Speakers
MODERATOR
EMMY AWARD-WINNING Anchor/Reporter/Producer and Entrepreneur with 17 years of on-camera experience on national television and online. I helped to revolutionize the world of online video journalism as a pioneer of digital video content post dot.com boom and beyond. Through dedicated hard work and giving back to the communities in which I’ve reported on, I was also awarded the Governor’s medallion for extraordinary service to the broadcast industry. My career has given me journalistic breadth ranging from local news to meteorology, sports and business with a focus on tech.
SPEAKERS
Regina Barzilay is the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She is internationally known in the fields of natural language processing and computational linguistics, and is widely respected as a creative thought leader, Barzilay’s research on natural languages focuses on the development of models of natural language, and uses those models to solve real-world language processing tasks. Barzilay’s work enables the automated summarization of documents, machine interpretation of natural language instructions, and the deciphering of ancient languages.
Angela Belcher is a materials chemist with expertise in biomaterials, biomolecular materials, organic-inorganic interfaces and solid-state chemistry. Her work focuses on evolving organisms to build new materials and devices for clean energy, electronics, the environment and medicine. Dr. Belcher was awarded the 24th annual MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the 2004 Four Star General Recognition Award. In 2006 she was named Scientific American’s Research Leader of the Year. Her work has been published in many prestigious scientific journals including Science and Nature, and has been reported in the popular press including Fortune, Forbes, Discover, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
Dr. Cynthia Breazeal is an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she founded and directs the Personal Robots Group at the Media Lab. She is also founder and Chief Scientist of Jibo, Inc. She is a pioneer of Social Robotics and Human Robot Interaction. She authored the book Designing Sociable Robots, and she has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles in journals and conferences on the topics of Autonomous Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Human Robot Interaction, and Robot Learning.
Donna is the co-founder of Care.com, the world’s leading online site for helping families find and manage family care with over 20 million members across 16 countries. During her tenure at Care.com, Donna played key roles in building and leading high performing teams, and scaling the company through 5 rounds of funding to IPO.
Donna has an 18-year career as a social entrepreneur. Previously VP of Operations at Upromise, an online service that helps families save for college, she is now Entrepreneur in Residence, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, and Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management.
KATIE RAE
Katie Rae is a Founder and General Partner at Project 11 Ventures, a firm that invests early stage seed capital into technology and software companies while working side-by-side with founders to increase their rate of success.
Rae has won many awards for her work in the start up community including: Rising Star Venture Capitalist from the New England Venture Capital Association, Innovation Catalyst from the MassTLC, and Most Creative People in Business from Fast Company.
She holds an MBA from Yale University and a BA in Biology from Oberlin College.
HOSTS
Anantha Chandrakasan is Department Head, MIT EECS, Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Chandrakasan received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989, 1990, and 1994 respectively. He is the recipient of the 2013 IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits and is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Ito is the director of the MIT Media Lab and MIT Professor. He is chairman of the board of PureTech Health and a board member of Sony Corp., the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and The New York Times Co. He is the co-founder and a board member of Digital Garage, an Internet company in Japan. He has created numerous Internet companies, including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. He was an early-stage investor in Formlabs, Flickr, Kickstarter, littleBits, Path, Twitter, Wikia and other companies.