By invitation only, but livestream is available here.
Monday, December 4th
6:00-8:30 pm
Hosted by Columbia University School of Professional Studies
Pulitzer Hall, Lecture Hall
2950 Broadway New York, NY 10027
6:00-7:00 pm: Reception
7:00-8:30 pm: Program and Q+A
Speakers:
Siddhartha Dalal, Ph.D. is a Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies. Prior to joining Columbia he was Chief Data Scientist and Senior Vice President at AIG in charge of R&D that included creation and application of AI, Statistics and CS to Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and Sensors/IOT for managing risks. He came to AIG from RAND Corporation where he was the CTO. Dalal also was Vice President of Research at Xerox, overseeing their worldwide imaging and software services research, and Bell Labs and Bellcore/SAIC as Chief Scientist and Executive Director. Dalal has an MBA and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester with over 100 peer-reviewed publications, patents, and monographs covering the areas of risk analysis, medical informatics Bayesian statistics and economics, image processing, and sensor networks. At Rand he was responsible for the creation of technology and spinning-off of Praedicat, Inc., a casualty insurance analytics company. Dalal is a member of US Army Science Board, an advisory board of 20 scientists appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Defense to advise the U.S. Army on technology. He has received several awards including from IEEE, ASA, and ASQ.
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Chris Dannen is a founder and principal of the Iterative Capital management company, which manages three pooled vehicles: Iterative Instinct Fund I, L.P., i2 Storj SPV, LP and Iterative Mining, LLC. Prior to founding the Investment Manager, Mr. Dannen was an independent strategy consultant. He has engaged clients including Bloomberg LP and Atlantic Media Group.
At Bloomberg, Mr. Dannen worked with the infrastructure engineering team to collect ethnographic research from senior engineers, to be used in strategic recruiting. At Quartz, he worked with the Senior Director of Branded Content in order to come up with market-focused enterprise software content franchises in conjunction with senior marketers at HP and Hitachi.
Before consulting independently, Mr. Dannen was a Senior Strategist at Undercurrent LLC, a 30-person management consulting company which was acquired in 2015. During his time at Undercurrent, Mr. Dannen developed long-term technology-focused business tactics for C-suite clients at American Express, General Electric, and Pepsico.
At Fast Company magazine Mr. Dannen served as senior technology editor for two years, launching a content vertical aimed at engineers, and building out a nationwide e-commerce hackathon sponsored by Target.
Mr. Dannen began his career as a technology reporter for CBS News covering publicly-traded enterprise software companies. He has authored four books. A self-taught programmer, Mr. Dannen holds one provisional patent on a computing hardware device for blockchain video distribution, filed Mar 8, 2016 number US 62/299,493.
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Meltem Demirors is the Director of Development at DCG and serves as the “connective tissue” between our subsidiaries, portfolio companies, investors, and corporate partners and is focused on creating new models for partnership and growth. A former management consultant and finance professional, Meltem has built several early stage companies and is an expert in crafting strategy, facilitating and building complex stakeholder groups, and developing new business models and sales strategies. Meltem has an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a B.A. in Mathematical Economics from Rice University.
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Joseph Lubin is a Canadian entrepreneur and a co-founder of blockchain computing platform Ethereum, a decentralized application platform incorporating a virtual machine that executes peer-to-peer contracts paid for via micropayments of the cryptocurrency ether. He is the founder of Consensus Systems, a Brooklyn-based software studio building decentralized applications. ConsenSys is one of the largest and fastest-growing companies in blockchain.
Joe graduated from Princeton with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He worked in the Princeton Robotics Lab, at tomandandy music developing an autonomous music composition tool, , and at private research firm Vision Applications Inc. building autonomous mobile robots.
As a software engineer and consultant, Joe worked with eMagine on the Identrus project, and was involved in the founding and operation of a hedge fund with a partner.
Switching gears, Joe moved to Kingston, Jamaica to work on projects in the music industry. Two years into his musical endeavors, Joe co-founded the Ethereum Project, and has been working on Ethereum and ConsenSys since January 2014.
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Joshua Ashley Klayman, J.D. is Of Counsel in the Financial Transactions Group and is a founding member and the head of MoFo’s Blockchain + Smart Contracts Group. Ms. Klayman is resident in the New York office and is a member of the firm-wide Women’s Strategy Committee, as well as Co-Chair of the New York Women’s Affinity Group. Ms. Klayman’s practice focuses on finance and corporate matters. In her finance practice, Ms. Klayman regularly represents lenders and borrowers in leveraged finance transactions involving senior, mezzanine and subordinated debt and equity offerings and co-investments, as well as in general lending matters. In her corporate practice, Ms. Klayman represents public and private organizations in a broad array of commercial transactions (including mergers and acquisitions, as well as royalty purchase and licensing transactions) and corporate governance matters.
Ms. Klayman has served for several years as an adjunct professor at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, where she has taught “U.S. Business Planning for International Transactions,” a capstone seminar for J.D. and L.L.M. candidates. At Morrison & Foerster, Ms. Klayman is active in diversity recruiting efforts and is the founder and serves as the senior advisor for MoFo’s Pro Bono name change practice assisting low-incomed transgender men and women. She also Chairs the Wall Street Blockchain Alliance’s Legal Working Committee and is a member of the Steering Committee for the New York City Opera. Prior to attending law school, Ms. Klayman served as Corporate Consultant, Global Accounts for a global, publicly traded organizational consulting and career transition firm and as Deputy Chief of Staff and Director of Special Projects for a nationally recognized political watchdog group based in Washington, D.C.
Ms. Klayman received her J.D., cum laude, from Temple University Beasley School of Law, where she was a Law Faculty Scholar and a member of the Temple Law Review. Ms. Klayman received her B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania.
Ms. Klayman is admitted to practice in New York and Pennsylvania, and before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
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Gillian Tett serves as US managing editor, leading the Financial Times’editorial operations in the region across all platforms. She writes weekly columns for the Financial Times, covering a range of economic, financial, political and social issues throughout the globe.
Ms. Tett previously served as assistant editor, U.S. managing editor from 2010-2012, and prior to this as assistant editor responsible for the Financial Times’ markets coverage. Her other roles at the Financial Timeshave included capital markets editor, deputy editor of the Lex column, Tokyo bureau chief, Tokyo correspondent, London-based economics reporter and a reporter in Russia and Brussels.
Ms. Tett’s latest book The Silo Effect, published by Simon & Schuster in September 2015, looks at the global economy and financial system through the lens of cultural anthropology.
She is the author of New York Times bestseller Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe (Little Brown, UK and Simon and Schuster, US) published in May 2009, and Saving the Sun: A Wall Street Gamble to Rescue Japan from its Trillion Dollar Meltdown (Harper Collins, 2003). Fool’s Goldwon Financial Book of the Year at the Spear’s Book Awards in 2009.
Before joining the Financial Times in 1993, Ms. Tett was awarded a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Cambridge University based on field work in the former Soviet Union. While pursuing the Ph.D., she freelanced for the Financial Times and the BBC. She is a graduate of Cambridge University.