David Rose founded Ditto Labs, which uses deep learning networks to automatically discover what people share in social media photos and video. Using these affinity signals, the company helps marketers infer who precisely will be interested in which products and services. Ditto’s APIs power the world’s leading software platforms.
Prior to Ditto Labs, Rose successfully founded and led game-changing technology companies including Vitality, a company that reinvented medication packaging; and Ambient Devices, which pioneered glanceable technology—embedding Internet information in everyday objects like lamps, mirrors, and umbrellas. He holds patents for photo sharing, interactive TV, ambient information displays, and medical devices.
Rose is also an award-winning entrepreneur, author, and instructor at the MIT Media Lab. His research focuses on making the physical environment an interface to digital information. His new book, Enchanted Objects, focuses on the future of the Internet of things (IoT), and how these technologies will impact the ways we live and work. He received his B.A. in physics and fine art from St. Olaf College and a master’s from Harvard University.
Dr. Christopher Ahlberg is the CEO of Recorded Future, Inc. and Chairman of Hult International Business School. He advises a series of start up companies. Earlier Ahlberg was the president of the Spotfire Division of TIBCO, which he founded in 1996 and in 2007 sold to TIBCO (Nasdaq: TIBX) for $195M. Spotfire was founded based on his ground-breaking research on information visualization. Dr. Ahlberg earned his doctorate from Chalmers University of Technology, worked as a visiting researcher at the University of Maryland, and has lectured and consulted extensively for industry, academia, military, and intelligence communities – as well as published & lectured in computer science, cyber security, psychology, linguistics, biology, and chemistry. He has five granted software patents, and multiple pending.
Dr. Ahlberg was named among the World’s Top 100 Young Innovators by Technology Review, MIT’s Magazine of Innovation in 2002. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.
Dr. Catherine Havasi co-founded artificial intelligence (AI) text analytics company Luminoso, which transforms the way organizations interpret and act on large-scale customer, employee, and marketplace feedback. Luminoso products surface trends, sentiment, and drivers of conversation instantly from surveys, product reviews, and social media.
Dr. Havasi is a research scientist in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics at the MIT Media Lab. She co-founded the Open Mind Common Sense project, which created the natural language AI program, ConceptNet. Fast Company included her in its “100 Most Creative People in Business 2015” ranking.
Data management start-up Tamr was co-founded by Andy Palmer. Tamr simplifies and automates data preparation for spend analytics, clinical data integration, and other business problems, so businesses can ask big questions and get to insights faster.
Palmer is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor who has helped start, fund or found 50+ innovative companies in technology, health care and the life sciences, including pioneering Big Data company Vertica Systems (acquired by HP). He also founded Koa Labs, a shared start-up space for entrepreneurs in Cambridge’s Harvard Square.
He was also a member of the core startup team and the SVP and CIO at Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI); and has held positions at innovative companies including Novartis, Bowstreet, pcOrder.com and Trilogy. (BA, Bowdoin 1988; MBA, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, 1994)
Tim Rowe is the Founder and CEO of CIC (Cambridge Innovation Center) which operates the largest facility in the world dedicated to housing startups. More than US $2B has been invested in companies that grew up at CIC, and approximately $7B of venture capital is headquartered within CIC’s two buildings in Massachusetts alone.
CIC has growing facilities in Boston, St. Louis, Miami, and Rotterdam. Collectively CIC facilities house about 1,000 startups.