Speakers Bios & What They Think A Lot About:

Diana Mojahed, PhD
Diana Mojahed, PhD is Founder and CEO of Lightfinder, an MIT spinout advancing chip-based imaging and sensing technologies powered by AI-driven analysis. Her mission is to leverages optic & photonics, AI, and materials engineering to develop tools that solve pressing problems, particularly in medicine. Previously, she was a Kavanaugh Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, and she earned her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University, where her research focused on AI-based imaging for rapid diagnostics. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Columbia BiomedX Technology Accelerator Program, published in top journals including Science Advances, and has been recognized with several honors including the SPIE Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship and Best Presentation at the 2021 Women in Science at Columbia Symposium.

Questions I think a lot about:
1. Will AI eventually surpass human capabilities in creativity, problem-solving, or intuition?
2. What are the most important skills future generations should learn to stay relevant in an AI-influenced job market?
3. As AI tools become more embedded in our daily lives, what guiding principles or critical questions should individuals keep in mind to ensure their usage aligns with ethical standards?
4. How can we recognize when our reliance on AI might be crossing a line — whether in terms of privacy, bias, or over-dependence — and what proactive steps can we as individuals take to prevent small ethical missteps from snowballing into larger societal issues?

Micah Smith, PhD
Micah Smith, PhD. Micah Smith is a software engineer, builder, and the Technical Lead of Core Engineering at OpenEvidence, a healthcare technology startup developing conversational AI for physicians and healthcare professionals. At OpenEvidence in Cambridge, MA, he leads the engineering and deployment of AI technology including large language models now used by a quarter of U.S. physicians to enhance clinical decision-making at the point of care. The company was recently valued at $1 billion following a $75 million investment from Sequoia. A full-stack ML engineer with experience deploying models across industries, Smith earned his PhD from MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where his research focused on making complex machine learning systems more accessible, collaborative, and automated through advances in human-computer interaction and software engineering. He earned his B.A. in Economics-Mathematics from Columbia University.

Questions I think a lot about:
1. How can we create systems that enable people to do machine learning and data science more easily and effectively?
2. How can we make machine learning and data science more collaborative in nature?
3. Can we automate mundane or error-prone tasks in machine learning and data science? How can we make these areas more accessible to other domain experts?
4. How can we expose data science and machine learning to the open-source development paradigm?

David Watkins, PhD
David Watkins, PhD. I spent 10 years at Columbia getting my undergrad, master's, and finally Ph.D. in Peter Allen's Columbia Robotics Lab, graduating in 2022 in localization free robotic mobile manipulation. I started working at The AI Institute in December of 2022, where I immediately began working on foundation models research for robotics. I co-founded the foundation models research team in August of 2023. In 2024 I founded the Capture team which is dedicated to producing 10,000 hours of high quality robot manipulation data. I now lead a team comprised of 26 researchers and engineers studying how best to collect this data.

Questions I think a lot about:
1. What are the most effective ways to choose research directions in AI to benefit humanity?
2. What are LLMs and why are they insufficient to solve general AI? Where do robots fit in?

Barnet Sherman
After a 30+ year career on Wall Street managing multibillion dollar fixed income portfolios at some of the world’s largest investment firms, Barnet Sherman currently is an Adjunct Professor at Boston University teaching graduate-level Multinational Finance and Trade as well as Corporate Finance. He heads The Tenbar Group, a consultancy he founded to advise mission-driven companies and startups. For over a decade, he has been a Senior Contributor to Forbes.com with over 100 articles and several “Editor’s Pick” commendations and other awards. His recent 8-part series on AI and the Municipal Bond Market is a detailed real-time analysis of how a $4 trillion marketplace is being completely transformed by technology. Proving he is not all work and no play, he is a member of the Screen Actors Guild, co-chairman of The Sherman Family Art Trust dedicated to helping families affected by cancer, and an Eagle Scout with a lifetime membership in the Eagle Scout Association. Mr. Sherman earned his undergraduate degree from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where he was a member of Pi Sigma Alpha, the National Political Science Honor Society. His Master’s in Public Administration is from the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.

Dan Rippy
Dan Rippy holds an S.M. in Science from Harvard-MIT and an MBA from Columbia Business School. Currently the Executive Director of Business Development at UMass Chan Medical School, Dan has served in C-Suite and executive positions in start-ups and public companies.