Keynotes, Day 2

Smitha Shyam is the director of engineering of UberAI and leads all the centralized AI/ML efforts for Uber. She has extensive experience building and leading high-performing teams in startups and in large companies. She graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Over the years, Smitha has mentored several engineers and managers across companies. She is also an advocate for diversity and inclusion efforts at Uber. As the chair of Ladyeng, she has started several foundational programs in hiring and retention for women engineers.

Dr. Dario Gil is IBM Senior Vice President and Director of Research Dr. Gil leads the technology roadmap and the technical community of IBM, directing innovation strategies in areas including hybrid cloud, AI, semiconductors, quantum computing, and exploratory science. Dr. Gil is responsible for IBM Research, one of the world's largest and most influential corporate research labs, with over 3,000 researchers. He is the 12th Director in its 76-year history. He is also responsible for IBM's intellectual property strategy and business. Dr. Gil is a globally recognized leader of the quantum computing industry. Under his leadership, IBM was the first company in the world to build programmable quantum computers and make them universally available through the cloud. An advocate of collaborative research models, Dr. Gil co-chairs the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, which advances fundamental AI research to the broad benefit of industry and society. He also co-chairs the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium, which provides access to the world's most powerful high-performance computing resources in support of COVID-19 research. Dr. Gil is a member of the National Science Board (NSB), the governing body of the National Science Foundation (NSF), serves on the President's Research Council of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and the MIT School of Engineering Dean's Advisory Council. Dr. Gil is on the boards of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), New York Academy of Sciences, New York Hall of Science, and Research!America. Dr. Gil received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

Anca Dragan is an assistant professor in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. Her goal is to enable robots and AI agents to work for and around people. She runs the InterACT laboratory, where she focuses on algorithmic human-robot interaction: algorithms that move beyond the robot's function in isolation, and generate robot behavior that coordinates well with human actions, and that is aligned with what humans actually want the robot to do. Anca got her PhD from CMU's Robotics Institute. She helped found the Berkeley AI Research Laboratory, and is a co-PI of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. She has been honored by the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), NSF CAREER, Sloan, Okawa, ONR Young Investigator Award, MIT TR35, IEEE RAS Early Career Award, and IJCAI Early Career Spotlight.