Saeed Contractor
Saeed Contractor is the Global Head of the Intelligent Automation COE, Tech at Uber. He leads the Intelligent Automation COE at Uber for Technology / Architecture, Strategy and Implementation. Recognized as a hands-on leader of software Architecture and Development, Saeed brings together new Technologies, Engineering, Business Processes and Mathematics to provide innovative and effective solutions to difficult problems. He has a strong customer focus and drives the Agile development of secure, scalable, reliable and highly available products with due consideration of negative paths and incorporating feedback from all stages of the product life cycle. Saeed has a Master of Engineering Degree from Princeton University and an MBA from UCF.
Shreesha Jagadeesh
Shreesha Jagadeesh is an Associate Director of Machine Learning at Best Buy. He leads a multi-national team of ML Scientists and Engineers building models that power the online customer journey through personalized recommendations and ads. He leverages his expertise in Multi-Stage Recommender Systems, LLMs, Embeddings, Multi-Arm Bandits, Offline Policy Evaluation and A/B testing to help digital teams to personalize the experiences deepening customer relationship & driving ecommerce revenue for Best Buy.
Prior to Best Buy, he has worked in a variety of corporate and consulting roles including at Amazon, EY and Cisco building Data Science models in a diverse set of domains spanning HR, Tax, Legal and Supply Chain. Outside of his day job, he advises early-stage startup, reviews pre-publication books/courses and has also published 2 online Data Science courses. He lives in Boston with his wife and enjoys travelling to exotic locations with an Antarctica expedition coming up in December 2024.
Stavros Zervoudakis
With over two decades of experience, Stavros Zervoudakis has established himself as a forward-thinking AI leader, sculpting the future with innovative solutions. He boasts an impressive track record, having orchestrated the successful launch of 24 AI initiatives in just three years, including the implementation of a comprehensive Data Science, Analytics, and Machine Learning framework. His work has catalyzed monumental gains, with single projects injecting between $12M and $56M in value. Recently, Stavros has architected and deployed a groundbreaking, modular Generative AI platform, enriching the digital ecosystem with four pioneering GenAI products seamlessly integrated across six input/output systems. At the helm of his company's AI voyage, he not only crafted the strategic blueprint but also executed the firm's inaugural AI/ML model in a mere three months, netting an impressive $450K in savings. A natural leader, Stavros has guided teams towards the creation of business-transforming applications, leveraging the latest in technology through agile, SME-centric project methodologies. His tenure as an academic luminary at NYU and the University of Exeter has allowed him to disseminate his profound AI insights, nurturing the next wave of innovation. His journey with agile startups and industry titans like Citigroup, led him to deep-rooted understanding of regulatory mandates and has empowered him to weave essential privacy and security measures into his strategic visions, product leadership, and advisory roles, benefiting startups and Fortune 500 firms. Beyond the digital realm, Stavros is a connoisseur of photography, an avid reader, a globetrotter, and a passionate creator of a future Einstein. Connect with him on LinkedIn to explore common interests.
Hemant Jain
Hemant works on efficiently fine-tuning and serving LLMs as a part of the Platform team at Cohere. Prior to this, he spent 3 years at NVIDIA developing Triton Inference Server, an open-source solution used to deploy machine learning models into production. He has a Masters in Data Science from the University of Washington.
