Ashwin Ram is Technical Director of AI in the Office of the CTO for Google Cloud. He focuses on bringing Google AI to the world through deep personalized engagement with the leadership of top companies to reimagine their businesses by leveraging the power of AI. He also works with Google’s AI teams to drive new technologies and capabilities that address customer needs.
Ashwin is a distinguished AI researcher, technologist, and entrepreneur. Prior to Google, Ashwin was Senior Manager of AI Science for Amazon Alexa. He led cross-functional R&D initiatives to create advanced Conversational AI technologies for intelligent agents, including the university-facing Alexa Prize competition. Earlier, Ashwin was a professor at Georgia Tech, co-founded 4 startups, and managed the Interactive Intelligence area at Xerox PARC. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1989, his MS from University of Illinois in 1984, and his BTech from IIT Delhi in 1982. He has published 2 books and over 100 scientific articles in international forums.

David Gunning is DARPA program manager in the Information Innovation Office (I2O). Dave has an over 30 years of experience in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. At DARPA, Dave manages the Explainable AI (XAI) and the Communicating with Computers (CwC) programs. This is Dave’s 3rd tour as a DARPA PM. Previously, Dave managed the Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) project that produced Siri and the Command Post of the Future (CPoF) project that was adopted by the US Army as their Command and Control system for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. In between DARPA tours, Dave was a Program Director for Data Analytics at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a Senior Research Manager at Vulcan Inc., SVP of SET Corp., VP of Cycorp, and a Senior Scientist in the Air Force Research Labs. Dave holds a M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, a M.S. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Dayton, and a B.S. in Psychology from Otterbein College.

Dr. Michelle Zhou is a Co-Founder and CEO of Juji, Inc., an Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup located in Silicon Valley, specializing in building responsible and empathetic AI agents that can deeply understand users and guide their behavior based on their psychological characteristics. Prior to starting Juji, Michelle led the User Systems and Experience Research (USER) group at IBM Research – Almaden and then the IBM Watson Group. Michelle’s expertise is in the interdisciplinary area of intelligent user interaction (IUI), including conversational systems and personality analytics. She has published over 100 peer-reviewed, refereed articles and filed over 40 patents. Michelle is currently the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS) and an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST). She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University and is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.