Vikrant Tomar, CTO & Founder at Fluent.ai

Vikrant Tomar is Founder and CTO at Fluent.ai Inc., a speech understanding startup based in Montreal, Canada. He earned his PhD from Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University. During his PhD, he worked on speech and language processing, particularly deep neural networks based techniques for automatic speech recognition. In the past, Vikrant has worked as a research scientist at Nuance Communications Inc., deep learning consultant at Vestec Inc., and research fellow at IIT Bombay, India.

Frederic Ratle, AI Researcher at Automat.ai

Frederic is an AI Researcher at Automat.  His current interests include Reasoning, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning.  Before joining Automat, Frederic worked as a Research Manager at Nuance Communications, where he developed NLP and AI-based solutions for analyzing and managing clinical documentation.  He also worked on the technology behind smart, voice-enabled virtual assistants while at Nuance. Frederic holds a Ph.D. from the University of Lausanne, and a M.Sc. and B.Eng. from the École Polytechnique de Montréal.

Soodeh Farokhi, Founder and CTO at C2RO Cloud Robotics

Soodeh is a visionary technology entrepreneur, Ph.D. in cloud computing, and passionate about Cloud Robotics and applying AI to enable cognitive capabilities for affordable service robots that can increase business efficiency or improve the quality life.  She has over 7 years of industrial experience as a tech lead, software product lead in cloud, telecom & distributed sys domains. In research areas,  she co-founded the first Service Oriented Architecture industrial research institute in Iran. In her doctoral research, she worked on the performance of self-adaptive cloud applications using techniques from control theory and robotics.

Tavian Barnes, NLP Dialogue System Developer at Microsoft

Tavian is an experienced software developer of both client and web applications. His experience is centered on high-performance algorithms, low-level implementation, concurrency, and optimisation, as well as large-scale enterprise systems. He specializes in the development of numerical algorithms and Natural Language Processing. At Maluuba (now Microsoft) he developed an NLP/dialogue system that runs on everything from phones to vehicles to the cloud, using state-of-the-art AI.

Dr. Bessam Abdulrazak, Professor at University of Sherbrooke

Dr. Bessam Abdulrazak is a Professor at the department of Computer Science of the Université de Sherbrooke, researcher at the Research Center on Aging (CdRV), researcher at the Institut interdisciplinaire d’innovation technologique (3IT), director of the Research Center on Intelligent Habitats, and director of AmI-Lab. Dr. Abdulrazak research interests include ubiquitous and pervasive computing, Ambient-Intelligence, Smart-Environments, IoT, Assistive Technologies and Rehabilitation Robotics.