MIT innovation, entrepreneurship, and industry collaboration have significantly impacted innovation economies around the world. What exciting new innovations are emerging from the MIT startup ecosystem? How will the latest technology trends affect your business? MIT Startup Exchange, an integrated program of MIT Corporate Relations, and LG Ventures are hosting a startup showcase featuring innovators in software, healthcare, energy, advanced manufacturing, and the internet of things, including speakers from Google and Airbus Ventures.
Karl F. Koster is the Executive Director of the MIT Office of Corporate Relations. The Office of Corporate Relations includes the MIT Industrial Liaison Program, which celebrated 67 years of service to the Institute and its corporate partners in 2015.
In that capacity, Mr. Koster and his staff work with the leadership of MIT and senior corporate executives to design and implement strategies for fostering corporate partnerships with the Institute. Mr. Koster and his team have also worked to identify and design a number of major international programs for MIT, which have been characterized by the establishment of strong, programmatic linkages among universities, industry, and governments. Most recently these efforts have been extended to engage the surrounding innovation eco-system, including its vibrant startup and small company community, into MIT's global corporate and university networks.
Mr. Koster also serves as the Chairman of the University-Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP), an organization that seeks to enhance the value of collaborative partnerships between universities and corporations.
Mr. Koster graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in geology and economics in 1974, and received a M.S. from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1980. At the Sloan School he concentrated in international business management and the management of technological innovation. Prior to returning to MIT, Mr. Koster worked as a management consultant in Europe, Latin America, and the United States on projects for private and public sector organizations.
Dong-Su Kim, Ph.D. is the CEO of LG Technology Ventures. He has over twenty five years of investment, strategy, planning, and technology experience. LG Technology Ventures was established in 2018 as the venture capital investment arm of the LG Group of South Korea. As the founding CEO, Dong-Su established the fund structure, hired key people, and initiated investment operations. Currently, LG Technology Ventures is managing over $400 million of fund assets and invests in early-stage information technology, automotive, manufacturing, life-sciences, energy, and advanced materials companies. Portfolio companies include AmazeVR, Lygos, May Mobility, and Ridecell. Previously, Dong-Su was Vice President and GM of Samsung Ventures America where he managed offices in Menlo Park, Boston, London, and Tel Aviv. He also led investments of over thirty companies in diverse sectors including semiconductors, equipment, materials, and storage systems. Dong-Su has M.A. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University, and B.S. with Honors in Applied Physics from California Institute of Technology.
Dr. Rebecca Xiong joined Corporate Relations as Program Director, Startup Exchange in October 2018. Dr. Xiong comes to Corporate Relations with more than 15 years of experience in the MIT Startup Ecosystem, having co-founded and worked at multiple MIT startups. Most recently, as Co-founder and Chief Scientist at SocMetrics, she leads product management, data science, and machine learning for SocMetric’s personalization and marketing campaign products. Before SocMetrics, Xiong co-founded Going.com. Going.com connected people via local events to enhance their offline social life, and through Rebecca’s leadership grew to 1M members, tens of millions of monthly pageviews, and finally its acquisition by AOL. Before these two entrepreneurial endeavors, Xiong held positions as Product Marketing Manager (DataPower, acquired by IBM), Senior Program Manager (Performaworks, acquired by Workscape), and Team Lead (Akamai Technologies). She also has research experience at Microsoft, Silicon Graphics, and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Dr. Xiong earned her B.S. in Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, and her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Media Lab at MIT with her thesis “Visualizing Information Spaces to Enhance Social Interaction." She was a National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellowship Recipient. She holds multiple patents and is very involved in the community, as the Lead Organizer of the Cambridge Parent Summit.
VP - AI and Machine Learning, LG Electronics
Recent advances in perception technology, fueled by progress in deep learning, have materially changed the degree of situational awareness one can expect from robots engaged in the real world: in addition to perceiving the geometry of the world around them, robots can now also reason about its semantics and communicate intuitively with the people sharing their environment. Yet, we're arguably still struggling to deploy robots in human-centered environments. Much of the difficulty centers around closing the loop between perception and actuation in a manner that's safe, reliable, precise, and flexible. This talk explores recent progress in machine learning which directly addresses these challenges and opens up new avenues in connecting perception and behaviors in real-world environments.
Principal Scientist, Director of Robotics Google
Vincent Vanhoucke is a principal scientist and director of Robotics at Google. He is a cofounder of the Conference on Robot Learning, now in its third year. His research has spanned many areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning, from speech recognition to deep learning, computer vision, and robotics. His lecture series on Udacity has introduced more than 100,000 students to deep learning. He holds a doctorate from Stanford University and a diplôme d'ingénieur from the École Centrale Paris.
Bo Zhu is the CTO of BlinkAI, a spinoff from imaging research he proposed as a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard and published in Nature. This revolutionary technique rethinks the conventional image reconstruction signal processing pipeline with a fully automated deep learning approach based on human perceptual learning, significantly improving image quality from rapidly acquired low-quality raw data. Zhu received his SB and MEng in electrical engineering from MIT and PhD in biomedical engineering at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST). At BlinkAI, he leads the development of machine learning techniques to accelerate high-fidelity CMOS image acquisition and reconstruction in difficult environments using efficient inference that can be deployed on mobile and embedded systems.
Bastiane Huang leads product strategy at Osaro, an AI software company for Industrial Automation, backed by Peter Thiel and Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud. She has a decade of experience in the automation and manufacturing industries. Her experience in the field started in 2009 at e2v, a British space and industrial image sensor and machine vision camera manufacturer that is now part of Teledyne. Huang has broad experience in product marketing, business development, and operations at international technology companies across the industrial automation, IoT, AI, and robotics industries. She drove the formation and growth of a new AI software business at Advantech, the world’s biggest industrial computer manufacturer. She was also an investor and advisor to early stage IoT and AI startups in the US and Greater China, and previously worked as a Senior Product Manager at Amazon Alexa. In addition, Huang is actively involved with Harvard’s ‘Managing the Future of Work’ initiative on AI and robotics, writing case studies and articles for Harvard Business Review and Robotics Business Review. She holds a BS in information management from National Taiwan University and an MBA in technology and entrepreneurship from Harvard Business School.
Karan Kashyap is cofounder and CEO at Posh, a Boston-based conversational AI startup focused on powering contextually aware bots for enterprises. Kashyap graduated from MIT with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in computer science, where his research focused on AI and natural language processing.
Subbu Kuchibhotla is the Americas executive for data integration & orchestration platform, Xapix.io, powering new digital business models for a "smart" planet (connected vehicles, smart cities, smart grids, smart buildings, etc.). Kuchibhotla is a senior leader with global experience across diverse industry segments, driving cross-functional (marketing, sales, supply chain, finance, engineering and IT) teams to deliver enterprise transformations that are measured in revenue, margin and total shareholder return as well as balance sheet/cash flow impact in both early/late stage startup and Fortune 50 company environments.
Will Tashman is cofounder and Chief Revenue Officer at Uncountable. In his role, he works closely with Uncountable's customers to implement the larger vision for material informatics across vastly different fields, delivering solutions that transform R&D organizations into a digital operations. Tashman graduated from MIT with a degree in materials science, and worked for Apple for 3 years on the Product Design team.
Thomas is the Managing Partner of Airbus Ventures, based in Silicon Valley. With an Airbus tenure of sixteen years, Thomas served previously as the Chief Operating Officer of Airbus Ventures, and as Chief of Staff to the Chief Financial Officer of Airbus. Trained as an aerospace engineer, Thomas has worked in manufacturing, procurement, supply chain, and finance roles throughout Europe and China, and was based in Shanghai for three years. In 2016, Thomas was named as a French-American Foundation Young Leader for the United States. Thomas holds an undergraduate degree in energy engineering, and a Master’s of Science degree in mechanical engineering from McGill University.
Anne Kim is cofounder and CEO of Secure AI Labs, which is based on her Media Lab graduate work at MIT with Professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland of the Human Dynamics Group. Secure AI offers a federated learning and blockchain solution for accessing siloed data from genomic and clinical trial data to corporate databases. Kim's experience in computer science and molecular biology include genome-wide association studies, natural language processing for EHR, machine learning, and cyberbiosecurity work with the EFF, ACLU, and DEFCON. She sees accessibility to healthcare as a right, and believes that the interface between biology, healthcare policy, and technology is a promising way to achieve that mission.
A seasoned business, product, and marketing professional with over 25 years experience, Ned Semonite is the Managing Director of Business Operations at Southie Autonomy. His career in hi-tech has included many innovations for increased productivity in manufacturing, healthcare, education, and business. Semonite developed industry leading expertise in robotic telepresence with 10 years at the startups VGo Communications and OhmniLabs, as well as Vecna Technologies, running the business line, including product management, customer service, sales and marketing, and business planning. Previously, he was instrumental in the evolution of the videoconferencing industry, delivering product breakthroughs at PictureTel and Polycom when in senior executive roles. Semonite earned his engineering degree from Brown University.
Waikit Lau is the CEO and Cofounder of RemoteHQ. He is a serial entrepreneur, having founded two companies, one acquired and the other taken public (NYSE: TLRA). Before that, he was an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners. Lau has also spent time working for the CIO at Merrill Lynch and in Business Development at Cisco. He holds Bachelor degrees in electrical engineering and computer science and finance from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Beth Porter is cofounder and CEO of Riff Learning Inc, an AI startup out of MIT that measures conversational dynamics to help people build situational and social awareness, especially when they collaborate. Porter’s philosophy is that people learn best from each other, and learning fosters both personal growth and organizational innovation and change. She teaches IT Strategies to MBAs at Boston University, where her students work in small, peer learning groups throughout the course. Prior roles include VP Product for edX, VP Software Product Management for Pearson Education, and senior engineering and product management positions at Mathsoft and PTC.
Boaz Efroni Rotman is the VP of Marketing and Business Development at Lightelligence. He is a creative and forward-thinking professional with over 24 years of hands-on global technology in business development, product management, strategic marketing, and sales. Boaz oversaw operations to manage and lead over 20 semiconductor SoCs and products into Consumer, IoT, Cellular, Mobile, Media, Telecom, and Automotive markets through strong technical background and aggressive and innovative go-to-market strategies. Boaz holds a BS in electrical engineering from the Ben-Gurion University in Israel and an MBA from Netanya Academic College in Israel.
Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Lecturer, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship Chief Product Officer, Relativity6
Nick Meyer is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Lecturer at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. His passion lies in pushing learning to be fun and hands on, smashing disciplines together, and supporting founders who believe the world can be better. A serial co-founder, Nick has been product or engineering lead for software companies in industries as diverse as gaming, video, travel, music, social, and consumer products. While still in high school, he co-founded the MMOG (multi-player massive online game) Kings of Chaos, one of the first browser-based viral casual games. At peak, KoC attracted hundreds of thousands of daily active players and is still running 15 years later. While an undergraduate student at MIT, Nick founded Reble.FM, a peer-to-peer streaming music service. Nick left MIT in 2006 to participate in Y Combinator, and then moved to San Francisco after raising seed capital from Tandem Entrepreneurs. Reble.FM was acquired by Playlist.com. After running Product at Playlist.com, Nick co-founded SocialShield, a subscription service for parents to protect their children from online bullying and cyber-stalking. SocialShield was later acquired by Avira. In 2009, Nick moved to New York and joined Vinay Pulim, an old MIT buddy and co-founder of Reble.FM, in founding MileWise. Frequent travelers are demanding, and MileWise saved time and money by optimizing reward travel spend. As an engineer and designer, Nick wore every hat you could wear, until the company’s acquisition by Yahoo! in 2013. MileWise’s investors included General Catalyst, Founder Collective, Atlas, Mitch Kapor, Naval Ravikant, and Keith Rabois. His most recent company was Sup, a mobile video app funded by Khosla Ventures. In a surprise twist, the company turned into Wim Yogurt, producing a kitchen appliance making healthy frozen yogurt right on your countertop. As a lecturer, Nick teaches classes and workshops across the engineering and business schools. His current classes include “Building an Entrepreneurial Venture,” “Intro to Making,” and “Digital Product Management.” Last year Nick taught “Open Source Entrepreneurship” with Professor Saman Amarasinghe, a software lab that applied the Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework to Open Source Software projects. During MIT’s Independent Activities Period in January, Nick runs MIT fuse, an intense three-week program he jokingly calls “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Founders. When not teaching, Nick loves sports and music. He is an IASI-certified alpine ski instructor and PADI-certified scuba diver, loves rock climbing, and is trying very hard at squash and golf. On Mondays, you’ll find him in the 9-ball tournament at Flat Top Johnny’s, and Wednesdays at the Plough and Stars working on his blues harmonica.
Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences NEC Career Development Professor MIT Media Lab
Ramesh Raskar joined the Media Lab from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in 2008 as head of the Lab's Camera Culture research group. His research interests span the fields of computational photography, inverse problems in imaging, and human-computer interaction. Recent inventions include transient imaging to look around a corner, a next-generation CAT-scan machine, imperceptible markers for motion capture (Prakash), long-distance barcodes (Bokode), touch + hover 3D interaction displays (BiDi screen), low-cost eye care devices (NETRA) and new theoretical models to augment light fields (ALF) to represent wave phenomena. In 2004, Raskar received the TR100 Award from Technology Review, presented to top young innovators under the age of 35, and in 2003, the Global Indus Technovator Award, instituted at MIT to recognize the top 20 Indian technology innovators worldwide. In 2009, he was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship. In 2010, he received the DARPA Young Faculty award. He holds more than 40 US patents, and has received four Mitsubishi Electric Invention Awards. He is currently co-authoring a book on computational photography.
John Wass is CEO of Profit Isle. He is the former Senior Vice President of Staples and CEO of WaveMark, an RFID company recently acquired by Cardinal Health. Wass was also a key senior executive during Staples? growth from three stores to over 1,000 nationwide. He is a graduate of Princeton and MIT.
Disclaimer: MIT Startup Exchange can make introductions that ideally provide open ended discussions in order to share mutual interests and potentially create common ground that incite the parties to collaborate. MIT Startup Exchange introductions may eventually lead to mutual partnerships, but that is not in any way guaranteed by MIT, MIT Corporate Relations, MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) or MIT Startup Exchange, which takes no responsibility for these outcomes and no formal part in such discussions following our introduction. MIT Startup Exchange and its activities and events are not for purposes of soliciting investment or offering securities.