Thursday opening welcome

Ben Lorica is the chief data scientist at O’Reilly. Ben has applied business intelligence, data mining, machine learning, and statistical analysis in a variety of settings, including direct marketing, consumer and market research, targeted advertising, text mining, and financial engineering. His background includes stints with an investment management company, internet startups, and financial services.

Roger Chen is cofounder and CEO of Computable and program chair for the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference. Previously, he was a principal at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), where he invested in and worked with early-stage startups primarily in the realm of data, machine learning, and robotics. Roger has a deep and hands-on history with technology. Before startups and venture capital, he was an engineer at Oracle, EMC, and Vicor. He also developed novel nanoscale and quantum optics technology as a PhD researcher at UC Berkeley. Roger holds a BS from Boston University and a PhD from UC Berkeley, both in electrical engineering.

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Alexis Crowell Helzer is senior director of artificial intelligence product marketing at Intel, where she and her team are responsible for technical positioning and messaging as well as outbound content and campaigns for Intel AI products. Alexis and her team partner with AI adopters across the industry from small device implementations to HPC clusters to launch products, showcase innovative use cases, and help other companies find their own AI path. She has an unyielding passion to deliver technology solutions that help businesses thrive. Over her rich career, she has run a cloud software engineering team focused on distributed computing and microservices integration, led the open source marketing efforts from Intel, and worked with many of the Fortune 100 companies to help incubate service offerings and deliver innovative products.