Artificial Intelligence Impacting The Futuristic Workplace

Marisa is a Director in the Cognitive Technology Group. As an Intelligent Automation lab member, she drives cognitive augmentation capabilities in prototype to production-level system development for internal use cases. Her experience includes roles as a research scientist, research engineer, and research manager. She has written various publications on the subject of language and cognitive processes. She holds four U.S. Patents related to the NLP field.

Professional and industry experience

While working as a research project lead at a tech research firm, her team created an enhanced methodology virtual assistant solution directly with a customer. Her duties included research, software development, developer oversight, project management, product methodology, and communicating vision. She was also on a team that designed, developed, and evaluated a modular question-answering system with components that could be extended to other NLP and AI problems. She has analyzed and advanced NLP components of IBM Watson while tuning it to medical use cases, with a main focus on syntactic and semantic features, textual inference, and question analysis.

Her PhD research included: developing a statistical dependency parser for unbounded syntactic dependencies in language data; engineering and training machine learning features derived from human memory limitations; and evaluating cross-linguistic corpora, producing statistical analyses, and programming software to support research needs.

Andy has had an eclectic background that provides him with a deep understanding for where AI fits within todays society. He is currently the President of a small start-up, Soar Automotive, that is focused on bringing human-like driving capabilities to self-driving vehicles. Andy also currently serves as the Vice President for Unmanned Platforms at Soar Technology where he is leading the organization in the development of advanced AI for unmanned military platforms. Prior to SoarTech/SoarAuto he worked at Saffron Technology an AI based company that spun-out of IBM Research. Andy has also enjoyed being the President and founding member of the Robotics Technology Consortium (RTC) who's purpose is to lead the development and transition of robotics research into the Department of Defense; and serving as a senior consultant on the State of Michigan’s 21st Century Job Fund which was created to help diversify and grow Michigan’s high-tech economy by investing in basic research at universities and non-profit research institutions, applied research at small business, university technology transfer; and the commercialization of products, processes and services. Andy also held positions at the Office of Naval Research (where he was assigned to DARPA to act as a Deputy Program Manager), where he played a leading role in the research, development and advancement of internet-based technologies supporting the maritime community; and at the Center for Naval Analyses where he served as a senior analyst and a personal assistant to the Commander, Second Fleet.

Chris is a Partner at Fontinalis, where he responsible for a wide range of critical processes across the firm’s various investment funds. As a member of Fontinalis’ investment committee, he leads and supports investments across a variety of next-generation mobility segments on a stage-agnostic basis.

Chris currently serves on the Board of Directors of one Fontinalis portfolio company, TransRisk, and previously served on the board of directors of TransLoc (acquired by Ford Smart Mobility in January 2018). He also currently serves as a Board Observer to three Fontinalis portfolio companies: SmartKargo, Synovia Solutions, and Zagster.

Prior to joining Fontinalis in early 2011, Chris spent five years in the Valuation and Financial Opinions Group of Stout, a leading independent advisory firm that provides investment banking, valuation, dispute consulting, and management consulting services. During his time at Stout, Chris worked with a diverse array of companies on transaction, tax, and financial reporting matters. Additionally, Chris specialized in advising private equity and venture capital clients, and played a critical role in furthering Stout’s relationships with this market segment.

Chris earned his Bachelor of Business Administration (with distinction) from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, where his senior thesis analyzed brand management techniques used by cities to promote economic growth. Chris also completed an internship in the alternative investments group of the University’s endowment, focusing on private equity, venture capital, oil & gas, and real estate partnerships. Chris has earned the right to use the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation and is a member of the CFA Institute and the Michigan Venture Capital Association.

Jason Vazzano is CEO and Co-founder of Vectorform, a global invention company that creates digital products and experiences for the world’s leading brands. For nearly 20 years, he has helped organizations define the future of their business and solve complex problems to build beyond an idea. A sampling of Vectorform’s client list includes Google, Walt Disney, Microsoft, Nike, BMW, and American Express, just to name a few.

Founded in 1999, under his leadership, the company has grown to six global offices in Seattle, Detroit, New York, Munich, Mumbai, and Hyderabad, and was named Automation Alley Technology company of the year for 2016.

A serial entrepreneur, Vazzano has founded or been a mentor to nearly a half-dozen tech startups in his career. In 2013, he was recognized by DBusiness Magazine as one of Detroit’s Top 30 in Their 30s, and is a TechWeek Detroit award recipient — a recognition of his contributions to Detroit’s burgeoning technology ecosystem.

In 2016, Endeavor Global, a nonprofit aimed at driving social change through entrepreneurship, selected Vazzano as an Endeavor entrepreneur at its 64th International Selection Panel in Madrid.

Vazzano serves as a board member of Crossroads for Youth, a non-profit organization that focuses on giving children the tools and skills required to lead productive and happy lives. He additionally serves on the Advisory Board of the Oakland University Information & Decision Sciences Department.

Rory Wellever is a partner and corporate attorney. His practice focuses on transactions involving information technology and intellectual property, including the licensing and/or transfer of trademarks, copyrights, software, and technology, as well as information technology issues arising in mergers, acquisitions, private equity, and debt financing transactions.

Rory holds a Certified Information Privacy Professional/United States (CIPP/US) credential given by the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP).

• Assists with software licensing and transfers
• Counsels clients on outsourcing and joint venture agreements, social media and advertising, and data security and privacy
• Counsels clients on music publishing, entertainment, and other media