Meet The Panelists

This innovative panel will be moderated by Saken Kulkarni. He is a Managing Director at Slalom focused on Data & Technology Enablement and manages a team of talented consultants and leaders. Saken has spent his career advising clients on how to utilize data, CRM technologies, and cloud platforms to improve the speed of decision-making across organizations and improve time to market. He is based in the New York area and in his free time enjoys cycling, playing golf, swimming, and spending time with his wife and three-year-old daughter.

Mr. Isidore (“Izzy”) Sobkowski is a recognized global leader with over 45 years of hands-on experience with advanced AI solutions. Mr. Sobkowski holds a US Patent for Ethical Artificial Intelligence.

His experience spans R&D, sales, marketing, intellectual property, and technology delivery with a demonstrated history of successful ideation and deployment of high-tech projects and businesses including CIO of NYC Health and Human Services, Global Technology Strategist at Microsoft, Artificial Intelligence Lead for Surveillance and Compliance at New York Stock Exchange, and AI Division Vice President at Computer Associates.

Mr. Sobkowski won the Microsoft Award for Best Product of the Year and has achieved the coveted upper right-hand position in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for a company he founded, Professional Help Desk and for his underlying AI technology called Experience-Based Reasoning (EBR). He is the recipient of the Innovation of the Year Award from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Mr. Sobkowski holds both Bachelor and Master degrees in computer science with a specialty in Computational Linguistics. He is a published and peer-reviewed author and an international speaker.

Ms. Vanessa Barnett is Senior Vice President, Entity Intelligence at FactSet. In this role, she is responsible for FactSet’s overall Entity data strategy, working closely with product strategy teams across the enterprise to meet the evolving and complex client demand for industry leading solutions in ESG, Private Markets and Industry Classification, among others.

Part of her responsibilities have included overseeing adoption of AI/ML for sourcing data. She will share thoughts on the licensing of third party data when building AI models. Furthermore, Vanessa can share her perspective on how to set expectations with customers when it comes to delivering AI-generated content.

Prior to this role, Ms. Barnett spent eleven years at Dow Jones & Company where she was the head of product strategy for the global Dow Jones Newswires product line. She received a B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University.

Dr. Phillip G. Bradford is on the faculty at the University of Connecticut. He was the founding director of the 4-year computer science program on the Stamford Campus. He is a computer scientist with extensive experience in academia and industry. Phil did early work formalizing the Turing test. He has also used ML for natural language processing. Phil was a post-doctoral fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, he earned his PhD at Indiana University, an MS form the University of Kansas, and a BA from Rutgers University. He was on the faculty at Rutgers Business School and the University of Alabama’s Engineering School. He worked for BlackRock, and Reuters Analytics, and he was a Principal Architect for General Electric.

Phil has a deep belief in bringing real research to practice. This is the root of his entrepreneurial perspective. Phil has a handful of best-in-class results. His Erdős Number is 2. He has given over 70 talks in 10 countries, and he is the author or co-author of over 70 articles.