Call for Speakers

Chase Baker, Unplugged AI

is CTO & Co-Founder at Unplugged AI, where he focuses on building AI systems that operate directly on edge devices without connectivity. His work explores small language models, on-device inference, offline embeddings, and deploying AI on resource-constrained hardware. In the past he has tested edge device systems across smartphones, rugged devices, and single-board computers, with a focus on making capable AI practical in environments where connectivity, compute, and power are limited.

Sourav Bhattacharyya, Wesco Distribution

is Manager of Data Insights and Analytics at Wesco Distribution, where he leads enterprise data strategy, analytics, and insight-driven decision-making initiatives. With nearly 18 years of experience across data engineering and analytics, he has helped organizations address the foundational challenges that determine whether data-driven systems succeed in production: data quality, integration, governance, scalable pipelines, and organizational trust. His work spans logistics and distribution, supply chain management, healthcare, insurance, and banking, giving him a practical perspective on how data programs must operate across complex business environments. As organizations accelerate their adoption of AI agents, Sourav focuses on the essential foundations beneath successful implementations: reliable data, disciplined governance, strong operating models, and change management that builds business confidence. He holds an Executive MBA from the University of Pittsburgh and a Bachelor of Technology in Information Technology. At the inaugural Pgh.AI Summit, he is excited to share lessons from enterprise data transformation and discuss what it takes to move agentic AI from compelling demos to dependable business capabilities.

Handerson Gomes, Alvorada Labs

is a principal software engineer and founder of Alvorada Labs, a Pittsburgh-based consultancy focused on production AI systems. His work with intelligent systems predates the current generative AI wave, including infrastructure supporting medical speech recognition at M*Modal in 2005, personalized health and fitness feedback systems at BodyMedia, and Turnitin's Revision Assistant, which used machine learning to provide students with immediate feedback on their writing. Over more than twenty years, Handerson has worked as an architect, principal engineer, and technical lead across healthcare, finance, retail, robotics, and connected devices. Today he leads client engagements involving RAG, AI agents, agentic systems, and AI-native software development practices, working with startups and alongside regional consulting firms including Highline Solutions and OpenArc. He also teaches AI and agent development at Highline Coding Academy, previously taught computer science at the University of Pittsburgh, and serves on the leadership team of AI@Work Pittsburgh. Much of his work involves helping organizations put AI into their own products, and he brings a pragmatic, from-the-trenches view of what it takes to get these systems into production.

Osea Giuntella, PhD, University of Pittsburgh

is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His research sits at the intersection of health and labor economics, with a focus on how technology—especially AI, robots, and digitalization—shapes workers' health and well-being, time use, and broader life-course outcomes. His work has appeared in leading journals in economics and general science, and he regularly gives invited talks on the impacts of technological change on work, health, and inequality.

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD, MBA, Cloud Adoption Solutions

is a sales technology expert and early adopter of Salesforce and related platforms. As a change agent in M&A environments, she specializes in integrating processes, pricing, and global teams with cultural sensitivity. With experience building three sales operations teams, she focuses on improving sales productivity through lean, effective approaches. Dr. Gregg is the president of Cloud Adoption Solutions, a Salesforce consulting practice, and provides keynotes, consulting, and workshops on sales productivity. She is the author of 'It's About Time' and instructs Professional Selling at Point Park University. She holds a BA from the University of Pittsburgh, an MBA in Management, and a PhD in Community Engagement from Point Park University.

Madeline Kitch, Carnegie Mellon University

is a Computer Science PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Nihar Shah. She studies settings where we use evaluations from people or AI to guide decision-making. For instance, in medical care, doctors assess patients to recommend treatment; in peer review, (LLM) reviewers evaluate papers to determine conference acceptance. The high-level goal of her work is to help ensure these evaluations reflect what affected individuals care about. In her research, she uses methods in statistics and machine learning to illustrate common issues in evaluation settings and develop methods to mitigate them. Previously, she obtained her bachelor's and master's degrees at Harvard, where she received the Enel Endowment Prize for the best undergraduate paper in environmental economics.

Melike Vivastine Konur, DEVA Arts + Consulting

is the Founder & Principal of DEVA Arts + Consulting, a human-centered systems design company established in Istanbul in 2012 and now based in Pittsburgh. Through her Care as Infrastructure™ framework, she designs organizational strategy, executive learning, curriculum, and approaches grounded in a universal human reality: at some point in our lives, every person will either need care or be responsible for providing it. Melike also serves as Director of Advancement at Kelly Strayhorn Theater, where she leads strategic partnerships and relationships with funders and donors. Having performed, collaborated, and conducted artistic research across more than 20 countries, she brings a global and interdisciplinary perspective to organizational design and systems change. Her TEDx talk, After Patriarchy: Care Is Infrastructure, will be released in October 2026.

Brandon Ledford, Strategos Group

is the Managing Director, AI & Operations of Strategos Group. He is a transformation executive bringing nearly 20 years of experience at the intersection of human capital, organizational strategy, and AI to optimize workforce performance and public sector service delivery. Brandon most recently served as an Executive at MGT and as Vice President of Council at the Borough of Dormont, writing one of the country's first municipal AI Use Policies. In his roles, Brandon led national efforts to embed AI into internal capabilities to accelerate transformation, improve talent decisions, and future-proof operations. He has been recognized as The Consulting Report's Top 25 Human Capital Consultants and Leaders of 2024, 40 Under 40 for Cancer, and Tampa Bay 40 Under 40. Prior to joining the MGT Executive Leadership Team, Brandon served as Vice President of a global technology company, as a management consultant for both Deloitte and Booz Allen Hamilton, and was a former U.S. Supreme Court and White House intern. Brandon combines real-world consulting scale with academic rigor, earning a Master's in Artificial Intelligence Management from Georgetown, while holding a Master of Public Policy from George Mason University's School of Public Policy, a Bachelor of Arts from the Pennsylvania State University, and certifications in AI (MIT), project management (PMP), and change management (Prosci). Brandon lives in Dormont with his wife, Kate, and two daughters, Charlotte (8) and Eliza (2).

Ganesh Mani, PhD, Carnegie Mellon University

is on the adjunct faculty of Carnegie Mellon University and is considered a global thought leader, helping scale human expertise via AI in many application areas, particularly financial services. He has been a pioneer in applying innovative techniques to multiple asset classes and has worked with large investment management firms including hedge funds, after having sold one of the earliest AI/ML-based asset management boutiques into SSgA, nucleating the Advanced Research Center there. Mani has an MBA in finance and a Ph.D. specializing in artificial intelligence from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as an undergraduate degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Bhavini Patel, Sustainable Pittsburgh

is the Executive Director of Sustainable Pittsburgh, an organization committed to advancing a more equitable, resilient, healthy, and prosperous future for southwestern Pennsylvania. In this role, she leads strategic collaborations across business, government, and the nonprofit sector centering sustainability as a unifying force for regional transformation. Bhavini brings a cross-sector portfolio of experience at the intersection of public service, civic technology, and policy-making. In 2023, she was a congressional candidate in Pennsylvania's 12th District, running on a platform rooted in economic development and support for working families. Prior to that, she served as Community Outreach Manager in the Office of Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, where she helped connect underserved communities with county resources and programs. She was also the Founder of Beamdata, a civic technology company that created Be the Change, a platform that enabled thousands of Pennsylvanians to engage directly with their elected officials. Bhavini was appointed to the Pennsylvania Medical Marijuana Advisory Board in 2020 by Senate Democratic Leader Jay Costa, where she continues to contribute to the state's regulatory and policy frameworks. A first-generation college graduate and the daughter of immigrants, Bhavini was raised in Monroeville and graduated from the Gateway School District. She holds an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford as a Rotary Global Scholar, and a BPhil from the University of Pittsburgh in International Area Studies, Sociology, and Africana Studies. Her leadership and service have been recognized by the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh as Righteous Among the Neighbors 2025, the Pittsburgh Business Times' 30 Under 30, and Pittsburgh Magazine's 40 Under 40.

Grace Roessling, Carnegie Mellon University (DDM Lab)

earned her PhD in Cognitive Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in August 2025, where she studied human perception and action in virtual driving environments under the supervision of Dr. Brett Fajen. Currently, she works in the Dynamic Decision Making (DDM) Lab as a postdoctoral research fellow with Dr. Coty Gonzalez. Her tool suite includes building and simulating computational cognitive models to explain and predict human behavior, as well as designing experiments to explore how humans and AI collaborate in complex and dynamic contexts. She is most passionate about developing computational cognitive models and biologically inspired algorithms to enhance the intelligence, adaptability, and robustness of AI and robotic systems.

Nihar B. Shah, CMU

is an Associate Professor in the Machine Learning and Computer Science departments at CMU. His research focuses on the evaluation of science. His work has been used in the review of several hundred thousand papers and thousands of proposals. He is a recipient of The Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence, a Young Alumnus Medal from the Indian Institute of Science, the David J. Sakrison memorial prize from UC Berkeley for a "truly outstanding and innovative PhD thesis," and several best paper awards.

Samhitha Srinivasan, Scale AI

is an Applied AI Engineer on Scale AI's Frontier Agents team, building the benchmarks, ground truth verification, and judge calibrations that decide whether production AI agents can be trusted in high-stakes enterprise workflows. Prior to Scale, she started at Meta within the Facebook Core ML team, shipping causal inference pipelines that modeled user sensitivity to personalize ads for billions of users. From there, she joined the Facebook Gen AI Products team, where she built AI evaluation frameworks and multi-agent systems that brought state-of-the-art models into Facebook Ads. At Carnegie Mellon, she earned an M.S. in AI Engineering (2025) and a B.S. in Cognitive Science (2024).

Tingyu Su, Youlify

is the Founding Designer at Youlify, a healthcare AI startup building revenue cycle management solutions for U.S. health organizations, where she oversees both product and marketing design. She previously led design at tech startups, creative agencies, and cultural institutions. She holds a BFA in Communication Design from Parsons School of Design and a master's in Integrated Innovation for Products and Services from Carnegie Mellon University. Her research was published at CHI 2025, and her work has been recognized with international design awards such as the iF Design Award.

Gaurav Trivedi, Health Universe

builds AI systems that work with clinicians, not instead of them. He is currently defining and building the AI platform at Health Universe, where the team is making it possible for anyone to deploy clinical-grade medical apps powered by modern language models. Before this he spent time at Suki.AI working on ambient voice AI for clinical documentation, at Philips Healthcare with their Advanced Innovation Group, and at Nvidia. His PhD at the University of Pittsburgh was on interactive machine learning — he designed and deployed systems where clinicians at UPMC could correct and retrain NLP models in real time, without a data scientist in the loop. He believes the most important problems in AI+medicine aren't about model accuracy in isolation. They're about trust, workflow fit, and the subtle ways clinicians reason under uncertainty. The Human + AI pairing beats either alone, every time.

Curtis Wadsworth, J.D., Ph.D., Nerd Lawyer Entrepreneur Services

is an intellectual property and corporate lawyer whose practice focuses on intellectual property, technology, and business law. He holds a Ph.D. in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology from the University of Pittsburgh. Over 15+ years in big law, he developed and implemented IP strategies for clients across biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and material science through computer-related inventions and artificial intelligence. He understands both what clients need and the technical nuances their industries present. Curt believes strongly in the power of entrepreneurship. He founded Nerd Lawyer Entrepreneur Services (NLES), an AI-native corporate and IP law firm that uses AI and large language models to extract and analyze information from diverse sources, bringing nuanced corporate and IP law to entrepreneurs at every level. NLES exists because founders shouldn't have to choose between billable-hour sticker shock and legal work that falls apart under diligence. Drawing on his experience building DorothyAI, a patent search and analytics platform, Curt creates AI-native workflows that cut the cost of legal infrastructure for startups and small businesses — then uses that same infrastructure to make them due-diligence-ready long before anyone asks. Clean formation, defensible IP, contracts that survive a data room: the work that turns an exit into a closing instead of a renegotiation. Outside of legal work, Curt is active in the maker community where he has made a lot of scrap metal blacksmithing and welding, while begging more seasoned makers to put watermarks on their instagram photos. He recently took ownership of a 1985 Volkswagen Vanagon Westfalia Weekender that he is fastidiously restoring between camping trips and outings with the Pittsburgh Vanagon Club.

Pim Welle, Allegheny County Department of Human Services

serves as Chief Data Scientist at Allegheny County Department of Human Services. He holds an engineering degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a PhD in engineering and public policy from Carnegie Mellon University. His career has focused on developing statistical and machine learning systems for government institutions. Currently, he creates innovative tools within human services to evaluate system effectiveness and direct resources to individuals with the greatest needs.

Steve Wray, City of Pittsburgh

is a civic leader and strategist dedicated to helping cities and regions harness innovation for economic growth and opportunity. He currently serves as Director of Economic Development for Mayor Corey O'Connor and the City of Pittsburgh, where he is responsible for attracting, retaining, and growing businesses in the City, with a particular focus on expanding Pittsburgh's innovation economy. Previously, Steve was Executive Director of Carnegie Mellon University's Block Center for Technology and Society, leading initiatives that connected cutting-edge research with public policy, industry, and community action. Before joining Carnegie Mellon, he was Senior Vice President and Principal at Econsult Solutions, where he built the firm's national 'Future of Cities' practice. Earlier, as Executive Director of the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, he led major regional initiatives including World Class Greater Philadelphia, Campus Philly, and Pre-K for PA. Steve holds a Master's in Public Management and Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, a Bachelor's in Public Policy Studies from Duke University, and executive education in Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management from Harvard Business School.

Shixiang (Woody) Zhu, PhD, Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy (CMU)

is an assistant professor of data analytics at Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy. He received his PhD in Machine Learning at H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. Woody's research spans machine learning, statistics, and operations research, with particular focus on sequential modeling and uncertainty quantification, human–AI collaboration in decision-making, and applications to operations and energy system management.