Christian Drescher is a member of the Artificial Intelligence Research group at the Mercedes-Benz corporate research division, where he is working on AI-driven support systems for automotive engineering and production, and advancing AI literacy within the company. He has 12 years experience in the studies and practice of automated problem solving and machine learning, including scientific publications at premier AI conferences and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence.

Marek has been working in the media and journalism field for almost 15 years. He has witnessed Polish newspapers’ digital transformation process from the inside from the very beginning. He also worked for Poland’s audit bureau of circulation where he organised conferences and workshops for journalists, and was the editor-in-chief of a media industry website that was aspiring to be the leading information source for Polish journalists about the media market. Previously, he was Coaching and Leadership Fellow at the Poynter’s Institute in Florida.

Andjela Todorovic is a software engineer and business consultant with a strong focus on the field of intelligent computing. As a former co-founder of two award-winning startups, she used the gained experience to help individuals and SMEs reach customers and vendors, and radically improve their products. Her current research is in the field of applied machine learning in medical imagery. She is a regular speaker and attendant at the largest tech conferences, and a passionate student of two distinct bachelor programs, in Computer Science and in Mathematics.

Chris is a data scientist who applies deep & machine learning, causal inference, and data science to hate speech, medicine, epidemiology, cancer, and political campaigns. In the 2018 U.S. elections, he led ML for Gavin Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign, now governor of California; he has also developed machine learning models for Ukrainian elections, Al Gore's climate change efforts, and Rock the Vote and is now building a heart attack prediction algorithm with Kaiser Permanente Northern California’s Division of Research.

Mike is a multi-year veteran of the US political technology space, working for campaign organizations, non-profits, labor unions, and software vendors. His work included administering the national voter file for the Democratic National Committee during the 2008 election campaign, supporting Barack Obama. Mike has been quoted about cybersecurity issues in US elections in multiple publications including Time Magazine. Currently, he oversees technology infrastructure, data, software development, and cybersecurity at EMILY’s List, a US political organization that supports pro-choice Democratic women.

Lukas is an Associate Director at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) based in Belgium. In this capacity, he researches Russian disinformation activities, as well as the military conflicts in Syria and Donbas. Lukas is an open source methodology trainer, organizing workshops and trainings around the globe. Additionally, he is an associate analyst at the Vilnius Institute for Policy Analysis (VIPA). Prior to this, he worked as the deputy head of the Strategic Planning Division in the State Railway Inspectorate under the Ministry of Transport of Lithuania. A lieutenant in the Lithuanian military, he served in the Lithuanian Special Operations Forces Special Purpose Service as a support officer.

A data visualization expert, Joey’s work has been highlighted in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and the Washington Post. His Breathing City graphic was shortlisted for an Information is Beautiful award. Joey developed his design expertise after a 15-year quantitative analysis and consulting career. It is this analytical foundation that helps him create visuals that are both clear and engaging. He offers training on data visualization and his Data Looks Better Naked series is used in visualization curricula around the world.

Mikheil is leading a 20-person team of data scientists, analysts and engineers at TBC Bank. His main focus is to develope analytical capabilities, integrate them deeply with business and promote a data-driven decision making culture companywide. After graduating from Oxford University, Mikheil taught machine learning, probability theory, statistics and econometrics at various univresities and talked regularly about data science at public lectures and conferences.

Sophie is the analytics lead for ClearScore‘s international business, helping to empower users all over the globe through better financial knowledge, and understanding the data that lenders have on them. Since joining the business three years ago, she has worked with bureaux and credit providers around the world, and has seen firsthand not just where the algorithms can go wrong, but also how they can be made right. Quite apart from this, Sophie is passionate about drawing the story from the numbers.

As a public financial management expert, Lorena has worked in monitoring and evaluation, open government and combating corruption, from government positions and as an international consultant. During her tenure as General Director of Performance Monitoring in the Ministry of Finance in Mexico, she coordinated the establishment of non-financial indicators, subnational governments' expenditures monitoring and fiscal transparency policies, including the national publication of public finances open data. Her experience also accounts for the design of the architecture for national planning including linking the budget with the Sustainable Development Goals.

Michael is a graphic designer and teacher. Before joining DATA4CHANGE, a leading force in the data-for-good movement, he was the Design Director at Beyond Words Studio. Prior to this, he worked for design studios in New York City and ran his own studio in Rotterdam, where he also taught at the Willem de Kooning Academy.

George is a technology leader with 19 years of experience in designing, realizing and delivering software products and solutions. He works as a Senior Software Architect at Siemens Corporate Technologies. Currently he is leading applied research in the area of cloud-based distributed architectures for industrial automation and energy management.

Milena is a Senior Advisor in Amnesty's Evidence Lab, where she works on complex human rights investigations leveraging open source information, data science and crowdsourcing. She leads Amnesty Decoders, an innovative platform using crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence to process and analyse large volumes of data such as documents, satellite images and pictures for large scale human rights investigations. Previously she worked at School of Data training and mentoring numerous NGOs and journalists around the world to make the most of their data, and at Transparency International supporting TI's global network to use technology in the fight against corruption.

Tiziana is a freelance information designer and co-founder of Market Cafe Magazine, the world's first magazine dedicated to data visualization. From her studio in London, Tiziana works independently with international award-winning agencies and high-profile clients to bring their data to life. She also enjoys organising data-driven "code&design" workshops to explore the educational side of working with data.

Eto is a Researcher at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab). In this role, she researches the information space, focusing on Russia and the Caucasus region. Prior to the DFRLab, Eto advised the National Security Council of Georgia and was involved in developing strategic documents. Earlier, Eto worked as a senior analyst at the country’s Ministry of Interior, where she covered security issues related to Russia and the occupied regions of Georgia. Eto was a conference host at DataFest Tbilisi 2018 and we are super excited that she’s reaturning as a speaker this year!

Zdenek is a full-stack developer working at the intersection of data visualisation, data science, and AI. During his 10 years in the industry, he worked on online facebook games where you win tickets for a Rihanna gig, plywood robots that predict how you're gonna die and everything in between. Zdenek strives to make complex things simple and enjoys making data speak human, not computer.

Alexander has a strong background of solving complex business problems using Data Science. During his career journey he has led various teams that developed predictive and optimization models in different industries: retail, e-commerce, telco, heavy industry and banking. In 2016 he join Visa Consulting and Analytics team in Moscow, working with clients from Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Edgar is a Machine Learning researcher and Quality Assurance engineer focusing on the automated prediction model development. In 2018, he developed an automated ML model for Lowfoot Inc. The model forecasts daily user-level water consumption for Peterborough, Ontario. Currently, he is working on the development of a customizable multi-algorithm based forecast platform. His primary interest is the time series analysis and prediction.

Jacopo spearheads Code for Africa’s data journalism story production and engagement strategies in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania. He also builds partnerships with key local news organisations and organises community events that foster collaboration between journalists, designers and technologists. Jacopo is an award-winning journalist and computer scientist experienced in data visualisation, in-depth storytelling and cross-border data journalism projects. His work has been published by The Guardian, Al Jazeera International, Der Spiegel, El País and Internazionale, among others.

Bronwen is a researcher and author. Since 2011, she has supported civil society and human rights organisations around the world to use data driven advocacy to amplify their stories. This work inspired her to identify pathways for civil society to use data for direct impact, and to co-found DATA4CHANGE. Founded in 2014, DATA4CHANGE has been a leading force in the data-for-good movement.

Piero is an award-winning graphic designer who enjoys transforming data into meaningful and compelling narratives; he also enjoys writing up about it in magazines or letting other people talk about it at events he curates. Piero currently works as a freelance information designer from his studio in London.

Rudolf is a data scientist with 5 years of experience in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. He has developed the first chatbot framework for the Georgian language which was adopted by one of the largest banks in the country and created AI-based tools for companies from the USA and Europe. Currently, he works at Swiss company Windsor.AI on the project of marketing campaign optimization tool which is used by the Fortune 500 companies.

Ildi is a mathematician who works as a lead data scientist at Emarsys in Budapest. Her research contributes to making marketing communication more relevant. She writes code mainly in R using the ggplot2, shiny, data.table, purrr and rmarkdown packages. Ildi has a major role in developing an in-house R package ecosystem of 5+ packages. Besides her work at Emarsys she is a mentor and organizer at Techcamp and a regular presenter at the Budapest RLadies meetup.

Laurent knows everything from A to Z when it comes to data! His expertise includes data collection, experimental design, legal aspects of data, annotations, data preparation, model training, benchmarking, data visualization, and so on. His PhD thesis was about understanding and building computational models to automatically infer first impressions at job interviews. He recorded one-to-one, face-to-face job interviews with multiple modalities and used these recordings to predict the impression made by the job applicant. How cool is that?

Tarick specializes in transparency and communication of budgetary issues in accessible formats and with plain language. As an international consultant, he has developed online and offline engagement strategies on how to communicate fiscal information and open data, including digital platforms. At GIFT, he advises governments, civil society, and other international organizations on the use of user-centered tools to improve transparency and develop communication and citizen engagement strategies.

Davit is a Data Scientist at the Yerevan office of DISQO, an audience first insights platform based in the USA. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics and is Adjunct Lecturer of Programming for Data Science at the American University of Armenia. Previously, he worked forUNDP and multiple international companies. His core competencies and expertise include Machine Learning, Neural Networks, and NLP.

Are traffic jams, overcrowded trains and ineffective bus routes part of your everyday life? Then you need this guy in your city. Ilya Boyandin designs and develops exploratory tools for the analysis of data about geographic movement of people with the goal of improving transport infrastructure and mobility services. Previously, he did research on the same topic at the University of Fribourg and developed data visualizations at Interactive Things. One of the open source projects for flow map visualization that Ilya has published is being used by people all around the world.

Do you wonder what it takes to bring contemporary technologies into memory institutions? Liviu Pop could tell all! Liviu works at the Folklore Archive of the Romanian Academy and knows how old archives become the "food" for content created by AI. If you meet him, you can talk to him about anything from digital archives, digitization and long term digital preservation, to the history of media technologies, evolution of content along the analog-digital-postdigital axes, philosophy of technology, archives roles in society, dark archives, open archives and digital humanities.

Anton is an expert in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning for text classification. He is a former Data Scientist of The World Bank in Washington, D.C. Currently, Anton is based in Dublin, Ireland. He focuses on investigating webspam trends and building anti-abuse ML models to improve the quality of online products. Previously, Anton was at the forefront of marketing and public relations at Apple, Airbnb, and Coub.

Ussal is the CEO of EDAM, one of the top-ranked think-tanks in the Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Previously, he managed the Business 20 and Think 20 engagement groups when Turkey chaired the G20 in 2015. At the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey between 2011-14, he started Turkey’s first innovation policy studies program. He has been an adviser to Turkish president’s office, and to the World Bank in Washington D.C. He holds an MA in international development from Harvard University.

Anush is a Project Manager at Krisp, where she coordinates research team projects and roadmaps, controls product quality and delivery timelines. She was a researcher within the Noise Cancellation team building the algorithms for removing background noise in real-time audio streams. Anush has a Ph.D. degree in natural sciences with specialization in real analysis, orthonormal bases. During the past 5 years, she has been teaching at Armenia’s leading universities.

Helen is a head of the Data Science faculty at the Netology online university, a leading provider of online education for Russian-speaking communities. She is the customer analytics startup co-founder and ex-business analyst in TOP-5 international petrochemical companies.

Salome is an AI Developer, quantum researcher, scientist and lecturer with more than 6 years of experience in the tech industry. She worked as a game developer for Rockstar Games, Naughty Dog and other big companies before getting interested in artificial intelligence and started her research on how she could use AI in Games. Finally, she ended up developing her own AI projects and working with the SpaceX team and Neuralink on the way.

Roman is a dataviz designer and engineer with a background in Graphic Design and Computer Science. His work has appeared widely in such media as the Washington Post, Forbes UA, VOX Ukraine, Eurasian Geography and Economics, MPSA Conferences, IFES, Ukrainian Truth, etc. As a member of the NGO Cifra Group, Roman has international experience as an election observer, and many of his visualizations are designed to display complex hidden patterns in electoral data.

Beso is a visual analytics professional with 7 years of experience in turning data into strategy, insights and decision. It’s all about enforcing data-driven decision-making culture within organizations. As a management consultant at Deloitte, he delivers success through industry knowledge, technical capabilities and a passion for helping clients bridge the gap between data and people.

Antonio is a Data Scientist at the Wellcome Trust, an independent charitable foundation supporting research to improve health across the world. He is responsible for developing tools to enable data-driven insights to inform research funding and impact assessment. Antonio has a PhD in Applied Mathematics and a vast experience of working in interdisciplinary, multi-cultural research centres such as AT&T Labs (USA), Télécom ParisTech (France) and Imperial College London (UK). He sits on the Selection, Scoping & Impact Committee at Datakind UK, a volunteer-based organisation using data in the service of humanity.

After doing research in theoretical physics, Cheuk has transferred her analytical and logical skills in natural science and built a career in data science. She has been a Data Scientist in the travel business; an AWS partnered consultancy; a startup aiming to revolutionise revenue management and; a global bank to investigating financial crime. Cheuk constantly contributes to the open-source community by giving AI and deep learning workshops. She is also a co-organizer of AI Club for Gender Minorities to support Diversity and Inclusion.

Eyal Gruss is a machine learning researcher, consultant and teacher, working mainly in image and language processing. Eyal has a diverse industry background, including medical, financial, cyber, sensors, ads, web, real-estate and creative. Eyal holds a PhD in physics, and is also a new-media artist creating and using generative algorithms.

Ruzanna is working on projects that fuse storytelling, complex algorithms and human-centered design for social impact. She knows exactly how your digital footprint can be used for the public good. Although the private sector jobs are more appealing for data scientists, Ruzanna is on a quest to show all the exciting ways that data science can be applied for in policy-making and sustainable development. She specializes in political science and media studies and has years of experience in public policy innovation.

Tiko is a professor at Caucasus School of Journalism and Media Management of Georgian Institute of Public Affairs where she leads classes in reporting and writing and social campaigning. She has earned a BA and MA in Medicine and MA in Journalism and Media Management. She has been an OSI Global Faculty Grant fellow at NYU University, visiting fellow at City University London, recipient of EU Cost Action STSM to Zaragoza University. Her research topics are: pre-natal sex selection, femicide, trauma and addiction, ethical decision making and health communication.

Mihai is an innovator from the Republic of Moldova. He is the founder of the fundraising agency Enable, which assists people and organisations in designing innovation projects and obtain funding for these. In 2015, he was part of a project about creating a crowdsourcing platform for the citizens of Moldova, which opened the path for many smaller initiatives related to innovation and citizen-to-government interaction.

Tom is a member of the Data Science team at LoopMe, who specialises in mobile advertising by harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence to deliver a powerful combination of attribution and real world outcomes using real time decision making and survey based optimization. Before moving across to the fast paced world of Adtech, Tom began his career at the UK Office for National Statistics where he led research projects exploring how new exotic data sources and the application data science can enhance our understanding of the economy and the job market.

In the past 13 years Nikolai has been providing digital security trainings for nonprofits. He is a former Steering Committee member of the Eastern Partnership (EaP) Civil Society Forum (CSF) and current time Country Facilitator to Belarus/Steering Committee member CSF EaP. He is a board member of the Digital Communication Network since 2018.

Artem has an experience in journalism, programming, data collection, data preparation and data visualization. He is a developer at Transparency International Russia, and also works as a data journalist at the investigating department of the Novaya Gazeta.

Andrey is the head of declarator.org project, a unified database of Russian public officials based on their asset and income declarations. Andrew’s interests include data standards, registries of public service employees and the legal limitations for them.

Sandro is an experienced Data Scientist and Software Engineer with a strong background in NLP, Computer Vision, Deep Learning and Big Data Analytics. He holds a master degree in Artificial Intelligence and Distributed Systems from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and has worked as a NLP R&D engineer at Logitech. Currently, Sandro is a Lead Machine Learning Engineer at MaxinAI and works on challenging R&D projects.

Before joining Bank of Georgia in 2015, Irakli worked as a data scientist at a leading Czech-Belgian bank CSOB in Prague. He was in charge of predictive modeling, management information system development and building rules for credit decision engine. Irakli obtained his Master’s and PhD degrees in Economics from University of Turin, where he also worked as a research fellow. His interests in artificial intelligence development focus on deep fuzzy reinforcement learning, natural language processing and extensive family of cognitive computing platforms.

Levan is a senior data scientist at TBC bank. He has BBA and MBA degrees from Georgian American University and a working experience in different industries as financial analyst, business process analyst, and ERP systems implementation specialist. After graduating Big Data Solutions MA program at Barcelona Technology School, Levan joined TBC Bank and currently his main responsibility is to supervise multiple data science projects.

Mariam is the analytical transformation leader at TBC Bank, where she leads the group of data scientists and business representatives and focuses on making better business decisions through data science. For the last four years her work has concentrated around data driven business decisions. Her one of the main interests is using data science to develop seemingly simple, but in reality very effective business solutions.

Nutsa is a Data Scientist at TBC Bank. Her main responsibilities include analyzing and modeling customers’ data from different perspectives and delivering high quality reports to decision makers. Before joining TBC Bank, Nutsa worked in market research industry and applied machine learning models to survey data. Nutsa holds a master’s degree in survey statistics from the University of Bamberg, Germany. In frames of her master thesis she developed an internal R package for questionnaire modularization for one of the biggest market research companies.

Elena Poughia is the Managing Director of Dataconomy Media and Data Natives, Europe’s largest data science community. With an entrepreneurial mindset and multidisciplinary experience combining work in art, tech and business, she is a visionary, speaker, and ecosystem builder, enabling people to lead.

Markus is originally a bioinformatician and a machine learning engineer providing him with extensive experience working with ML models and data sets from health care to retail. As a co-founder and a data science lead at MindTitan, he has worked as a consultant and project manager for companies ranging from startups to departments of governments. This gives him a wide overview of what it means to integrate ML and AI into an organization from both the technological and organizational standpoint and why it seems simple for some while being insurmountable to others.

Nikita is a Deep Learning Engineer at OneSoil, a precision farming startup from Belarus. He works on training deep neural networks to predict sowing dates using solely Sentinel 1 or Sentinel 2 satellite images. Nikita has substantial experience in applying AI technologies and developing computer vision algorithms across a wide range of business domains. At OneSoil, he also combines engineering work with scientific research.

Davit is a Solution Architect at Bank of Georgia. He works in mBank/iBank team and is responsible to deliver data flow architecture for new products and processes. Before he became SA, he worked as a project manager in BOG and DDRC on different kind of projects, but mostly focused on mobile and web application products.

Jane is a startups mentor and adviser. She is actively involved in the tech ecosystem development in Ukraine. Jane teaches at the International Institute of Business and Kyiv School of Economics. She is corporate social responsibility expert and a social investor at Urban Space 500.

Paul is the founder of IMRE, a consultancy that helps businesses take on the challenges of AI and related technologies with a specific focus on Conversational AI. He helps to run the London Data Science Toastmaster club where he helps technical people find their voice. His passion and interests lie in helping people, AI, business, and futurism. He regularly puts on events at conferences and is a keen debater himself. Most recently he helped a physicist and a philosopher debate the implications of marketing to machines.

Hrant Khachatrian is leading YerevaNN, a machine learning research lab based in Yerevan, Armenia. He did his PhD in applied mathematics at Yerevan State University. He is also an advisor at IntelinAir, a US-based startup doing aerial imagery analysis for agriculture.

Ben is currently the lead data scientist at Oleeo, an HR service provider, where he’s working on deep learning models on text. Before that, he was working in the financial service and betting industries, and in research. Among other things, he’s designed and conducted experiments on the brain and analysed experiments with terabytes of data, he’s run brain models on IBM supercomputers with up to 64k cores, and he’s built production systems processing hundreds of thousands of transactions per day. His computational research culminated in a Ph.D. degree from KTH, Stockholm. When he’s not looking after his young son, he’s going to meetups about deep learning and machine learning.

Anna Pellegatta works as Associate Director at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. During her first year at DFRLab, she conducted research on disinformation and election monitoring in Italy and Europe. Since 2019, she transferred to DFRLab’s headquarter in Washington DC, where she supports global operations within the executive team. She’s now relocating to Brussels to establish a DFRLab HUB Europe. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree from Bocconi University in Milan, a Master’s Degree in International Relations and Security Studies from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University in New York and a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.