is a world-renowned biomedical and data science researcher who has published over 350 papers and five books, launched four companies, received numerous awards, and been elected as a fellow to multiple scientific societies. He was the first associate vice chancellor for innovation and industrial alliances at the University of California San Diego and the first associate director for data science at the National Institutes of Health. As dean of the School of Data Science, Bourne is leading an effort to create a new kind of school — a school “without walls,” defined by interdisciplinary collaboration and open scholarship. The School is guided by common goals: to further discovery; share knowledge; and make a positive impact on society through collaborative, open, and responsible data science research and education. Founded in 2019, the School of Data Science is positioned to play an integral leadership role in the global digital future.

Renée Cummings               
Assistant Professor of the Practice in Data Science, UVA School of Data Science

Renée Cummings is a criminologist, criminal psychologist, therapeutic jurisprudence specialist, AI ethicist, and the historic first data activist in residence at The School of Data Science, University of Virginia.  Cummings is also a community scholar at Columbia University. She advocates for AI we can trust and more diverse, equitable, and inclusive AI. She is on the frontline of ethical AI, generating real time responses to many of the consequences of AI.

Cummings also specializes in AI risk management, justice-oriented AI, social justice AI, AI policy and governance, and using AI to save lives. She is committed to using AI to empower and transform communities by helping governments and organizations navigate the AI landscape and develop future AI leaders. Cummings works at the intersection of AI, criminal justice, racial justice, social justice, design justice, epidemiological, and urban criminology, and public health. She has extensive experience in trauma-informed justice interventions, homicide reduction, gun and gang violence prevention, juvenile justice, evidence based policing and law enforcement leadership. Her work extends to rehabilitation, reentry, and reducing recidivism. 

Cummings is committed to fusing AI with criminal justice for ethical real time solutions to improve law enforcement accountability and transparency; reduce violence; and enhance public safety, public health, and quality of life.  A thought-leader, motivational speaker, and mentor, Cummings is an articulate, dynamic, and passionate speaker who has mastered the art of creative storytelling and deconstructing complex topics into critical everyday conversations that inform and inspire.

Brad Doss               
Senior Director, Customer Engagement, Git Hub 

Brad Doss is a Go-To-Market leader at GitHub where he has led various teams across Sales, Marketing and Product including Market Development, Go-to-Market Strategy, Enterprise Advocacy, Revenue Enablement and key integration initiatives with parent company, Microsoft. Currently he oversees the Revenue Marketing function and is focused on accelerating revenue growth through customer engagement, pipeline generation and product utilization.

Prior to GitHub, Brad worked as a general management, consulting and operations leader at Gartner (previously CEB) where he ran its fastest growing Sales and Marketing consulting practice and led strategy and operations for the professional services business unit.

Brad holds a BS in Human & Organizational Development and a BA in History from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN and an MBA from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business in Charlottesville, VA. When he isn’t talking to customers about GitHub, he enjoys watching and playing sports and spending time with his wife, two daughters and goldendoodle in the Washington DC metro area. 

Andrew Gamino-Cheong               
Co-Founder and CTO, Trustible AI

Andrew Gamino-Cheong is the Co-Founder & CTO of Trustible – a leading technology provider of responsible AI governance. Its software platform enables AI and compliance teams to scale their AI Governance programs to help build trust, manage risk, and comply with AI regulations.

Andrew has spent his career working at the intersection of policy and AI. Prior to founding Trustible, Andrew was a machine learning engineering tech lead at FiscalNote (NYSE: NOTE), a DC based policy information services company, where he built AI systems to help organizations better understand and map regulatory risks, applying AI to the policy landscape. Now, at Trustible, he's flipped the script and is working to apply policy to the AI landscape. Andrew has a Bachelor's degree from Georgetown University, where he double majored in Computer Science and Government, and a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Maryland College Park.

Omar Garriott               
Executive Director, Batten Institute, UVA Darden School of Business

Omar Garriott is a Tech Intrapreneur for Good, venture founder, and bestselling author. He is the Executive Director of the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship, Technology and Innovation at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. Prior to Darden, he was the Global (SVP/GM) of Education for Qualtrics--a $100M business--and previously led education product marketing for Salesforce, LinkedIn, Apple, and Adobe. In addition to his corporate bona fides, he is a teacher and mentor, having taught 3rd grade through Teach for America and advised students ranging from high schoolers to Executive MBAs on college and career transitions.

Omar also worked as a Career Coach at both UC-Berkeley Haas and the University of Virginia, was a reporter for Major League Soccer, and has been published in The New York Times, Forbes, and The Washington Post.

Matt Gers               
Strategy and Operations, Meta

Matt Gers leads partnerships strategy and operations for devices, AI, and technology platforms at Meta. Prior to Meta, he worked at Google as of Strategy and Operations. For the last decade he has worked in tech, building new business models and scaling product platforms and ecosystems. 

Matt is a UVA Darden School of Business alum (MBA ’12) and has a Bachelor’s degree from UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School in Business Administration.

Yael Grushka-Cockayne               
Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean for Professional Degree Programs, UVA Darden School of Business

Professor Yael Grushka-Cockayne's research and teaching activities focus on data science, forecasting, project management and behavioral decision-making. Her research is published in numerous academic and professional journals, and she is a regular speaker at international conferences in the areas of decision analysis, project management and management science. Prof. Grushka-Cockayne is an award-winning teacher, winning the Darden Morton Leadership Faculty Award in 2011, the University of Virginia's Mead-Colley Award in 2012 and the Darden Outstanding Faculty Award in 2013 and 2022 and Faculty Diversity Award in 2013 and 2018. In 2015, she won the University of Virginia All University Teaching Award. Prof. Grushka-Cockayne teaches the core "Decision Analysis" course, an elective she designed on project management and an elective on data science. She has served as the leader of the open enrollment courses "Project Management for Executives" and "The Women's Leadership Program."

Before starting her academic career, she worked in San Francisco as a marketing director of an Israeli ERP company. As an expert in the areas of project management, Prof. Grushka-Cockayne has served as a consultant to international firms in the aerospace and pharma industries. She is a UVA Excellence in Diversity fellow and a member of INFORMS, the Decision Analysis Society, the Operational Research Society and the Project Management Institute (PMI). She is an associate editor at Management Science and Operation Research and the President-elect of the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society.

In 2014, Grushka-Cockayne was named one of "21 Thought-Leader Professors" in Data Science. Her recent "Fundamentals of Project Planning and Management" Coursera MOOC had over 100,000 enrolled, across 200 countries worldwide. Her "Data Science for Business" Harvard Online course, launched in 2021, has taught hundreds of learners around the world.

Jamie Jones            
VP of Field Services and Technical Partnerships, Git Hub

Jamie Jones has served in a variety of roles at GitHub since joining the company in 2015 and is currently vice president of field services and technical partnerships, with a mission of providing trusted technical advice to GitHub’s current and prospective customers. Jones is also a board member of the Fintech Open Source Foundation, known as FINOS, which is a nonprofit that promotes open innovation in financial services. 

Earlier in his career, Jones worked as chief technologist for Capital Weather LLC where he focused on data architecture, graphic design, site implementation, and social media strategy. Capital Weather joined forces with The Washington Post in 2008, with Capital Weather Gang becoming a leading local weather blog. Jones graduated from the University of Virginia in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering. 

Ron Keesing               
SVP for Technology, of AI/ML Accelerator, Leidos

Ron Keesing is the Vice President and Director of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Leidos, where he is responsible for developing and implementing the company’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning strategy. He leads a team of top data scientists, artificial intelligence researchers, and engineers within the Leidos Innovation Center – the technology-driven core of Leidos – who develop innovative solutions and conduct internally and externally funded research and development, delivering science and technology solutions tailored to specific customer needs.

Keesing has been directing research, development, and deployment of advanced solutions in AI, ML, and related technologies for over 25 years. He has done pioneering work on research programs addressing many of the nation’s toughest problems, from forecasting complex events like cyber threats and political instability from sparse data to discovering new potential cancer treatments by extracting and aligning knowledge embedded within massive datasets and research publications to creating the first generation of autonomous systems for spacecraft command and control. He has led the successful transition of many research technologies into operational programs within the DoD and Intelligence Community.

Keesing is a Leidos Technical Fellow and has authored papers and patents in diverse subfields of AI. His current research is focused on methods to improve resilience, security, assurance, and user trust in AI and ML.

Jeanne Liedtka
Interim Dean and United Technologies Corporation Professor of Business Administration, UVA Darden School of Business

Jeanne M. Liedtka is currently serving as interim dean at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business. She is also a faculty member and is the former chief learning officer at United Technologies Corporation, where she was responsible for overseeing all activities associated with corporate learning and development for the Fortune 50 corporation, including executive education, career development processes, employer-sponsored education and learning portal and web-based activities.

At Darden, where she formerly served as associate dean of the MBA program and as executive director of the Batten Institute, Jeanne works with both MBAs and executives in the areas of design thinking, innovation and leading growth. Her passion is exploring how organizations can engage employees at every level in thinking creatively about the design of powerful futures.

Jeanne's most recent book is Experiencing Design: The Innovator's Journey, with Karen Hold and Jessica Eldridge. Her recent research focuses on how the experience of using Design Thinking transforms innovators. Her previous books include Designing for the Greater Good: Innovation in the Social Sector; The Catalyst: How You Can Lead Extraordinary Growth (winner of the BusinessWeek best innovation books of 2009); Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers (winner of the 1800 CEO READ best management book of 2011) and its accompanying field guide, The Designing for Growth Field Book: A Step by Step Guide; The Physics of Business Growth: Mindsets, System and Process; and Solving Business Problems With Design Thinking: 10 Stories of What Works.

Alex Pascal 
Senior Fellow, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School

Alex Pascal is a Non-resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Pascal previously served for five years on the National Security Council (NSC) staff at the White House in various roles, including managing the U.S. government’s day-to-day national security policymaking system as Senior Director of the NSC Executive Secretariat and advising on U.S. strategy for the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, countering ISIL and multilateral peace operations, as Director for Strategic Planning. As Senior Policy Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 2011-14, he advised on U.S. foreign policy, international security and multilateral diplomacy. Pascal has worked at the State and Defense Departments on Middle East policy and at NGOs in the Middle East and Africa.

Roshni Raveendhran 
Assistant Professor in Business Administration, UVA Darden School of Business

Roshni Raveendhran is an assistant professor of business administration in the Leadership and Organizational Behavior area at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. She is also a Faculty Fellow affiliated with the Batten Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Roshni received her Ph.D. in business administration (management) from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.

Roshni's research focuses on understanding the future of work. In particular, she examines how technological advancements influence organizational actors, workplace practices and the management of employees. In doing so, she develops insights about how organizations can effectively integrate novel technologies into the workplace to manage their employees and address the changing nature of work. Her work has been published in leading journals such as Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Computers in Human Behavior, and Behavioral Science and Policy and outlets such as the MIT Sloan Management Review. It has also been featured in media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, CNN Business, Financial Times, Business Insider, Forbes India, WIRED UK, and Virginia Public Radio. Roshni's research has also received numerous awards including the Academy of Management's 2020 Outstanding Practitioner-Oriented Publication in Organizational Behavior and was recognized as a finalist in the INFORMS Best Dissertation competition in 2017.

Roshni teaches the core course on "Leading Organizations" and  an elective on Negotiations. In 2021, she was named by Poets & Quants as one of the "40 Best Business Professors Under 40". Roshni also received the Frederick S. Morton Leadership Award in 2020 and 2021, a recognition given each year to the Darden professor who "best fostered exceptional student leaders' leadership ability by stimulating the student leader to act upon ideas for evolution and improvement". In 2021, Roshni also received the Faculty Diversity Award for her "exceptional contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion within the Darden community".

Marc Ruggiano
Inaugural Director, UVA Darden-School of Data Science Collaboratory for Applied Data Science

Marc Ruggiano holds a joint appointment from the University of Virginia’s School of Data Science and UVA’s Darden School of Business. Ruggiano currently serves as inaugural director of the Darden-SDS Collaboratory for Applied Data Science, an innovative collaboration between the two schools under the sponsorship of the provost’s office that will serve as a vehicle to advance research and teaching efforts at the intersection of data science and business. Ruggiano’s research focuses on health and health care-related decision-making, and on the changing nature of organizational leadership in a data-saturated world.  

Previously, Ruggiano spent more than two decades in the corporate sector working primarily in technology and health care. Most recently, he was head of Customer Relationship Marketing and Management at Humana, a leading U.S. health care company. While there, Ruggiano was responsible for managing a team of analytics, marketing, and technology experts that developed, delivered, and measured the impact of more than 1 billion health-related consumer interventions annually. 
 

Adam Ruttenberg 
Partner, Cooley

Adam Ruttenberg focuses on technology transactions, including counseling, structuring and negotiating such deals in industries such as Artificial Intelligence (including Generative AI), cloud computing, big data, patent licensing, software, hardware, internet, new media and edtech. He has broad experience representing emerging companies and large corporate clients in technology and intellectual property matters. 

Representative matters include: 

• Domestic and international matters involving inbound and outbound licensing. 
• Technology development, procurement and distribution agreements (software and hardware). 
• Joint marketing, strategic alliances and collaboration agreements. 
• Patent licenses. 
• University licenses. 
• Big data. 
• Artificial Intelligence transactions and policies. 
• Clean Energy transactions. 
• Bioinformatics and health informatics transactions. 
• Software and SaaS transactions. 
• Cloud transactions. 
• Digital media transactions. 
• Data security and privacy counseling. 
• Strategic counseling and dispute resolution. 
• Open source counseling. 
• Information technology and business process outsourcing.  

His strategic counseling experience includes developing commercialization distribution and pricing strategies for companies and data acquisition and use strategies for artificial intelligence companies. Prior to joining Cooley, Adam was the vice president of contracts and sales operations of MicroStrategy. Previously, he had been in private practice representing technology companies in information technology, hardware and biotechnology matters. Adam has published numerous articles on business transactions, technology transfer, intellectual property and internet law, and he is a frequent speaker on these topics.

Mona Sloane 
Assistant Professor of Data Science and Media Studies, UVA School of Data Science

Mona Sloane is a sociologist working on design and inequality, specifically in the context of AI design and policy. She frequently publishes and speaks about AI, ethics, equitability and policy in a global context. Mona is a Research Assistant Professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, a Senior Research Scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, as well as a Fellow with NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK), where she convenes the Co-Opting AI series. Mona is the Founding Director of the *This Is Not A Drill* program at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, which develops a public pedagogy on art, equity, technology and the climate emergency. She also serves as the technology editor for Public Books, and is a Fellow with The GovLab. Currently, Mona works on new methods for AI auditing, innovating AI procurement, AI in hiring and talent acquisition, AI, participation and public education, new AI tools for investigative journalism, local governance innovation on AI, and a range of different responsible AI topics. In 2020-2021, Mona was awarded a grant from the New America Public Interest Technology University Network to lead A BETTER TECH, a public interest technology convention and career fair that brought together students and organizations in the public interest technology space across the United States and beyond, and that reached over 12,000 people. Mona is also affiliated with the Tübingen AI Center in Germany where she leads a 3-year federally funded research project on the operationalization of ethics in German AI startups. Recent projects Mona has led as principal investigator include the Terra Incognita NYC project, an investigation of New York City’s digital public spaces in the pandemic, as well as the AI Procurement Roundtables project, which she led together with Dr. Rumman Chowdhury (Director of Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency & Accountability at Twitter, Founder of Parity) in collaboration with the IEEE Standards Association. In Spring 2020, Mona worked with the Swiss Consulate New York City on the “AI Here and There” series on the social impact of AI. From 2020-2021 she was an inaugural fellow of the Future Imagination Collaboratory (FIC) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. In December 2020, she was added to the “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics Hall of Fame”. In 2021, she was named a NYU Faculty Honoree. Since 2021, she has served on the board of the Artificial Intelligence & Equality Initiative of the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs. Mona holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has completed fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley, at the University of Cape Town, and at the Weizenbaum Institute Berlin. She has written for The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, OneZero Medium, and other outlets. You can follow her on Twitter @mona_sloane.

Jepson Taylor               
Chief AI Strategist, Dataiku

Jepson has over 18 years of machine-learning experience. After studying chemical engineering Jepson worked for Intel/Micron in applied semiconductor building process control and fault models. After that, he worked as a quant at a hedge fund on a 600 GPU cluster. Taylor then joined a young Sequoia-backed HR startup called HireVue to run their data group where they delivered 14 patents. In 2017 Jepson co-founded Zeff.ai with David Gonzalez to pursue deep learning for image, audio, video, and text for the enterprise. Zeff was acquired by DataRobot in 2020 where Jepson worked as their Chief AI Evangelist until recently joining Dataiku as their Chief AI Strategist. Jepson is very active in the global startup communities. 

Raj Venkatesan               
Ronald Trzcinski Professor of Business Administration, UVA Darden School of Business

Professor Rajkumar Venkatesan teaches "Marketing Technology Products," "Marketing Strategy" and Marketing Analytics at Darden. Venkatesan's research focuses on analytics as it relates to marketing return on investment, customer lifetime value, mobile marketing and the global political economy. His research has appeared in several journals, including The Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science and Harvard Business Review. He is also a co-author of the book Cutting Edge Marketing Analytics. 

Many of his research publications have been recognized with prestigious awards, such as the Don Lehmann Award for the best dissertation-based article, the MSI Alden G. Clayton and the ISBM Outstanding Dissertation Proposal awards, and the ISBM award for long-term contributions to business-to-business marketing. He was selected as one of the Top 20 rising young scholars in marketing by the Marketing Science Institute, one of the Top 40 professors under 40 by Poets & Quants, and recognized among the Top 5 percent of marketing strategy scholars by the Journal of Marketing Education. 

Venkatesan has consulted with firms in the technology, retailing, media, industrial goods and pharmaceutical industries. He has developed custom executive education programs or data analytics software for Capital One, Explore Learning, General Electric, General Dynamics, HBO, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, MAS Holdings, Pitney Bowes, Porsche MHP, Rosetta Stone, SAP and Teradata. For his work with IBM, he was recognized as one of the finalists for the Informs Practice Prize Competition. 

Before coming to Darden, Venkatesan taught graduate students at the University of Connecticut. There, he was the recipient of the MBA Teacher of the Year Award. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Houston and his B.E. in computer engineering from the University of Madras.

Kinney Zalesne               
Senior Advisor, GETTING-Plurality and former General Manager, Corporate/Responsible Growth Strategy, Microsoft

E. Kinney Zalesne is a Senior Advisor to the GETTING-Plurality Initiative at Harvard’s Kennedy School, a Deputy National Finance Chair at the DNC, and a former General Manager of Corporate Strategy at Microsoft. She is the co-author of the New York Times bestselling book and regular Wall Street Journal column "Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes,” and has published more than a dozen essays in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Business Insider, and The Times of Israel. Earlier in her career, Kinney was a Senior Strategist on the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton in 2008 and Bill Clinton in 1996, and served as Counsel to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and as a White House Fellow with Vice President Gore. Kinney was also Executive Vice President for the US at Hillel and President of College Summit, a nonprofit named “Social Entrepreneur of the Year” at Davos in 2008. She currently serves on the board of the Collective Intelligence Project and of the American affiliate of the National Library of Israel. An honors graduate of Harvard Law School and Yale University, Kinney lives in Washington, DC with her husband and their four children.