Raquel Urtasun is Founder and CEO of Waabi, an AI company building the next generation of self-driving technology. Waabi is the culmination of Raquel’s 20 year career in AI and 10 years of experience building self-driving solutions. Raquel is also a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, a co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI, and the recipient of several high profile awards including a Longuet-Higgins Prize, an Everingham Prize, an NSERC EWR Steacie Award, and more.
In 2021, Raquel was named as 100 Women of Impact by Entrepreneur Magazine, 100 People Transforming Business by Business Insider and Toronto’s Most Influential Torontonians according to Toronto Life Magazine. She was also named Chatelaine 2018 Woman of the year and 2018 Toronto's top influencers by Adweek magazine.
Alex Mariakakis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and an Affiliate Scientist at Techna. He runs the Computational Health and Interaction (CHAI) lab, which leverages ubiquitous and emergent technologies to address problems related to people’s health and wellbeing. His research not only creates new sensing technologies for measuring physiological, behavioral, and contextual health indicators, but also examines the implications of these technologies in people’s hands. Alex and his research group deliver innovative solutions using expertise in multiple subareas of computer science, particularly machine learning, signal processing, computer vision, and human-computer interaction.
Alex received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. As a student, he received the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship, and the Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award at UbiComp 2018. His work has garnered multiple Best Paper Awards at ACM venues (CHI, COMPASS) and significant attention from media outlets ranging from the BBC to National Geographic.