We are extremely lucky to have so many talented and accomplished individuals who have volunteered their time to further our discussions. As part of our Women Speak Tech community, we are encouraged that men & women continue to come together to create more equitable workplaces and invest in others.
Travis Dirks, is a CTO at XLabs, a moonshot factory for AI. Prior to XLabs, he was Chief Science Officer and Co-founder of Seldn, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup predicting global socio-economic disruptions (“black swans”). His superpower is in connecting complex science/math to impactful business problems and building software around the solutions. Seldn was a new type of AI leveraging custom machine learning algorithms specifically tailored to deal with complex, nonlinear human-generated data. Specifically, Seldn pioneered the application of breakthroughs in Complexity Physics along with in-house advances in validation to tackle the prediction of rare socio-economic human disasters.
Prior to Seldn, Travis co-founded and led Rotary Gallop – a Big Data Finance firm that applies game theory to impact investments and strategy for corporate control (m&a, hostile takeover, and activist situations). Travis’s analysis on popular contested situations has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Travis received his Ph.D. in physics from the world’s leading institution for condensed matter, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Contact: travis@xlabs.ai
Anne Cocquyt’s journey across four continents is driven by her passion for transforming ideas into reality and leading cross-functional teams to implementation. Anne has successfully founded and led a broad range of projects, startups, and non-profits in multiple industries ranging from IT outsourcing to hardware consumer products, social networking communities, cancer prevention, digital health, and biotech.
In her current venture, Anne puts her MBA and her experience as a serial female founder to work: with her expertise in computer and data science and her passion for building communities around causes paired with her ability to inspire she founded the GUILD – a novel networking solution for female entrepreneurs and women in business to build stronger networks.
Anne keeps active in the digital health world by advising a patient education startup specialized in stroke prevention, mentoring HealthTech and medical device startups at the Singularity University Accelerator, supporting the due diligence process for MedTech track of 500 Startups, mentoring USF Design Thinking class and assisting a data insights startup as COO.
Jess Roeder has a PPh.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience and is a Director of Product for Insight Data Science, where she advises companies on building data teams and oversees a team focused on helping scientists and engineers transition to careers in data.
Mars Hall merges creativity & engineering through his work as a research & development engineer at Salesforce / Heroku. Tasked with wildly varying problems, he runs strategic experiments pushing the Salesforce platform where customers want to go, including machine learning apps with PredictionIO and cross-cloud architecture with Terraform.