Best-Selling Author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent 21 years as a risk taker (quantitative trader) before becoming a researcher in philosophical, mathematical and (mostly) practical problems with probability. Taleb traveled the conventional route of education to real-life and theory to practice in inverse sequence from the common one, moving from the practical to the philosophical to the mathematical. He started as a trader, then got a doctorate in mid-trading career; he wrote literary books before writing technical papers, and his work became progressively more technical and formal with time. Taleb is the author of a multivolume essay, the Incerto (The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game) covering broad facets of uncertainty. It has been published into 41 languages. In addition to his trader life, Taleb has also written, as a backup of the Incerto, more than 70 scholarly papers in mathematical statistics, quantitative finance, statistical physics, philosophy, ethics, economics, & international affairs, around the notion of risk and probability (grouped in the Technical Incerto). Taleb is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering (only a quarter time position) and scientific advisor for Universa Investments. His current focus is on the properties of systems that can handle disorder ("antifragile"). Taleb refuses all honors and anything that "turns knowledge into a spectator sport."

Carl Bass designs and builds things - robots, boats, electric cars - in his Berkeley, CA workshops. Bass serves as the lead director of Zendesk Inc and as a director at Box and Ouster. He also serves on the board of directors of Arris Composites, Built Robotics, Bright Machines, Dyndrite, Formlabs, nTopology, Oqton, Phylagen and Planet Labs. In addition, he serves on the board of trustees of the California College of the Arts; and on the advisory boards of Cornell Computing and Information Science, UC Berkeley School of Information, and UC Berkeley College of Engineering. Carl Bass was president and CEO of Autodesk from 2006-2017. He spent 24 years at Autodesk where he held a series of executive positions including chief technology officer and chief operating officer. Bass co-founded Ithaca Software and Buzzsaw. He holds a BA in Mathematics from Cornell University.

Dr. Nadia Shouraboura started her academic career in the field of mathematics and computer science. Her work in machine learning attracted the attention of Princeton University where she was offered a scholarship and received a PhD in Mathematics. Her research resulted in several important papers, referenced by over 200 publications. Nadia joined Amazon.com in March of 2004. She was a member of Amazon's management board and served on Jeff Bezos’ executive S-Team responsible for overall direction and operations of Amazon. Under her guidance as the Head of Worldwide Supply Chain and Fulfillment, Amazon achieved the largest product selection on earth and implemented a novel retail supply chain controlling the move of every item, every associate and every package with precision in real time, worldwide. She left Amazon to start Hointer with the vision to change the physical retail experience from the inside out. In 2019 she sold the business to the Australian conglomerate Wesfarmers. Most recently Nadia co-founded a new venture QuantyCat and she also serves on the boards of Ocado, Ferguson, Tosca and Formlabs. A Ukrainian ex-pat, Nadia lives in Seattle with her husband Charlie Bell. They met at Amazon. Charlie worked at Amazon for more than 23 years, including the past 15 years as the top technology leader at AWS. In August of 2021 Charlie left Amazon to take on a newly formed security platform at Microsoft following his calling to fight digital medievalism. Their daughter Caroline graduated from Carnegie Mellon University and now works as a DevSecOps Engineer at Intuit.

Max Lobovsky is co-founder and CEO of Formlabs. Formlabs pioneered the new category of professional desktop 3D printing when it launched the world’s first affordable, powerful desktop stereolithography 3D printer. Prior to starting Formlabs, Lobovsky led the efforts at Fab@Home, one of the industry’s earliest open-source 3D printing projects which has been instrumental in setting up labs in schools worldwide. A Forbes’ 30 Under 30 recipient and World Economic Forum Pioneer, Lobovsky holds a B.S. in Applied Engineering and Physics from Cornell University and a M.S. in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.

Dayna Grayson is Co-founder and General Partner of Construct Capital, an early stage venture firm that invests in extraordinary founders building technology to transform the most foundational industries of our economy from manufacturing to mobility. Dayna was one of the first venture capitalists to turn her attention to transforming these sectors of our economy through software based models. She backed companies creating new advances in manufacturing, automation, and vertically integrated consumer brands. During her time as a partner at NEA (2012-2020), she was the lead investor from the earliest stages and was on the board of companies including Desktop Metal (2015 - today), Tulip (2017 - 2020), Onshape (acqd by PTC) (2013-2019), and Framebridge (acqd by Graham Holdings) (2014-2020) among others. She also led investments in Guideline, Formlabs, Evenly and Neuralmagic. At Construct, along with her co-founder Rachel Holt, Dayna is exclusively focused on early stage investments and investing behind the accelerating changes in foundational industries that together make up half our economy’s GDP are failing to meet customer expectations. Some of their investments include Copia, Veho, Hadrian, The Rounds, and Verve Motion. Dayna started her career in product development and led design efforts at Blackbaud [BLKB], the leading global provider of software to nonprofit organizations, as the company grew to over $130 million in revenue and completed a successful public offering and was an investor at North Bridge Venture Partners from 2007-2012. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia (Systems Engineering) and Harvard Business School, where she serves as a venture partner today.

Amy Feldman is a senior editor at Forbes, and heads up Forbes’ coverage of manufacturing and industrial innovation. She is also editor of the Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. Previously, she worked as a senior writer at BusinessWeek and at Money, a reporter at the New York Daily News, and, in an earlier incarnation, a writer at Forbes. Her work has also appeared in Barron’s, Inc., Fast Company, and numerous other publications. She resides in New York.

Rodney is a robotics entrepreneur and is currently the CTO and co-founder of Robust AI. Before that he was Founder, Chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics (it ran from September 1st, 2008, through October 3rd, 2018, and was originally called Heartland Robotics). He is also a Founder, former Board Member (1990 - 2011) and former CTO (1990 - 2008) of iRobot Corp (Nasdaq: IRBT). Dr. Brooks is the former Director (1997 - 2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984. He has published many papers in computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics, and artificial life.

Karen Kerr is passionate about partnering with entrepreneurs to build technology-based companies. She has spent more than two decades as a venture investor, instigator, and advisor to intrepid entrepreneurs. Karen is the founder and Managing Director of Exposition Ventures. She is also a lead Investor with the Portfolia Rising America fund. Most recently she was Executive Managing Director at GE Ventures where she led a team investing in advanced manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, and enterprise software companies that drove productivity at General Electric. She was previously a Managing Director at ARCH Venture Partners and started her career as a Sr. Associate and Kauffman Fellow at Patricof & Co. Karen was a Director at Intellectual Ventures and helped to launch numerous startups as Senior Director of New Ventures and Alliances at the University of Southern California. Karen earned a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Chicago and an AB in Chemistry from Bryn Mawr College. She is a member of the Charter Class of Kauffman Fellows and is active on multiple boards including the Kauffman Fellows, mHub, ORAU, and the Evergreen Climate Innovations boards as well as the University of Chicago Physical Sciences Division and Institute of Molecular Engineering Visiting Committees, and the Bryn Mawr College Board of Trustees. Karen has been recognized as a CVC Rising Star, a Crain’s Tech 50, one of LA’s Top Innovators, Crain’s Chicago Business 40 Under 40, and C200 Women Business Leaders.

Natan Linder is co-founder and CEO of manufacturing technology company, Tulip, and co-founder and chairman of Formlabs, the pioneer and industry leader in professional desktop 3D printing. Drawing from over 15 years of experience and accomplished careers at companies like Samsung, Sun Microsystems, and Rethink Robotics, Linder holds a depth of expertise in computer science, product design, and entrepreneurship. Prior to starting Tulip and Formlabs, Linder was co-founder and general manager of Samsung Electronic’s R&D Center in Israel, spearheading the group’s innovation efforts in mobile and shipping multiple products to the global market. He’s served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Jerusalem Venture Partners, the leading Israeli venture capital firm. Linder holds a PhD from MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group and a S.M. in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Linder’s work aims to fuse design and engineering to create novel human experiences.

Randy Altschuler is the CEO and co-founder of Xometry, a global digital marketplace for on-demand manufacturing. A successful entrepreneur, Randy co-founded Xometry in 2013 and led it through tremendous growth on its journey to becoming a public company in 2021 (NASDAQ: XMTR). Randy recognized the clear opportunity to digitize and disrupt the $260B manufacturing industry after traveling the country to meet with local manufacturers to better understand their challenges. Today, through its AI-driven marketplace, Xometry enables enterprise buyers to tap into global manufacturing capacity to efficiently source on-demand manufactured parts and assemblies. Xometry’s marketplace also offers innovative fin-tech, digital marketing and enterprise management tools to help shops of all sizes grow their businesses. Xometry employs nearly 1,000 people worldwide and is home to the popular Thomasnet.com platform, which the company acquired as part of its acquisition of Thomas in late 2021. Prior to Xometry, Randy co-founded and was Executive Chairman of CloudBlue, a leading provider of recycling services for electronic equipment. CloudBlue was acquired by Ingram Micro in 2013. Before CloudBlue, Randy was the co-founder and co-CEO of OfficeTiger, a global BPO company that would eventually employ 4,500 people. OfficeTiger was acquired by RR Donnelley in 2006. Randy serves on the Boards of Directors of the Maryland Tech Council and the Regional Manufacturing Institute of Maryland. Randy began his career in investment banking at DLJ and real estate private equity at Blackstone. He graduated from Princeton University and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. He studied at the University of Vienna as a Fulbright Scholar.

William B. Bonvillian is a Lecturer at MIT, and Senior Director for Special Projects at MIT’s office of Open Learning. In recent years, he has helped lead major research projects on workforce education. From 2006 until 2017, he was director of MIT’s Washington Office, supporting MIT’s longstanding role in science policy at the national level. He served as an advisor to MIT’s major cross-campus policy initiatives on advanced manufacturing, as well as on energy technology, life science convergence and online education. He was an MIT representative to the President’s industry-university Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) which formed U.S. manufacturing policies in the 2011-2016 period, including the development of the Advanced Manufacturing Institute program. He teaches courses on innovation systems and science and technology policy at MIT in the and Science Technology and Society and Political Science Departments. Previously, he worked for over 15 years on science and innovation issues as a senior advisor in the U.S. Senate, and earlier was a Deputy Assistant U.S.Secretary of Transportation His most recent book, with MIT Prof. Sanjay Sarma, Workforce Education – A New Roadmap (MIT Press), was released in 2021. He is also author with Peter Singer of a major book on manufacturing innovation, Advanced Manufacturing – The New American Innovation Policies (MIT Press 2018) and, with Charles Weiss of Georgetown, the books Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors (Oxford University Press 2015) and Structuring an Energy Technology Revolution (MIT Press 2009). He is coeditor of and contributor to the book The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies (Open Book Publishers 2020). He is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters. He serves on the National Academies of Sciences’ Board on Materials and Manufacturing, its standing committee for its Innovation Policy Forum, was on its Board on Science Education for seven years and has served on seven other NAS committees, including three on manufacturing policy. In recent years, he chaired the standing Committee on Science and Engineering Public Policy (COSEPP) at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and he serves on the board of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. He was named a AAAS Fellow in 2011, was awarded IEEE’s public service award in 2007, and has written and spoken extensively about science and technology and innovation policy issues. He has degrees from Columbia, Yale and Columbia Law. Further information is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Boone_Bonvillian and https://www.bonvillian.org/cv

As Chief Storyteller at GE, Tomas Kellner oversees the content and publishing strategy of GE Reports, GE’s digital media hub, and the GE Brief, GE’s global newsletter. His career in journalism includes eight years as a reporter and staff writer at Forbes magazine in New York, where he covered business, innovation, and technology. Tomas also worked as a reporter in Europe and spent six years at Kroll as a senior director managing business intelligence research and investigations. Tomas graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and he also holds a degree in mechanical engineering and materials science from Czech Technical University. He is a Fulbright Scholar.

Valentin Heun is a VP of Innovation Engineering at PTC where he is leading the PTC Reality Lab. His work focuses on new computer interaction methods for the physical space. Valentin’s works have been published in many academic conferences such as Ubiquitous Computing, SIGGRAPH Asia, and Computer-Human Interaction conference. His work (Reality Editor) was named by Fast Company as Boldest Ideas in User Interface Design, and has received global recognition, including the SIGGRAPH Asia Emerging Technologies Prize, awarded by Wired UK to the Smart List, and received the Editor’s Choice Award for IoT Software & Tools by PostScapes. Valentin holds a Ph.D. and Master of Science from the MIT Media Lab and the German Diplom in Design from the Bauhaus-University Weimar.

Simon Lancaster lives and breathes DeepTech product. He has over 51 patents to his name and is co-founder and General Partner at Omni Venture Labs, an early-stage accelerator and venture fund not afraid to invest in deeply technical founders with ambitions to change the ways we design, build and consume physical products. Simon comes from over 15 years of experience in advanced manufacturing and product design from Apple, Google and Blackberry and has a history of angel investing in HardTech and DeepTech startups at pre-seed and seed. Simon has direct operating experience both in Big Tech as well as in-the-trenches with early stage founders for over a decade. Prior to founding Omni Venture Labs, Simon Led business strategy and growth at Arris Composites from Series A to pre-C which recently raised $88.5M series C.

Nilay Parikh is the founder and CEO of Be Global Safety - an AI powered manufacturing safety platform to detect safety incidents and near-misses in real time. Prior to devoting his full time effort in making the world a safer place, Nilay worked with various multinational software and manufacturing companies in various product management capacities. He has a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southern California and spent close to 7 years in the Advanced Manufacturing industry before making the jump to AI for Manufacturing. Apart from being a Tech startup founder, he has lived in 3 continents, speaks (almost) 4 languages and built his own 4D Printer and a racecar. Engineer in the mind, at heart he believes he is a chef and a part-time writer.

Etienne is the founder and CEO of Vention, a Manufacturing Automation Platform that democratizes access to industrial automation. Before Vention, Etienne spent five years at McKinsey & Company as an Associate Principal with the Operations and Product Development Practices. In this role, he led enterprise-wide strategic, operational, and turnaround programs at global industrial and high-tech companies. Before joining McKinsey, he held various positions in product management, product development, and supply chain at General Electric as part of the Technical Leadership Program. Etienne holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a BA in mechanical engineering from the École de Technologie Supérieure.

Andrew is an executive and board leader with a deep understanding of technology, innovation, and complex systems. As a physicist, program manager, and officer in the USAF he applied systems thinking to the full technology stack of command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) systems in airborne and space-based platforms. He has used that same approach across a broad array of industries and products to create value and sustainable superior performance. Over his career, his experiences in developing teams and implementing strategies have enabled innovation, growth, and profitability improvements in aerospace, commercial electronics, fast-moving consumer goods, and industrial sensors and safety products. He is an NACD Certified Director with experiences on Fortune 500 wholly owned subsidiaries, start-ups, private, and non-profit boards. He currently serves as Chairman and CEO for RealWear, and as a board member on the Finance Committee for the Rogers Group. RealWear is building the world’s first voice-driven and fully ruggedized head-mounted tablet solution for connected industrial workers. It is the only wearable computer that has an inherently safe ATEX Zone-1 certified product for use in hazardous environments such as oil and gas production and chemical processing. RealWear’s approach to augmented and assisted reality solutions is transforming how work is performed by addressing key challenges in workforce training, safety, and productivity with IoT data visualization, remote mentoring, and workflow applications. Prior to his current role, Andrew served briefly as COO, chaired the Advisory Board for RealWear, and was a member of the Audit Committee. The Rogers Group Inc. provides crushed stone, sand and gravel, asphalt and highway construction to the southeastern United States. In 2014, the company was ranked as the eighth largest aggregates producer in the nation (Aggregates Manager, July 2015). For the past several years, RGI has remained the largest privately owned company in the aggregates industry. Additionally, Andrew consults and advises on issues of technology development, innovation, productivity, operations, cybersecurity, and digital strategies. Other roles included increasingly responsible positions in general management, operations, quality, compliance, and information systems with industry-leading companies such as Johnson Controls, Tyco, United Technologies, Goodrich, Energizer, Pfizer, Warner-Lambert, and Hitachi. He holds two undergraduate degrees in Engineering Physics from Oregon State University’s Honor Program where he was a distinguished graduate of Air Force ROTC. He has a Master’s Degree in Systems Management from the University of Southern California and later completed a certificate of professional development at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is a founding member, Faculty Instructor, Board Advisor and Qualified Technology Executive of the Digital Directors Network, the only curated global network of digital executives, directors and organizations working together to improve digital competence and diversity in the corporate boardroom to shape and secure the digital future for everyone.

John Hart is Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Director of the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity, and Director of the Center for Additive and Digital Advanced Production Technologies at MIT. John’s research and teaching efforts focus on the science and technology of manufacturing. He is a co-founder of Desktop Metal and VulcanForms, and is a Board Member of Carpenter Technology Corporation.

Santosh Sankar is a Founding Partner at Dynamo Ventures. Santosh has been an early investor in several distinguished supply chain technology startups including Stord, Gatik AI, and SVT Robotics. Prior to his career in venture capital, Santosh was a public equities analyst. Santosh started his first company, an IT support business, when he was 13 years old. Santosh was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 List in 2017.

Dr. Josef Waltl, studied Computer Science at the University of Salzburg and holds and MBA as well as a PhD with focus on Software Platform Management from the Technical University in Munich. He started his career at Siemens focusing on building up the Industrial Software business and extending the Factory Automation business to emerging markets. Prior to founding Software Defined Automation, he also built-up the global Industrial Software Partner Ecosystem for Amazon Web Services and lead a product line on Manufacturing IoT in Microsoft Azure.