BIG chairs
Dr. Evgeniy Gabrilovich
Dr. Evgeniy Gabrilovich is a senior staff research scientist at Google, where he works on improving healthcare. Prior to joining Google in 2012, he was a director of research and head of the natural language processing and information retrieval group at Yahoo! Research.
Evgeniy is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, and is a recipient of the 2014 IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize. He is also a recipient of the 2010 Karen Sparck Jones Award for his contributions to natural language processing and information retrieval. Evgeniy has served as a program chair for WWW 2017 and WSDM 2015. He earned his PhD in computer science from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
Dr. Kira Radinsky
As the chief scientist and the director of data science of eBay, Dr. Kira Radinsky is building the next generation predictive data mining, deep learning and natural language processing solutions that will transform eCommerce. She co-founded SalesPredict, acquired by eBay in 2016, that was the leader in the field of predictive marketing building solutions leveraging large-scale data mining to predict sales conversions.
One of the up-and-coming voices in the data science community, she is pioneering the field of Web Dynamics and Temporal Information Retrieval.
Dr. Radinsky gained international recognition for her work at Microsoft Research, where she developed predictive algorithms that recognized the early warning signs of globally impactful events, including political riots and disease epidemics. In 2013, she was named to the MIT Technology Review’s 35 Young Innovators Under 35, in 2015 as Forbes 30 under 30 rising stars in enterprise technology, and in 2016 selected as “woman of the year” by Globes. She is a frequent presenter at global tech events, including TEDx and the World Wide Web Conference, and she publishes in the Harvard Business Review. Radinsky also serves as visiting professor at the Technion, Israel’s leading science and technology institute, where she focuses on the application of predictive data mining in medicine.
Dr. Kuansan Wang
Dr. Kuansan Wang is Managing Director and Principal Researcher from Microsoft Research Outreach in Redmond, WA. He joined Microsoft Research in 1998, first as a researcher in the Speech Technology Group working on multimodal dialog system, then as an architect that designed and shipped various speech products, including the Voice Command on mobile that eventually becomes Cortana, and Microsoft Speech Server that is still powering Microsoft and partners’ call centers.
In 2007, he rejoined Microsoft Research to work on large scale natural language understanding and web search technologies, and is currently responsible for running the largest machine reading efforts that use AI agents to dynamically acquire knowledge from the web and make it available to the general public.
Kuansan received his BS from National Taiwan University and MS and PhD from University of Maryland, College Park, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. In addition to 120+ scholarly papers and 40+ patents he has published, his work has also been adopted into 10 international standards from W3C, Ecma and ISO.