Flower City AI

Keynote

Max is the founder of MAX.IO LLC, an AI Knowledge Discovery business, and the organizer of Flower City AI. As Chief Everything Officer, he builds and sells AI products to businesses that need predictable and scalable solutions. We develop state of the art model serving inference software, train models, and help companies incorporate AI in their customer facing products.

SAPIEN

Masum is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Rochester and Co-founder of SAPIEN Coach. He has been working on Natural Language Processing and Langauge Models for more than 5 years. Currently, he and his team are building a general-purpose virtual-human API backed by Large Language Models that aims to redefine customer service, education, and entertainment.

Music

L. é D is a multi-talented vocalist, and rapper, guitar player and dancer. She dubs herself a creative entrepreneur. She was born in Bansoh, Cameroon. With the rise of AI and language model based chatbots she found that she could use artificial intelligence to bridge the resource gap between independent artists like her self, and multi million dollar creatives.

Prompting Positivity

Chris Cooley, the visionary CEO of Cooley Comics, LLC, is a renowned visual storyteller, artist, and community builder. With a passion for AI technology and a keen eye for creative solutions, he stands as an investor and enthusiast in the field. Chris empowers individuals to embrace their inner strengths by helping them explore their truths, promoting positivity, and fostering mindfulness in the present moment.

Iryss

Jeff embarked on his entrepreneurial journey in 2021, backed by a rich background in financial services and technology. Mid-career Jeff transitioned from managing billion-dollar portfolios as a buy-side healthcare equity analyst to steering innovative AI projects. Jeff initially led the product team at an AI-powered intellectual property search engine, demonstrating his ability to communicate from the lab to the C-suite. He was then recruited to lead product development on the development of a revolutionary universal operating system for industrial robots.

Building an AI Developer Community

Landon Gray is an empathy-driven problem solver and software consultant working at Test Double, a Software Consultancy. In his free time, Landon pursues learning about and implementing AI use cases in the Ruby programming language. Landon enjoys bringing together people and recently founded a community called Ruby AI, which has a following of almost 300 engineers and technologists interested in building AI applications in Ruby.

Business and Innovation

An expert in international business, Weber was an executive for two corporations selling lead-edge technology around the world. He has earned multiple honors for student mentoring at Nazareth University. Weber co-developed and is the director of the Business, Artificial Intelligence, and Innovation (B.S.) major. He received his received his bachelor's degree in marketing and advertising from Ohio University and a master's degree in business administration from the University of Dayton.

Tempus

Abbas is passionate about leveraging real-world data in oncology to drive advancements in precision medicine. Expert in multimodal datasets analysis, including genomics, clinical information, and medical imaging. Skilled in implementing machine learning techniques to extract valuable insights.

Tympana

Paul Yacci is Co-founder and CTO of DataCicada. He has over 15 years of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Software Development and Data Analytics. He has served as the leading developer and visionary for Tympana. He has successfully deployed software for the Federal Government while working as a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton. Paul also served as Director of Data Science at ITT Gould's Pumps and is Adjunct Faculty at RIT in the college of computing. He is a co-author of the book, “Field Guide to Data Science,” and several research papers. He holds Masters Degrees in Computer Science (George Mason University) and Bioinformatics (Rochester Institute of Technology) and a Bachelors in Biotechnology from RIT.

Tympana

Allison Yacci is Co-founder and CEO of DataCicada. She is a serial entrepreneur that has run 5 prior companies. Allison is hands on with all aspects of DataCicada and is responsible for the management of business operations at DataCicada. She has a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) degree with dual concentrations in Finance and Entrepreneurship and a Bachelors of Science degree in Biotechnology from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Emcee

Our Emcee for the day - Evan Dawson is the host of "Connections with Evan Dawson." He joined WXXI in January 2014 after working at 13WHAM-TV, where he served as morning news anchor. He was hired as a reporter for 13WHAM-TV in 2003 before being promoted to anchor in 2007.