Conference Past Speakers

Chaouki T. Abdallah is the Executive Vice President for Research (EVPR) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Abdallah serves as chief research officer for the Institute, providing overall leadership for the research, economic development, and related support units within Georgia Tech. As a direct report to President Ángel Cabrera and a member of the president’s cabinet, he serves as chief research officer for the Institute. This position provides overall leadership for the $1.45 billion annual research enterprise that includes the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), 10 interdisciplinary research institutes (IRIs), as well as economic development, and related support units within Georgia Tech. He also serves on the executive committee of the Council on Research for the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities (APLU), the executive committee for the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR), and the advisory committee for the Center on Measuring University Performance (MUP).

Abdallah came to Georgia Tech from the University of New Mexico, where he served as the university’s 22nd president, as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, as well as department chair of the electrical and computer engineering (ECE) department. During his tenure, Abdallah oversaw long-range academic planning and efforts to improve student success, as well as retention-achievement and graduation achievement rates.

He conducts research and teaches courses in the area of systems theory with a focus on control, communications, and computing systems. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, national laboratories, and various companies. Abdallah, who is fluent in English, French, and Arabic, is a senior member of IEEE and a recipient of that organization’s Millennium Medal.

Abdallah began his college career at the Faculté d’ingénierie of the Université Saint-Joseph in Lebanon, then obtained a Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) degree from Youngstown State University in 1981, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech in 1982 and 1988, respectively.

He has published eight books (three as co-editor and five as co-author) and more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and provided expert testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Jonathan Clarke is an Associate Professor of Finance in the College of Business. He received his PhD from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. His undergraduate degrees are in Mathematics and Economics from Indiana University in Bloomington.

Dr. Clarke's work has been published in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Management Science, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Business, the Journal of Banking and Finance, Annals of Finance, Journal of Empirical Finance, and the Journal of Corporate Finance. His paper titled "Long-Run Performance And Insider Trading In Completed And Canceled Seasoned Equity Offerings" won the 2001 William F. Sharpe award for best published paper in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.

From 2012 to 2018, Dr. Clarke served as the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs and guided Scheller to a #11 ranking in Poets and Quants and a #21 ranking in U.S. News and World Report. During Dr. Clarke’s tenure as Associate Dean, the mean starting salary for Scheller College graduates increased by 21%, the number of applicants nearly doubled, and the acceptance rate dropped from 44% to 26%.

Dr. Clarke is an award-winning teacher. He was named to the Poets and Quants 2018 list of Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professors. He was also voted the 2009 and 2013 MBA Core Professor of the Year, was a 2009 Hesburgh Award teaching fellow, and received the 2010 James F. Frazier, Jr. Award for Teaching Excellence. He has taught in custom programs for NCR, Clorox, Georgia Pacific, Lockheed Martin, and the National Football League. Dr. Clarke is on the board of the Eastern Finance Association, on the editorial board of The Financial Review, and edits the Handbook of Modern Finance.

Dean Elect Anuj Mehrotra will assume his role as Stephen P. Zelnak Jr. Dean's Chair of Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business on Jan. 1, 2024.

Mehrotra is currently the dean of The George Washington University School of Business (GWSB) and has held that position since 2018. He is also a professor of Decision Sciences in the school. Under his leadership, GWSB has reimagined graduate business education by introducing modularity and flexibility through industry-driven certificates that help create customizable master’s degrees. The school has also invested in making its programs more accessible by expanding the portfolio of online offerings. With Mehrotra at the helm, the school converted all undergraduate business degrees to B.S. degrees featuring new majors in business analytics, entrepreneurship, information systems, international business, and marketing. These changes have enabled students to obtain double majors. The school also created 4+1 combined degree pathways for both business and nonbusiness students to pursue interdisciplinary education opportunities and earn a specialized master’s degree at GWSB — in addition to the undergraduate degree — in five years.

Dean Mehrotra is credited with engaging alumni, industry, and government leaders through creative programming and partnerships, including the Dean’s Corporate Council and George Talks Business speaker series. In Spring 2023, Dean Mehrotra led the launch of the inaugural business and policy forum that convened leaders from industry, government, and academia to address the most significant issues related to the evolving landscape of emerging technology and cybersecurity with a focus on policy and regulation. He also established the GWSB Entrepreneurial Hall of Fame to recognize individuals who have made significant contributions to entrepreneurial excellence.

During his tenure, Dean Mehrotra appointed the school's first chief diversity officer and led the Dean's Diversity Council in widening partnerships and deepening engagement with various stakeholders to cultivate and support a sense of belonging within the community. The school earned recognition across MBA rankings for leadership in diversifying enrollment in the full-time MBA program, notably achieving majority women enrollment as well as the highest percentage of women in the program nationwide for three years in a row.

Donie Lochan is Managing Director, Chief Technology Officer, and Global Head of Technology for Invesco, overseeing strategy and execution for Invesco Technology. He was previously the global head of information technology strategy, innovation, and planning.

With the support of the global Invesco Technology team, Lochan is guiding Invesco into a new digital- and data-driven era, with a focus on delivering an investment experience that helps people get more out of life. Collaborating with senior technology leaders and business partners, he develops and oversees implementation of the strategic technology roadmap to support Invesco’s investment capabilities and help drive revenue and profit growth. He champions the value of a strong, unified organization, and his strategic vision embraces emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics and automation, blockchain, and the “internet of things”, which are redefining the rules of the financial and asset management industries.

Lochan has a background in organizational transformation, with a focus on wealth and investment management in domestic and international settings. Prior to joining Invesco in June 2015, Lochan served as head of corporate strategy and mergers and acquisitions for LPL Financial. Before that he was a partner with Bain and Company, a global strategy consulting firm.

Lochan earned a BSc degree with first class honors in mathematics, statistics and computing.

Harald Schneider is Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Equifax. Schneider is responsible for global data innovation, maximizing the benefits of Equifax differentiated data assets, leading analytics capabilities and using data fabric within the Equifax CloudTM to drive new products and growth.

Schneider joined Equifax from Visa, where he served as the Global Head of Data Products, serving customers and partners with web-based and API Data Products to drive customer engagement, fraud strategies, marketing optimization, and underwriting strategies.

Prior to Visa, Schneider built and successfully launched the challenger bank Tandem Bank in the U.K. As Tandem Bank’s Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Analytics Officer, he led the development of the bank’s product suite as well as the company’s risk management, data management, marketing and analytic strategies.

Schneider also held data and analytics leadership positions at Capital One, including Managing Vice President of Decision Sciences, for the Capital One credit card business. Prior to Capital One, he held international data and business leadership roles at Citigroup and Pardus Capital Management.

Schneider holds a master’s degree in finance from J.W. Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business.

Krish Swamy is Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Citizens Financial Group, Inc. With over 20 years of experience in financial services, Krish is responsible for building a robust data environment at Citizens.

Prior to Citizens, Krish was the head of the Enterprise Analytics and Data Science group at Wells Fargo. As part of his role, Krish led the analytics and data science/ machine learning teams that were responsible for supporting transformation initiatives across strategic functions. Krish's group also played a product ownership role for central AI, analytics, and data platforms for 5000+ analytics professionals across the bank. Prior to Wells Fargo, Krish had a long analytics career at Capital One where he supported a broad range of functions.

Krish is based out of the San Francisco Bay Area in California.

Dr. Chava is the Alton M. Costley Chair, a Professor of Finance at Scheller College of Business at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta and leads the Financial Services Innovation Lab. He also serves as Finance Area Coordinator at Scheller and as the director of the nationally top 10 ranked master’s in quantitative and computational Finance (QCF) program at Georgia Tech (a joint program of School of Mathematics, Industrial and Systems Engineering and Scheller College of Business).

Dr. Chava is the Alton M. Costley Chair, a Professor of Finance at Scheller College of Business at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta and leads the Financial Services Innovation Lab. He also serves as Finance Area Coordinator at Scheller and as the director of the nationally top 10 ranked master’s in quantitative and computational Finance (QCF) program at Georgia Tech (a joint program of School of Mathematics, Industrial and Systems Engineering and Scheller College of Business).

Douwe Kiela is the CEO of Contextual AI. He is also an Adjunct Professor in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. Previously, he was the Head of Research at Hugging Face and before that a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research. Douwe received his PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge, has an MSc in Logic from the University of Amsterdam, and studied philosophy and cognitive AI for his undergraduate. His work focuses on machine learning and natural language processing, specifically on developing better models for language understanding and generation, and better tools for evaluation and benchmarking.

Diyi Yang is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, also affiliated with the Stanford NLP Group, Stanford HCI Group, and Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). Her research focuses on natural language processing, machine learning, and computational social science. Her goal is to build socially responsible NLP systems for positive impact. Her work has received multiple best paper nominations or awards at top NLP and HCI conferences (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, SIGCHI, and CSCW). She is a recipient of IEEE “AI 10 to Watch” (2020), the Intel Rising Star Faculty Award (2021), the Samsung AI Researcher of the Year (2021), the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2021), and the NSF CAREER Award (2022).

Tucker Balch is a computer scientist, researcher, and educator specializing in AI, Robotics, and Finance. He earned his Bachelor's degree and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Balch has published over 120 peer-reviewed research papers in Robotics, AI, multi-agent systems, and Finance. He has held research and teaching positions at Carnegie Mellon University and Georgia Institute of Technology, where he instructed AI, Robotics, and Computational Finance courses.

Dr. Balch co-founded Lucena Research, a data-driven investment technology company utilizing Machine Learning, big data, and quantitative analysis to offer actionable insights for investment professionals. He joined J.P. Morgan in 2018 as a managing director, leading teams exploring ML and Cryptography, multi-agent system simulations, high-frequency electronic markets, and Synthetic Data for Finance.

Dr. Balch is also an online education pioneer, developing and teaching MOOCs like "Computational Investing" and "Machine Learning for Trading," which have reached over 170,000 students worldwide. Before his research career, Balch served as an F-15 pilot in the U.S. Air Force.

With over two decades of distinguished experience in leading AI/ML transformations within the financial services industry, Balaji Gopalakrishnan has helped to harness the power of AI/ML to drive innovation and deliver exceptional value in multiple organizations. As Head of AI/ML Model Development at Vanguard for Personal Investor and AI/ML Research, Balaji Gopalakrishnan plays a pivotal role in shaping the future of the retail brokerage business, and driving major transformation programs such as hyper-personalization, Generative AI, and Advice at Scale initiatives that are redefining the industry’s landscape.

Balaji Gopalakrishnan holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Georgia tech and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Institute for Mathematics & Applications. With a keen focus on pushing the boundaries of Ai/ML, Balaji Gopalakrishnan is at the forefront of creating innovative solutions that empower businesses and enhance customer experience.

Dr. Om Deshmukh is the Head of Data Science & Innovation and Head of Data Products at Envestnet Data & Analytics. Om brings over two decades of academic and industry experience in translating business challenges into quantifiable data problems, developing state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to deliver data-driven solutions and building practical big-data-scale products. Om possesses a Ph.D. in Machine Learning (U. Maryland, College Park). He is also an award-winning writer/researcher with over 50 papers published globally, and has garnered more than 50 patents (filed/granted). At Envestnet, Om is committed to using the power of data & analytics to deliver on Envestnet’s promise of helping consumers live an Intelligent Financial Life.

Kristoffer (Kip) Jackson is a Senior Financial Economist in the Compliance Risk Analysis Division at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which charters, regulates, and supervises national banks, federal savings associations, and federal branches of foreign banks. As part of his responsibilities in this role, he assesses quantitative model risk in complying with laws and regulations related to fair lending, anti-money laundering/terrorist financing, and sanctions screening. Kip specializes in novel and complex areas of fair lending supervision, including credit models using alternative data and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML).

He was awarded OCC’s Supervision Risk & Analysis (SRA) Initiative Award in 2022 and the SRA Bank Supervision Award in 2023 for his pioneering work in fair lending supervision around residential real estate appraisals and AI/ML credit models, respectively. Kip also publishes academic research in the fields of personal and real estate finance and urban/housing economics. His research is published in top field journals like the Journal of Urban Economics and is discussed in the Handbook for Regional and Urban Economics. Kip has a PhD and MA in Economics from the University of California—Irvine and a BS in Economics (with minors in Statistics and Quantitative Finance) from Utah State University. He is also a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS).

Agus Sudjianto is an executive vice president, head of Model Risk and a member of Management Committee at Wells Fargo, where he is responsible for enterprise model risk management.

Prior to his current position, Agus was the modeling and analytics director and chief model risk officer at Lloyds Banking Group in the United Kingdom. Before joining Lloyds, he was an executive and head of Quantitative Risk at Bank of America.

Prior to his career in banking, he was a product design manager in the Powertrain Division of Ford Motor Company.

Agus holds several U.S. patents in both finance and engineering. He has published numerous technical papers and is a co-author of Design and Modeling for Computer Experiments. His technical expertise and interests include quantitative risk, particularly credit risk modeling, machine learning and computational statistics.

He holds masters and doctorate degrees in engineering and management from Wayne State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Peter Swire is the J.Z. Liang Chair in the Georgia Tech School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, and a Professor of Law & Ethics in the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business. He is Research Director of the Cross-Border Data Forum, Senior Counsel with the law firm of Alston & Bird. He served two terms on the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Forum on Cyber-Resilience, and was on the 2022 study committee for the National Academies report on The Future of Encryption.

Under President Clinton, Swire was Chief Counselor for Privacy in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, the first person to have U.S. government-wide responsibility for privacy policy. Under President Obama, Swire served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, and then was one of five members of President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology. In 2015, the International Association of Privacy Professionals awarded Swire its annual Privacy Leadership Award. In 2018, Swire was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for his project on “Protecting Human Rights and National Security in the New Age of Data Nationalism.”

Chris is the Senior Vice President, Chief Data Scientist, and Equifax Fellow leading the global analytics R&D team that is chartered to pioneer disruptive solutions utilizing machine learning and artificial intelligence. Chris and his team are engaging key customers, industry leaders, and academic partners to deliver new insights using big data and advanced mathematical modeling on high performance cloud computing platforms.

Chris has over thirty years of global R&D experience and has successfully built and led R&D teams in USA, France, Scotland, Israel, and India. Chris has earned a Master of Science, Computer and Information Science, University of Florida, and a Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering, with Distinction, Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Glenn Matlin is a 2nd-year PhD student in Machine Learning at Georgia Tech advised by Professor Sudheer Chava. Specializing in Natural Language Processing, Glenn focuses on enhancing Large Language Models for financial applications to improve quantitative reasoning. His work has won 1st prize at the 2023 SCS Ph.D. Research and Poster Competition and has been published in the NeurIPS 2022 conference. Glenn also serves as a Program Committee member for the Conference on Next Generation Arithmetic and has consulted for Lemurian Labs on Hardware/Software Co-Design for ML accelerators. He is open to research collaborations and can be reached at glennmatlin@gatech.edu or via LinkedIn.

Agam Shah is a Machine Learning Ph.D. Candidate in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, where he was honored with the prestigious "2023 Rising Star Doctoral Student Research Award". Before embarking on his doctoral journey, he obtained a Bachelor's degree (Hons.) in Information and Communication Technology with a minor in Computational Science from DA-IICT. His outstanding academic achievements were recognized with the President's Gold Medal, awarded for graduating at the top of the 2019 class. He also holds a Master's degree in Quantitative and Computational Finance (QCF) from Georgia Tech. His research interests span Natural Language Processing, Finance, Computational Science, and Data Science. The outcomes of his research efforts have been published and presented in esteemed journals and conferences such as AFA, ACL, EMNLP, Journal of Credit Risk, and Expert Systems With Applications.