Seizing new opportunities for digital business transformation
The Covid-19 pandemic forced digital transformation upon businesses as they saw the need for greater resiliency and flexibility. Leading companies adapted their digital transformation strategies and pivoted to digitize and digitalize their operations and transform their business models, not only to survive but also to thrive in an evolving digital economy. Metaverse and Web3 are shaping the next generation of the web, which will be the internet of values with enriched digital functions and customer experience.
Our annual MIT Digital Technology and Strategy Conference will explore MIT’s latest research and its implications for the enterprise. MIT faculty, startups, and industry executives will offer their insights with a focus on the frontier of new digital technologies, such as digital twins, AI/ML, VR/AR, metaverse, synthetic realities, blockchain, Web3 for enterprise, synthetic data, cybersecurity and cloud data tools. The conference will cover new strategic insights and advice on key performance measurement and optimization, digital value capture, platform business models, and positive-sum automation, etc., in digital business transformation. We will also discuss how digital technology and strategy can enable us to realize ESG and net-zero emissions.
This conference will offer networking opportunities with top MIT researchers and industry representatives.
Special Offering for ILP Members
In-person conference registrants are encouraged to attend our pre-conference workshop on October 11th from 1:30-5:30 PM. This free in-person workshop is organized in collaboration with MIT Professional Education and will feature leading MIT researchers and instructors Bruce Cameron, Blade Kotelly, and Abel Sanchez, who will share insights and strategies for driving digital transformation and innovation across the enterprise.
The workshop requires a separate registration. For more information and to register, please visit this page. Space is limited; register now.
Conference Registration Fee
John Roberts has been Executive Director of MIT Corporate Relations (Interim) since February 2022. He obtained his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at MIT and returned to the university after a 20-year career in the pharmaceutical industry, joining the MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) in 2013. Prior to his return, John worked at small, medium, and large companies, holding positions that allowed him to exploit his passions in synthetic chemistry, project leadership, and alliance management while growing his responsibilities for managing others, ultimately as a department head. As a program director at MIT, John built a portfolio of ILP member companies, mostly in the pharmaceutical industry and headquartered in Japan, connecting them to engagement opportunities in the MIT community. Soon after returning to MIT, John began to lead a group of program directors with a combined portfolio of 60-80 global companies. In his current role, John oversees MIT Corporate Relations which houses ILP and MIT Startup Exchange.
Dr. Rong is Director of Corporate Relations at MIT. He currently supervises a group of ILP officers who promote and manage the interactions and relationships between the research at MIT and companies worldwide, particularly in greater China and extended Asian countries, to help them stay abreast of the latest developments in technology and business practices.
Previously, Dr. Rong founded IKA, LLC. He has led corporate development and product innovation, and provided strategic advices to companies in corporate strategy, IT leadership, digital transformation, AI, enterprise content management, and customer relationship. He held senior roles in Harte-Hanks and Vignette Corporation. He held an EU postdoctoral research fellowship in the University of Edinburgh in Scotland where he started global collaborative research.
Dr. Rong is on the board of multiple organizations, including 128CUTE since 2005 and MIT Sloan Alumni Association of Boston from 2009 to 2012. He chaired MIT Sloan CIO Symposium from 2009-2011. He is a senior expert invited by international organizations.
Dr. Rong holds a M.B.A. in global and innovation leadership from the MIT Sloan School of Management and Ph.D in numerical computing from University of Guelph in Canada.
Federico is Executive Vice President of Design at Samsung Electronics. He heads the Samsung Design Innovation Center (SDIC) in San Francisco CA Next-Generation Experience Planning Team in Seoul and Experience and Insights teams within Samsung Research. Federico leads global multidisciplinary teams in the USA Asia and Europe to design new generation of experiences and envision future products. As a designer innovator and social scientist he focuses on the impact of networked digital technologies on human behavior and society and designs products services and meaningful experiences to improves people’s lives. Before joining Samsung Federico was an Associate Professor of the Practice at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology teaching at MIT and MIT Media Lab. He also founded and directed the MIT Design Lab and the MIT Mobile Experience Lab. He previously worked at Motorola Inc. and Philips Design envisioning and creating innovative product experiences. He has been awarded honorary professorships at the Glasgow School of Art University of Glasgow and the Jiangnan University School of Design in Wuxi China. He has published several scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals along with books and articles and he has won several awards for his design and innovation work. Federico earned the PhD degree in Sociology of Culture and Communication from the Sorbonne University Paris V with a focus on mediated communication and social interaction in networked communities and smart cities.
Federico Casalegno will discuss the evolution of interaction in digital environments, including the promises of the Metaverse, virtual and augmented reality, digital twins, and ambient computing, among others. He will presents ideas about the future of interaction, and how the design of Synthetic Realities will be the next big challenge to craft innovation for human benefits.
Metaverse and Synthetic Realities, are not about mere technologies. We are designing new powerful hybrid human environment that support social interaction. And the future of interaction will require that we shift our thinking beyond simple interaction with a single device or service to design interaction with a constellation of devices, ecosystem of services and connected learning systems who proactively takes autonomous decisions.
In these new digital environments, before focusing products and technologies, we need to focus on the experiences that we want to have in these new spaces. Today we have the opportunity to design a humanity-centered Metaverse with purpose, good for humans and the planet.
John Williams holds a BA in Physics from Oxford University, a MS in Physics from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in Numerical Methods from University of Wales, Swansea. His research focuses on the application of large-scale computation to problems in cyber-physical security and energy. He is director of MIT’s Geospatial Data Center and from 2006-2012, was Director of the MIT Auto-ID Laboratory, where the Internet of Things was invented. He is author or co-author of over 250 journal and conference papers, as well as the books on Rock Mechanics and RFID Technology. He contributed to the 2013 report for the UK Office for Science Foresight Project- The Future of Manufacturing. Alongside Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, he was named as one of the 50 most powerful people in Computer Networks. He consults to companies including Accenture, Schlumberger, Shell, Total, Exxon, SAP Research, Microsoft Research, Kajima Corp, US Lincoln Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, Motorola, Phillip-Morris Inc., Ford Motor Company, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Total, and ARAMCO. His international collaborations include Oxford and Cambridge Universities, HKUST, KACST, Alfaisal University, PolyU Hong Kong, Imperial College of Science and Technology UK, Malaysia University of Science and Technology (MUST), and Masdar Institute of Science and Technology Abu Dhabi. He organized the first Cyber-Physical Security Conference in the UK (2011), and along with Dr. Sanchez, he runs the MIT Applied Cyber Security Professional Education summer course. At MIT, he teaches courses Architecting Software Systems (MIT 1.125) and Engineering Computation and Data Science (MIT 1.00/1.001). .
In data engineering and data science, early work included simulation of Ford's global network, and analysis of SAP smart grid billing system. For Altria, he analyzed the performance of item level tagging and also their implementation of an anti-counterfeiting system using the Electronic Product Code (EPC)
In password security, Dr. Williams was a PI that developed the algorithms for a negative password authentication system for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) agency.
Dr. Williams advises companies in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
Dr. Williams affiliations include:
Last year I was really pleased that I could load a 1 million row table into a Pandas DataFrame on my Mac. This year I could rip through a 12 billion row table in a couple of seconds using Google’s BigQuery. That’s a 10,000 times improvement in one year. Oh, and it cost me nothing. So what’s the problem? Why are companies still struggling with their Digital Transformations? Why is there no silver bullet? In this talk, we’ll look at the modern data stack offerings on AWS, Google, Azure, Databricks, and Snowflake and talk about why other companies, such as dbt, Fivetran, Confluent and Apollo solve problems with your APIs and data pipelines. We’ll see that ultimately its still a “people problem” and that our experience with DevOps, LeanDevOps and Agile teams show that C2 Command and Control is giving way to other organizational structures that leverage SO, Self-Organization, and our knowledge of Complex Adaptive Systems.
Ben Armstrong is the executive director of MIT’s Industrial Performance Center. His research and teaching examine how workers, firms, and regions adapt to technological change. In his work, Ben has collaborated with governments, non-profit organizations, and firms to understand how scholarship and education can be useful to practitioners and policymakers. Previously, he worked for Google Inc. and served on the board of an open-source hardware non-profit. Ben received his PhD from MIT.
What firms gain from automation in productivity, they often risk losing in flexibility. When firms make this tradeoff, we call it zero-sum automation. But this doesn’t have to be the case. How technologies are designed, who is involved in implementing them, and the ways that organizations define success can all shape the eventual impact that automation technology has. There’s an emerging set of technologies and management approaches that can enable firms to automate flexibly. This presentation focuses on how lower-code programming interfaces, bottom-up approaches to integrating new technologies, and a new way of thinking about the role of automation within the firm can contribute to automation that improves productivity and flexibility. These ideas are part of MIT’s Work of the Future initiative, an applied research, and education program to understand how employees and organizations make technology work in practice. As part of the initiative, MIT researchers partner with organizations to learn the problems they aim to solve with new technologies, the challenges they face in deploying them, and the consequences for their workers, customers, and society.
Catarina has been working with the Cambridge/Boston startup ecosystem for over 10 years and joined Corporate Relations with a solid network in the innovation and entrepreneurial community. Prior to MIT, she was part of the team that designed and launched the startup accelerator IUL MIT Portugal, which was later rebranded as Building Global Innovators. She was based in Lisbon and worked in direct relation with the Cambridge team. She held positions including Operations Coordinator, Program Manager, and Business Developer. The accelerator soon achieved steady growth in large part due to the partnerships that Catarina led with regional and global startup ecosystems. After that, she worked at NECEC, leading a program that connects cleantech startups and industry. In this role, she developed and built a pipeline of startups and forged strong relationships with both domestic and European companies. She has also held positions in Portugal and France, including at Saboaria e Perfumaria Confiança and L’Oréal as Technical Director and Pharmacist. Catarina earned her bachelor's in chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences in Portugal. She went on to earn her Master of Engineering for Health and Medicines in France.
Vishal (‘Vish’) is the CEO and co-founder of SoWork - the 'Workplace Metaverse' - founded at Harvard's iLab. SoWork started off as a more human way for his team to internally communicate, and now Fortune 10 companies and thousands of companies and startups alike enter the SoWork Metaverse to work, socialize, build communities, and host events. Besides being a CEO, Vishal is a medical doctor, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs, a Mentor at the Oxford Foundry, and Alumni Advisor at MassChallenge Boston. In his prior life, Vish worked at the World Health Organization in Geneva and became one of the highest-rated Teaching Fellows at Khan Academy in Health and Medicine. Vish likes traveling, playing video games and hockey, and building things with smart people.
Lucas Liebenwein is Tech Lead and Principal Research Scientist at OmniML, focusing on enabling efficient AI for all.OmniML empowers users to design, optimize, shrink, and deploy advanced machine-learning models to resource-constrained hardware devices, focusing on mobile, automotive, robotics, and IoT applications.
Before joining OmniML, Lucas received his SM and Ph.D. in computer science from CSAIL, where he worked with Prof. Daniela Rus on algorithms for efficient deep learning. His research interests lie in theoretical and practical algorithms for neural network pruning, architecture search, and other ways to improve the inference time efficiency of neural networks. Previously, Lucas was a research intern at Tesla and nuTonomy (now Aptiv/Motional), researching algorithms on motion planning for self-driving cars, as well as a research consultant for Neural Magic.
Elaheh Ahmadi is a co-founder and CEO of Themis AI. She received her BSc and MEng in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Ahmadi and her peers at MIT CSAIL spun-off Themis AI with the vision to bring fair AI into the industry. Themis AI is a leader in providing high-performance and risk-robust AI solutions — identifying and tackling bias, uncertainty, and other real-world generalization challenges.
Carter Prince has spent his career working throughout the lifecycle of healthcare data. PriortoSyntegra, he led strategic partnerships at Aetion, building their data partner network, now a keyaspect of their value proposition and strategy. At Epic Systems, he held multiple leadership rolesincluding leading the development and initial implementation product for pharmacy inventorymanagement. At Janssen Pharmaceuticals, he designed data-basedpatient engagement tools andhelped redesign their EHR decision support strategy. Carter also brings expertise from the investmentside, having worked with both Flare Capital Partners and Symphony AI. As an investment associate atSymphonyAI, he partneredwith the fund’s managing partner to create their initial healthcareinvestment thesis leading to acquisitions that became Concert AI.
Ms. Cardello has over 27 years’ experience in senior leadership roles in global sales, marketing, and supplier relations within the professional imaging, print and packaging, branding, market research, and consulting industries in both B2B and B2C environments.
Max Kleiman-Weiner is Co-Founder and CEO of Common Sense Machines, an AI startup building agents that learn to simulate the world. Inspired by how children learn, we are building Real-to-Sim, a machine learning system for autonomously building models of everyday objects, spaces, and agents directly from sensor inputs. Our models are used for flexible robotic planning, perception, and reasoning and serve as the grounding for common sense understanding. Max was previously a fellow at Harvard in the Data Science Institute and Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS). He completed a Ph.D. in Computational Cognitive Science at MIT advised by Josh Tenenbaum where he was an NSF and Hertz Foundation Fellow. His thesis won the Robert J. Glushko Prize for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation. Max was also Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Diffeo, a collaborative machine intelligence startup that grew to 22 people and was acquired by Salesforce in 2019. Before all that he was a Fulbright Fellow in Beijing, earned an MSc in Statistics as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, and did his undergraduate work at Stanford as a Goldwater Scholar.
Dr. Piali De is a Brown University-educated physicist, who has driven ground-breaking innovation in the Defense Industrial Base Sector for the United States Department of Defense and is presently transforming chronic care delivery in the Digital Healthcare Industry. Dr. De co-founded the Technology company Senscio Systems in 2010, a digital health company with a mission to give older adults the power to age comfortably and independently at home. Senscio developed the nation’s first AI-powered home-to-clinic digital therapeutics platform, Ibis™, and launched its flagship consumer offering, Ibis Health, in 2018. Ibis Health is a fully comprehensive virtual health care service for the daily management of multiple chronic diseases. Enabled by technology and an expert Clinical team to support individuals and their Primary care physicians along the continuum of care.
Dr. Chad Spensky is a lifetime hacker with over 10 years of research experience and a vendetta against cumbersome security solutions. He is currently the founder and CEO of Allthenticate, a cybersecurity company that is changing the way that humans interact with their world by offering a single smartphone-based solution for both physical access control and digital authentication. Chad has over 10 years of research experience and has numerous academic publications in top conferences. Formerly, he was a member of the technical research staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he helped them solve some of the Department of Defense's toughest cyber-security problems. Chad received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is also a recipient of the prestigious IBM Ph.D. Fellowship. In addition to his academic credentials, Chad has some serious hacking clout. His hacking career started in his teenage years and has taken him to compete in some of the world's best capture the flag tournaments around the world as a member of the Shellphish hacking team. His unique blend of hacking knowledge and academic rigor make him particularly well-suited to solve complex real-world cybersecurity problems, like authentication.
Dr. Andy Wang is the founder and CEO of Prescient, a Boston-based technology startup that builds next-generation edge data transformation software and systems. Prior to Prescient, he was the co-founder and CTO of GTI IoT Technology, which developed low-power wireless sensing solutions for industrial and smart-city applications. Dr. Wang received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
SoWork | OmniML | Themis AI | Syntegra | Ennoventure | Common Sense Machines (CSM) | Senscio Systems | Allthenticate | Prescient Devices
Startups at Lunch Exhibit Only
Dr. Peter Lohse joined the Office of Corporate Relations (OCR) in October 2018 as Program Director.
Lohse comes to OCR with deep and broad knowledge and expertise in the pharma, biotech, and other life sciences-driven industries including agro, nutrition, chemical, and consumer products. As a scientist and entrepreneur, he has an extensive background developing business and managing partnerships with large corporations, early-stage companies, academia, and non-profit organizations. Most recently, Lohse was V.P, Operations and Business Development for InnovaTID Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge. Before that, he was a Strategy Consultant for Eutropics Pharmaceuticals, an emerging biotech company in Cambridge.
Prior to this, Dr. Lohse was Director, Scientific Operations & Innovation Program Director for Eli-Lilly’s open innovation platform, InnoCentive, Inc. in Waltham. Earlier in his career, he held positions with increasing responsibility at ArQule of Woburn, Phylos in Lexington, and Novartis Pharma in Switzerland.
Lohse earned his M.S., Chemistry & Applied Sciences and his Ph.D., Organic Chemistry at Federal institute of Technology (ETH) in Switzerland. He earned his M.B.A., Strategy, Finance, Marketing as a Sloan Fellow at MIT. He also held the position Research Fellow, Molecular Biology at Harvard Medical School - Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston (with Professor J. Szostak, Nobel Prize 2009), This was a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship -- In vitro selection of functional RNAs.
Michael Schrage is a research fellow with the MIT Sloan School of Management's Initiative on the Digital Economy. His research, writing, and advisory work focuses on the behavioral economics of models, prototypes, and metrics as strategic resources for managing innovation risk and opportunity. He is author of the award-winning book The Innovator’s Hypothesis (MIT Press, 2014), Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become? (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), and Serious Play (Harvard Business Review Press, 2000). His latest book, Recommendation Engines, was published in September 2020 by MIT Press as part of its Essential Knowledge series. He's done consulting and advisory work for Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, British Telecom, BP, Siemens, Embraer, Google, iRise, the Office of Net Assessment, and other organizations
Schrage has run design workshops and executive education programs on innovation, experimentation, and strategic measurement for organizations all over the world and is currently pioneering work in selvesware technologies designed to augment aspects, attributes, and talents of productive individuals. He is particularly interested in the future co-evolution of expertise, advice, and human agency as technologies become smarter than the people using them.
This brief talk describes a research and innovation trajectory combining digital instrumentation, machine learning and portfolio management to redefine how organizations measure and manage key performance. Drawing on the insight that ‘KPIs’ and other metrics can be recast as ’software agents,’ this talk suggests that successful ‘digital transformations’ will be organized around the measures that matter most. This disruptive shift poses unique risks and opportunities for leaderships and boards alike.
Patrick Sheridan is the Global Head of Digital Sustainability at Syngenta Group, leading Syngenta’s efforts to develop and commercialize digital technologies for sustainable agriculture. On a mission to realize opportunities where digital, sustainability, and business meet, his focus areas are climate action, biodiversity improvement, and farmland restoration. Leading up to his current position, he worked in commercial, and IT functions at startups and corporations in the agriculture industry. Patrick holds a master’s degree in agricultural economics and modeled sustainable land use systems for his Ph.D. Based in beautiful Switzerland, he enjoys spending time with friends and family, outdoor activities, and meeting new people around the world.
Mak is a seasoned Product Strategy professional advising globally dispersed high-caliber teams on a breadth of business and technology challenges spanning IoT, Semiconductors, Energy and Sustainability. At Schneider Electric, he oversees the EcoStruxure IoT Platform strategy spanning sensors, edge and cloud including emerging technologies (low-power WAN, digital twins, metaverse, 5G) and connectivity standards (Zigbee, Matter, Thread). Mak has held leadership roles across startups, corporations and standards organizations and is a regular speaker and active contributor to thought leadership activities. He has a BS and MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering and an MBA from Northwestern Kellogg School of Management. Based outside Boston, Mak enjoys family time, running, and trying out new cuisines during his travels.
Gregory Norris Directs SHINE (the Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise) at MIT, where his research focuses on advancing and applying methods for Net Positive sustainability: creation and assessment of positive social and environmental “handprints” that exceed the actor’s footprints. Greg teaches Life Cycle Assessment at Harvard.
Dr. Norris co-founded and is Director of Science at Earthster.org, a web-based platform democratizing LCA. He served as Chief Scientist with the International Living Future Institute, where he helped design, launch, and advance the Living Product Challenge. In 1996 he founded Sylvatica, which applied and advanced LCA methods and tools through 2010. Dr. Norris founded the non-profit New Earth in 2003 to promote collaboration between industry and civil society on community-driven sustainable development at a global level. In 2015 he co-founded NewEarth B, a public benefit corporation scaling the Handprinter platform for positive environmental and social impacts.
Marcelo Lu serves as Senior Vice President, Care Chemicals North America at BASF Corporation. He assumed this role in January 2021, overseeing eight manufacturing sites, four laboratories, and a team of over 650 people that serve our customers. In this role, Marcelo leads the strategic and operational performance of the Care Chemicals business that serves customers in the Home Care, Personal Care, Agrochemical Additives, and Industrial markets. Key responsibilities include customer relationships, operational excellence and innovation, and collaborating with teams globally to meet the needs of the North American market. Marcelo joined BASF in 2006 and has held various commercial and general management positions in Germany, Hong Kong, Canada, and the U.S. Marcelo then held regional business management positions in Asia in the textile, packaging, and automotive markets. Prior to BASF, Marcelo held several consulting positions at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank. He is a Steering Committee member for the Commercial and Sales PDP Program and the P&G NA Customer Network Executive Sponsor. Before joining Care Chemicals North America, Marcelo served as Managing Director of BASF Canada. In this role, he put a spotlight on BASF as a sustainability leader in Canada through driving thought leadership, promoting a circular economy, and advocating innovation, digitalization, and smart regulation for sustainable solutions in Canadian business. Marcelo holds a Bachelor of Science Degree from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.) and executive education from INSEAD. Marcelo is passionate about archery, swimming, spinning, and traveling. In his free time, he enjoys the company of his daughter and son and is trying to be a fun dad.
Eric Bergemann is Senior Director of Executive Programs at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he oversees a portfolio of non-degree executive programs. He has worked with firms in the fields of energy, pharmaceuticals/life science, mobility, high technology, banking/finance, and consumer products. Bergemann is active in business development, and is the Executive Education capability development leader in Program & Instructional Design Methodology and Improvement. In 2009, he received the MIT Sloan Appreciation Team Award.
Before becoming the Chief Strategy Officer at McFadyen Digital, Peter Evans was a Managing Partner at the Platform Strategy Institute, a consultancy dedicated to management strategy and application of platform business models across a wide range of sectors. Dr. Evans has over 20 years of experience leading teams in identifying, framing, assessing, and communicating high-priority marketplace trends and disruptions that support business planning and investment prioritization. He has specialized in helping companies see around corners, anticipate key market trends, and craft seminal thought leadership that framed major multi-year growth initiatives.
At KPMG, he was a Partner in the Innovation and Enterprise Solution group responsible market and emerging technology sensing, innovation portfolio management and business development. To support the firm's intelligent automation strategy, he led a major study of how the world's largest enterprises are adopting artificial intelligence.
Prior to joining KPMG, Dr. Evans was Vice President at the Center for Global Enterprise a nonprofit established by Sam Palmisano, former Chairman and CEO of IBM. He was instrumental in framing and delivering on the Center’s research, business education, and global CEO engagements.
Previously, Dr. Evans held key strategy and market intelligence roles at General Electric. He was the lead author of GE's seminal white paper 'Industrial Internet: Pushing the Boundaries of Minds and Machines," which articulated the macro trends behind GE's shift to a 'digital industrial' enterprise and led to the establishment of Predix.
He also worked as an independent consultant for a variety of corporate and government clients, including the US Department of Energy, the OECD, and the World Bank.
He received his master's degree and Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an International Academy of Management Fellow. He is the co-chair of the MIT Platform Strategy Summit and the Founder of MusicTech Connect in Atlanta.
A shift to a more decentralized, blockchain-based internet will have important implications for the enterprise. The next phase of the internet, often referred to as Web3, will require adapting to a shifting external environment. Changes to customer identity and data sovereignty will have important implicants for marketing, product design and data analytics. Web3 will also require internal adjustments. These changes include developing new business processes that are more on-chain and involve new technologies like NFTs, the Metavserse, and tokenized digital twins. A shift from static to dynamic certificates will change internal training and development in ways that will incentives and reward continuous learning. In short, web3 will create a new enterprise frontier, requiring a new wave of innovation and investment to keep pace.
Stephanie Woerner is a Research Scientist at the Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Stephanie is an expert on how companies use technology and data to create more effective business models and her research centers on how companies manage organizational change caused by the digitization of the economy. In 2016, she was a subject matter expert on enterprise digitization for the Wall Street Journal CEO Council Conference. She has a passion for measuring hard-to-assess digital factors such as connectivity and customer experience, and linking them to firm performance. Recent articles (with Peter Weill) include "Thriving in an Increasingly Digital Ecosystem,” and “Is Your Company Ready for a Digital Future?”, in Sloan Management Review. Stephanie is the coauthor, with Peter, of What’s Your Digital Business Model? Six questions to help you build the next generation enterprise, (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018).
As the world rapidly digitizes, companies are racing to first create new value from digital and then capture that value from digital in their financial performance. A digital economy not only creates opportunities for many companies but also erects barriers to those that can’t adapt fast enough, putting the viability of existing business models at stake. The goal of a digital business transformation is to improve customer experience and be more efficient – we call the companies that have learned to do both simultaneously and consistently future-ready. In this presentation, Stephanie will describe the four pathways a company can take in its digital transformation to future-ready and what needs to be done to enable companies to capture and accumulate new digital value.
Jon Kim joined Corporate Relations in February 2022 as Program Director.
Jon comes to Corporate Relations with extensive experience in managing business and product development, and partnership with Korean and Asian companies.
Prior to MIT, Jon worked for several technology companies (Entegris, Amazon Alexa, Brooks Automation, Nuance Communications, VoiceSignal Technologies) leading product development and partnership with Korean and Asian companies in semiconductor, AI, voice assistant, mobile, robotics industry.
Before coming to US, Jon was Commercial Specialist at the US Embassy in Seoul (US Department of Commerce, Foreign Commercial Service). There he developed market entry and business strategies for US technology, energy, and automotive companies, and conducted market research and partner alliance programs. Jon also resolved many regulatory issues working with both Korean and US government agencies, for US automotive companies to increase sales in Korea significantly.
Jon earned his B.A. in Public Administration at the Yonsei University in Seoul, and his MBA at the University of Michigan.
Devavrat Shah is Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of AI and Decisions at MIT where he is currently the faculty director of Deshpande Center for Technology Innovation as well as founding director of Statistics and Data Science Center. His research focuses on algorithms for Statistics and Machine Learning. He is a Kavli Fellow of National Academy of Sciences, distinguished alumni of his alma mater IIT Bombay. Previously he co-founded retail analytics start-up Celect which is now part of Nike since 2019. Currently, he is focused on making AI functionalities accessible. Towards that, he co-founded Ikigai Labs in 2019 with the mission of enabling the use of AI with the ease of spreadsheets.
Physical to digital transformation has led to the rise of business “data operators”: individuals in organizations, from the ground level to the C-suite, who are using data as their primary “sensors” to run mission-critical operations. The day-to-day workflow of such a data biz operator requires accessing data from multiple sources, "stitching" them together, extracting current status as well as insights, making decisions and communicating to the downstream task in a collaborative manner. While there are a number of tools for data analysts, data scientists and data engineers, the tool-set for data operators has been absent and subsequently leading to widespread reliance on spreadsheets.
In this talk, we shall discuss how AI-native cloud-data platform can enable such data operators to "program" their biz ops seamlessly. We shall discuss how AI can enables stitching disparate data sources seamlessly with human-in-the-loop workflows. We shall also discuss the opportunities that can be realized by recent advances in causal inference and reinforcement learning for "what if" scenario analysis.
Adam Chlipala has been on the faculty in computer science at MIT since 2011. He did his undergrad at Carnegie Mellon and his PhD at Berkeley, and his research focuses on clean-slate redesign of computer-systems infrastructure, typically taking advantage of machine-checked proofs of functional correctness. Much of his work uses the Coq proof assistant, about which he has written a popular book, "Certified Programming with Dependent Types." He most enjoys finding opportunities for drastic simplification over incumbent abstractions in computer systems, and some favorite tools toward that end are object-capability systems, transactions, proof-carrying code, and high-level languages with whole-program optimizing compilers. Some projects particularly far along the real-world-adoption curve are Fiat Cryptography, for proof-producing generation of low-level cryptographic code, today run by Chrome for most HTTPS connections; and Ur/Web, a production-quality domain-specific language for Web applications.
Most of cybersecurity at today's typical large corporation is reactive: we accept that the computer systems we deploy will be riddled with security vulnerabilities, so we focus on rapid response as individual issues are discovered. It's a cutthroat arms race against bad actors, who work to find new vulnerabilities as quickly as we can patch them. The venerable idea of formal verification offers a more principled solution: if we can build our systems alongside mathematical proofs of security, then we get out of the business of being surprised by specific vulnerabilities. The 21st century has actually seen very good progress on real-world realization of this idea, and I will give some examples from my work at MIT CSAIL, including our Fiat Cryptography project, which is used by all major web browsers to provide proved-correct code for cryptographic arithmetic. I will also explain the bigger-picture promise and remaining challenges of related technology.
Dr. Anthony is Associate Director of MIT.nano, Faculty Lead for the Industry Immersion Program in Mechanical Engineering, and Co-Director of the MIT Clinical Research Center. With over 25 years’ experience in product realization—Dr. Anthony won an Emmy (from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) in broadcast technical innovation—Dr. Anthony designs instruments and techniques to monitor and control physical systems. His work involves systems analysis and design and calling upon mechanical, electrical, and optical engineering, along with computer science and optimization, to create solutions.
The focus of Dr. Anthony’s research is computational instrumentation—the design of instruments and techniques to measure and control complex physical systems. His research includes the development of instrumentation and measurement solutions for manufacturing systems and medical diagnostics and imaging systems. In addition to his academic work, he has extensive experience in market-driven technology innovation, product realization, and business entrepreneurship and commercialization at the intersection between information technology and advanced manufacturing. His teaching interests include the modelling of large-scale systems in a wide variety of decision-making domains and the development of optimization algorithms and software for analyzing and designing such systems. He has extensive experience in market-driven technology innovation as well as business entrepreneurship.
Digital technologies are changing the world, the way we live, manufacture, and learn!
You are likely familiar with digital technologies in the home. Voice technology assistants, thermostats, light bulbs, robotic vacuum systems. These devices collect data using sensors to perform tasks and provide automated responses to changing conditions.
New types of Computation, enable new opportunities in the manufacturing and process controls industry. New types of Displays, Sensors, and Algorithms… these digital technologies serve to help automate and improve manufacturing processes and to bring better products to market faster and cheaper! Smart technologies perform similar tasks on the factory floor, monitoring processes, troubleshooting on-the-fly, monitoring the condition of the factory, worker, and supply chain.
Similarly, digital technologies are changing the way that humans monitor their personal health.
We explore concepts driving the digitalization of manufacturing and healthcare -- the convergence of automation, data analytics and machine learning from the machine to the supply chain, from the individual to the health-care system. We will explore cases that will help you innovate now and in the future.
Dr. Cagri Hakan Zaman, is the Director of MIT Virtual Experience Design Lab and a Lecturer of Design and Computation at the Department of Architecture. His interdisciplinary research focuses on understanding human spatial experiences in physical and virtual spaces, and the development of immersive media tools for design and engineering. His dissertation "Spatial Experience in Humans and Machines" offers a novel approach to spatial experience from a story-understanding perspective. Dr. Zaman has extensive research experience in artificial intelligence, immersive media, and computational design. Before founding MIT Virtual Experience Design Lab, he conducted research at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT Media Lab, and MIT Design Lab. A recipient of the MIT DesignX challenge grant in 2017, Dr. Zaman founded Mediate, a Sommerville-based research and innovation laboratory, which develops AI and XR solutions that empower people in physical spaces. His project Supersense, an AI-powered mobile application for visually impaired and blind individuals, has been considered among the top assistive technology solutions and supported by National Science Foundation and US Veteran Affairs. He holds a Ph.D. (2020), Master of Science in Architecture Studies (2014), and Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (2014) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, B.Arch (2009), and a Master of Science in Architectural Design Computing (2011) from Istanbul Technical University.
Originally introduced in a sci-fi novel, the term Metaverse has become a popular term in recent years to describe infinitely many possibilities brought forward by emerging technologies of virtual and augmented reality, high speed networking, and blockchain technology. You are probably familiar with the promise that you will soon teleport to any place you want –real or imaginary- with a click of a button, and meet with your friends and colleagues as if they are just across the room. The idea of metaverse comes with a lot of fantasies and hype just like these. How much of these are actually true and impactful? How should we design these digital immersive spaces and integrate them to the physical space? We study and develop immersive media technologies that tackle these questions. Putting the human factor to the center, we explore many exciting futures such as remote training and maintenance, human- AI collaborative spaces, intelligence augmentation, and more.