Sponsors
Join the MIT Industrial Liaison Program for the 2019 MIT Startup Showcase Tokyo centered around Fintech, Digital Transformation, and AI. As more and more interactions move and live online, financial institutions especially have an opportunity to apply AI and digital transformation to their business to provide customers with better products and services. But the big question is how can businesses best integrate fintech for digital transformation? What can an organization gain from utilizing AI in their daily operations? From fraud and risk analysis and forecasting, to algorithmic trading, customer support, and more, the opportunities are endless with the right infrastructure and right data.
Keiji Yano is a program director at MIT Corporate Relations and associate director of MIT-ILP, Japan in Tokyo. He has been associated with the office since September 2008 and has been enjoying connecting Japanese ILP member companies with the MIT community since then. He has been always fascinated by the risks companies are willing to take to make an impact in society.
Prior to joining the ILP, Yano managed his own consulting company while he was a visiting researcher at the MIT Whitehead Institute for three years. Prior to that, he was the technical area manager for the Asia/Pacific region at Coventor, an MIT-connected startup software company developing MEMS. While at Coventor he established many relationships with companies from all over the world. He provided services to help companies design and build prototypes for new devices or products. He started his career as a process engineer in the basic design group from concept design to preoperation test of the Nuclear Waste plant project for Tokai #2 Nuclear Power Plant in Japan.
He holds a B.S. in science and technology from Nihon University and Ph.D. in Fluid Dynamics in Aerospace Engineering from the Ohio State University.
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.
Senior Advisor for Blockchain Opportunities, Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) MIT Media Laboratory
Michael Casey is a senior advisor at the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative and a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. He and his colleagues are seeking to build awareness around digital currencies and their underlying blockchain technology, helping shape scholarship around the topic and exploring dedicated research projects that use this emerging technology to achieve social impact goals.
Before joining MIT, Michael was a senior columnist covering global finance at The Wall Street Journal, where he culminated a two-decade career in print journalism that spanned various roles and stints on five continents. He also hosted online TV shows for WSJ Live and frequently appeared on various networks as a commentator, including CNBC, CNN, Fox Business, and the BBC. He recently revived his involvement with media, taking on a role as Chairman of the Advisory Board at blockchain news outlet CoinDesk and this year founded his own media company, Streambed Media, which focuses on themes of innovation and society.
Michael is the author of five books on the digital economy and Internet culture. In 2015, he and co-author Paul Vigna published the critically acclaimed The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order and three years later published its sequel, The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything. He has also collaborated with documentary filmmakers on the same topic and is frequently called on to speak about these issues at conferences and other public events.
Michael has written three other books: The Social Organism: A Radical Understanding of Social Media to Transform Your Business and Life, which he co-wrote with social media entrepreneur Oliver Luckett, The Unfair Trade: How our Broken Global Financial System Destroys the Middle Class, an analysis of the global dimensions of the 2008 financial crisis, and Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image, about the famous photo of Ernesto "Che" Guevara by Alberto Korda.
A native of Perth, Australia, Michael is a graduate of the University of Western in Australia and has higher degrees from Cornell University and Curtin University.
As once-trusted institutions are ever more brazenly compromised, Casey lays out a case for blockchain, citing its potential to restore control over data, assets, and personal identities; disrupt industries from finance and tech to legal and shipping; and grant billions of people access to the global economy.
Mr. Ogata was born in 1952, joined Japanese National Railways (JNR) in 1974 and afterwards was assigned to East Japan Railway Company (JR East) when JNR was divided and privatised in 1987. In JR East, after he held various management positions, he joined the Board of Directors as Director of Transport and Rolling Stock Dept. in 2002. From 2008 to 2011, as Executive Vice President and Head of Railway Operations Headquarters, he held the full responsibility to operate safely and reliably the entire railway network. As Vice Chairman of JR East since June 2011, he has been driving open technological innovation and open globalisation onward to enhance quality and variety of the overall business domain of JR East.
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.
We have access to all sorts of data that can help make better decisions: financial transactions data for compliance, customer data for better serving them, human resources and organizational data for efficiency, product data for improving quality and more. Currently, the process of data driven decisions using AI involves messy data engineering and annoying data cleaning followed by ingenious modeling and predictions, and if possible pie-in-the-sky "what if analysis.'' In this talk, I will present a new approach to achieve all of this within clicks driven by AI. In short, anyone in the organization who can use Excel, should be able to use AI to make data driven decisions. We will go through examples including financial audits, email marketing, claims processing involving unstructured data and efficiently manage supply chain to name a few.
Nick Meyer is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, Senior Lecturer at MIT, and Chief Product Officer at Relativity6. He is a serial co-founder having been the lead engineer for software companies across several industries.
The predictive power of AI and ML continues to grow, but if the humans on the front line of your organization can’t do anything with the predictions nothing is going to change. In Operationalizing AI we talk about the framework we use at Relativity6 to make sure we ask the right questions early, so humans and AI work together to drastically increase revenue and operational creativity.
Jewan John Bae comes to MIT Corporate Relations with more than 20 years of experience in the specialty chemicals and construction industries. He facilitates fruitful relationships between MIT and the industry, engaging with executive level managers to understand their business challenges and match them with resources within the MIT innovation ecosystem to help meet their business objectives.
Bae’s areas of expertise include new product commercialization stage gate process, portfolio management & resource planning, and strategic planning. He has held various business leadership positions at W.R. Grace & Co., the manufacturer of high-performance specialty chemicals and materials, including Director of Strategic Planning & Process, Director of Sales in the Americas, and Global Strategic Marketing Director. Bae is a recipient of the US Army Commendation Medal in 1986.
MIT Startup Exchange actively promotes collaboration and partnerships between MIT-connected startups and industry. Qualified startups are those founded and/or led by MIT faculty, staff, or alumni, or are based on MIT-licensed technology. Industry participants are principally members of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP).
MIT Startup Exchange maintains a propriety database of over 1,700 MIT-connected startups with roots across MIT departments, labs and centers; it hosts a robust schedule of startup workshops and showcases, and facilitates networking and introductions between startups and corporate executives.
STEX25 is a startup accelerator within MIT Startup Exchange, featuring 25 “industry ready” startups that have proven to be exceptional with early use cases, clients, demos, or partnerships, and are poised for significant growth. STEX25 startups receive promotion, travel, and advisory support, and are prioritized for meetings with ILP’s 230 member companies.
MIT Startup Exchange and ILP are integrated programs of MIT Corporate Relations.
Karan Kashyap is cofounder and CEO at Posh, a Boston-based conversational AI startup focused on powering contextually aware bots for enterprises. Kashyap graduated from MIT with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in computer science, where his research focused on AI and natural language processing.
John Wass is CEO of Profit Isle. He is the former Senior Vice President of Staples and CEO of WaveMark, an RFID company recently acquired by Cardinal Health. Wass was also a key senior executive during Staples growth from three stores to over 1,000 nationwide. He is a graduate of Princeton and MIT.
Paul is the cofounder and CEO of dMetrics, a company that places AI in the hands of every business user. Paul leads dMetrics’ strategic development and oversees the company’s commercial efforts. Supported by a team of award-winning natural language processing (NLP) experts, dMetrics serves some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical, banking, and insurance firms. Prior to dMetrics, Paul has launched and led many projects in the field of Human Computer Interaction, in startups, at MIT, and in partnership with Fortune 500 companies. He is the author of 15 academic publications, 3 book chapters, as well as numerous musical compositions and interactive exhibits. His work has been exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Decordova Museum, and other venues. Paul received his doctorate from MIT, where he focused on machine learning and information retrieval with applications to audio, video, and text.
Arjun Mendhi is a leading media technology researcher and entrepreneur. As the CEO at MTonomy, he applies next-generation technologies to radically simplify core operations of the film, TV and entertainment industry—such as rights, content and financials/payments management. At MTonomy, he leads a team of engineers from MIT, and collaborates with digital media enterprises from across the world. Previously Arjun led product, technology, and business operations across organizations including Google and Danaher, completed his undergrad in computer science, and his MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Arun is CFO, investor, and early team member of Cerebri AI, an enterprise software company whose customer experience platform measures engagement and drives financial results for large enterprises in financial services, automotive, telecom, and travel sectors. Cerebri AI, with offices in Austin, Toronto, and Washington DC, is backed by M12 (Microsoft Ventures), is part of Mastercard’s Start Path program, and was named a 2019 Gartner Cool Vendor in AI for Customer Analytics. Prior to Cerebri AI, Arun was a partner at Virgo Capital, a private equity firm investing in software and services companies. He previously led design, analysis, and development of control systems and software for commercial and government satellite programs at Boeing. He is also a co-founder of Terrafugia, an aviation and automotive startup founded at MIT and acquired by Geely. Arun has an MBA from MIT Sloan, an MSc from Stanford, and a BSc from Illinois Tech. He is an author on three patents in the areas of machine learning and spacecraft control.
Abhi Yadav, Co-Founder and CEO of Zylotech is a passionate AI technologist who loves to solve problems and build products that sit at the intersection of data, decision-making, and marketing. He has worked with numerous enterprise brands across the retail, technology and financial industries over the last decade to solve their Customer 360 view & customer-tech category problems while building innovative products and teams. He is an engineer with an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management. A frequent speaker and writer on AI/ML, Customer Tech and Agile Marketing, follow him on LinkedIn or Twitter at @abhishekyd.
Zylotech is a Self Learning Customer Intelligence company, venture-backed enterprise software firm, also one of the Top 5 key vendors of the Customer Data Platform category, featured with numerous analyst firms including Gartner and Forrester including Forrester wave of CDP 2019.
Posh: Conversational AI with chatbots across multiple channels Profit Isle: Uncover hidden profits that are invisible to company dMetrics: AI based tracking of risk/opportunity for companies and brands Mtonomy: Modern operations platform for digital media Gataca: Decentralized Identity Technology for customer onboarding and compliance Cerebri AI: Customer loyalty analytics ZyloTech: Self Learning Customer Intelligence Relativity6: Customer retention with AI
FORUM8 provides VR solutions driven by its in-house developed Interactive 3D VR Simulation and Modeling software called VR Design Studio UC-win/Road that allows easy creation of a large virtual environment and driving simulation within, often integrated with many types of hardware including driving simulators with motion platform, and used as an integrated VR platform for research and development of autonomous driving technology, ADAS simulation, or concept visualization by automakers worldwide
FORUM8 continues its endeavor for active software development and invention to deliver expert VR solutions to construction and automotive industry and indeed the whole society, by incorporating into VR Design Studio the most advanced technologies to expand the software's versatility as well as its compatibility with AR, cloud, and emerging technologies including AI.