AI and Entrepreneurship Talk: Parag Agrawal, Parallel.ai CEO and Cofounder
2026-02-05 11:00 - 12:00 UTC
The Columbia Engineering AI Entrepreneurship Series is a bi-weekly speaker series that brings students and faculty at Columbia together with founders, VCs, technologists, and business leaders to learn about the process of transitioning lessons from research and the classroom into products and value.

This week join to hear from:

Parag Agrawal, Parallel.ai CEO and Cofounder
11AM February 05, 2026 Davis Auditorium
Parag Agrawal is the founder of Parallel Web Systems, a company unlocking the web for AI agents. Previously, he spent 11 years at Twitter, where he joined as an engineer before serving as CTO, and then CEO. Parag has a PhD from Stanford University in Computer Science and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT, Bombay.

February 27 Lecture Series in AI: Ali Farhadi, CEO of AI2
2026-02-27 10:30 - 12:00
Columbia Engineering Lecture Series in AI
Friday, February 27: Ali Farhadi, CEO of Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) & Professor, University of Washington

10:30-11:00am Check-in
11:00-12:00pm Lecture

Advance registration is required for both Columbia affiliates and non-affiliates
REGISTER HERE
ABOUT THE LECTURE
“What is the Language Model of a Crow?”
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Ali Farhadi is the CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and a Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Ali has been a professor at the UW Allen School since 2012. He first joined Ai2 in 2015 to lead the institute’s computer vision research team with a focus on visual common-sense reasoning and the role of actions and interactions in visual understanding. While at Ai2, he co-founded Xnor.ai, the first on-device deep learning startup that was acquired by Apple in 2020. Ali led Apple’s next-generation machine learning efforts until 2023 when he rejoined Ai2 as CEO in July. Ali’s research impact has been globally recognized with several best paper awards at CVPR, NeruIPS, AAAI, NSF Career Award, and the Sloan Fellowship, and he was named one of Forbes’s Top 5 AI Entrepreneurs in 2018.

Data Science and AI Exchange 2026
2026-04-14
Join the Data Science Institute on April 14th to explore how leaders across academia, industry, and government are shaping the future of Responsible AI.
Learn more.
