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Speakers and Lecturers
Meet the guest speakers, lecturers, and advisers of the AI for Good Institute, 2024
Peter Norvig
Distinguished Education Fellow, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI
AI Research Scientist, Google Inc.
Speaker/ Lecturer: AI for Good Institute, 2024
Peter Norvig is a Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford's Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute and a researcher at Google Inc; previously he directed Google's core search algorithms group and Google's Research group. He was head of NASA Ames's Computational Sciences Division, where he was NASA's senior computer scientist and a recipient of NASA's Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has taught at the University of Southern California, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He was co-teacher of an Artificial Intelligence class that signed up 160,000 students, helping to kick off the current round of massive open online classes. His publications include the books Data Science in Context (to appear in 2022), Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (the leading textbook in the field), Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and the world's longest palindromic sentence. He is a fellow of the AAAI, ACM, California Academy of Science and American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Mehran Sahami
Tencent Chair of the Computer Science Department, Stanford University
James and Ellenor Chesebrough Professor and Senior Fellow, by Courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Speaker/ Lecturer: AI for Good Institute, 2024
Mehran Sahami is Tencent Chair of the Computer Science Department and the James and Ellenor Chesebrough Professor in the School of Engineering. As a Professor (Teaching) in the Computer Science department, he is also a Bass Fellow in Undergraduate Education and previously served as the Associate Chair for Education in Computer Science. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was a Senior Research Scientist at Google. His research interests include computer science education, artificial intelligence, and ethics. He served as co-chair of the ACM/IEEE-CS joint task force on Computer Science Curricula 2013, which created curricular guidelines for college programs in Computer Science at an international level. He has also served as chair of the ACM Education Board, an elected member of the ACM Council, and was appointed by California Governor Jerry Brown to the state's Computer Science Strategic Implementation Plan Advisory Panel.
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Academic Appointments
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Professor (Teaching), Computer Science
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Senior Fellow (By courtesy), Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Faculty Affiliate, Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)
Administrative Appointments
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Chair, Computer Science Department (2023 - Present)
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Associate Chair for Education, Computer Science Department (2007 - 2022)
Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations
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Co-Chair, ACM Education Board (2014 - 2018)
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Advisory Board, Code.org (2013 - Present)
Teresa Chahine
Sheila and Ron ’92 B.A. Marcelo Senior Lecturer in Social Entrepreneurship, Yale School of Management.
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Speaker/ Lecturer: AI for Good Institute, 2024
Teresa Chahine is the inaugural Sheila and Ron ’92 Marcelo Lecturer in Social Entrepreneurship at the Yale School of Management. She is the author of "Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship," a twelve step framework for building impactful ventures in new and existing organizations.
Dr. Chahine's research focuses on developing tools to characterize and advance social and environmental determinants of health. She launched the first social entrepreneurship program in the context of public health, at Harvard University. She was also responsible for launching the first venture philanthropy organization in her home country of Lebanon, providing tailored financing and critical management support to social enterprises serving marginalized populations through education and job creation for youth and women.
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Dr. Chahine has published widely on financing, measuring, and scaling social impact. She has worked on social innovation and sustainable development within corporate, governmental, academic and non-profit organizations. Among these are the United States Environmental Protection Agency, United Nations Populations Fund, Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs, Malaysian Directors Academy, Sichuan University, Kazakhstan School of Public Health, and Amani Institute in Brazil. She was the recipient of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative's inaugural Elizabeth T. Weintz humanitarian research award in 2016 and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health's emerging leader in public health award in 2017.
Brandon Farwell
General Partner at Xfund
Mentor, STVP, the Stanford Engineering Entrepreneurship Center.
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Speaker/ Lecturer: AI for Good Institute, 2024
Brandon Farwell is a General Partner at Xfund. Prior to Xfund, he was an Investment Professional at DFJ focused on software investments including Box (NYSE: BOX), Yammer (acq., MSFT), Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), Newsle (acq., LNKD), SugarCRM, and Insight Squared, in addition to other frontier investments like Planet (NYSE: PL) and SpaceX. After DFJ, he helped build the 150-company portfolio at Rothenberg Ventures nearly from the beginning, including companies like SpaceX, Planet, Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD), Matterport (NASDAQ: MTTR), Vicarious Surgical (NYSE: RBOT), Nearpod (acq Renaissance Learning), Gusto, Patreon, Boom Supersonic, Andela, Bustle, Customer.io, VRChat, and others. This portfolio was awarded #1 in VR /AR and frontier technology by Goldman Sachs, CB Insights, and Pitchbook.
Brandon spent time in sales operations and corporate development at Box. His passions and focus are mainly in enterprise technologies; notably applied machine intelligence (computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning), VR/AR, robotics/autonomy, and space. He has been named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 Venture Capital list. Brandon is currently a formal advisor to CASIS, the organization designated by NASA to manage, promote, and broker research on the International Space Station (ISS) U.S. National Laboratory.
Brandon received a B.A. in Economics and International Relations from Stanford University. He helped run BASES (Stanford’s leading entrepreneurship organization) and was awarded Pac 12 All-Academic Team honors as a varsity rower. He also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a Rock Ventures Fellow.
Juan Lavista Ferres
Chief Scientist and Lab Director, Microsoft AI For Good Research Lab
Speaker/ Lecturer: AI for Good Institute, 2024
Juan M, Lavista Ferres is currently the Chief Scientist and Lab Director of the Microsoft AI For Good Research Lab, where he works with a team of data scientists and researchers in AI, Machine Learning and statistical modeling, working across Microsoft AI For Good efforts. These efforts includes projects in AI For Earth, AI for Humanitarian Action, AI For Accessibility and AI For Health.
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Juan joined Microsoft in 2009 to work for the Microsoft Experimentation Platform (EXP) where he designed and ran randomized control experiments across different Microsoft groups. Juan also worked as part of the Bing Data Mining team, where he led a group applying data mining, machine learning, statistical modeling and online experimentation at a large scale as well as providing data services for Bing.
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Juan started the Microsoft efforts related to SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome), and his work has been published in top academic Journals including Pediatrics. His work has been covered in New York Times, CNN, Chicago Tribune, USNews, USAToday , and over 100 news outlets around the world.
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Juan is involved in working to define the data science discipline within Microsoft, and is currently the editor of the Microsoft Journal of Applied Research (MSJAR).
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Before joining Microsoft, Juan was the CTO and co-founder of alerts.com. Previously, he spent 6 years in Washington working at the InterAmerican Development Bank applying data science to understand the impact of programs for reducing poverty and inequality in Latin-America and the Caribbean. Juan has two computer science degrees from the Catholic University in Uruguay, and a graduate degree in Data Mining and Machine Learning from Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Kirkland, WA, with his wife and three children. He has been a speaker in the US at Strata, IEEE, Berkeley, Cornell, and in many countries including Canada, Switzerland, Argentina, Colombia , Costa Rica, and Uruguay, and he also was a TedX Speaker.
Ahmad Rushdi
Senior Manager of Research Communities, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)
Speaker/ Lecturer: AI for Good Institute, 2024
Ahmad A. Rushdi is a Sr. Research Manager at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI). He works with the diverse machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence communities across Stanford and the corporate world, in order to envision, build, and maintain new bridges around cutting-edge research that would create useful and trusted systems for a variety of AI applications.
Dr. Rushdi's research interests include statistical signal processing and uncertainty quantification methods applied to machine learning models trained on time-series and real/synthetic image datasets. His publications span system design, communications, genomics, meshing, and national security applications.
Prior to joining Stanford, Ahmad was a research scientist at the Center for Computing Research of Sandia National Laboratories, an R&D manager of data science at Northrop Grumman Corporation, a research fellow at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of UC Davis and the Computational Visualization Center under Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at UT Austin, and an R&D engineer at Cisco Systems.
Ahmad holds a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Davis, and MSc/BSc degrees in Electrical Engineering from Cairo University.
Younes Bensouda Mourri
Founder & CEO, Livetech.AI
Lecturer, Machine Learning at Stanford University
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AI/ ML Curriculum Adviser and Lecturer: AI for Good Institute, 2024
Younes Bensouda Mourri is the founder of LiveTech.AI, an AI learning platform that transforms academic institutions by providing them with AI tools. He got his B.S. in Math & Computer Science and M.S. in Statistics all from Stanford University. He started a PhD at MIT in Social Robotics and is currently on leave to work on LiveTech.AI. He co-created 5 Deep Learning, 4 Natural Language Processing, and 1 Machine Learning course that have reached over 1.3 million learners online. 23% of the online learners got a job in AI after completing the courses. He is currently an Adjunct lecturer of computer science at Stanford since the age of 22 where he teaches Machine Learning with Andrew Ng. Younes previously worked in Coursera and Deeplearning.AI where he not only developed and taught courses but also built smart AI auto-graders capable of grading millions of submissions in real time. Outside of Stanford, he taught/teaches generative AI courses in companies like ASML, CISCO, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), etc. Recently his interests are in developing AI educational tools and more specifically NLP for personalized feedback and chain of thought reasoning.
Younes was born and raised in Morocco and advocates for Artficial Intelligence powered education. He helps people learn new skills to prepare them for jobs in a fast changing world. His work focuses on Artificial Intelligence. Younes prefers working with products from the start. He is interested in data acquisition strategies to build solid AI models during the early prototyping phases of product. Finally, while at Stanford, he built an interest in education technology and is particularly interested in using technology and AI for better social learning.
Mohammad Musa
Founder & CEO @ Deepen AI
Product Management Adjunct Faculty @ Santa Clara University
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Speaker/Lecturer: AI for Good Institute, 2024
Mohammad founded Deepen AI in 2017 to solve critical bottlenecks preventing faster adoption of autonomy and robotics products. He was a Product Strategy Manager for Google Apps (Gmail, Google Calendar, Drive, Admin Console, Docs, Sheets, Slides) now part of Google Cloud Platform.
Before Google, he worked as a Software engineer at Havok (acquired by Intel), Emergent Game Technology (acquired by Gamebase), and Sonics (acquired by Facebook).
Jad Khattib
A Data Architect/Consultant based in London, he is a graduate of Hult Business School with a degree in Finance.
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Speaker/Lecturer: AI for Good Institute, 2024
Jad is currently working on investments, investor relations and data at Transform VC. Jad specializes in SaaS and exercises his experience gained in the data industry as an architect to make Transform VC a successful data-driven impact fund.
Shadi Battah
Physician, strategist, and problem solver.​​
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VC Panelist: AI for Good Institute, 2024
Dr. Battah is board certified in Internal, Pulmonary, and Critical Care Medicine and brings nearly two decades of clinical and administrative experience in healthcare. His expertise includes bedside/hospital care, Telemedicine/electronic ICU, Medical Education, Utilization management and process improvement, and strategic planning and business development. He’s deeply involved in the healthcare entrepreneurial ecosystem and serves now as chief medical officer (CMO) in a respiratory device company, and has served as a clinical instructor, medical director, and as a board member in prior roles.
Dr. Battah has joined TVC as a fellow/resident MD in 2023 and is now leading the health tech group, assisting the group with deals screening and due diligence, as well as market research.