From PhD to IPO at South Park Commons
What does it take to make the leap from academic research to company building?
South Park Commons NYC is convening researchers, engineers, and early-stage founders for an in-depth conversation on how the frontiers of research shape the future of technology. Join us!
Panelists include:
Jonathan Frankle is Chief AI Scientist at Databricks, where he leads the AI research team toward the goal of bringing the latest advances in large language models, computer vision, and reinforcement learning to Databricks’ tens of thousands of enterprise customers. He arrived via Databricks’ $1.3B acquisition of MosaicML, which he co-founded and led as Chief Scientist. He earned his PhD at MIT, where he empirically studied deep learning, specifically the properties of sparse networks that allow them to train effectively (his "Lottery Ticket Hypothesis" - ICLR Best Paper). He earned his BSE and MSE in computer science at Princeton.
Dr. Tara Sainath holds an S.B., M.Eng, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Her expertise in speech recognition and deep neural networks led to a 5 year stint at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and currently fuels her work as a Tech Lead in Google DeepMind's Audio Pillar. There, she focuses on the integration of audio capabilities with large language models (LLMs). She has served as a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) as well as the Associate Editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. Her primary research interests are in deep neural networks for speech recognition.
Alex Wiltschko is Founder and CEO of Osmo, on a mission to give computers a sense of smell. He is a repeat entrepreneur and has spent much of his career exploring new frontiers and building businesses at the intersection of AI and biology. Previously, he was a research leader at Google DeepMind, and has founded and exited two AI companies (Syllable, sold to Neumora; Whetlab, sold to Twitter). Alex holds a Ph.D. in Olfactory Neuroscience from Harvard University.
Stephen Roller is a Member of the Technical Staff at Thinking Machines Lab, working on Pretraining and Scaling. Previously he worked as a pretraining researcher at Gemini, CharacterAI, and Facebook AI Research.
Agenda:
5pm: Doors Open
5:30-6:30pm: Panel Discussion & Q&A
6:30-7pm: Networking
Registration and approval is required and space is limited, so please RSVP soon.