2024 MIT AI Conference: Tech, Business, and Ethics - Startup Exchange Lightning Talks

Paloma Gonzalez-Rojas is an entrepreneur, a Machine learning expert, and a Material Scientist by practice. She earned her Ph.D. at MIT by developing AI tools for simulating pedestrian trajectories. She pivoted to materials AI and engineering at MIT because of her hunger to commercialize renewable materials in the Climate-Tech / Clean-Tech space and became Atacama’s CEO. After five years of research, Paloma and Jose Tomas Dominguez funded Atacama Biomaterials in 2022 and later welcomed Jose Antonio Gonzalez to the founding team as Santiago Lab Managing Director. Our startup, leveraging the MarieCurie AI model developed by MIT Researcher Paloma Gonzalez-Rojas, effectively addresses the plastic crisis by optimizing the production of sustainable packaging materials. This AI application is critical in managing the complexity of diverse biomass inputs, a task beyond human capability, ensuring consistent, high-quality, biodegradable products. Our process dramatically reduces energy consumption to just 11% of traditional methods, aiming for an annual net reduction of 2 gigatons of CO2 after 2035.

Francis Huang is the co-founder of Apers, an AI autopilot startup for private equity in alternative assets. His professional experience spans investment banking, private equity, and real estate development. With over $1bn deal experience, Francis has extensive international investing experience across different stakeholders of Sovereign Wealth Funds, Pension Funds, and Endowment Funds. Francis holds a Master's degree in Real Estate Investment from Harvard University and a Master's degree in Public Administration from Columbia University. He co-founded Apers with Gavin Guo from MIT EECS.

Dr. Mazdak Tootkaboni is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a member of the Center for Scientific Computing and Data Science Research at UMassD. Dr. Tootkaboni’s research is cross-disciplinary and focuses on drawing upon advances in stochastic modeling, applied statistics, and data analytics to develop techniques that help the engineering community move towards more reliable, resource-efficient, and resilient solutions. Dr. Tootkaboni’s research has been funded by NSF, ONR, MASS DEP, and the UMASS president’s office, as well as the Mobility Industry. He is a recipient of the NSF early CAREER award, University of Massachusetts System President’s Science and Technology award, and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Chancellor’s Sponsored Research Recognition. Dr. Tootkaboni is a member of Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI) and its Probabilistic Mechanics Committee and is one of the co-founders for Carbin AI, a UMass-MIT spinoff focusing on AI for telematics data analytics.

Ishaan Grover is a 3rd year PhD student at the MIT Media Lab. His research interests are in Machine Learning and its applications in the field of human-agent interaction and early-literacy education. Prior to this work, he worked on algorithms to enable reinforcement learning agents to learn from human feedback. In industry, he has interned at Apple, Palantir and Microsoft where he worked on applications ranging from natural language understanding to anomaly detection.

Erez Kaminski is the CEO and Founder of Ketryx Corporation, the first and only connected lifecycle management software for MedTech that unifies quality and R&D efforts to deliver safer software. Over the last decade, he worked in industries including computational mathematics, biotech, and energy, helping build monitoring systems for pharmaceutical equipment and AI for medication management.

Snejana Shegheva brings a deep background in mathematics to her role as chief architect for Nara Logics Synaptic Intelligence Platform, the leading AI platform for decisioning with explainability built in. As part of the Nara Logics team, she works closely with customers to understand their needs to ensure the platform delivers performant, understandable, and responsible AI. Snejana has published research on graphical models and geometric patterns, as they relate to human intelligence, as a part of Georgia Tech’s Design & Intelligence Lab. Her passion is translating complex knowledge in mathematics, cognitive sciences, and large, integrated systems into principles and processes to support engineers in delivering ethical AI solutions.

Bindu Chanagala is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at nurtur, the only digital health application that predicts and prevents postpartum depression using the power of AI. Fueled by personal connection and the need for improvements in women’s health, she is focused on ensuring this solution reaches women impacted by postpartum depression. Bindu’s story is about impact. She began her healthcare journey at Intermountain Health and SelectHealth where she honed her leadership skills, rising from an engineer to leadership roles, spearheading quality initiatives and fostering innovation. Streamlining processes at SelectHealth, leading engineering teams to improve operations through automation, and being part of the development of predictive risk models are just a few of her accomplishments. She has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.

Kevin Christopher, JD/MBA, is co-founder and CEO of Quantiscope. He is a widely recognized leader at the nexus of impact and innovation. He leads Quantiscope from the Altitude Lab in Salt Lake City.

Fadi Micaelian is a seasoned enterprise software executive. Over the past three decades he has served in a number of senior positions at industry leaders like Oracle, BroadVision, Intellectual Ventures, and DataBeam (now IBM). He is also a serial entrepreneur, currently serving as a CEO at Sparkdit, the 3rd start-up he founded. Fadi is a distinguished scholar. He lectures at ASU and USF. As an inventor, his work has been published extensively and he was awarded 8 highly cited AI/ML patents by the USPTO. He is passionate about Technology, Physics and Track and Field. Fadi holds a BS in Physics, a BE in Engineering, and obtained an MS from MIT, and an MBA from INSEAD.