The Conference
For AI Innovators,
Technologists,
and Creatives

Raquel Urtasun is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision and a co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI. Prior to this, she was an assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, an academic computer science institute affiliated with the University of Chicago. She was also a visiting professor at ETH Zurich during the spring semester of 2010. She received her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science department at Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, Switzerland in 2006 and did her postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley. She's a world-leading expert in AI for self-driving cars. Her research interests include machine learning, computer vision, robotics, and remote sensing. Her lab was selected as an NVIDIA NVAIL lab. Raquel has received an NSERC EWR Steacie Award, an NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award, a Ministry of Education and Innovation Early Researcher Award, three Google Faculty Research Awards, an Amazon Faculty Research Award, a Connaught New Researcher Award, a Fallona Family Research Award, an UPNA alumni award, and two Best Paper Runner-up prizes at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in 2013 and 2017. She was also named Chatelaine 2018 Woman of the Year, and one of Toronto's 2018 top influencers by Adweek magazine.

Krish is the SVP and GM of VMware’s Cloud Platform Business Unit with responsibility for the vSphere product line. Krish drives our strategy, roadmap, and delivery of the vSphere platform that powers the VMware Hybrid Cloud, spanning on-premises, edge, and the VMware Public Cloud offerings. Krish Prasad has extensive experience in the enterprise software business, having held senior/executive management positions for the past 15 years. Prior to VMware, he worked at HP and BMC Software. During his 25+ years in the software industry, he has built a well-rounded background combining R&D with general management experience. Krish lives in Los Gatos, California with his wife and daughter.

Vicki Dobbs Beck has more than 30 years of broad-based management experience in the entertainment industry. Variety recently named her a “Digital Innovator to Watch in 2020”, and in 2019, the Advanced Imaging Society recognized Vicki with a Distinguished Leadership Award for being a significant “entertainment industry growth catalyst.” Currently, Vicki is the Executive in Charge of ILMxLAB, the award-winning division launched by Lucasfilm in 2015 to pioneer in the field of immersive storytelling. ILMxLAB wants to make it possible for people to ‘Step Inside Our Stories’ in ways never before possible. Using new technologies like virtual and augmented reality, ILMxLAB aspires to create connected experiences that transform places, spaces and our daily lives as we transition from story-telling to story-living.

Under Vicki’s leadership, ILMxLAB created the ground-breaking VR installation, Carne y Arena, which was the vision of Alejandro Iñárritu in association with Legendary Entertainment and Fondazione Prada. Carne y Arena was chosen as the first-ever VR Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival (2017) and was awarded a special Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, “in recognition of a visionary and powerful experience in storytelling.” In addition to producing multiple promotional VR experiences supporting major film releases and experiments in “all shades of reality”, ILMxLAB has collaborated with the VOID to develop and produce the critically acclaimed hyper-reality experience: Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire as well as Ralph Breaks VR and Avengers: Damage Control. Most recently, ILMxLAB released Vader Immortal, a three-part original VR Story Series for the Oculus Quest and Rift / Rift S headsets. Episode I of Vader Immortal won the inaugural PGA Innovation Award in 2020, GDC Best VR/AR Game (2020), was a 2019 Emmy Finalist for Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Media, and won ‘VR Experience of the Year’ from the London-based VR Awards (2019).

Vicki is a member of the Television Academy; the Producers Guild of America; a BAFTA Associate Member; and has served on the BAFTA Immersive Entertainment Advisory Group. She is also Chairman of AIXR’s VR Advisory Group and an Advisory Board member for the Los Angeles-based Infinity Festival. Vicki has spoken extensively at industry events and in business forums including CNBC’s Squawk Alley, the BBC, Fortune Brainstorm Tech Conference, Bloomberg Design Conference, Vancouver Film Festival, Infinity Film Festival and YPO’s Global EDGE conference. As a member of Lucasfilm’s Franchise Team, ILM’s Senior Staff and CG Operations Team, Vicki has received credits on more than 24 films. Vicki received her MBA from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business where she also completed her undergraduate studies, earning a BA with distinction in International Relations.

Soumith Chintala is a researcher at Facebook AI Research, where he works on high-performance deep learning. Soumith created PyTorch, a deep learning framework that has traction among researchers. Before joining Facebook in August 2014, he worked at MuseAmi, where he built deep learning models for music and vision targeted at mobile devices. He holds a master's degree in computer science from New York University, and spent time in Yann LeCun’s NYU lab building deep-learning models for robotics, pedestrian detection, natural image optical character recognition, and depth images, among others.

Michael Kagan is NVIDIA CTO (Chief Technology Officer) since May 2020. He joined NVIDIA through Mellanox acquisition. Michael Kagan was previously Mellanox CTO and a co-founder of Mellanox that was founded in April 1999. From 1983 to April 1999, Mr. Kagan held a number of architecture and design positions at Intel Corporation. While at Intel Corporation, Mr. Kagan was architect of the i860XP vector processor, managed Pentium MMX design, and managed the architecture team of the Basic PC product group. Mr. Kagan holds a BSc. in Electrical Engineering from the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology.