Speakers and instructors

Scott Bailey is the Head of Social Science Data and Software at Stanford Libraries, and a research developer in the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research. He collaborates and consults with faculty, staff, and students on projects in the humanities and computational social sciences, and teaches workshops on topics in digital research methods and tools, such as text analysis in both R and Python.

Workshop - Track 2 - Text

Emmanuelle Bermès is deputy director for services and networks at BnF since 2014. From 2003 to 2011, she worked at the National Library of France (BnF), first in digital libraries and digital preservation, then in metadata management. From 2011 to 2014, she was in charge of multimedia and digital services at the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France). In the course of her career, Emmanuelle has also held a number of responsibilities at the international level (Europeana, W3C, IFLA, IIPC and IIIF).

AI and Cultural Heritage, Lightning Talks I - Corpus
Workshop - Track 1 - Designing an AI Program / Designing an AI Project

Peter Broadwell is a Digital Scholarship Research Developer at the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research in the Stanford University Libraries, where his work applies machine learning and other methods of digital analysis to complex cultural data. Recent studies in which he has participated have involved automatic translation and indexing of folklore collections in multiple languages, as well as choreography detection in online video collections.

Workshop - Track 4 - Audio/Video

Svein Arne Brygfjeld has his education from the Arctic University in Tromsø Norway. He has worked in various industries like telecom and healthcare, and he has a long career at the National Library of Norway (NLN). At NLN he has worked on digital strategies, and he has been leading the development of NLNs digital library. He is now heading the AI-lab at NLN with a focus on application of AI in libraries, archives and museums.

AI and Cultural Heritage, Lightning Talks I - Nancy, Program Committee

Joanna J. Bryson is a researcher on the structure and dynamics of human-and-animal-like intelligence. Her research covering topics from artificial intelligence, through autonomy and robot ethics, and on to human cooperation has appeared in venues ranging from a reddit to Science. She holds degrees in Psychology from Chicago and Edinburgh, and Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh and MIT. She has additional professional research experience from Princeton, Oxford, Harvard, and LEGO, and technical experience in Chicago's financial industry, and international management consultancy. Bryson is currently a Reader in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath. She will be a Professor of Ethics and Technology at Hertie School in Berlin from February 1st, 2020.

Plenary session - Keynote speaker

Zuzana Bukovčiková is a PhD student at The Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at The Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, where she is part of a research group specialized in Machine learning. Her thesis is focused on content-based image search, with an emphasis on biometrics. She is currently working on software used for face recognition and subsequent metadata creation, indexing and searching over large scale image and video databases – both contemporary and historical.

Workshop - Track 3 - Images

Bryan Catanzaro is VP of Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, where he leads a team solving problems in fields ranging from video games to chip design using deep learning. Prior to his current role at NVIDIA, he worked at Baidu to create next generation systems for training and deploying end-to-end deep learning-based speech recognition.

Plenary session - Keynote speaker

Angèle Christin is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and affiliated faculty in the Sociology Department and Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. She studies how algorithms and analytics transform professional values, expertise, and work practices. Her book project, Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Meanings of Algorithms, focuses on the case of web journalism, analyzing the growing importance of audience data (‘clicks’) in web newsrooms in the U.S. and France. Angèle received her PhD in Sociology from Princeton University and the EHESS (Paris). She is an affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute.

Data Privacy and Ethics, Discussion

Nicole is Digital Research Architect for the Stanford University Libraries and Research Director for Humanities+Design, a research lab at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. Nicole works at the intersection of the digital library and digital scholarship as a lead architect in the design and development of practical research services. She is currently leading an initiative within the Library to identify and enact applications of artificial intelligence —machine perception, machine learning, machine reasoning, and language recognition— to make the collections of maps, photographs, manuscripts, data sets and other assets more easily discoverable, accessible, and analyzable.

Workshop - Track 1 - Designing an AI Program / Designing an AI Project, Program Committee

Quinn Dombrowski is the Academic Technology Specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University. Previously, she worked in Research IT at UC Berkeley, and in Academic Technologies at the University of Chicago. Her background is in Slavic linguistics and library and information science. She has written a book, Drupal for Humanists, published by Texas A&M Press as the first in the Coding for Humanists series, which she co-edits. 

Workshop - Track 2 - Text

Sandy Hervieux is the Liaison Librarian for Political Science, Religious Studies and Philosophy at McGill University. She graduated with an MLIS from McGill University in 2014. Her research interests include reference services, information literacy and the impact of artificial intelligence on user services.

Workshop - Track 1 - Designing an AI Program / Designing an AI Project

Ashley Jester is the Assistant Director of the Science & Engineering Libraries. She oversees the staff and operations of the Robin Li & Melissa Ma Science Library and the Terman Engineering Library. She has expertise in statistics, advanced research methods, and a variety of software packages and programming languages.

Data Privacy and Ethics, Discussion

Vanessa Kam is the head of Bowes Art & Architecture Library. Prior to returning to Stanford for her new role, she was Head Librarian of the University of British Columbia’s Music, Art and Architecture Library in Vancouver, Canada (2005–2016). Stanford veterans will remember Vanessa as Associate Art Librarian and Exhibits and Publications Manager at the Stanford University Libraries (2000–2005). She holds two Master’s degrees in Art History, and Library and Information Science from the University of Texas at Austin.

AI and Visual Art, Discussion

Peter Leonard, Director of the Digital Humanities Laboratory at Yale University Library, received his BA in art history from the University of Chicago and his PhD in Scandinavian literature from the University of Washington. He came to Yale in 2013 as the first Librarian for Digital Humanities Research. Prior to coming to Yale, Peter was responsible for humanities research computing at the University of Chicago and served as a postdoctoral researcher in text-mining at UCLA, supported by a Google Digital Humanities Research Award. During 2007-2008, he served as a Fulbright Scholar at Uppsala University in Sweden.

AI and Cultural Heritage, Lightning Talks I - Pixplot
Workshop - Track 3 - Images

Emanuele Lugli teaches and writes about late medieval and early modern art, with a particular emphasis on Italian painting, trade, urban culture, and the history of fashion. His theoretical concerns include questions of scale and labor, the history of measurements and technology, conceptualizations of precision, vagueness, smallness, and the reach of intellectual networks.

AI and Visual Art, Discussion

Kyle McDonald is an artist working with code. He crafts interactive installations, sneaky interventions, playful websites, workshops, and toolkits for other artists working with code. Exploring possibilities of new technologies: to understand how they affect society, to misuse them, and build alternative futures; aiming to share a laugh, spark curiosity, create confusion, and share spaces with magical vibes. Working with machine learning, computer vision, social and surveillance tech spanning commercial and arts spaces.

AI and Visual Art, Discussion

Katie is a historian of eighteenth-century France working at the intersection of political culture and the history of science and technology. She completed her PhD in History at Stanford in 2013. She has taught at Bates College and was a postdoctoral researcher in digital humanities at Western Sydney University (Australia). Before joining the Turing Institute, Katie was the Academic Technology Specialist in the Department of History/Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research at Stanford University. At the Turing, Katie works on the Living with Machines project.

AI and Cultural Heritage, Lightning Talks II - Living with Machines
Workshop - Track 1 - Designing an AI Program / Designing an AI Project
Workshop - Track 5 - Maps

Kenric McDowell has worked at the intersection of culture and technology for over twenty years. Kenric co-leads the Artist + Machine Intelligence program at Google, where he facilitates collaboration between artificial intelligence researchers, artists, and cultural institutions. Kenric is a regular conference speaker and consultant to think tanks and arts organizations, helping groups connect artistic practice and technology production with larger traditions of human understanding.

AI and Visual Art, Discussion

Elena Nieddu is a PhD student in Computer Science at Roma Tre University. Since 2017, she works at the "In Codice Ratio" research project, born from the collaboration between the Engineering and Humanities Departments of Roma Tre, and the Vatican Apostolic Archive (formerly Vatican Secret Archive). The goal of the project is to extract knowledge from digitized documents. Her research interests are mainly in the handwritten text recognition and natural language processing.

AI and Cultural Heritage, Lightning Talks I - In Codice ratio
Workshop - Track 3 - Images

Zac Painter is the Engineering Librarian for Research and Teaching Support at the Stanford Libraries. In addition to serving as a subject specialist for the School of Engineering, he is also one of the lead instruction librarians for the Stanford Libraries. He manages the Stanford Libraries local activities with The Carpentries, a nonprofit organization which teaches foundational skills in research computing; in addition he teaches on a wide variety of subjects from information literacy skills to programming with simple electronics. He earned his Masters in Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and completed a BS with a secondary education teaching license in History at Appalachian State University. 

Pre-conference workshop - Cloud services

Abigail Potter is a Senior Innovation Specialist with the Library of Congress Digital Innovation Lab. She's currently working to support new and creative uses of the Library's digital collections that engage diverse audiences. She and the Labs team also pilot new technologies and methodologies that help to realize the Digital Strategy. Prior to joining the Library, Abigail worked on digital publishing and library programs at National Public Radio, the University of Michigan Library, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the University of Michigan Press. Abigail earned an MS in 2005 from the University of Michigan, School of Information and a BA in 1999 from Western Michigan University.

Workshop - Track 1 - Designing an AI Program / Designing an AI Project

James Pustejovsky is the TJX Feldberg professor of computer science at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, United States. His expertise includes theoretical and computational modeling of language, specifically: Computational linguistics, Lexical semantics, Knowledge representation, temporal and spatial reasoning and Extraction. His main topics of research are Natural language processing generally, and in particular, the computational analysis of linguistic meaning. Pustejovsky proposed Generative Lexicon theory in lexical semantics.

AI and Cultural Heritage, Lightning Talks II - Automating Indexing of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting
Workshop - Track 4 - Audio/Video

Jack is a software engineer working on digital discovery of and access to cultural heritage content. A co-founder of the GeoBlacklight project and an active contributor to many open source software projects, Jack is passionate about building software for the IIIF, library, and geospatial data communities. He also serves on the executive committee of The International Association for Geoscience Diversity. Jack received his BS in Geology from Georgia State University and MS in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Pre-conference workshop - IIIF for machine learning

Teemu Roos is an expert and educator in AI, machine learning, and data science. His free Elements of Artificial Intelligence online course for non-experts has more than 200 000 participants. Roos has been a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, visiting researcher at MIT, UC San Diego, and USC, and a visiting postdoc at UC Berkeley. He serves on program committees of major international machine learning conferences including NeurIPS, ICML, and UAI. Roos is currently an associate professor of computer science at the University of Helsinki.

Democratizing AI, Lightning Talks - Elements of AI
Workshop - Track 1 - Designing an AI Program / Designing an AI Project

Thomas Smits has completed a PhD on the transnational trade in illustrations of the news in the mid-nineteenth century at the Radboud University. In the last six months of 2017 he worked as a Researcher-in-Residence for National Library of the Netherlands, studying how we can apply computer vision techniques to large databases of historical images. He currently works as a postdoc for the ERC-funded REACT project (Remembering Activism. The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe), where he studies how images shape the memory of activism and memory in activism.

AI and Cultural Heritage, Lightning Talks II - CHRONIC & SIAMESE
Workshop - Track 5 - Maps

Rachel Thomas is founding director of the University of San Francisco Center for Applied Data Ethics, which aims to address harms such as disinformation, surveillance, algorithmic bias, and other misuses of data.  She is co-founder of fast.ai, which created the “Practical Deep Learning for Coders” course that over 200,000 students have taken, and which focuses on students from diverse backgrounds, with small datasets, and with little computational power. Rachel earned her math PhD at Duke, was selected by Forbes as one of 20 Incredible Women in AI, and is a former software engineer. 

Data Privacy and Ethics, Discussion
Democratizing AI, Lightning Talks - FastAI

Thomas van Djik is a post-doc at the chair Efficient Algorithms, Institute of Computer Science at the University of Würzburg. His research focuses on algorithmically-guided user interaction, algorithms for Geographic Information Systems, implementation, computational experiments, and exact algorithms (exponential-time /parameterized).

Workshop - Track 5 - Maps

Jan Willem van Wessel graduated in Computational Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. His career centered around the combination of content and software engineering, ranging from electronic dictionaries to content management systems and from ever smarter search technologies to Artificial Intelligence (AI). In 2018, Jan Willem joined the National Library of the Netherlands as head of the Processing & Preservation Division. AI is playing an increasingly important role in the libraries’ products and services as well as in their work processes. Jan Willem took the initiative to formulate 7 Principles for using AI in libraries.

AI and Visual Art, Discussion

Freddy Wetjen is a senior system developer focusing on AI development since 2015. Freddy works at the National Library of Norway. His works include research, software development, project management in the Telecom sector, and software running inhouse at mobile operators across the globe as a Telecom Operation Support Systems specialist. he holds a MSc in Computing theory, and a Mba in Technology management.

Workshop - Track 3 - Images
Pre-conference workshop - Introduction to Tensorflow

André Walsøe is a data scientist working at the AI-lab of the National Library of Norway since 2017. Before he worked as a head engineer/data scientist at the University of Oslo and scientific Assistant at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). André Walsøe holds a MsC in electronics engineering with specialization in Signal processing and speech technology from NTNU.

Workshop - Track 3 - Images
Pre-conference workshop - Introduction to Tensorflow

Amanda Wheatley is the Liaison Librarian for Management, Business, and Entrepreneurship at McGill University. Her research interests include gamification, artificial intelligence, and emerging technologies. Amanda is currently involved in a research project on the intersection of artificial intelligence and user services in academic libraries, she is working toward the promotion of AI literacy for all.

Workshop - Track 1 - Designing an AI Program / Designing an AI Project

Emanuel Zgraggen is a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Database Group. His research interests include HCI, InfoVis and Data Science and he is currently working on interactive tools for visual data exploration and analysis. He holds his Ph.D. from Brown University where he was advised by Andy van Dam.

Democratizing AI, Lightning Talks - Northstar
Workshop - Track 1 - Designing an AI Program / Designing an AI Project