Dr. De Kai, Founding Member, Google's AI Ethics Council & Cultural AI Researcher

Ivelyse Andino, Founder & CEO, Radical Health & Commissioner, New York City Commission on Gender Equity

Christopher Ategeka, Founder & CEO, Unintended Consequences of Technology Inc.

Emily Best, Founder & CEO, Seed&Spark

What forms of bias are a part of being human? How do we minimize the impact of biases embedded in technology? Participate in a discussion led by Christopher Ategeka, Founder/CEO of the Unintended Consequences of Technology, on systemic consequences and solutions to ingrained biases embedded in technology. He will be joined by Dr. De Kai, expert in AI and systemic bias and founding member of Google's AI Ethics Council, Ivelyse Andino, Founder/CEO of AI-driven equal access healthcare platform Radical Health, and Emily Best, Founder/CEO of the community-powered storytelling and culture-building platform Seed&Spark. Join this session to learn about the complexities of tech-embedded bias and to explore potential solutions with us.

Dr. De Kai's cross-disciplinary work relating music, language, intelligence, and culture stems from a liberal arts perspective emphasizing creativity in both technical and humanistic dimensions. For pioneering contributions to machine learning of the cognitive relationships between different languages, De Kai is among only 17 scientists worldwide selected in 2011 by the Association for Computational Linguistics to be awarded the honor of Founding ACL Fellow, and is a Distinguished Research Scholar at UC Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute. A native of St Louis, he worked and traveled extensively in San Francisco, New York, Germany, Spain, China, India and Canada before joining Hong Kong's ambitious creation of Asia's now top-ranked HKUST, where he developed the foundations of modern statistical machine translation technology, with broad applications in computer music and computational musicology as well as human language processing, and built the world's first public web translation service resulting in global coverage.

His recent work explores the potential of cognitive machines that learn the relationships between various different kinds of musical languages.

During his doctoral studies in cognitive science, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics at Berkeley, he worked on seminal projects on intelligent conversational dialog agents. His PhD dissertation employing maximum entropy to model human perception and interpretation of ambiguities was one of the first to spur the paradigm shift toward today's state-of-the-art statistical natural language processing technologies. De Kai also holds an executive MBA from Kellogg (Northwestern University) and HKUST. His undergraduate degree at UCSD was awarded cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and won the liberal arts oriented Revelle College's department award.

In 2015, Debrett's HK 100 named De Kai as one of the 100 most influential figures of Hong Kong.

In 2019, Google named De Kai as one of eight inaugural members of its AI Ethics council, ATEAC (Advanced Technology External Advisory Council).

Ivelyse Andino is an Afro-Latina health equity innovator born and raised in The Bronx. She is the founder and CEO of Radical Health and a Commissioner on the New York City Commission on Gender Equity. Ivelyse enjoyed a fledgling career in health tech, pioneering some of its first digital health solutions, including bringing the first mobile app prescribing platform to market and working with global clients such as National Health Service (NHS London) and Kaiser Permanente. While she routinely trained oncologists on new drugs, she found herself unprepared when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. This forced her to directly and intimately confront the systemic healthcare disparities she knew that existed. In founding Radical Health — the first Latina-owned and operated Benefit Corp in NYC — she has sought to combine her expertise in healthcare and her passion as a community organizer. Coming from an historically marginalized community herself, it was important for Ivelyse to initially build Radical Health by bringing together her neighbors around her kitchen table and hearing first-hand from voices — including the undocumented, women of color, elderly, young people, and LGBTQ — who are otherwise (figuratively and) literally never given a seat at the table to have a say in their own healthcare destiny. Through Radical Health, Ivelyse is committed to the task of transforming healthcare by facilitating health literacy and self-advocacy, as well as forging a relationship between meaningful face-to-face conversations with cutting-edge technology.

Christopher Ategeka is an award-winning serial-entrepreneur, engineer, futurist, & an optimist. He is the Founder/CEO at UCOT Inc., a company that has created a unique model to support and fund early-stage startups creating solutions to unintended & willfully ignored consequences of Technology. Chris also founded UCOT FORUM a conference whose main objective is to have authentic discussions around exponential technology development and usage that may not be serving humanity's best interests.

Before that, he founded Hourglass ventures a fund that supports visionary entrepreneurs from the African continent who come from the underprivileged background- and need a Friends and Family round of financing to get their ideas off the ground. He also founded Health Access Corps, a social enterprise that works to establish sustainable health care systems on the African continent. Chris has been invited to speak at some of the world’s most prestigious platforms such as TED,Clinton Global Initiative and United Nations.

Chris has won many international awards for his work, TEDFellow; Forbes Magazine 30Under30, Ashoka fellow, Echoing Green fellow and most recently he has been honored by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader (YGL).

Chris' work has been featured in many major media publications both locally and Internationally such as BBC, Forbes, and NPR. Chris holds a Bachelor’s of Science, and Master’s of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He also completed an intensive executive program on Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century, at John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, an online crowdfunding and subscription streaming platform for content creators and audiences that emphasizes diversity and inclusion. Best founded the company in 2012 and is responsible for business development, fundraising and overseeing all day-to-day operations.

In addition to her work at Seed&Spark, Best produces film, series and VR that have premiered at Sundance, SXSW and other festivals. Best produced projects including "Like the Water," a feature film starring Caitlin FitzGerald ("Masters of Sex," "UnREAL"); "Fck Yes!," a digital series about sexual consent which she also cowrote and codirected; Janicza Bravo's virtual reality film "Hard World for Small Things" which premiered at Sundance; and James Kaelan's "The Visitor," which premiered at Slamdance and was featured at Tribeca.

Best was named a 2013 Indiewire Influencer, a 2014 New York Business Journal "Woman of Influence," a 2015 Upstart 100 entrepreneur (Business Journals), received the Ivy Film Innovator Award in 2015 and in 2016, graduated from Techstars Boston, an elite accelerator program for the country's top entrepreneurs. Best has raised millions of dollars in traditional funding, equity crowdfunding and rewards-based crowdfunding and has personally participated in more than 300 crowdfunding campaigns.

An advocate for diversity and inclusion in the entertainment industry, Best regularly speaks at conferences and events about building equity and sustainability for everyone. She also runs workshops to help independent content creators successfully crowdfund, build an audience and pitch their projects.

Seed&Spark is an online platform that offers crowdfunding for independent movie and television creators, a streaming subscription service for audiences and educational events for creative talent. Crowdfunding projects and streaming content on Seed&Spark emphasize diversity and inclusion with more than 70 percent coming from women, people of color and LGBTQ talent. The streaming subscription service, available on Apple TV, Roku or online using any device, offers a highly curated library of award-winning movies and television shows with subscribers having the option to pay what they can every month. Since the company was founded in 2012, more than $16 million has been raised for over 1,100 movies and television shows, boasting a campaign success rate averaging 80 percent which is the highest of any crowdfunding platform in the world. Seed&Spark also holds more than 125 educational events every year across the country to help content creators get their projects produced and distributed.

Confronting Tech-Driven, Systemic Bias and Inequity