The AIconics Awards Shortlist 2023 - Solution Provider of the Year

Amr Awadallah is a trailblazing serial entrepreneur, investor, and founder of three companies: Aptivia, Cloudera, and Vectara. 

This year, Amr's passion for ML and experience as a tech founder converged in Vectara, a generative AI company competing with the likes of Cohere and OpenAI. Tackling concerns around GenAI misinformation, bias, and copyright infringement, Vectara’s newest model, Boomerang, enables the world to discover deeper meaning through transformative LLM innovations. Vectara further reduces hallucinations due to more relevant retrieval grounded in facts. Amr and his team have rewritten the rules of language comprehension using the power of transformer-based tech coupled with grounded generation to ensure every organization finds answers grounded in truth and facts.

Amr also served as VP of Engineering at both Google and Yahoo. In these roles, he was pivotal in some of the companies’ biggest initiatives, including shaping the future of cloud technology at Google and Big Data machine learning at Yahoo.

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Don Bosco Durai (“Bosco”), CTO and Co-Founder of Privacera, the AI and data security governance company, is a passionate advocate for safeguarding the use of AI across industries. He plays an exceptional role in propelling data security through the technology he co-created with Balaji Ganesan, which is currently used to manage petabytes of data for Fortune 500 companies around the world.

In June 2023, Bosco led the creation of Privacera AI Governance (PAIG), the industry’s first AI governance innovation. PAIG helps enterprises securely and responsibly harness the power of AI. From the continuous scanning and classification of training data to the securing and auditing of AI models, model outputs, and user requests, PAIG empowers organizations to efficiently manage the entire AI data security lifecycle.

Previously, Bosco co-founded XA Secure to help organizations manage data security and governance in Hadoop data lakes. The technology was later acquired by Hortonworks, which contributed the product to the Apache Software Foundation. It is now deployed in thousands of companies around the world and is the leading open-source project for unified data access governance for Hadoop big data environments.

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​​​​​​Dr. Chris Hazard is Co-Founder and CTO of Howso, provider of understandable and privacy enhancing AI. Howso was spun out of Hazardous Software, a company Chris founded in 2007 that focuses on decision support, visualization, and simulation for hard strategy problems in large organizations, DoD, and government. Chris holds a PhD in computer science from NC State, with a focus on AI for trust and reputation. 

Chris has been working for two decades to build ethical AI frameworks. His life’s mission is to create an alternative to black-box AI, eliminating the bias, hallucinations, and misinformation so common in AI systems today. Chris’ work, backed up by over 60 patent assets, is based on instance-based learning (IBL), an explainable alternative to the black-box neural networks that power most AI today. The free open-source Howso Engine provides the open-source community with powerful tools to ensure AI becomes safer and more transparent.

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Dr. Tammy Malloy took the lead in the AI-powered mental health diagnostics platform Aiberry implementation at Futures Recovery Healthcare in Tequesta, Florida. 

Prior to implementation, only 24% of clients received an official diagnosis for a depressive disorder due to more subjective psychometric assessments being facilitated. This rose to 46% post-implementation.  In addition, 67% of those who scored for severe depression during their initial assessment were reduced to mild or minimal level. All clients who scored high or moderate for suicide risk level were also at low risk by the time of discharge. Aiberry’s assessment was found to be more sensitive than traditional screening methods. 

According to Dr. Malloy, “Traditional methods require patients to rate their own symptoms and severity levels, often resulting in a low level of engagement. Aiberry creates an engaging experience by initiating a conversation, during which patients get to talk about what's on their minds and how they are feeling. This interaction is more dynamic and complete than standard forms allow. Using Aiberry, they're more apt to be open about where they are and we're seeing a difference in treatment outcomes as a result.”
 

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Migüel Jetté has dedicated his career to improving the way millions of people understand the human voice through his contributions to AI speech recognition technology. Migüel’s work has enabled speech-to-text company Rev to produce the most accurate transcriptions and captions across the industry, creating new avenues for accessibility, productivity, and communication. 

As a multilingual speaker, Migüel understands firsthand the harm inaccuracies in transcription and translation can cause—such as in legal court depositions where inaccuracies could impact a case, or in classrooms where inaccurate captions hinder students’ ability to learn—and has invested his career in improving the ways people communicate. Since joining Rev in 2016, Migüel has worked to create automated speech recognition that works for everyone, leveraging Rev’s 6.4 million hours of high-quality training data to reduce the biases and inaccuracies that too often arise with AI. Rev uses a unique system for training AI involving human input and feedback from a community of 70,000 skilled transcribers. 

Migüel’s work is contributing to a future for AI that is accurate, fair, and accessible to everyone. He deserves recognition for his decades-long pursuit combining computer science, mathematics, and human relations to ensure every voice is heard and understood.

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As a thought leader in the AI space, Luv has founded and led Techolution, a company that believes in enriching the human experience through technology, a philosophy he titled  ‘innovation done right’. He has been building and implementing AI solutions since 2018, and even developed a "Co-Create" process that helps manage customer's risk of innovation. 

Luv’s vision is to help enterprises transition from lab grade AI to real-world AI, so they can increase their profit and serve their communities better. He has created innovative solutions combining the power of GenAI, computer vision, AI and robotics to deliver ROI generating real-world AI across various Industries. All of his projects focus on delivering next level profitability with ESG impact for clients that shows Luv’s sustainable dedication to the planet and its people.

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Oz Karan leads Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory’s Trustworthy AI services where he routinely advises client leaders in risk, controls and governance structure considerations around design, development, and use of Artificial Intelligence in a responsible and ethical manner. Oz works closely with Deloitte’s AI Institute and AI Center of Excellence supporting research, innovation, and assisting clients with a range of AI topics related to AI risk management, controls, responsibility, and ethics. He has helped clients across financial services and technology industries to craft leading AI risk governance programs. 

Oz has led the transformation of conceptual values and principles underpinning trustworthy AI frameworks into tangible mechanisms for organizations to understand, explain and responsibly utilize AI to enable and enhance their day-to-day operations. He has led cross-functional efforts across clients to define governance strategies and operating models, working simultaneously with technology and data stakeholders to bring together the tools needed to embed trust in their use of AI. Beyond the contributions to his clients, Oz has developed thought leadership on the risks and limitations of generative AI, and the mechanisms needed to establish effective governance, including publication in the Wall Street Journal.
 

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