NLP SUMMIT - Key Persons

Anitha Kannan

Job Titles:
  • Founding Member and Head of Machine Learning Research at Curai
Anitha Kannan is a founding member and Head of Machine Learning Research at Curai where she leads research on AI-driven innovative solutions to equitable best quality healthcare accessible to all. Prior to Curai, she has held senior research positions at Facebook AI research and at Microsoft research. She holds a Ph.D. in machine learning from the University of Toronto and was a Darwin Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK. She has extensively published in top-tier conferences and holds numerous patents.

Kfir Bar

Job Titles:
  • Chief Scientist at Basis Technology
Kfir Bar is the Chief Scientist at Basis Technology. He has spent many years working in a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) disciplines, including statistical machine translation, named entity recognition, and digital-humanity applications. Kfir is a big fan of combining linguistic knowledge with sophisticated AI algorithms for extracting the most important information from a piece of text. Before Basis, Kfir worked for Intuview as CTO, supporting national security and counter-terrorism missions by deducing authorship, sentiment, intent, and other contextual information. In 2013, he co-founded Comprendi, which transforms big data into actionable marketing insights. Comprendi served some large scale advertisers in different verticals, with great success. In 2016 Kfir's team won the 2016 Twitter #Promote challenge, for a $250K prize in cash. Kfir is a lecturer at Bar Ilan University, COLMAN, and IDC (all are universities in Israel), where he teaches courses in computer science, digital humanities, machine learning, and natural language processing. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Tel Aviv University for a thesis on Semantics and Machine Translation, titled "Deriving Paraphrases for Highly Inflected Languages, with a Focus on Machine Translation.

Vishakha Sharma

Job Titles:
  • Principal Data Scientist at Roche
  • Principal Data Scientist in Roche
Vishakha Sharma is a principal data scientist in Roche diagnostics information solutions, where she leads advanced analytics initiatives such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to discover key insights improving NAVIFY product portfolio, leading to better and more efficient patient care. Vishakha has authored 40+ peer-reviewed publications and proceedings and has given 15+ invited talks. She serves on the program committee of the ACM-W, NeurIPS, AMIA, and ACM-BCB. Her research work has been funded by the NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative to build an NLP precision medicine software. Vishakha is a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science.