Invited Speakers


  • Nine Cups of Coffee for Captain Hook, Yanki Margalit, SpaceIL, Israel

    • Yanki Margalit is an Israeli entrepreneur, investor, and speaker best known for starting the Internet security company Aladdin Knowledge Systems, which was sold in 2009. He is a partner in the seed investment fund Innodo Ventures and a chairman of several technology startup companies, including SpaceIL. SpaceIL is a non-profit space technology organization and is currently competing for the Google Lunar X Prize. Yanki is also engaged with several non-profit organizations, including Idealist.org, Latet, College4all.org, Meet.mit.edu, Adama.org.il, and SpaceIL.com He has appeared as a professional speaker on technology, entrepreneurship, innovation, and human evolution, while studying and working in his more recent interests of biotechnology, clean energy, and space exploration. Described as the Israeli Singularity prophet, Yanki took a key role in introducing Singularity University in Israel. He lectures on such topics as Israel as a startup nation, the future of silicon and carbon, entrepreneurship and innovation, and more.

  • Data Science: Is it Real? Is it Just Machine Learning?
    Professor Jeffrey D. Ullman, Stanford University, USA

    • Jeffrey David "Jeff" Ullman is a computer scientist and professor at Stanford University. His textbooks on compilers (various editions are popularly known as the Dragon Book), theory of computation (also known as the Cinderella book), data structures, and databases are regarded as standards in their fields. Ullman received a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering Mathematics from Columbia University in 1963 and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1966. He then worked for several years at Bell Labs. From 1969 to 1979 he was a professor at Princeton. Since 1979 he has been a professor at Stanford University, where he is currently the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Computer Science (Emeritus). In 1995 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and in 2000 he was awarded the Knuth Prize. Ullman is also the co-recipient (with John Hopcroft) of the 2010 IEEE John von Neumann Medal. Ullman's research interests include database theory, data integration, data mining, and education using the information infrastructure. He is one of the founders of the field of database theory, and was the doctoral advisor of an entire generation of students who later became leading database theorists in their own right. He was the Ph.D. advisor of Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, and served on Google's technical advisory board. He is currently the CEO of Gradiance.