2023 SPEAKERS
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Gary is a renowned serial entrepreneur and investor with 30+ years' experience, 17 companies, two Unicorns, and a triumphant IPO. He co-founded ClickSoftware, a part of Salesforce's 1.35 billion acquisition, and Yva.ai, acquired by Visier. As CEO and Founder of GSD Venture Studios, a Silicon Valley-based Family Office, Venture Studio, and Super Scaler, Gary oversees 139 global companies from 59 countries. His visionary leadership earned him recognition as a top global innovator in 2023. A prolific international speaker and author, he penned "Artificial Imagination: How Generative Transformers Like ChatGPT Pivoted Every Possibility" and contributed 240+ articles to the field.
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Dr. Kevin Knight is an academic and entrepreneur. He served on the faculty of the University of Southern California for 26 years, and held Chief Scientist positions at Language Weaver, Didi Global, and Specifio, Inc. He has a PhD in computer science from CMU and a bachelor's degree from Harvard. Dr. Knight's research interests include natural language processing, automata theory, decipherment of historical documents, and number theory. He has written over 150 research papers, in addition to the books "Artificial Intelligence" (1991), "Math Kook" (2022), and "In Theory" (2022). Dr. Knight was President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2011, and he co-program chaired the inaugural Asia-Pacific ACL conference in 2020. He is a Fellow of both the ACL and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
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Dr. Zornitsa Kozareva is the CTO & Co-Founder of SliceX AI, whose mission is to make next-generation AI universally accessible to anyone, anywhere. Prior to that, Dr. Kozareva was the Head of Large Language Models at Facebook AI Research. Dr. Kozareva brings 15+ years of experience from big tech like Google where she led and managed Search and Intelligence efforts; Amazon where she oversaw the launch of Amazon Comprehend and Lex services, and Yahoo! where she drove Mobile Search and Advertisement. Dr. Kozareva was a Professor at University of Southern California spearheading research funded by DARPA & IARPA.
In 2022 Dr. Kozareva was the EMNLP 2022 Program Chair, one of the largest NLP conferences. She serves on the UCSC Advisory Board and her work is featured in Forbes, VentureBeat, GizBot, and NextBitWat. Dr. Kozareva is the recipient of the John Atanasoff Award given by the President of the Republic of Bulgaria in 2016 for her contributions and impact in science, education and industry; Yahoo! Labs Excellence Award and RANLP Scientist Award
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Geert-Jan “GJ” Kruijff is Head of Machine Learning & Personalization for Amazon Music in Berlin, leading a team that delivers AI-driven innovation to deliver great audio experiences to millions of people every day. Over the last 15+ years GJ has held executive roles across research, product management, and end-to-end product delivery in a variety of areas, ranging from voice assistants for automotive and mobile applications, music recommendations, to robot-assisted disaster response in search & rescue. He holds an engineering degree in AI and a PhD in Natural Language Processing, and is a Research Fellow at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence.
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Tjarko Leifer is an accomplished tech founder and CEO with a proven track record of building and scaling successful businesses in Ag and FoodTech. After serving as an independent board director to FarmWise for 3 years, Tjarko joined the company in January 2023 as the company’s CEO.
Prior to FarmWise, Tjarko was the SVP of Strategy at The Climate Corporation, a leader in decision support software for agriculture, which was acquired by Monsanto for $1B in 2013. In late 2016, he co-founded FoodTech company Wellio Inc. and served as CEO through the successful exit of the business to the Kraft Heinz Company.
Tjarko’s previous positions also include leading merger projects for the COO of Aon Corporation, running sales and marketing as Senior Managing Director at fintech start-up Unison, and strategy consulting at McKinsey & Company in their Zurich and San Francisco offices. Tjarko holds an MS in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from Stanford University and a BS in Industrial Engineering from Brown University.
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Matt McGuire serves as the Chief Agricultural Officer for JV Smith Companies, a family-owned business focused on farm fresh vegetables. His present duties include overseeing and growing agricultural operations of 28,000 acres of vegetable crops and 10,000 acres of non-vegetable crops across JV Farms, El Toro Agricola, Triangle Farms, JVO Organic Farms, Southern Colorado Farms, Skyline Potato, and Skyview Cooling Co.
Throughout the years, Matt has gained a wide range of experiences across sales, cooling operations, harvest management, and as a grower and general manager of operations in the southwest and Salinas.
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Paul Mikesell is the founder and CEO of Carbon Robotics. Paul has deep experience founding and building successful technology startups. Paul co-founded Isilon Systems, a distributed storage company, in 2001. Isilon went public in 2006 and was acquired by EMC for $2.5 billion in 2010. In 2006, Paul co-founded Clustrix, a distributed database startup that was acquired by MariaDB in 2018. Prior to Carbon, Paul served as Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Uber, where he grew the team and opened the company’s engineering office in Seattle, later focusing on deep learning and computer vision.
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Vic Smith is CEO of JV Smith Companies, a diverse group of operations with farming, cooling, and distribution facilities and shipping capacities in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Baja, Mexico. Skyview Cooling was the company’s first operation, formed in 1970 as a cooling company in Colorado and New Mexico. By 1977, it had expanded to Yuma, and then in 1982 it began operations in northern Mexico. Today, JV Smith Companies farm several commodities including romaine, iceberg lettuce, spinach, celery, mixed leaf and organic spring mix, carrots, and green onions.
Mr. Smith studied Economics and Business Law at the University of Colorado from 1970-1974. He went on to study Finance at Arizona State University in 1975. Since 1991, he has overseen all the companies’ farming, packing, and cooling operations, including over 32,000 acres of vegetable production annually. Mr. Smith is currently on the Board of Directors of the Center for Produce Safety, Brighter Bites, and ifoodDecisionSciences, Inc. He is also a member and previously served on the Boards of United Fresh Produce Association, Produce Marketing Association, and Western Growers.
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David Yang, Ph.D. is a Silicon Valley-based serial entrepreneur with a focus on AI. He is the founder of ABBYY, a world-renowned developer of AI and Content Intelligence solutions with 50 million users worldwide, and Newo.ai, the drag-and-drop platform for creating “Digital Employees”/Non-Human Workers/Intelligent Agents with low or no code. Dr. Yang is also a member of Band of Angels and has founded 12 companies.
Dr. Yang is known for his TEDx and keynote presentations (Will robots ever become part of the human family, 5 Leadership Styles to Success, etc.). Additionally, Dr. Yang is a well-known philanthropist and co-founder of Ayb Educational Foundation, he supports various scientific, charitable, educational, and art initiatives. He is also the author of numerous articles and patents. The World Economic Forum in Davos named him as one of the top 100 World Technology Pioneers, Best Startup US named Dr. Yang as California’s 100 Top Founders in the Big Data Space.