Jason Baldridge, PhD, is co-founder and Chief Scientist at People Pattern, and is also Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. He is one of the co-creators of the Apache OpenNLP Toolkit and has been active in the creation and promotion of open source software for natural language processing, including ScalaNLP, Junto, TextGrounder, and OpenCCG. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 2002, where his doctoral dissertation was awarded the 2003 Beth Dissertation Prize from the European Association for Logic, Language, and Information. His main academic research interests include categorial grammars, parsing, semi-supervised learning, coreference resolution, and georeferencing.

Dr. Michelle Zhou is a co-founder and CEO of Juji, Inc., a high-tech startup specializing in helping users automatically discover their individuality traits, such as major strengths and weaknesses, motivators and turnoffs, and cognitive and emotional DNAs, from their social media activities, and helping them find matched opportunities that best value their individuality. Michelle received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University, and had worked at IBM Research, and then the IBM Watson Group. She is a top expert in the interdisciplinary field, Intelligent User Interaction (IUI), which intersects Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction, aiming at combining the power of machine and human intelligence to turn computers into humans’ best assistants. Michelle has led the research and development of many cutting-edge, IUI technologies and solutions, including context-sensitive human-computer conversational systems, personality analytics from social media, and opportunistic crowdsourcing. Her works have been incorporated into over a dozen IBM products and solutions and resulted in over 80 scientific publications and 35 issued/filed patents. Her work has also been widely featured in press, including Venture Beat, Washington Post, and MIT Tech Review.